Stanley Ketchel

Stanley Ketchel, the fierce middleweight champion known as "The Michigan Assassin," died in Springfield, Missouri, on October 15, 1910, hours after he was shot at a ranch near Conway. He was twenty-four. He was born Stanisław Kiecal on September 14, 1886, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to a family that had come from central Poland. He had little use for school, ran away from home at twelve, and rode the rails as a boy. In Butte, Montana, he worked as a bellhop and a bouncer and began fighting in back rooms for twenty dollars a week. He turned professional there in 1903, at sixteen, and went 36-2-3 in his first forty-one bouts before heading to California in 1907, where the big fights were. In 1908 he knocked out Mike "Twin" Sullivan in one round and won general recognition as world middleweight champion. He defended the title against Jack "Twin" Sullivan, Hugo Kelly and Joe Thomas, lost it to Billy Papke by knockout, and won it back from Papke in an immediate rematch. He fought with a reckless, swarming style and often took on heavyweights who outweighed him by thirty pounds or more. The most famous of those fights came on October 16, 1909, at Colma, California, against heavyweight champion Jack Johnson. In the twelfth round Ketchel dropped Johnson with a surprise right; Johnson rose and knocked him out moments later. The film of the bout circulated widely, and the punch that floored the champion became part of boxing lore. By 1910 hard living had worn him down. Hoping to rebuild his strength for a rematch with Johnson, he went to stay at the Missouri ranch of his friend R. P. Dickerson. On the morning of October 15 a newly hired ranch hand, Walter Dipley, shot him from behind during a robbery. Dickerson chartered a special train to carry him to a hospital in Springfield, where he died that evening. Dipley was convicted in the killing. Ketchel was buried in Grand Rapids. Decades later he remains on lists of the greatest middleweights who ever lived.