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Braddock won one of biggest boxing upsets of all time


It was 86 years ago today – June 13, 1935 – that James J. Braddock won a 15-round decision against heavily-favored and defending champion Max Baer to capture the heavyweight boxing title.

The story was captured well in the 2005 Ron Howard film titled Cinderella Man. Braddock was tagged with the Cinderella Man title by newspaper reporter Damon Runyon, who chronicled the boxer’s fairy-tail-like rise from a poor fighter in New Jersey to the heavyweight boxing title of the world.

Braddock was a rough, hard-punching boxer, who was a bit past his prime when he stepped into the ring with Baer.

Going into the fight, few people gave Braddock much of a chance at winning the fight. But in one of the biggest boxing upsets of all-time, Braddock outlasted Baer and claimed the victory.

Russell Crowe portrayed Braddock in the movie, while Paul Giamatti won an Academy Award for his roll as Braddock’s manager Joe Gould. For you who have not seen the movie, I highly recommend it.

In his film, Ron Howard did a good job of capturing the way things were in America as the country tried to recovery from the Great Depression.

The film included a lot of elements that made Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky movies a success. Like real life boxer James J. Braddock, Stallone’s fictional character Rocky Balboa also was 30 years old when he fought for the title.

Stallone said that his fictional character was loosely based on Chuck Wepner. After seeing the fight between Wepner and Muhammad Ali in 1985, Stallone was inspired to write his Rocky script.

Wepner has a great boxing career, but unlike Braddock, he never won the heavyweight title.

Ali knocked out Wepner in the 15th round of their fight in 1975.

Though Wepner did not win against Ali, Stallone’s movie, Rocky, won for the Academy Award best picture in 1977. Rocky Balboa went on to defeat Apollo Creed in the sequel to the original movie. In real life, Braddock and Baer never fought in a rematch. They were supposed to have a rematch, but it never happened. Baer fought Joe Louis, who went on to beat Braddock in a fight for the heavyweight title a couple of years later.

Braddock recorded a knock down against Louis early in that fight, but Louis came back to posted an eight-round knockout. The Cinderella Man retired a short time later, while Louis went on to become one of the greatest heavyweight fighters of his time.