There have been so many Hartford (Connecticut) based boxing trainers/coaches over the years, from John Datro, Bill Gore and Walter Brown to Pepe Vazquez, Wesley Shuff and Desi Clark but I think most people familiar with Hartford boxing have one man's name come to mind when they think of trainers in the city-- that being the legend, Julio"The Duke" Julio Gallucci, better known as Johnny Duke.

“The Duke” had been involved in boxing as a fighter (in the early 1940's he was managed by George Gainsford while boxing out of the same Harlem, New York stable as Gainford's top boxer, Sugar Ray Robinson) and as a trainer since the 1950's at the Bellevue Square Boys Club in the Bellevue Square Housing project in the north end of the city.  Duke, maybe best known as the first trainer for future welterweight champion Marlon Starling, was probably most proud of the fact that he guided the future two-time world champ to his first major amateur title when the then fifteen year old kid from “the Square” won the National Junior Olympic welterweight crown in Peoria , Illinois back in 1974. 

Duke had found success as an amateur trainer many years earlier, though, when he guided Hartford 's Jimmy Blythe to two consecutive National AAU heavyweight titles back in 1958 and 1959. He also started out Bellevue Square prospect Donny Nelson, an extremely promising lightweight who was killed on a Hartford street back in 1975.

Duke’s Bellevue Square Boys Club thrived for years on end and would often see more than thirty of its boxers entered in the annual Golden Gloves tournament each January in Holyoke ,  Massachusetts where guys like Nelson, Eddie Reynolds, Stevie Hilyard and Herbie Darity won multiple crowns over the years.

I first met Johnny Duke way back in January of 1983 at the Western Massachusetts Golden Gloves tournament and last saw him about two weeks before his passing in 2006. In that twenty-three years span of time, I was around him many, many times, from his being my roommate at the 1986 National Golden Gloves tournament in Iowa (sixty two years old and he had us sleeping with the light and TV on) to his helping me run amateur boxing tournaments in Hartford in the late 1990's. I was also fortunate to have him present in my corner numerous times as both an amateur and as a professional boxer ("punches win fights!!" he'd constantly tell you) including in numerous national tournament bouts. He also acted as "the Glove Man" at my local amateur shows in Hartford and being in his presense you always seemed a second or two away from experiencing what would ultimately become a memorable “Duke story.” 

It seems like every single person who ever spent even just a few minutes with the man has at least one of them.  

You certainly didn't need to know the Duke for as long as I had to have some. You could meet him just one time and probably come away with a story that you found yourself telling and retelling many times over the course of your life.

I have dozens of them amassed through boxing trips and gym sessions.

My first time representing New England at the National Golden Gloves, for example, was out in Cedar Rapids , Iowa in May of 1996.  Duke, as usual, was the New England team coach. We were roommates that year and one thing that really stands out to me was that he couldn't sleep without the TV being on.  Every night when it was time to go to bed, I had to wait until he fell asleep before I could turn the lights and the TV off.  We spent a lot of time together that week, especially when it was time to eat because he didn't want me to eat a lot of junk food and come in over weight. So, one day we are in a local restaurant. After a while, he starts his usual routine of talking to the waitress, flirting with her, telling her funny stories. At the end of the meal, he tells the girl, "In a few weeks I am going to be on TV in the corner of Marlon Starling (vs. Johnny Bumphus). And I want you to watch that fight because before the fight, because of your great service here today, when I come to the center of the ring with Marlon, I'm gonna' start rubbing my belly like this”  (Duke starts rubbing his belly in a circular motion) “And when I do that it's going to be my way of saying hello and thank you to you." 

The girl was so excited as she wrote down the date of the fight, and I thought to myself how cool it was that he would do that for her.  Surely a moment she would remember for a long time after it happened.

I noticed, though, that by the end of the week he had told almost every local Iowa person he had a conversation with that story.

So when Marlon fought a couple weeks later and Duke made his way to the center of the ring on national TV he had just about every single person in the entire city of Cedar Rapids , Iowa  watching him as they told their friends who were huddled around their TV set, "See? He's saying hello to me!!" 

A Hartford Courant reporter asked me after his death in early March of 2006 what I thought people would remember most about Johnny Duke and I immediately told him that, as hard as it might be for some to believe, it would most likely be non-boxing related things that would initially stand out in their minds.

Picking up an old coat off the street and bringing it back to "the Square" in Hartford so he could give it to someone who was cold and needed one.

Filling up a paper bag at Ponderosa's buffet with chicken wings and potato wedges to take back to someone in the projects who maybe hadn't eaten dinner that day.

Selling eggs out of the back of his truck at discounted prices or loaning people money with a small interest rate attached.

Some of those borrowers will surely laugh now at the sight and sound of Duke loudly calling them out on a busy Hartford street from his truck with his bullhorn, letting everyone in the immediate area know how late they were with their payment.

Or maybe it's for things like I heard the day after his funeral, when I read what former Golden Gloves champion Tommy Rivera told the same reporter on the day of Duke's burial. I have known Tommy for more than thirty years now, ever since we won the Holyoke Golden Gloves together for the first time back in 1985, but wasn’t until after I read his story in the newspaper, though, that it dawned on me how true what I said to the reporter really was.

Tommy, currently a good 53 years years old and out of boxing for 30 years, made his way to Duke's funeral, just as many of his former boxers did.  I would be willing to bet that most if not all of them had a story similar to the one Tommy told that day. It seems that when he first came to the gym as a young kid, he was living in a cramped Bellevue Square apartment with several other family members. Duke dropped by the apartment one day early on in Tommy's boxing career for one reason or another and when he saw how many people actually lived there, he asked little Tommy (even as a grown man he never got above the 106 pound weight class) where he slept.  Tommy replied with his finger, pointing down to the hardwood floor. 

The next day, Duke returned to the apartment and presented Tommy's mother with a bed - a spare one that he had unceremoniously taken from his own daughter's apartment, so that the kid could have a comfortable place to rest his head at night.

Johnny Duke knew how to save things.

One look into his truck would reaffirm the idea that this man very seldom threw things away. Every boxer who spent time in the gym with him knows that when Johnny had to get something out of his pocket, it was like digging into a grab bag of some sort. You never knew what he might pull out of one of his many pockets. There were sticks of gum, a ton of scribbled notes and phone numbers, old candy wrappers, movie ticket stubs, key chains, boxing pins, pencils, a pocket knife, maybe a marble or two.

Nothing was wasted or went unused with The Duke. 

This was a guy who even found a way to put dead cockroaches to good use.

It's no secret that your average inner city housing project has no shortage of cockroaches crawling around.  "The Square" was no different. Every once in a while, the Duke would catch one but he wouldn't throw it away after terminating it.  Instead, he would seal it up in an envelope, put it in his desk drawer, and save it until it was time to put the little guy to use. Each one eventually ended up with someone’s name in magic marker on the outside. Always the name of whoever was on his bad side at the moment, scribbled on the outside of it for identification.  Marlon Starling had his name on one in that drawer for quite a long time. Hartford boxing manager Mac Buckley had one for a while, too, as I remember.  

I still consider it a comical honor in a certain sense that I had my own name on one of those envelopes for several months back in 1990, when I first left the Irish Knights team.

The story goes that whenever my name would come up in conversation during some of those dark days, Duke would reach in the drawer, pull my envelope out, lay it on the table, and say something derogatory about me as he smashed his palm onto it.  Then he'd toss me, "back in the drawer where he belongs."

Around ten years ago, I decided to raise money to put a giant plaque of Johnny Duke up in Bellevue Square, right where the gym used to be. 

The night before we were to unveil it at a public ceremony, I brought the plaque down to the Bellevue Square to keep it there for the night, right where we were going to hang it. It was very heavy  and we wanted it to be ready for the ceremony ahead of time. I got there at about 11 p.m. and there were a few guys hanging around.  When I put it up against the wall, I started thinking that maybe somebody might damage it or even steal it.  It cost $4,000.  So I asked one of the older guys standing there what he thought about it.  He said to me "Son, listen, that's Johnny Duke right there. You could leave that thing out here for as long as you want, day and night, and nobody's going to touch it. And if somebody DID touch it, someone looking out a window would see them and you better believe they would come out here and kick their ass."

When I originally decided to put the plaque up in Bellevue Square to commemorate Duke, I knew that I would have to go through the proper channels to get it done. I was told I would have to go to the Hartford Housing Authority and give them the pitch. I grew up in Windsor, which is one town over, and I wasn't sure if that would be an issue. I didn't grow up in Bellevue Square , so it might have seemed kind of odd for someone who didn't live there to want to put a plaque up there. I was pretty sure I had a strong case, but just to be sure I felt I needed an insider to help me. The first guy I thought of was a Hartford firefighter by the name of Anthony Taylor. People had told me that when Anthony was a kid in the gym, he was like "Duke's right-hand man." If you saw Johnny Duke, chances were that little Anthony Taylor was somewhere close by.

And I distinctly remember how proud Johnny was of Anthony becoming a successful firefighter with the city of Hartford. 

I was able to reach out to Anthony and asked him to attend the Hartford Housing Authority meeting with me, which he did with no hesitation.  After I got up and gave my original presentation, I told them that I had a special guest who could give them a little bit more personal insight into what it would mean to the community to get this done. 

Now, if you know me then you know that I am not an emotional person at all. Things don't really affect me that much on an emotional level one way or the other. But as I stood there listening to Anthony Taylor telling those people what Johnny Duke meant to him and other kids over the years in Bellevue Square, I felt something inside of me that I’ve very rarely encountered in my life. At one point with tears in his eyes, Anthony told those people that he speaks for hundreds of other Bellevue Square Boys when he says "Johnny Duke was the only father a lot of us ever knew."  I was so uncharacteristically caught up by the power of his words that I actually found myself heading out into the hallway for a couple minutes so I could keep myself composed. 

I never realized the true power of Johnny Duke until that actual moment. 

After I regrouped and came back in the room, I whispered to one of the guys the room, "It's a done deal, man. After that, no way are they saying no now." 

A couple weeks later, that plaque was up on the wall in Bellevue Square where it remains untouched to this day.