The short, violent life of Stanley Ketchel, the middleweight champion of ‘tumultuous

It was 115 years ago this week that Stanley Ketchel, then regarded as the greatest middleweight champion boxing had ever known, unlaced his gloves and stepped out of the ring for the last time.

He didn’t know it was the last time, of course. There was no reason to suspect as much. He was a champion in the prime of his career, one of the most famous boxers in the world — behind his heavyweight rival Jack Johnson. But after logging five fights in the span of four months, Ketchel, known as “The Michigan Assassin,” needed some time off. So after his knockout win over Jim Smith on June 10, 1910, he retreated to a friend’s ranch outside Conway, Missouri, to rest and recuperate and, he hoped, regain his strength for a potential rematch with Johnson.

Four months later he would die there, shot in the back by a ranch hand named Walter Dipley. He was 24 years old. He’d never expected to see old age and said as much to friends on many occasions. But even Ketchel couldn’t have believed that his wild life would end this soon, or that his death would leave such a void in the sport.

He may have died young, but it must be said that Ketchel packed a lot of living into the years he got. His early life reads like a turn-of-the-century adventure tale. Born Stanislaw Kiecal, son of Polish immigrants who’d settled in Grand Rapids, Michigan, he ran away from home at the age of 12 to pursue life as a gunslinging cowboy in the American West.

He was too young or maybe just too naive to realize that those days had ended, and maybe were never quite as romantic as he’d been led to believe, and anyway he made it only as far as Chicago before his fists got him into the kind of predicament that would repeat itself throughout his short life.

The way famed boxing writer Nat Fleischer described it in “Stanley Ketchel: The Saga of the Michigan Assassin,” his biography of Ketchel, the trouble started when an older boy selling newspapers on the street called him “a dirty hobo.” In fairness, Ketchel had arrived by train only hours prior, and the state of clothes suggested that he hadn’t gotten there in a comfy seat on a passenger car. But just because the older boy was making a statement of fact didn’t mean Ketchel was going to let him get away with it. He attacked with a furious assault and soon the other boy went running. Ketchel ran after him, but was halted by the hand of an ex-fighter turned lunchroom operator known as “Socker” Flanagan, who pulled him in off the street and eventually put him to work.

Flanagan, according to Fleischer, was the first to introduce Ketchel to the art of boxing. He put gloves on the boy, taught him some of the basics, and advised him to reconsider his plan of living life as a cowboy on the open range.

According to Fleischer, Flanagan told Ketchel that he carried “a peach of a wallop” for a little guy, but he’d never be a technical boxer since there was “too much of the slugging spirit” in him. Still, he said, with a little craft and experience, he might have a future in the fight game.

Flanagan also gave the boy another piece of advice — he needed to ditch the “foreign brand” and adopt a more “American” name. This is how Stanislaw Kiecal became Stanley Ketchel, though he would later be known as Steve to his friends.

(Fun side note: Ketchel shows up in one of Ernest Hemingway’s lesser known short stories, as two women who both claim to have known him trade stories about him while waiting for a train. One insists on calling him Steve, as if to show how well she knew him, but also tells a suspiciously romantic story about their relationship, calling him “the finest and most beautiful man that ever lived.” The other woman tells a far more believable story about having a brief, purely sexual relationship with Ketchel, who she says once told her simply: “You’re a lovely piece, Alice.” She cries softly to herself while thinking of him, but also adds that she was, indeed, “exactly as he said” back then.)

Ketchel continued to live a nomadic existence for much of his teenage years. He hopped trains to various mining and lumber towns looking for work, though was sometimes turned away due to his youth and small stature. Whenever a situation called for violence (and sometimes when it didn’t), he leapt eagerly to the task. He still dreamed of the cowboy life, and resolved to make it to Montana, which he’d heard was one of the last wild places in the West. He nearly died on the voyage there after falling asleep in a boxcar that was locked from the outside and left on an isolated stretch of track, but was saved by a farmer who, days later, overheard his cries for help.

At last, he made it to Butte, Montana, a bustling mining town built atop a vast ocean of copper with tens of thousands of miners from all over the world working day and night to get it out.

“In the early nineteen-hundreds, when Ketchel first came to Butte, that town had a well-deserved reputation for being lawless, gay, and in many respects as tough a spot as could be found from the Atlantic to the Pacific coast,” Fleischer writes in his biography of Ketchel. “The town was a hive of energy, wide-open from the sport standpoint, with its large population of miners ever ready to spend their money, and a choice selection of gamblers, gunmen and thugs always on hand to get the pickings from the payrolls.”

Here, again, a familiar scene unfolded. While working as an all-purpose laborer at a saloon and dancehall called The Copper Queen, he got into a tussle with the club’s bouncer, who occasionally boxed in local events under the moniker of the “Go-Git-‘Em-Kid.” He was older and bigger, but was quickly overwhelmed by Ketchel’s speed and ferocity. Instead of being reprimanded by his boss for fighting at work, Ketchel was given the bouncer’s job.

He turned out to be perfectly suited for the role. Longtime fight manager “Dumb” Dan Morgan once described Ketchel as having “the soul of a bouncer — but a bouncer that loved his work.” (By the way, “Dumb Dan” was one of those ironic nicknames, since Morgan loved to talk so much that sports writer Whitney Martin once remarked that “when he slows up to 150 words a minute he’s practically silent.”) After he’d flattened enough patrons, it was gently suggested to Ketchel that he offer his services in one of Butte’s many boxing events.

Ketchel was 16 when he made his official debut against “Kid” Tracy, winning via first-round knockout. He was fighting under the name “Young” Ketchel (if you were under 22 or so, practically the only names available to a fighter were “Young” or “Kid,” and some fought under both at different times), and he was immediately notable for his aggression and his fury — but not his skill.

“When Ketchel appeared in the ring at the Broadway Theater he was without a doubt as awkward a man as ever put on a pair of gloves,” the Anaconda Standard wrote later, in 1914. One man who tried to show him just how much he did not yet understand about the sweet science was Maurice Thompson, a lightweight who got by more on defense and ring craft — with a hefty dose of miner toughness and a little bit of cheating when necessary — than on relentless punching power. Ketchel would lose only two of his first 10 fights, both to Thompson.

According to Fleischer, the two men fought many more times than is reflected in the record. Thompson started out sparring with Ketchel in what passed for a boxing gym in Butte, then later met him in actual bouts and sometimes training sessions that became street fights. Each time, he found Ketchel significantly improved.

“He was a fighter of the gorilla style,” Ketchel would later say of Thompson. “After two or three minutes, we would find ourselves rolling out in the street with him on top of me trying to bite off my ear.”

The fight scene in Butte was rough in more ways than one. In a short time, it had grown from just another small mining camp to one of the biggest cities in the American West. The mines worked around the clock to get at the copper that helped electrify the nation. In the years between the time Ketchel arrived in Butte and the end of World War I, it’s estimated that Butte provided somewhere between one-quarter to one-third of all the copper in use anywhere in the world.

That translated to vast, sudden wealth for a relative few, but also a ruthless city that played by its own rules. One of Ketchel’s first fights took place in a theater where the ring backed up against a large curtain. His opponent that day was managed by the proprietor of the establishment, who had a practice of hiding behind the curtain with a sandbag, ready to deliver a blow through the cloth that would be unseen by the crowd but very much felt by the recipient.

Ketchel had supposedly been tipped off to this practice, so when his opponent tried to back him toward the curtain he reversed the position and let the manager bonk his own fighter over the head. In Butte, it wasn’t enough to be tough. You also had to be at least a little savvy. Ketchel developed such a reputation that he was a regular fixture in the warring newspaper factions that served as mouthpieces for various mining magnates known generally as the “Copper Kings.”

“Young Ketchell Develops Terrific Hitting Powers,” read one misspelled headline in the Butte Evening News in 1906. (The story would go on to warn readers that at Ketchel’s upcoming fight at the Butte Athletic Club there would be ample seating but no “rowdyism” allowed.) Coverage in The Butte Miner could sometimes be less friendly to Ketchel as he grew in fame, once calling him “a wild, unthinking spendthrift who loves to pick the buds along the Primrose Path as well as any many that ever lived.”

It’s hard to say to what extent the environment in Butte shaped Ketchel as both a fighter and a person. Did it harden him into a certain violent resolve, or merely reward those existing aspects of his character? The mining town was a rough place, overflowing with vice of all kinds, and whether in the mines or the saloons or the streets, death hovered all around. Even after he left Butte for bigger…