[professordp]

As I was researching the Floridian middleweights (circa, 1970s), I kept tripping over two guys, Fast Eddie Davis and Henry "Slick" Mitchell. They appeared so often, that I found them impossible to ignore, thus the ratings below.

It seems that if you were a middleweight either living or passing through Florida you just had to fight one, if not both, of these guys. Usually more than once!

Davis and Mitchell were the guys who typically showed up in the locker room on fight night. If someone didn't show, if the scheduled matches ended early, or if a young prospect needed an easy night, these were the boys you plugged in.

Marcel Clay, Milton Owens, Gene Wells, and Elsiha Obed feasted on these boys, as did many others. When there weren't any other opponents, Fast Eddie and Slick fought each other. They did this four times. Davis won two of their meetings, Mitchell prevailed in one, and they fought to a draw in a fourth encounter. I doubt that there was much public demand for this series!

I have absolutely no proof of this at all, but I like to imagine that Fast Eddie and Slick were pals, knocking down some beers after taking a beating in an improptu match against a more talented opponent. Licking their wounds and recounting there few ring triumphs in some cheap bar.

Mitchell was based in Brunswick, Georgia but fought almost all of his matches in Florida. Henry owned the ultimate glass jaw. He lost a total of forty-six fights out of seventy-three. Thirty-one of those were the result of knockouts or stoppages. And you didn't need much of a wallop to put Slick to sleep. Light-hitting Gene Wells did it twice!

Fast Eddie seems to have had a little more in terms of boxing skills, but not much more with a career record of 15-46-6. Unlike his buddy, Davis could take a punch and was only stopped fourteen times. And the quality of his opponents was a tad higher than the pugs Henry faced.

He gave a young Vinnie Curto a tough bout (at least according to The Ring) losing a split decision in a 1978 ten rounder. Fast Eddie also got into the ring with Carlos De Leon (twice) and Sugar Ray Seales. True he was stopped in these fights, but these guys at least had recognizable names among boxing fans in the 70s. You couldn't make that claims for the guys who beat up Mitchell.

A note about the attached ratings. For this thread, I like to go far beyond what's contained in BoxRec. Typically, I look for addtional sources on the Net and comb through old, musty copies of The Ring. Additionally, I want to include a picture of the fighter.

In preparing these ratings, I conducted a search far greater than what either fighter (or both combined!) was worth in the grand scheme of things. Needless to say, I found little more than scraps of information and not phots of either man. So these are truly very broad approximations of each fighter's abilities--or lack of same.