Heroes of Yesterday
Merthyr’s EDDIE Thomas excelled at every level of the sport for around 40 years. Today, veteran players still remember him as a shrewd manager who ran a compact stable from his office in an ice cream parlour in his hometown, deep in the Welsh valleys.
Among the many great boxers Eddie brought to stardom were all-time legends Howard Winstone, Ken Buchanan and Colin Jones. He had many others during the 1960s and 1970s, including Eddie Avoth, British light heavyweight champion from 1969 to 1971, and Carl Gizzi, who challenged for the British heavyweight title in 1969.
Colin Jones – Action Pictures/Sports Pictures
As a boxer, Eddie was ranked number two in the world at welterweight in the January 1951 issue of Ring magazine. To prove this great achievement, the only man above him is Sugar Ray Robinson.
Like most of the great boxers of the period, Eddie was a very good amateur. Despite working a hard job as a coal miner, he won the Welsh light heavyweight championship in 1946 and went on to win the ABA title five weeks later. Ten thousand fans packed the Empire Pool, Wembley, to see these championships and Eddie won fights against the Scotsman, T Fraser, and then the army champion, Ernie Thompson. Two weight classes above Eddie, 17-year-old Randolph Turpin was successful at middleweight. Eddie and Randolph teamed up again later that month when both boys won for the ABA by a score of 5-3 against a strong team from the United States.
Eddie wasted no time in becoming a professional boxer. He won his first fight just six days after representing the ABA, defeating Basingstoke’s Ivor Simpson in a four-round bout at Jack Solomons’ promotion at the Harringay Arena. The highlight of the night was a 12-round heavyweight bout between Bruce Woodcock and Freddie Mills. Eddie was competing alongside respected peers, and with the attention of top London manager Sam Burns, his path to the top would be carefully mapped out.
He won his first 10 fights, with contests taking place at London’s top shows or in small halls in South Wales, where he was building up a large following. A painful defeat to Finland’s Yrjoe Piitulainen slowed him down a bit and a further loss, in March 1948, to fellow Welsh veteran Gwyn Williams in a British welterweight eliminator, gave his team pause and thought.
Eighteen consecutive wins later put things back on track and saw Eddie move from UK number five to world number two and a potential match with Sugar Ray. Along the way, Eddie won the British title. After defeating veteran Ernie Roderick in a knockout, Eddie then defeated Henry Hall and Cliff Curvis in title fights to gain two places on the Lonsdale belt.
Unfortunately, Jack Solomons was unable to finalise negotiations for a world title fight, as Robinson was making big money at middleweight and becoming a two-weight world champion. Instead, Eddie had to settle for the Commonwealth title and then the European title, which he won at Market Hall, Carmarthen, of all places.
Eddie was now at the peak of his career and both the Board and the EBU recognised his next contest, a European title defence against Frenchman Charles Humez, as a world title eliminator. Eddie defended his title in his native Wales once again, this time at Porthcawl, but he came in second, with BN reported that Humez “put on an exhilarating display of two-handed power fighting, which proved too much for Thomas. Eddie never seemed to feel comfortable under the wrath of his formidable opponent”.
He continued to fight for three more years, losing the British title and thus the chance to win the Lonsdale belt, but he went on to achieve much more as a manager. One of the greatest Welsh boxers, Eddie died in 1997, aged 71.
