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07/10/2006 Archived Entry: "A MESSAGE FROM ‘TIGER’ PAUL KENNEDY"
A MESSAGE FROM ‘TIGER’ PAUL KENNEDY
Paul Kennedy died quietly in his sleep last Friday, July 7, 2006 at home in Portland, Oregon. He was 81 years old. His long, full life was rich in experience. He served with the U.S. Army in WWII. He had two wives and he fathered seven children. He worked a lot of different jobs, with the longest stint as a Teamster truck driver.
In his later years, among his favorite memories was his lengthy career as a boxer. Paul Kennedy was born in 1925 in Chester, Illinois and he did a lot of his growing up in Detroit. He started boxing there in 1939 and continued when his family moved to Washington State. Kennedy would have just come home from the war in 1946 when he boxed in the National AAU tournament in Portland’s Multnomah Stadium. His friend Herb Patzer of Portland remembers Paul fighting during that event. Three rings were set out on the baseball field with seating all around them on the grass. That was the same time that a young U.S. Army heavyweight named Rocky Marciano came down from Fort Lewis to fight. Herb Patzer also remembers that the following year, 1947, Paul Kennedy went to the AAU Nationals in Boston.
Describing Kennedy’s boxing, Herb Patzer says, “He was methodical with a nice, smooth style.” He was a biggish welterweight who often fought as a small middleweight.If you look at Paul Kennedy’s pro record on Boxrec.com you’ll find 68 total bouts, with 29 wins, 34 losses, 10 draws, and 9 wins by KO. The record begins in 1947, right after that National amateur tournament, and runs to 1960.
Patzer says he’s sure that Kennedy had many more bouts that have not yet been collected for the official record. Paul Kennedy himself told his daughter, Kaye, that he had a total of around 181 bouts, and that he’d lost 60 or 80 of them. “But I won a lot of friends,” he said.
When his daughter asked him how he wanted to be remembered, Paul Kennedy said, as “a guy that tried to be friends to everybody.”
He liked going to the monthly lunch meetings of the Oregon Veteran Boxers Association to hang around with his old friends. When his health started failing, his daughter Kaye kept taking him until he really couldn’t make it there any more.
When she asked him if he had any message for his boxing friends, Paul Kennedy said, “Keep your hands up, and keep punching.”
---By Katherine Dunn
