Everybody heard it. He broke three ribs. Man, it was a beautiful punch.
LORNE CAMPBELL describing a Bernie Guindon punch
Guindon hadn’t given up on boxing when he got out of prison in 1974. Thirty-two was an advanced age for an amateur athlete in a sport that rewards reflexes, but he still had a puncher’s shot at the Olympics in 1976. His strengths in the ring were power and brains and toughness, and they hadn’t gone anywhere.
He trained now mostly with professional fighters. “I used to spar a lot with the pros, good top pros. I enjoyed that more.” He fit right in when he tested himself at the sport’s top levels. There was a loss by decision to Clyde Gray, a slick boxer with a crisp jab who would go on to become a world-ranked fighter and the British Commonwealth champion. “He gave Clyde a good fight,” Spider Jones said.
There was also a win by decision over Gray’s brother Stu, a solid professional. “He [Guindon] fought a lot of good, good guys who were more than his weight, and he beat most of them,” Chuvalo said. “His record speaks for itself.”
While Guindon was spending a lot of time with the pros, he still had no plans to turn pro himself, but it wasn’t for lack of confidence or opportunities. He didn’t go pro because he still feared it would have legal ramifications, giving authorities the excuse to ramp up any charges against him after a brawl. “When you’re a pro, you’re not allowed to hit anybody on the street. Your hands are weapons.”
Outside the ring, Guindon remained a fearsome street fighter but not a particularly dirty one. He didn’t go for the stomp circles, which was when some bikers would circle, kick and stomp a fallen enemy. Once, after dropping an Ottawa-area club president, he waved off other Choice members who wanted to give him what bikers call a boot-fucking. Guindon was matter-of-fact about the encounter. He’d asserted his dominance in the club and didn’t want the dust-up to become something worse. He felt that his punches spoke loudly enough. “I said something. He said a smart remark. So I gave him a left hook, knocked him out.” The club president wound up in hospital from the one-punch fight. When he got out, he sought out Guindon but not for revenge. “He said, ‘Thanks for stopping those guys from kicking,’ ” Guindon recalled.
He still wasn’t impressed by much of what he saw of the pro game, including how the handlers of Eddie (Hurricane) Melo of west Toronto matched him with top pros when Melo was still a teenager. Melo, who was a Canadian pro middleweight champ and an enforcer for mobster Frank Cotroni of Montreal, would likely have gone further with better management. “He was young and they just didn’t care,” Guindon said. “They threw him in with top fighters.”
Once back in boxing circles, Guindon also renewed acquaintances with former pro Baldy Chard, who still supplemented his bouncer’s income by collecting debts for the mob. “He was friendly. I didn’t find him to be a belligerent person or rude. He just did his job.”
The fights and the criminal underworld overlapped frequently, but few straddled the line between them more than Guindon. Needing work, he drifted onto Toronto’s seedy Yonge Street strip, finding employment as a doorman and manager at the Venus Spa, a second-floor walk-up with peeling paint. “At the time, my girlfriend was a stripper/dancer. That’s how I ended up in the area.” A walk down Yonge Street in the mid-1970s wasn’t too much different than a trip to the tenderloin district of Bangkok, except for the language on the sex club signs and the ethnicity of the hookers. Grainy skin flicks played at the Loews Theatre just north of Queen, where moviegoers had once watched silent pictures and vaudeville acts, and then the works of Joan Fontaine and Clark Gable. There were a hundred places like the Venus Spa around Yonge and Dundas, where for twenty or thirty bucks, a man could have a body rub with masturbation, oral sex or naked dancing. A little more cash bought full intercourse.
Guindon’s job was to sort out customers who were mouthy or mistreating the women. It wasn’t much of a job, but there was no heavy lifting and it left him time to train. One day, his teenaged daughter Teresa noticed he was sporting an expensive-looking suit and a Rolex watch.
“Well, you look like you’re doing well,” Teresa said.
“Of course I am,” Guindon replied.
“What are you doing?”
“Well, I’ve got girls working for me.”
Although she generally found her father charming, Teresa wasn’t impressed with this particular boast. “He was laughing and thought it was funny.”
One day around this time, Suzanne Blais’s mother called her daughter to tell her that Bernie was going to be boxing at the Sheridan Mall in Mississauga. “I had moved into a new home in Erin Mills, and had two kids, but dropped everything and went out with my mom to see the fight,” Suzanne recalled. “Bernie won and I was so proud. This was the first time I’d seen him since 1960.”
Later that year, he fought on a card at the Burnhamthorpe Community Centre that included Nicky Furlano of the Cabbagetown Boxing Club in Toronto against Thomas Hearns of the Kronk boxing club in Detroit. Hearns would later become a world champion, but he left town that day a loser. Guindon was impressed by Furlano’s potential and personality. “I used to give him a lot of pointers. He wasn’t a smart aleck.”
Guindon was paired against Wilson Bell of Detroit. They stayed close for all three rounds, but Bell won the decision with a series of left hooks. That said, Choice members appreciated the fury of Guindon’s punching and cheered loudly. Among them was Ken Goobie, playing the role of his manager.
Jack Guindon still flirted with boxing but never displayed the primal rage or natural gifts that made his brother such a force in the ring. Jack had a boxing match of his own planned for the UAW union hall in Oshawa. While he didn’t pretend to be a great fighter, Jack was good enough to have a solid shot at winning the regional Golden Gloves. He was looking forward to a little hometown glory. But Jack’s opponent didn’t show up, and a replacement was needed fast. Bernie was in the crowd and was hauled in as a last-minute opponent for the five-round main event. It was Jack’s chance to finally beat his younger brother, since Bernie hadn’t been training for it, while Jack had been working out hard.
Lorne Campbell considered both of the Guindon brothers friends, but that day he was in Jack’s corner, taping his hands. He heard Jack warn Bernie that he meant business. He would be coming after him when the bell sounded. “I’m not going to fool around, Bernie,” Jack said.
Despite the warning, Bernie started off like a joker. “He just dropped his hands and let Jack hit him,” Campbell recalled. Then Bernie settled down to business, torquing a left hook that began at the soles of his feet and exploded somewhere deep in Jack’s midsection. “You could hear the wind go right out of Jack,” Campbell said. “Everybody heard it. He broke three ribs. Man, it was a beautiful punch.”
Years later, Jack remembered that left hook just as vividly. “It just lifted me off of my feet and down I went on my back. I was in pain. Guess what? I was off work the next day. Sore. I could hardly walk. Everything seized up on me.”
Guindon offered no apologies. Boxers are supposed to punch hard, and he felt he honoured the sport when he competed seriously. “He folded over like an accordion,” Guindon said, adding, “He beat me up when I was a real young kid.”
Guindon was a far gentler man when he thought of his young daughter Debbie Donovan, who was born in 1969. Guindon loved her company and shielded her from the club during their times together. “He never brought me around any of them,” she recalled. “Any time I saw him was family time. He always picked me up on the bike. He would take me to the CN Tower, to breakfast.”
Guindon would appear and then disappear from her life, and she never really understood what was going on when he was out of sight. “He was in and out of jail so much. I didn’t really know where he was. I know he loved his mother. He was just a normal guy to me. Never drank. I’ve never seen him smoke. Never heard him swear. He was always soft-spoken.”
Even during the occasional bike rides, he didn’t present himself as a dangerous boxer or biker. “I never saw any bad side of him. I’d see him…He was always happy. I never seen him angry, yell. Nothing.”
Years later, she would realize that her father was protecting her, in his own way. He was her dad, and dads are supposed to protect their little girls, even if Dad runs an outlaw biker gang.