WHEN the lightweight southpaw Tyrone Everett died at the age of 24 in 1977, Philadelphia lost one of the most talented and colourful contributors to its thriving pugilistic scene. Brash, handsome and frequently haughty, Everett made a name for himself as the top “little man” on the East Coast, going so far as to vie for the lightweight championship in his hometown against the incumbent champion, Alfredo Escalera. Everett was unsuccessful in his lone shot at a title, losing a split decision—an outcome that confounded partisan spectators that night in Philadelphia, November 1976, at the beloved Spectrum Arena. As suspicions of corruption mounted, Escalera-Everett would soon pass into boxing’s lore of sordid shenanigans. The late Harold Lederman, who was ringside for the miscarriage, called it the worst robbery he ever witnessed. Six months later, in a ghastly coda egregious even by boxing’s typically seamy standards, Everett was discovered slain in the second-floor bedroom of a row home in South Philadelphia. He had been shot dead by his girlfriend, Carolyn McKendrick.
The mysterious circumstances governing Everett’s final days and the gnawing, bitter sense of irresolution his death has left behind for the past five decades are the subject of a new book by Boxing News contributor Sean Nam: Murder On Federal Street: Tyrone Everett, the Black Mafia, Fixed Fights, and the Last Golden Age of Philadelphia Boxing.
As the subtitle suggests, Everett came of age during one of the great regional renaissances in American prizefighting. Of course, the Philadelphia boxing revolution of the 1970s is mostly associated with the hard-nosed middleweights at the time: Willie 'The Worm' Monroe, Eugene 'Cyclone' Hart, Stanley 'Kitten' Hayward, and 'Bad' Bennie Briscoe. Throw in the light-heavyweight Matthew Saad Muhammad and you had a fistic culture that prioritised maximising the entertainment buck of the fight fan. Everett could not be more anomalous in that tradition of stoic machismo and noblesse oblige. A defensive, diminutive fighter, Everett was at odds with his peers from every standpoint: from the way he braided his hair, to the way he talked smack to his opponents inside the ring, to the way his fights seemed to attract more female admirers than male ones.
The following adapted excerpt introduces the reader to Everett at the very outset of his professional career, just
