He knew what he had to do to be a good fighter. He had the stuff.
GEORGE CHUVALO on Bernie Guindon
Guindon was so caught up in club business that he wasn’t in good enough shape to make the Canadian boxing team for the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City. He did fight in qualifying matches but wasn’t at his best. “You’d get so involved. I never used to train. I’d be doing club stuff and then I’d go out and box. It shows in your boxing.”
His friend Walter Henry made the Canadian Olympic team again as a flyweight, after representing Canada in the 1964 Olympic Games in Tokyo. He thought Guindon could have made the Mexico City team, despite his substandard conditioning, but some judges of his bouts had other ideas. “There were some very bad decisions that went against him,” Henry said.
It didn’t help that Guindon drew large, vocal crowds of Satan’s Choice to his matches, which rankled officials worried about the sport’s image. “I would think that was working against him,” Henry said. “They knew who he was and they probably leaned the other way not to let him go to the Olympics.”
Still, there were offers for Guindon to turn pro, but he worried that it could be used against him in court after one of his many street brawls. He suspected that a simple assault could become assault with a weapon if an ambitious Crown attorney argued that the fists of a professional fighter should be considered weapons. He also didn’t trust the boxing business in general. There were fixed fights, managers who didn’t care about their athletes, and not much money for most fighters. “There are a lot of crooks who are managers. Fucking crooks take all of your money.”
“He could have done well as a pro,” Canadian heavyweight champion George Chuvalo said. “He was ready to turn pro. He could take a punch. He could deliver a punch. You weren’t going to go in there quickly and knock him out, that’s for sure. He knew what he had to do to be a good fighter. He had the stuff.”
Henry said there was always a special buzz whenever Guindon appeared on a fight card. “Everyone would go just to see him because he was in Satan’s Choice.”
“He was intimidating,” Henry recalled. “Stick his chin out. Go, ‘Come on, hit me again.’ One of those types of people. A lot of them were afraid of him…He was just a tough fighter. A good boxer but mostly looked to fight. Looked to get in and slug it out.”
Coming from Belfast, Henry didn’t know a thing about the Satan’s Choice, beyond the club’s obviously tough reputation and cryptic things Guindon would tell him. “People would say, ‘You’re friends with Bernie?’ I’d say, ‘All I see about Bernie is good stuff. I’ve never seen him do any bad.’
“All I ever knew about Bernie was that he was such a nice person. A gentleman…We were very close friends. We got along very well. He never spoke about it.”
Henry was impressed that Guindon helped out other boxers with money when he could. He also sometimes covered for them, taking the blame for things he didn’t actually do. “He’d take the rap for a lot of things that he wasn’t the instigator of,” Henry said. “He was loyal to a fault. He just feels that’s the way the leader should be.”
On June 3, 1968, Guindon was doing well enough in the ring to be one of the local sports celebrities honoured at the Oshawa Sports Celebrity Dinner at the Oshawa Civic Auditorium, despite his growing notoriety as an outlaw biker. Guests of honour that night included Montreal Canadiens’ captain Jean Béliveau, former world boxing champion Rocky Marciano and Oshawa mayor Ernie Marks. Guindon was suitably impressed by Marciano but didn’t approach him. “He was busy. I just don’t like bugging guys. You see the man. You know who he is. You respect him for what he has done. What else can you do? He wasn’t going to be able to help you.”
Sometimes Guindon wondered if Sister Dirty Gertie at Holy Cross Catholic Elementary knew who he had become. He certainly hoped she did. He still considered her a bully. “She lived long enough to know who the hell I was. I was so fucking happy when she died.”
Guindon still made training trips to Buffalo. Monsignor Kelliher didn’t talk much about Bernie’s biker club with the ungodly name. “I’d go and see him on a one-on-one basis. Me being a Satan’s Choice, he knew that. I just said it was a motorcycle club.”
Once when Guindon was fighting in Buffalo, a vocal contingent of Satan’s Choice members showed up, and one filled in as his corner man. Guindon was handily winning the three-round bout when the clubmate in his corner ran out of water just after round two. He grabbed another member’s Coke, drained it and then dropped the ice cubes into Guindon’s trunks, just in time for the third round to begin. Guindon managed to hang on to win the fight, although he was shivering visibly.
No one questioned his durability in the ring. He possessed the rare ability to stay on his feet even when temporarily detached from his senses. “The only time I ever got knocked out was at the beginning of the third round of one fight,” Guindon said. “I don’t remember anything else. My corner man was cutting off my hand bandages at the end of the fight. I said, ‘Grant, who won the fight?’ He goes, ‘You did.’ I said, ‘I don’t remember anything after the third round.’ He said, ‘Oh, you fought better in the last few rounds.’ ”