The Making Of A Legend

One spring night in 1954 some 200 naval officers, top brass and ordinary gold braid, gathered in Washington to pay tribute to a small, deaf, bald-headed man who stood before them looking like an athletic Victor Moore. In his hands the little man held a handsome silver trophy which was engraved:

To
SPIKE WEBB
Coach Instructor Advisor Friend
From his shipmates with admiration and the Navy's highest praise "Well done"

Seldom has so much high-ranking affection been showered on a man so obviously unimpressed by rank. The list of guests at the banquet read like Who's Who in the U.S. Navy, but to Spike Webb, who in 35 years became a living legend as "the man who taught the Navy how to fight," these salty celebrities were simply his boys. He had known them when.

Bullnecked, bantam-sized (he stands 5 feet 4½ inches in his boxing shoes), Spike stood at the head of the banquet table, bowing modestly to the applause and tributes from his friends and admirers. They pointed out that Spike Webb is a unique figure in the annals of American sport: the only man ever to coach four United States Olympic teams (his Olympic boxers won two team and seven individual championships) and the only boxing coach in history whose teams recorded 11 consecutive years of intercollegiate boxing without a dual-match defeat. Fleet Admiral William F. Halsey stated flatly: "Spike Webb is the greatest psychologist I have ever known in my life." Another speaker recalled Dan Parker's observation: "When Spike gets the ear of a boxer, he is the most convincing talker alive." A third summed it all up by quoting John V. Grombach's book The Saga of Sock: "Spike Webb is probably the greatest boxing teacher and coach in the world."

Nobody really wanted Spike Webb to retire. It was like thinking that the statue of old Tecumseh, out in front of Bancroft Hall, ought to be put in the attic because it was getting worn. And even at 67 Webb is still as hard as old Tecumseh's bronze—trim, tough, able to box any of his former Navy "boys" and give them a good fight. Today, as on any day in the past, he can be spotted around the Academy by his distinctive gait and a fedora slanted low across his eyes. He lives in Annapolis, alone, in a third-floor apartment in the house of a retired Navy captain's wife. But he's seldom there. Usually he's heading briskly for the homes of old friends, or local taverns, or the Carvel Hall Hotel, where there is likely to be a gabby group of retired Navy officers. The talk is boxing. "I still study the fight game all the time," Webb says. "I watch it mostly on television. And, believe me, those guys don't look so hot. They don't know anything about self-defense. There's nobody to teach them any more."

Spike Webb ought to know. He coached during an era of fisticuffs and fun that the world is not likely ever to see again. Those were the years when Webb made boxing so popular at the Academy that the superintendent once ordered all spectators to wear formal dress to the matches, and admission was by nontransferable ticket—and still there was "squeeze room only" in big Macdonough Hall. There was the time, too, when Spike caught Captain Slade Cutter, who became one of Annapolis' great all-round athletes, slugging it out with another boxer in a fight over a girl; instead of reporting them, Spike refereed the match. And the day Spike introduced Rear Admiral William V. (Mickey) O'Regan, then a shiny new ensign training for the Olympics, to a group of plebes as "captain of the 1923 boxing team, intercollegiate light heavyweight champion and the Naval Academy's greatest boxer." Then Spike asked O'Regan to take his stance, and when he did the small coach knocked the Great Hero smack into the middle of the plebes.

That was the way Spike was, all through his career at Annapolis. Even his coming there had a special twist to it; when he applied, he had just shed the uniform of a World War I sergeant in the Army. "When I got back to Baltimore after the war," he recalls it, "Captain P. V. H. Weems told me they were looking for a boxing coach down at the Naval Academy. So I showed up at Annapolis and applied for the job. Lieutenant Commander Bully Richardson, the officer in charge of the gym, had me demonstrate my method of teaching boxing. Then he told me to put on a pair of trunks and fight for the job.

"I had no trunks, so he dug up a pair. They must have been Bully's trunks. He weighed 250 and I weighed 130. They wrapped around me like a kimono.

"Richardson took me to the boxing room, where we found two big men in trunks and boxing gloves, all ready to fight. There was a large group of spectators on hand, which got me wondering if this was some sort of frame-up. I gave myself a fight talk. 'Hell, Spike,' I says to me, 'you're as strong as a pine knot, you're in good fighting condition, you know your boxing and you've got no guts missing.'

"The commander pointed to one of the men and says, 'This is Joe Stanton, one of our instructors. He'll fight you first.' Stanton was 6 feet, 190 pounds, but I waded into him. I banged him in the furnace, just above the belt. He was through.