|
January 1958
JANUARY 1958 RING: In semifinal 6 round affair at Civic Auditorium in Omaha, Nebraska on Nov 7, 1957, light heavy weight matchup say Sonny Ray stop George Blackstone in round 5. It proved to be the last of a short career for Blackstone. Not much to know about Blackstone. I’ve include Ray’s file from the TB data base but updated with some bio info. Doing a search on the web I found a couple nice articles about Ray, one of them written by the LA Times in 1987 when Sonny was painting cars in Long Beach to eke out a living. Find out that Sonny started out as a baseball player playing the infield in a Chicago Cubs minor league in the late 1940s’. His baseball career didn’t amount to much and after spending 3 years serving in the Army over in Korea he returned home and decided to take up boxing.
TITLE BOUT 2013: In our replay fight, Blackstone manages to go the distance with Ray though Sonny wins by unanimous decision, 57-56, 57-55, 58-54. Blackstone managed to land a combination in the 2nd round that stunned Ray putting him down for an 8 count! Ray recovered though and fought back to put Blackstone down with a hook at the 2:12 mark in the 5th round. Blackstone gets up though in 7 and finishes out the fight.
|