For a while, Lavern Roach seemed to be a fighter who knew when to quit. A husky, young ex-marine and Ring magazine's Rookie-of-the-Year in 1947, he had learned a dreadful lesson when he climbed into the ring against the late ex-Middleweight Champion Marcel Cerdan. That night two years ago, he crawled around the ring on his hands & knees as Cerdan's sledgehammer blows smashed him to the floor seven times in eight rounds. After that beating, handsome Lavern Roach, a good fighter who had been brought along too fast, went back home to Plainview, Texas with his wife and daughter, and took a job selling insurance.
But even in Plainview Lavern Roach still heard the roar of the crowd and the money-jingling song of the promoters. Last week, after three tune-up fights along the comeback trail, Middleweight (159½ Ibs.) Roach shuffled his feet in the rosin box at Manhattan's St. Nicholas Arena and waited for the bell. The memory of what "Cerdan did to him had apparently faded; he insisted that he felt as strong and fast as ever.
"Stop It!" For seven rounds, the fast-stepping Texan fought rings around his opponent, swarthy George Small of Brooklyn. Roach was so far ahead on points that he could not help winning—if he just stayed out of trouble. But in the eighth round Small let go a desperation right and it crashed flush on Roach's jaw. It ripped the flesh inside his mouth and blood gushed from his lips. Roach's legs buckled; staggering, slack-jawed and glassy-eyed, he hung on.
He lasted through the ninth, his wavy brown hair damp and matted, his body streaked with red from Small's blood-smeared gloves. When the bell sounded for the tenth round Roach doggedly came out into the ring again. Small jabbed a soggy left to his mouth. The blood trickled down from Roach's battered mouth, splattering down on his black boxing trunks.
Then a vicious right put Roach down for a count of nine. Even Manhattan's bloodthirsty boxing fans seemed to sense what was about to happen and began yelling: "Stop it! Stop it!" Referee Frank Fullam did stop it—after another punch had sent Roach sprawling to the deck. By then it was too late.
"I'm All Right." As Roach lay half-conscious in the ring, a doctor jumped quickly through the ropes. "I'm all right,"
Roach muttered thickly. "I'm getting up." But it took two men to help get him back to his corner. The referee asked him the prize ring's compass question: where was he? "I'm all right," Roach insisted. "I'm in the St.Nicholas Arena."
But subconsciously, Lavern Roach seemed to know what was happening. "Damn it," he said, "my luck is running out." Then he lapsed into a coma. Fourteen hours later, in nearby St. Clare's Hospital, Lavern Roach, 24, died* of a brain hemorrhage.
*He was the first boxing casualty of 1950. Last year there were nine U.S. ring deaths.