Former Contender Still Talks the ‘Science’ at 81

CHARLESTON, W.Va. —  When Natie Brown clenches his 81-year-old fists and snakes a hook through the air, the car wash where he works becomes his boxing ring.

“You don’t throw a left hook,” Brown said. “A lot of people, that’s a mistake they make. They think you throw a left hook.”

Instead, he shows how he once drove his square, huge fists into the bodies of future champions Joe Louis and Max Baer. He emphasizes his whole weight, not just his arm, was behind the punch.

He bobs and weaves his head, but staggers when his left leg buckles under a move made too quickly.

Natie is down in his seat, but not for the count.

A few moments later, he sets aside an unlit cigar. He’s up again: jab, jab, jab, jab.

What happens when you drop the right?

“Why, you get hit,” he says with disdain. “We used to say, ‘You keep your right hand high, your (butt) off the canvas and you become a world champion.”

Brown didn’t make it that far. He peaked in 1934, the year Baer was champion and Brown was ranked eighth in the world. Louis, just starting his climb to the top, was ninth.

Louis and Baer are dead, as are most of the others Brown fought between 1925 and 1950.

Brown’s light blue eyes don’t flinch beneath his gold wire rims when he says he doesn’t think much about death. “You can’t,” he says.

Trying to remember, Brown sometimes stumbles over details as though he is signing an autograph in his boxing gloves.

“Do you know how long it’s been?” he asked. “We’re talking more than 50 years.”

Actually, it’s been more than 70 years since he grew up in Philadelphia, the ninth of 10 children.

“Everybody was fighting everybody else,” he says of his neighborhood. “Especially the blacks and the whites.”

Brown turned pro at 15. He later moved on to Washington, D.C., where he was based much of his career and was elected to the city’s boxing hall of fame in 1981.

Brown’s fights with Louis and Baer were among the highlights of his career, but the broken cartilage in his nose and the pulpy texture of his face probably were sculpted by journeymen.

“Those fights, you were just glad to get out alive,” Natie said.

He did more than that in 20 rounds against Baer and Louis.

Brown fought Baer on Nov. 6, 1929, losing a six-round decision in Oakland, Calif. Baer became champion in 1934.

Brown lost a 10-round decision to Louis on March 28, 1935, in Detroit. In the rematch, Brown took a pounding and the fight was stopped after four rounds on Feb. 17, 1937, in Kansas City.

Louis knocked out James J. Braddock in the eighth round of his next fight to become champion.

“Baer was a good fighter and a hell of a puncher,” Brown said. “Louis was great. ... You knew when he’d hit you.”

Brown was more of a craftsman than a puncher like Baer, Louis or Dempsey.

“I was an exceptionally good boxer,” he said. “If I didn’t want anybody to hit me, they couldn’t hit me ... but I stood my ground.”

Slugging it out didn’t ensure a loss against punchers like Louis, but it put Brown on unequal footing. It also, however, was why he got the fights in the first place.

“A couple” of his matches involved fighters who were paid to lose, but Brown insisted he didn’t have anything to do with it and he never threw a fight.

“The good fighters, you couldn’t buy,” he said. “It was the fellows who were ordinary, who needed money, who you could buy.”

He can’t remember his record, but believes he won most of about 75 fights by decision.

In the 1950s, a Charleston newspaper credited him with about 200 victories out of almost 240 fights. Because of sketchy records, it’s unclear how many times Brown fought professionally.

Brown says he always got the best treatment in between fights.

“Always,” he says. “They looked out for you.”

He dabbled in politics at the same time, earning money to speak at political meetings for the Republican National Committee in 1934.

He quit boxing after winning four fights in 1950 and settled in Charleston. He ran a carnival for children in the 1950s and 1960s.

In the mid-1960s, he was sentenced to prison for buying and receiving stolen cigarettes. Brown was granted parole in 1967, according to the state Department of Corrections.

He won’t talk about it except to say the charge stemmed from a misunderstanding.

He has given up the carnival business, but still makes and sells Easter baskets and helps his son, Mackie, operate Mountaineer Hand Wash in downtown Charleston.

Don’t ask Brown for a favorite fighter from today’s ranks. He figures most don’t put in much more roadwork than the several miles of walking he does each week with his wife in Charleston’s suburban hills.

“When I was younger, I used to go out and play golf and softball games, anything pertaining to athletics,” Brown said. “I don’t do hardly any of those things anymore, but I don’t miss them.

“Boxing, it was something you participated in, making money in. You do miss those things.”