It was 115 years ago this week that Stanley Ketchel, then regarded as the greatest middleweight champion boxing had ever known, unlaced his gloves and stepped out of the ring for the last time.

He didn’t know it was the last time, of course. There was no reason to suspect as much. He was a champion in the prime of his career, one of the most famous boxers in the world — behind his heavyweight rival Jack Johnson. But after logging five fights in the span of four months, Ketchel, known as “The Michigan Assassin,” needed some time off. So after his knockout win over Jim Smith on June 10, 1910, he retreated to a friend’s ranch outside Conway, Missouri, to rest and recuperate and, he hoped, regain his strength for a potential rematch with Johnson.

Four months later he would die there, shot in the back by a ranch hand named Walter Dipley. He was 24 years old. He’d never expected to see old age and said as much to friends on many occasions. But even Ketchel couldn’t have believed that his wild life would end this soon, or that his death would leave such a void in the sport.

He may have died young, but it must be said that Ketchel packed a lot of living into the years he got. His early life reads like a turn-of-the-century adventure tale. Born Stanislaw Kiecal, son of Polish immigrants who’d settled in Grand Rapids, Michigan, he ran away from home at the age of 12 to pursue life as a gunslinging cowboy in the American West.

He was too young or maybe just too naive to realize that those days had ended, and maybe were never quite as romantic as he’d been led to believe, and anyway he made it only as far as Chicago before his fists got him into the kind of predicament that would repeat itself throughout his short life.

The way famed boxing writer Nat Fleischer described it in "Stanley Ketchel: The Saga of the Michigan Assassin," his biography of Ketchel, the trouble started when an older boy selling newspapers on the street called him “a dirty hobo.” In fairness, Ketchel had arrived by train only hours prior, and the state of clothes suggested that he hadn’t gotten there in a comfy seat on a passenger car. But just because the older boy was making a statement of fact didn’t mean Ketchel was going to let him get away with it. He attacked with a furious assault and soon the other boy went running. Ketchel ran after him, but was halted by the hand of an ex-fighter turned lunchroom operator known as “Socker” Flanagan, who pulled him in off the street and eventually put him to work.

Flanagan, according to Fleischer, was the first to introduce Ketchel to the art of boxing. He put gloves on the boy, taught him some of the basics, and advised him to reconsider his plan of living life as a cowboy on the open range.

According to Fleischer, Flanagan told Ketchel that he carried “a peach of a wallop” for a little guy, but he’d never be a technical boxer since there was “too much of the slugging spirit” in him. Still, he said, with a little craft and experience, he might have a future in the fight game. 

Flanagan also gave the boy another piece of advice — he needed to ditch the “foreign brand” and adopt a more “American” name. This is how Stanislaw Kiecal became Stanley Ketchel, though he would later be known as Steve to his friends.

(Fun side note: Ketchel shows up in one of Ernest Hemingway’s lesser known short stories, as two women who both claim to have known him trade stories about him while waiting for a train. One insists on calling him Steve, as if to show how well she knew him, but also tells a suspiciously romantic story about their relationship, calling him “the finest and most beautiful man that ever lived.” The other woman tells a far more believable story about having a brief, purely sexual relationship with Ketchel, who she says once told her simply: “You’re a lovely piece, Alice.” She cries softly to herself while thinking of him, but also adds that she was, indeed, “exactly as he said” back then.)

Ketchel continued to live a nomadic existence for much of his teenage years. He hopped trains to various mining and lumber towns looking for work, though was sometimes turned away due to his youth and small stature. Whenever a situation called for violence (and sometimes when it didn’t), he leapt eagerly to the task. He still dreamed of the cowboy life, and resolved to make it to Montana, which he’d heard was one of the last wild places in the West. He nearly died on the voyage there after falling asleep in a boxcar that was locked from the outside and left on an isolated stretch of track, but was saved by a farmer who, days later, overheard his cries for help.

At last, he made it to Butte, Montana, a bustling mining town built atop a vast ocean of copper with tens of thousands of miners from all over the world working day and night to get it out.

“In the early nineteen-hundreds, when Ketchel first came to Butte, that town had a well-deserved reputation for being lawless, gay, and in many respects as tough a spot as could be found from the Atlantic to the Pacific coast,” Fleischer writes in his biography of Ketchel. “The town was a hive of energy, wide-open from the sport standpoint, with its large population of miners ever ready to spend their money, and a choice selection of gamblers, gunmen and thugs always on hand to get the pickings from the payrolls.”

Here, again, a familiar scene unfolded. While working as an all-purpose laborer at a saloon and dancehall called The Copper Queen, he got into a tussle with the club’s bouncer, who occasionally boxed in local events under the moniker of the “Go-Git-‘Em-Kid.” He was older and bigger, but was quickly overwhelmed by Ketchel’s speed and ferocity. Instead of being reprimanded by his boss for fighting at work, Ketchel was given the bouncer’s job.

He turned out to be perfectly suited for the role. Longtime fight manager “Dumb” Dan Morgan once described Ketchel as having “the soul of a bouncer — but a bouncer that loved his work.” (By the way, “Dumb Dan” was one of those ironic nicknames, since Morgan loved to talk so much that sports writer Whitney Martin once remarked that “when he slows up to 150 words a minute he’s practically silent.”) After he’d flattened enough patrons, it was gently suggested to Ketchel that he offer his services in one of Butte’s many boxing events.

Ketchel was 16 when he made his official debut against “Kid” Tracy, winning via first-round knockout. He was fighting under the name “Young” Ketchel (if you were under 22 or so, practically the only names available to a fighter were “Young” or “Kid,” and some fought under both at different times), and he was immediately notable for his aggression and his fury — but not his skill.

“When Ketchel appeared in the ring at the Broadway Theater he was without a doubt as awkward a man as ever put on a pair of gloves,” the Anaconda Standard wrote later, in 1914. One man who tried to show him just how much he did not yet understand about the sweet science was Maurice Thompson, a lightweight who got by more on defense and ring craft — with a hefty dose of miner toughness and a little bit of cheating when necessary — than on relentless punching power. Ketchel would lose only two of his first 10 fights, both to Thompson.

According to Fleischer, the two men fought many more times than is reflected in the record. Thompson started out sparring with Ketchel in what passed for a boxing gym in Butte, then later met him in actual bouts and sometimes training sessions that became street fights. Each time, he found Ketchel significantly improved.

“He was a fighter of the gorilla style,” Ketchel would later say of Thompson. “After two or three minutes, we would find ourselves rolling out in the street with him on top of me trying to bite off my ear.”

The fight scene in Butte was rough in more ways than one. In a short time, it had grown from just another small mining camp to one of the biggest cities in the American West. The mines worked around the clock to get at the copper that helped electrify the nation. In the years between the time Ketchel arrived in Butte and the end of World War I, it’s estimated that Butte provided somewhere between one-quarter to one-third of all the copper in use anywhere in the world.

That translated to vast, sudden wealth for a relative few, but also a ruthless city that played by its own rules. One of Ketchel’s first fights took place in a theater where the ring backed up against a large curtain. His opponent that day was managed by the proprietor of the establishment, who had a practice of hiding behind the curtain with a sandbag, ready to deliver a blow through the cloth that would be unseen by the crowd but very much felt by the recipient.

Ketchel had supposedly been tipped off to this practice, so when his opponent tried to back him toward the curtain he reversed the position and let the manager bonk his own fighter over the head. In Butte, it wasn’t enough to be tough. You also had to be at least a little savvy. Ketchel developed such a reputation that he was a regular fixture in the warring newspaper factions that served as mouthpieces for various mining magnates known generally as the “Copper Kings.”

“Young Ketchell Develops Terrific Hitting Powers,” read one misspelled headline in the Butte Evening News in 1906. (The story would go on to warn readers that at Ketchel’s upcoming fight at the Butte Athletic Club there would be ample seating but no “rowdyism” allowed.) Coverage in The Butte Miner could sometimes be less friendly to Ketchel as he grew in fame, once calling him “a wild, unthinking spendthrift who loves to pick the buds along the Primrose Path as well as any many that ever lived.”

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It’s hard to say to what extent the environment in Butte shaped Ketchel as both a fighter and a person. Did it harden him into a certain violent resolve, or merely reward those existing aspects of his character? The mining town was a rough place, overflowing with vice of all kinds, and whether in the mines or the saloons or the streets, death hovered all around. Even after he left Butte for bigger opportunities in California and elsewhere, a violent and sometimes malicious recklessness would come to define Ketchel’s adult life.

It was in Butte that Ketchel first developed the habit of carrying a gun with him at almost all times. Boxing writer Hype Igoe later said he “never knew [Ketchel] to sit down to a meal in any big town without first laying his big blue six-shooter across his lap.”

He played practical jokes that could be mean and even dangerous. He once shot a young assistant who worked in his training camps, firing his Colt revolver through the door and hitting the boy in the leg. Such was his punishment for waking Ketchel from a nap in order to deliver urgent news. He loved to drive fast cars and once, according to “Unforgivable Blackness,” Geoffrey C. Ward’s excellent biography of Jack Johnson, “deliberately drove his roadster into a San Francisco fruit stand just to see the limes and lemons fly.”

Igoe later wrote that Ketchel had often remarked that he didn’t believe he’d live past 30. He thought it most likely that he’d die “with an automobile engine jammed through my wishbone,” and he didn’t seem to regard this as anything more than a reason to spend every dime he made now rather than saving it for later.

“I’m going to have as much fun as possible before I cash in but I must hurry for I haven’t a lot of time left for this earth,” Ketchel said, according to Igoe. He often seemed to live as if he were trying to turn this into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Igoe recalled riding in the passenger seat of a Lozier touring car with Ketchel at the wheel in a severe rainstorm, pushing the speedometer to nearly 80 miles per hour. Igoe tried to act as a voice of reason, shouting over the roar of the engine: “Hey Steve, suppose we skid?”

Ketchel, with utter indifference to this potentially fatal prospect, shouted back: “It will be too late for supposing.”

Along with Ketchel’s recklessness and apparent disregard for his own life came a sort of effortless confidence, the kind people might call hubris — but only if he’d lost. He was known to send telegrams to his mother and father before a fight, reporting that he’d won. When asked why he did this before the fight had even happened, he replied that he might forget if he waited until after the fight.

After being advised to leave Montana and seek greener boxing pastures in and around San Francisco, Ketchel had a series of memorable bouts with top middleweight prospect Joe Thomas. First they fought to a draw that most observers thought Ketchel won, which helped him secure by far the biggest payday of his career when he agreed to rematch Thomas in a 45-round bout promoted by James W. Coffroth (sometimes called “Sunny Jim” because of his good luck with the weather when promoting outdoor events).

Ketchel asked for his share of the purse in advance. Coffroth gave it to him, and Ketchel took it straight to a local poolhall and bet it all of it on himself to win. When advised to hold at least a little back, just in case, Fleischer reports that Ketchel declined, saying: “It’s all or nothing with me, sport. I never hedged in my life for marbles or money. Anyway, I’m due to win sure. There’s no fighter around my weight that I can’t lick inside of forty-five rounds.”

He would prove to be right, at least about Thomas. Billy Roche, who refereed that fight just outside San Francisco in 1907, later wrote an account for The New York Press in which he called it “the greatest fight I ever saw.”

Ketchel was a newcomer to the California fight scene, but had already made a name for himself in the same old fistic fashion. According to Fleischer, he’d hoboed his way into the state, despite having the money for a ticket, and when he was yanked off a boxcar by a particularly brutish and much despised railyard detective nicknamed the “Marysville Mauler,” Ketchel became an instant folk hero by thrashing the larger man in front of a crowd of grateful observers.

Still, when he fought Thomas it was widely believed that he was little more than exciting fodder for the local man who would soon become middleweight champ. That suspicion seemed to be confirmed in the 29th round, when Thomas flattened Ketchel with a clean right hand to the jaw.

Up until that point, according to the referee Roche, it had been an even but “cyclonic” battle, with both men fighting “at a lightning clip.” When Ketchel went down, he seemed at first to be out cold. At ringside, newspapermen began wiring the result back to their home offices. Then, at the count of seven, Ketchel rose up on one knee. Just before the count of 10, he was on his feet. That he not only survived, but immediately resumed his assault with full force, astounded Roche.

“I remember leaning over the ropes in between rounds and remarking to a ringside friend: ‘This fellow Ketchel isn’t a man. He’s a fighting devil!’”

Ketchel would go on to win by knockout in Round 32, after knocking Thomas into the ropes where, according to Roche, “he hung suspended, limp as a rag, mouth open, eyes glazed and dead to the world.”

The pair fought once more, with Ketchel winning a less ferocious bout before moving on to fight two twin brothers, Jack and Mike Sullivan, knocking out both of them in back-to-back bouts a few months apart, which only strengthened his claim to the title of world’s best middleweight. By the time he beat Billy Papke in 1908, Ketchel was recognized by all as middleweight champion. He would lose the title to Papke via shocking knockout later that same year, only to win it back in an immediate rematch two months later. With that, Ketchel became the first man in boxing history to regain the middleweight title after losing it in the ring.

Despite his success as a middleweight, Ketchel was never satisfied with just the one championship. Not unlike many of today’s fighters, he became obsessed with going up in weight to fight for another title — and there was none bigger than the heavyweight championship of the world.

This had seemed like a somewhat reasonable ambition when the title was held by Tommy Burns, the Canadian-born fighter who was undersized for the division even by the standards of the day. Ketchel stood about 5-9, and typically weighed around 150 pounds, which meant that a fight with Burns would be one of physical equals. That calculus changed on several fronts when Burns lost the title in 1908 to Jack Johnson, who became the world’s first Black heavyweight champ.

Had Ketchel been pushing for a shot at prior heavyweight champions like James J. Jeffries or “Gentleman” Jim Corbett, the size difference alone might have been a sufficient roadblock. But white America largely could not stand the idea of Johnson as champ. He was utterly unafraid and unapologetic in the face of tremendous racism, which only fueled desires to see him dethroned by a white fighter of any size.

By 1909, Ketchel had become a national sensation following two wins over Papke and two brutal battles with “Philadelphia” Jack O’Brien, who endured a heroic beating in the first fight and then was swiftly knocked out in the rematch, which he unwisely accepted less than four months after the hellacious first fight. (O'Brien later told reporters that Ketchel was "an example of tumultuous ferocity.") 

Ketchel also benefited from a New York press tour during which his manager, Willus Britt, decided to dress him up as a cowboy and take him around to every newspaper office in the city. Britt later told writer John Lardner that, given Ketchel’s age and youthful appearance, he initially considered pitching him to the New York papers as a college boy.

“Then I listened to his language a few minutes and decided to bill him as a cowboy instead,” Britt said. “A cowboy might know those words. No college boy would.”

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The increased media attention made a potential champ vs. champ fight against Johnson seem not only plausible, but extremely lucrative. Racism helped drive interest in the fight, but also allowed many white boxing fans to talk themselves into thinking that Ketchel stood a decent chance. His whiteness alone would make him superior to Johnson, they believed. Ketchel’s manager also made sure to dress him in bulky clothes with high-heeled boots for every pre-fight appearance in order to downplay the size difference.

Just how legitimate a fight it was ever supposed to be is still a subject of debate. Johnson later said that he discussed the fight in advance with Britt, Ketchel’s manager, adding: “There is a great difference between a fix and a deal … but we did have a deal.” That deal may have been motivated by a desire to draw the fight out into a multi-round affair, which would translate into more money from films of the fight. Such films accounted for a substantial piece of the revenue pie for title fights at the time, even if they didn't show up in theaters or parlors for the paying public to see until weeks or months later.

This, Johnson would claim, is why he agreed to let Ketchel “make a good showing” for at least 12 of the 20 rounds that the bout was scheduled for. He may or may not have also promised Britt that he wouldn’t hurt Ketchel too badly, so as not to diminish his future earnings when he returned to the middleweight division.

Later there would be much disagreement on exactly how the fight was supposed to go, with some claiming the fighters choreographed the finish while others insisted it was the result of an attempted double-cross by Ketchel and his team. What is clear is that in Round 12 at the Mission Street Arena in Colma, California, on Oct. 16, 1909, Ketchel clipped Johnson behind the ear and sent the heavyweight champ stumbling to the canvas. For a moment, it seemed like Ketchel might pull off the biggest upset in boxing history.

That moment proved to be incredibly brief. Johnson was up in seconds, seemingly unhurt by the flash knockdown. Ketchel, true to form, came rushing in for the finish. Johnson had this part of his game thoroughly scouted, and he caught the smaller man with a short but brutal answer that knocked Ketchel out cold while also removing several of his teeth.

Ketchel had never been beaten so soundly or so easily. Even before the finish, Johnson seemed to be toying with him in the fight, at times picking him up off the floor like an unruly child and carrying him to another part of the ring. Even without accounting for the size difference, Johnson was a terrible matchup for Ketchel from a stylistic standpoint. Ketchel was all fury and force, while Johnson was a technician and defensive master. Giving up such an advantage on the scale negated Ketchel’s usual edge in punching power, but he had little ability to adjust his style to account for that. “The Michigan Assassin” knew only one way to fight.

Ketchel could never let go of his hopes for a rematch. He obsessed over the idea of beating Johnson. In reality, the two men were very much alike. Both spent their money freely until it was gone. Both were flamboyant attention-seekers, while also remaining mercurial mysteries at times even to those who knew them best. Both also loved fast cars (Johnson would die in exactly the type of car accident that Ketchel foresaw for himself) and the affections of multiple women at once. In his autobiography, Johnson would refer to Ketchel as “a fine fellow” who was also “one of my best friends.”

Ketchel may not have felt that same fondness for Johnson. After the loss he returned to middleweight, fighting several more times, including finally agreeing to meet the Black middleweight Sam Langford, who he’d previously avoided. But when he retreated to the Missouri ranch owned by friend R.P Dickerson, it was to rest and recover in preparation for a rematch with Johnson. According to Frank Bell’s “Gladiators of the Glittering Gulches,” a history of the early Montana fight game, Ketchel admitted that his nightlife and all the “dallying with the splendors of the Great White Way” had diminished him physically.

“A short rest and the outdoor life will make a new man of me,” Ketchel told friends.

Exactly why Walter Dipley decided to surprise him with a .22 rifle on that October day in 1910 is still unclear. Some said that Ketchel had berated and humiliated him the day before after seeing Dipley abuse a horse. Dipley, who had claimed to be married to the ranch’s newly hired cook, Goldie Smith, would later claim that Ketchel had either raped or attempted to rape Smith, and Dipley was avenging her honor. The motive may have been purely financial, as Ketchel was known to carry large amounts of cash.

Whatever the reason, Ketchel was supposedly sitting with his back to the door, perhaps at Smith’s request, while eating breakfast that morning. Dipley entered with a rifle and told Ketchel to place his revolver, which by now everyone knew he kept handy, as well as his money on the table. Ketchel stood and began to turn around, while telling Dipley that he’d remove the gun but had no intention of giving it up. Dipley shot him as he turned, with the bullet entering Ketchel’s shoulder and traveling to his lung.

Dipley initially ran, then came back inside to snatch Ketchel’s pistol and hit him in the face with it before fleeing with Ketchel’s money. When Dickerson rushed to Ketchel’s side, the fighter told him, “Take me home to mom, Pete.”

Dickerson requested and paid for a special train to take Ketchel to the hospital in nearby Springfield, but it arrived too late to save him. The middleweight champion was dead at 24.

The news was so shocking that many didn’t believe it at first. When manager Wilson Mizner was told the news, he’s said to have replied: “Start counting over the dear boy and he’ll get up.” (Mizner, a hard-drinking and ethically challenged man who took over Ketchel’s management via clever subterfuge, once told the fighter that all he could do was improve his mind since “your morals are the same as mine already.”)

Dickerson put out a reward for Dipley’s capture, but stressed that he wanted him dead as opposed to the typical “dead or alive” phrasing. He meant it, too. When Dipley was apprehended by a posse, Dickerson initially refused to pay the reward on the grounds that the man was still breathing. Dipley and Smith were tried and convicted the following year. Smith served less than two years for the robbery, arguing that she didn’t know Dipley would shoot Ketchel. Dipley served 23 years and then was paroled.

The boxing world reeled at the loss of its middleweight champ. Multiple contenders emerged trying to take his place, but none could sustain a meaningful title reign that captured the public’s imagination in quite the same way. For decades, he was regarded as the gold standard of the division. Fight fans were known to observe, in moments of nostalgia or simply disdain for the state of things, “there will never be another Stanley Ketchel.”

But Ketchel’s sudden death is at least part of the reason he’s remembered so fondly, despite his many personal faults. He was murdered at or near the peak of his powers as a fighter. He never had a chance to grow old in public, becoming a fading version of his former self in the ring. Ketchel himself seemed to realize how much the fight game values those rare figures who leave before their time is up.

“It’s a cinch that any one who sticks to the game is going to get trimmed,” Ketchel said. “The thing is to know when to quit, and I notice that there isn’t one in a thousand who does.”

Ketchel never got the chance to find out if he was capable of quitting on time. Maybe a part of him wanted it that way.

(Special thanks to the Butte-Silver Bow Public Archives for research help with this story.)

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