‘The Golden Gloves Story’: When it ventured into the boxing movie business, the Chicago Tribune learned it wasn’t so easy

CHICAGO — You’ve heard about “Creed III.” It’s the latest in a long line of boxing movies, snaking back to the end of the 19th century. The third chapter in the “Creed” saga, born of the “Rocky” saga, made history last weekend: It did better business in the U.S., not adjusted for inflation, than any previous opening-weekend sports movie, ever.

So. The boxing genre is doing all right.

Boxing films have it all, starting and ending with a metaphoric stage inside the screen. That stage, the boxing ring, crystallizes conflict, combat and redemption, or downfall, on a square patch of destiny. There’s your purple prose for the month: It’s good for you, like fiber.

The post-World War II years were especially rich: John Garfield in “Body and Soul.” Kirk Douglas in “Champion.” Robert Ryan, Chicago’s own, in “The Set-Up.” Tormented, flawed individuals played by giants. Boxing and film noir: another match made by destiny.

It is a hardy, long-lived genre, rediscovered anew every generation, in 1999 thanks to Denzel Washington in “The Hurricane.” Or best-picture Oscar winners “Rocky” and “Million Dollar Baby.” And, though it has a slight edge on “Rocky” and “Million Dollar Baby” in terms of cinema, there’s always “Raging Bull,” to many the artistic pinnacle of the form, even if some of us — including the man who made it, Martin Scorsese — remain forever more devoted to the films that inspired it.

But have you heard of “The Golden Gloves Story” from 1950?

There’s a tale behind that obscure title, one that illustrates how the Chicago Tribune used to operate and what they promoted, relentlessly. Longtime Tribune sports editor Arch Ward was a key figure behind the creation of both the Golden Gloves and the Major League Baseball All-Star Game. And in the late ‘40s, a plan was hatched to shoot a feature film, fictional but soberly respectful of the real-life Golden Gloves tournament and its belief in good, clean combat.

A little about the film you don’t know anything about:

“The Golden Gloves Story” was made with money raised from Chicago backers, about $500,000. Lawyers, businessmen, “manufacturers, retailers and professional men,” is how a Tribune story from 1950 put it.

The screenplay concerns a promising Chicago Golden Gloves fighter, played by Dewey Martin, suspected of murder but meantime smitten with the dental receptionist daughter (Kay Westfall) of boxing referee Joe Riley. Joe’s an amiable straight arrow, played by the movie’s marquee attraction, James Dunn, who won a supporting actor Oscar for “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” (1945).

Seventy-six minutes long, director Felix Feist’s scrappy independent movie, more heart than finesse (but that’s true of a lot of boxers, too), was photographed on location in Chicago, with the Tribune’s Ward portraying himself. As does WGN’s Jack Brickhouse, and a variety of sports writers.

How’s the movie? No KO. No TKO. Pretty stiff. Pretty square. But it’s an irresistible time capsule, just to see the streets, apartments and gymnasiums of Chicago as they were in late 1949. It’s also nearly impossible to see in this country. It’s not streaming anywhere, or available on DVD, even. Amazon UK sells DVD copies, but this is not the UK.

The film, as the opening credits point out, was produced “with the whole-hearted cooperation of sportsmen under the auspices of the Chicago Tribune Charities, Inc.” The script of “The Golden Gloves Story” plays as if written by a morals committee sweating every page to ensure no further harm comes to the image of boxing. A January 1950 Tribune feature on the film notes that its hoped-for success might help Chicago “make a comeback as a (film) producing center,” as it was, for a few years, in the silent era. The story also notes that its storyline is “something different — not a sordid exhibition of bribery, thrown fights, brutality, alley brawls, broken promises and illicit love.” To which the average 1950 or the average 2023 moviegoer might respond with: Shoot! Not even a little of that stuff?

Two months after the film’s Oriental Theatre premiere, preceded by a parade down State Street, Tribune sports editor Ward’s “In the Wake of the News” three-dot column already seemed to be tiptoeing away from the independently financed and produced project, which didn’t so much sink like a stone as plip like a pebble with the larger U.S. market.

The Tribune, Ward stressed, was initially “not enthusiastic” about a fictional Golden Gloves boxing movie. It sounded “unsavory,” he wrote, and “we demanded the right of script approval before even discussing the proposition.” He added that it was “a challenge” to the producer and the director to make “an entertaining picture with the restrictions imposed on them.”

Watching “The Golden Gloves Story” today, in a DVD dupe of a rare 16 mm copy (more on that in a sec), you feel like an ingrate for complaining about the corniness of the romantic triangle (two adversarial boxers, one dental receptionist) or the unexceptional ring action. To see Chicago as itself, in a movie about a newspaper’s boxing promotion and charity fundraiser that became a very big thing, is like hopping in H.G. Wells’ time machine and setting it to when “The Golden Gloves Story” was filmed. The year 1949 was great for screen knockouts, with two exceptional boxing films of Hollywood pedigree: “The Set-Up” and “Champion.”

Mitch Levin, now retired and living in Skokie, knows those movies inside out. He knows “The Golden Gloves Story,” too, because he owns one of a handful of 16 mm copies in existence. It’s part of a 250-hour collection of sports films, heavy on the boxing and the wrestling, he and his brother, Joel, also of Skokie, have amassed over the years.

They grew up in Albany Park, and watched the fights on TV with their father when TV was relatively new and boxing was supreme. “The Friday Night Fight, sponsored by Pabst Blue Ribbon,” Mitch says. We’re at a booth at an IHOP, talking boxing and boxing movies.

Turning 79 later this month, Mitch also has a rare 16 mm copy of another Tribune-sponsored Golden Gloves film, this one a promotional travelogue running 38 minutes, from 1952. It’s called “Golden Gloves Across the Sea,” and it’s swell, chronicling (to the voice of announcer Brickhouse) the European tour undertaken by a group of 10 or so young amateur fighters chaperoned by sports editor Ward, among others. The feel-good vibe works here; it’s a promotional video, no apologies, with none of the grittier requirements of a good boxing drama.

Levin recalls going to a lot of the Golden Glove fights at the St. Andrew School gymnasium on Addison near Lincoln on the North Side. He remembers the bleacher seats. “No frills. Hot dogs, Cokes.”

His favorite fighter? That’s easy, he says: Stanisław Kiecal, aka Stanley Ketchel, World Middleweight Champ. Nickname: “The Michigan Assassin.” He died at 24, murdered in Conway, Missouri. Hemingway wrote a short story inspired by him, The Light of the World.”

Levin’s love of boxing started with his father, who drove a cab; his mother worked as a server at The Bagel on Broadway near Belmont for 55 years. That love remains strong today, decades after his parents’ passing.

“To see these guys, whether they’re Golden Glove amateurs or the greats, do things you could never do — it’s amazing,” he says, finishing up his coffee. “It’s not my quote” — it comes from William Shenstone, 18th-century English poet — “but I like it: ‘Whoever excels in what we prize, appears a hero in our eyes.’ You know what I mean?”

There’s a lesson in that, he figures. “Even if you lose, well, you had the guts to get in the ring.”