Boxing legend Angelo Dundee never forgot his South Philly roots

You never had to ask Angelo Dundee where he was from.

Through all his long life, the countless hours spent in perspiration-scented gyms, the globetrotting glory days with Muhammad Ali, the twilight years as an ambassador for a sport that badly needed one, he never shed South Philly.

He never lost the accent, the street savvy, the playfulness and toughness he'd developed growing up near Eighth and Morris Streets.

Mr. Dundee, who became nearly as great a boxing legend as the fighters he trained, died Wednesday at 90 in Florida.

Jimmy Dundee told the Associated Press that his father was hospitalized for a blood clot last week and was briefly in a rehabilitation facility before returning to his apartment.

"He was coming along good yesterday, and then he started to have breathing problems," Jimmy Dundee told the AP. "My wife was with him at the time, thank God, and called and said, 'He can't breathe.' We all got over there. All the grandkids were there. He didn't want to go slowly."

Mr. Dundee worked fights in London, Manila, and Kinshasa, Zaire. He learned his craft in New York's Stillman Gym. He opened Miami's famed Fifth Street Gym. He spent his last years in Tampa, Fla.

And yet, like those juicy roast pork sandwiches he so enjoyed on his frequent visits home, Mr. Dundee always oozed South Philly.

"I didn't know there was anything beyond Philly," Mr. Dundee said in a 1990 Inquirer interview. "I'd never been nowhere. Didn't have a car. Nobody did. Atlantic City was about as far as I got."

In those days especially, South Philadelphia was a boxing hotbed. Tommy Loughran, from 17th and Ritner, won the light-heavyweight championship in 1927, when Mr. Dundee was 6. That same year, Gene Tunney and Jack Dempsey fought for the heavyweight title at Sesquicentennial Stadium, just down Broad Street.

Born Angelo Mirena and one of seven children, Mr. Dundee and his boxing-crazed brothers admired a boxer named Dundee. So when brother Joe Mirena began a career as a prize fighter, he adopted that last name. Soon brothers Angelo and Chris, both also bitten by the boxing bug, followed suit and became Dundees, too.

While he would always be attracted to the sport's more cerebral aspects, Mr. Dundee admired the grit and guts boxing demanded. And he found plenty of that in the gyms that dotted Philadelphia's boxing landscape.