MICKEY Walker was one of the best of all the world middleweight champions. This glittering division, packed with history, has a habit of turning up some truly tremendous fighters and, up until the War, there were few better than Walker.
By 1931, when he had outgrown the division, he was competing at light-heavyweight and heavyweight and he managed to draw that year with future world heavyweight champion Jack Sharkey, before losing out to ex-champ Max Schmeling in a valiant bid the following year. It was at middleweight, however, that he is best remembered.
Walker only ever boxed against one British fighter, and that was against Scotsman Tommy Milligan at the Kensington Olympia in 1927, when Walker was making the first defence of his world middleweight title, having won it the previous year in a bruising encounter with Tiger Flowers.
Milligan, from Hamilton, was the reigning British middleweight champion, and as well as also winning the British title at welterweight, he had, in 1925, been European middleweight champion, too. He was a good fighter and a worthy contender to meet the great American. In 1927, Walker was still something of an unknown quantity, having only just won his title, and many scribes, both in the UK and in America, gave Milligan a decent chance.
Unlike so many good Scottish boxers in the early 1920s, such as Alex Ireland, Johnny McMillan and George McKenzie, Milligan had not stood out as a top amateur and had largely learnt his trade boxing six-rounders in the many small halls then dotted in and around Glasgow. He quickly established a very good reputation as a boxer who could also punch and had lost only five of his 55 contests going into the bout.
The contest was scheduled for 20 rounds – quite rare at the time for a world title bout – and, as Walker had not previously boxed over that distance, he trained assiduously. He set up his camp at Tagg’s Island, a small island on the Thames, just close to Richmond.
The island was owned by circus impresario Fred Karno, who had opened a luxurious hotel there named the Karsino, and this is where Walker trained. Today, the island is a highly desirable and exclusive location mainly inhabited by people living on houseboats, one of which was purchased by David Gilmour and used by Pink Floyd as a recording studio.
Shortly before the fight, Walker sustained a nasty cut against sparring partner George West, a London-based light-heavyweight and an ex-Grenadier Guardsman. West had been the victim in 1926 when Milligan picked up the vacant British middleweight title and he knew the Scotsman well. No wonder, then, that Walker was keen to employ him as chief sparring partner.
Despite the cut, Walker went ahead with the contest. Unusually, the referee, Eugene Corri, took the trouble to visit the camps of both fighters in the days leading up to the contest to explain what it was he expected of them both and how he intended to control the contest. This is standard practice today, when the referee speaks to both fighters in their dressing rooms, but was a most innovative, and welcome, change at the time.
The editor of Boxing News, John Murray, slightly favoured Milligan in his preview while noting that “any advantage Tommy may have will be more than offset by the undeniable fact that Walker’s experiences in the highest-class company have been far more extensive, frequent and more testing than any which Milligan has gone through”.
These were wise words for, in the event, Walker was in a different class. He battered Milligan, flooring him three times in the ninth and 10th rounds, and then leaving him badly hurt on the canvas as the towel fluttered in.
After knocking out Maxie Rosenbloom in nine rounds in 1928, Milligan suffered a first-round knockout at the hands of Frank Moody to lose his British title and he then retired. He was a good fighter, but Walker was something else.
