Uncle Tony the Prize Fighter Extraordinaire

I knew I had a famous uncle.  But I did not know it when I was a small child.  He was just my Uncle Tony.

Tony Bosnich was one of my Mom’s older brothers, the first one in her family born in the USA. They had an older sister, Agnes, who died at infancy in Yugoslavia (now Croatia), and an older brother, John, also born there in Blato, on the island of Korcula in the Adriatic Sea.  Mom and her twin brother, Frank Jr., came three years after Uncle Tony, also born in the USA.

Tragedy struck the family when Mom and her twin were nine years old, Tony twelve, and John 15, when their father died which resulted in the older brother, my Uncle John, having to leave school and go to work to help support the family.  Borden’s Dairy and Delivery employed their dad and they immediately employed Uncle John to help support this family of five.  Uncle John was loyal to that company and remained working there until the day he retired.

My Uncle Tony started boxing at the Corpus Christi gym at 13 years old.  When he was a kid at Balboa High School, he was an “All-City” left tackle for a few years, but boxing was his claim to fame.  He was boxing as an amateur during his senior year. His manager, Sid Flaherty, (against his mother’s wishes) coaxed him to quit football in 1940 so “he wouldn’t get hurt” and spend more time training for boxing, and that pretty much shot his chances at ever getting a scholarship. He became a heavyweight boxer from 1941 to 1952. He was quite handsome, standing 5’11” and had a very sweet disposition.

He took a two year break in the early 40s to serve as an Army Paratrooper, a duty he volunteered for to get the extra “jump pay” to send home to his mother.  He was in an exhibition jump unit that did demonstration jumps to raise money for war bonds. The pictures of him in his uniform were everywhere.

Several years later tragedy struck again for the family.  My Mom’s twin brother, their brother, Frank who was a great athlete in both football and baseball was injured playing baseball and got cleated below the knee which led to medical issues and, ultimately, bone cancer.  Uncle Frank was a star baseball player pegged for stardom as a first baseman.  He ended up first losing his leg and then his life at 22 years old.  Boxing was a good way for Tony to earn money to pay for his brother’s hospital bills. 

The death of his brother was hard on the family and by then Tony was married with a wife and a son, my cousin Ray.  Tony always did better when his brother, Frank, was at ringside, so the death of his brother and the wishes of his beautiful wife for him to get out of the ring posed a problem for him, causing him to retire from boxing in 1952.  Many people at the time thought he could be a very famous champion had he continued boxing.

An alumni at Balboa High School, they have him listed in their Hall of Fame for boxing and he was the Excelsior District (in SF) hometown professional athlete and local hero who also received honors from the Veteran’s Boxing Association.  He is also featured in the book, “Image of America – Excelsior District.”  Those who remember SF in the 1940s remember my uncle and rooted for him because boxing was very popular in those days, although the boxers never got the kind of money they get today. Boxers today rank number two in the highest paid sport, second to golfers.

During his illustrious career, in recorded boxing records, he won 34 matches (with 18 KOs), lost 12, and had three draws for a total of 49 fights in his 11 years.  He boxed a total of 318 rounds with a KO percentage of 36.73. 

As with lots of hype before boxing matches, the boxing matches with Pat Valentino (another Excelsior boy) were billed as fateful–grudge trilogies with “local bruiser Tony Bosnich” which drew feverish crowds. In reality, they were friends.

Their first fight, in December 1947, was declared a technical draw after Valentino suffered a cut from a butt in the first round. Tony won the second bout by majority decision over 10 rounds after flooring Valentino late in the fight. Valentino convincingly won the rubber match over 15 hectic rounds on October 4, 1948. It was in the last fight that Valentino took a thumb in the eye and suffered a torn retina. Despite the injury, gutsy Valentino entered the ring two months later to face another boxer. They were tough guys back then.

After retiring from boxing, my uncle owned the Club Mayflower bar in the Potrero District in SF for many years. All during this time, he became a referee, and it was not unusual to see him on television refereeing a boxing match. He and his wife during this time had two more children, another son, Frank, and a daughter, Rita, and they lived not far from us, in Daly City.

Years later, they divorced, he sold the Club Mayflower, remarried, gained a step-daughter named Stella, had the bar at Val’s in Daly City and then for the next twenty years he owned Tony’s Haufbrau in South SF until 1992. 

I remember when he was honored at the War Memorial Building in SF when I was an adult.  We went to the dinner and it was loaded with all the old time boxers coming to honor one of their own. I recall thinking that they sounded like they were all punch-drunk.  You can’t take that many beatings without your brains getting all mixed up.

Tony once had to call Herb Caen, the Pulitzer Prize winning columnist who wrote for both the SF Chronicle and the SF Examiner, and who coined the phrase referring to San Francisco as “Baghdad by the Bay” because Herb wrote in his column that he had died.  Uncle Tony called him and said, “”Herb, last time I checked, I was alive.”

Looking back, when we were kids, my brother and I used to spy on him when he came over our grandmother’s house and worked out in the basement of her home.  We had hardwood floors in our houses, and at our grandmother’s, if you got down on the ground and put your face to the floor, you could look between the little minute spaces of the planks and see what was going on in the basement. Uncle Tony worked out on weights and he did that jump rope thing that boggles the mind. At least it boggles mine. I could never figure out how they jumped that fast with just picking up their feet a little bit.

As a kid, I grew up watching the Gillette sponsored Boxing on Cavalcade of Sports on television as did my whole family.  Of course it was on those small screen televisions back in those days, but we all sat together and watched television as a family.  When you only have one television, you were a captive audience for whatever your father wanted to watch, and, unlike today, you or your siblings were the “remote” television channel changers. 

I still enjoy watching a boxing match on television, especially when they have cute boxers like Oscar de la Hoya.  Thank God he retired; I worried about his beautiful face. To his credit he generated more money than any other boxer in the history of the sport, an estimated $696 million Pay-Per-View income.  Uncle Tony and other boxers in his day never came close to that kind of money and took more of a beating. But that was life back then and they loved what they did and that is all you can ask for.