The Italian Stallions exhibition is a celebration of another time in the history of North American society, and, by extension, of North American sport. It is also a tribute to the classic rags to riches tale of the new immigrant, told through a collection of 61 images of a band of Italian-Americans who, for the middle third of the 20th century, held sway over the national sporting psyche in a way perhaps no other single ethnic group ever has.
In the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, the nation was obsessed with two major sports, baseball and boxing. It was, as acclaimed author Thomas Hauser proposes, a time When Boxing Mattered. Nowhere was this more evident than New York City, the Mecca of the fight game, where Yankee Stadium, the Polo Grounds and Madison Square Garden played host to most world title fights, but also, where no fewer than 22 neighborhoods gave birth to local fight clubs. Those neighborhoods were cauldrons of desperation, but also of opportunity; one, the Lower East Side of Manhattan, spawned two men, Thomas Rocco Barbella and Giacobe LaMotta, who would not only become middleweight champions of the world but whose stories were so compelling that Hollywood featured them in movies starring Paul Newman and Robert DeNiro.
At roughly the same time Barbella -- better known as Rocky Graziano -- and LaMotta were moving to Brooklyn and the Bronx, the tough streets of Hartford and Brockton, Massachusetts and the onion fields outside Canastota. N.Y., were shaping three other men who would come to rive public passion: Guglielmo Papaleo, Rocco Francis Marchegiano and Carmen Basilio. Papaleo -- or Willie Pep, as he became known -- fought a remarkable 242 times over 26 years, where Marchegiano begat Rocky Marciano, whose career record - 49-0 - would become boxing's most storied number.
Wherever and whenever they stepped into a ring, those five, ably supported by the likes of Roland LaStarza, Joey Maxim and Joey Giardello, inspired passion and excitement. In the 15 years between 1945 and 1959, one or the other among them was a combatant in Ring Magazine's Fight of the Year an incredible 13 times. At end of the century USA Today poll ranked two of their fights -- Pep's second with Sandy Saddler and Graziano's second against Tony Zale -- as among the top four bouts ever.
Those fights are central components to The Italian Stallions exhibition. Eight black and white images from that Saddler-Pep fight are among 30 searing shots from their four-fight, four-year war that are mounted in dramatic sequence along a 30-foot white wall. The Graziano-Zale bout gives rise to a spectacular 38" by 48" giclee on canvas piece that dominates a brick wall in our Stone Distillery location.
The exhibition presents a broad range of photographs, including black and white and color action. But the most unique -- and arguably most significant -- images are a series of color studio shots taken of the major Italian-American fighters in the decade following the end of World War II. The shoots were arranged to provide full-page color images of the fighters for major feature articles in SPORT magazine during its halcyon days as the iconic North American sporting publication. In the expressions on the fighters' faces -- from the look of tentativeness playing across Willie Pep's lips, even as his head is swaddled in a white towel, almost like a newborn, to the malevolence captured in Jake LaMotta's taut features to the depth in Rocky Graziano's eyes -- it is almost as if they are present in the room, ready to step back through the doors of time and into the ring once more, to be greeted by the roar of a blood-thirsty fight crowd.
The names of many of the photographers whose work is included have been lost in the recesses of time, but several prominent shooters are included. The Pep image was photographed by Curt Gunther, who later went onto fame as the official chronicler of the Beatles' inaugural North American trip, while several shots of Rocky Marciano were taken by Ozzie Sweet, perhaps the preeminent magazine cover photographer of all-time, with over 1,800 covers to his credit.
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