On This Day: Nicolino Locche paints a masterpiece in his stoppage of Paul Fujii
His cornermen were looking around for him in the dressing room, and they found him taking a nap on a massage table. Earlier on, they went to pick him up from his hotel room, only to find him smoking a cigarette in his bathroom.
And all that happened only a few hours before he climbed through the ropes to create one of boxing’s most enduring masterpieces of all time.
Argentina’s Nicolino Locche always knew that his punching power was not his biggest strength. To this day, his 14 knockouts in 136 fights (a KO ratio of 12%) still ranks among the lowest for any world champ in history. If he wanted to succeed as a fighter, he would have to develop other skills strong enough to compensate his lack of pop.
His defense, namely his way of slipping and ducking punches, became the stuff of legends. After being booed out of the ring in his early days, he became a folk hero in his native Argentina, where the demanding and knowledgeable crowds at Buenos Aires’ Luna Park came to revere him, week after week. His way of frustrating his foes with a minimum of head movement and avoiding most of their punches earned him one of the most appropriate monikers in boxing history: “El Intocable” (the Untouchable).
A model athlete he was not. Notorious for his lackadaisical approach to training, and known as a chain smoker even in his prime, Locche was as much a circus performer as he was a boxer, throwing just the bare minimum amount of punches and denying his foes the chance to land any of theirs on his way to win after win.
Inevitably, the business savvy of his Hall of Fame promoter Tito Lectoure and the support of his people earned him a title shot in Japan against Hawaii-born Paul Takeshi Fujii, who had developed a reputation as a knockout artist in his early years. Fujii’s past as a US Marine who never quite learned to speak Japanese made him hard to accept for his countrymen at first, but he did become a beloved fighter in Japan especially after stopping Italy’s Sandro Lopopolo to earn the WBC junior welterweight title.
On December 12, 1968, Fujii put that belt at stake in what would be remembered as one of boxing’s best defensive performances of all time.
Legend has it that Fujii’s CompuBox numbers (if the punching-counting company had existed at the time) would have been a flat zero for the first three rounds of the bout, in which Locche used a looping left jab-hook to keep Fujii on the defensive while frustrating him with his unparalleled bobbing-and-weaving technique.
Having trained seriously for the first time in years, the usually lazy and clownish Locche took the fight to Fujii as the rounds progressed, closing his foe’s eyes with his peppering jab and his two-fisted attack.
Frustration piled up on Fujii as much as Locche’s punches did, and he ended up quitting in his stool at the end of the ninth round to award Argentina its third world championship in history – and to allow Locche to become a legend that remains unparalleled to this day.
Diego M. Morilla has written for The Ring since 2013. He has also written for HBO.com, ESPN.com and many other magazines, websites, newspapers and outlets since 1993. He is a full member of the Boxing Writers Association of America and an elector for the International Boxing Hall of Fame. He has won two first-place awards in the BWAA’s annual writing contest, and he is the moderator of The Ring’s Women’s Ratings Panel. He served as copy editor for the second era of The Ring en Español (2018-2020) and is currently a writer and editor for RingTV.com.
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