King of Kembla: the story behind Illawarra's boxing great

‘‘I’ve got a couple of old boxing gloves that I’ve just picked up at an op shop for $10,’’ he said.

‘‘Apparently, they used to belong to an old-timer named Russ Critcher.’’

Gaudiosi, a former Australian middleweight champion, knew immediately that his friend had stumbled upon a rare and precious find.

‘‘I knew that Russ Critcher was a legend,’’ he said.

‘‘He had fought the best of the best.

‘‘He had fought them all and beat them where they fought for a living and they fought hard.

‘‘To turn an Australian or Empire title back then was prestigious.’’

Critcher came from boxing’s greatest era when men fought 15-round fights back to back to stave off starvation during the Depression years of the late 1920s and 1930s.

He fought his first professional fight at the age of 17, when he knocked out his first opponent, Fred Lloyd, at a fight near his Woonona home in July 1927.

In the following year, he went on to win the next 13 fights convincingly.

These were the days when championship fights would last a gruelling 15 rounds and when he would often have less than a month between bouts.

Critcher’s crowning glory came in March 1931 when he won the national welterweight title in a fight against Wally Hancock at Sydney Stadium.

When he retired in 1937, Critcher had fought 124 fights in a decade – and probably more, since many fights of this era went unrecorded.

One report claims he had more than 300 fights, including defending his welterweight title 19 times in a single afternoon.

Gaudiosi set to work researching Critcher’s career and the history of the battered gloves which have  horsehair protruding from the gaps where the brown leather has  worn away.

He wanted to know why, in fading ink, one set of gloves has the name ‘‘Mark’’ inscribed in them.

He rang the Dapto Anglican Church shop in Brownsville and was given the phone number of a woman who told him the story.

She said they had belonged to a teenage boy who was given the gloves by Critcher, who had trained him to fight off bullies.

And here, the story is taken up by Phill Critcher, the grandson of Russ, who was contacted by Gaudiosi with news that he had his grandfather’s gloves.

‘‘I learned that my grandfather’s mate asked him to teach his son, Mark, how to fight because he was a bit quiet and was getting picked on at school,’’ Critcher said.

‘‘Mark was the son that my grandfather taught how to fight.

‘‘He ended up belting the main guy who picked on him at school.’’

Critcher was close to his grandfather and spent the first couple of years of his life living with his parents in the garage at the back of his miner’s cottage at Kembla Heights.

Russ Critcher was a miner and Phill remembers walking up the hill to meet him at the end of the shift.

‘‘ That was in the pick and shovel days,’’ Critcher said.

‘‘They would come out all black and pants up with belt. I would meet them and walk down with Pop.

‘‘He would get the old bag, hang it up on the peach tree, glove me up, wash himself up and glove the other set up.

‘‘He would train with me until the young bloke came who he used to train.

‘‘These gloves would have had my sweat on them from the mid ‘60s and all of a sudden, they have come back around.’’

Now Critcher is seeking to make contact with the family, to thank them for restoring a part of his family history. He  believes that Mark died in a motorcycle accident in the early 1970s. Although the Depression generation have mostly died, Critcher is still recognised by his surname shared with his grandfather, known as the ‘‘King of Kembla’’.

Even once his career was over, Critcher senior would be a target of young men at the Mt Kembla pub wanting to make a name for themselves – few of them did.

Phill Critcher now plans to frame the gloves and put them with other memorabilia from his grandfather in his billiards room.

Pride of place in his collection is a black and white, hand-coloured photograph taken of his grandfather shortly after winning the welterweight crown.

Russ Critcher died in 1978 after a few years in hospital when – according to Phill, ‘‘His mind was in another place’’ – possibly induced by his boxing career.

More likely though, it was events outside the ring that did the damage.

In 1939, he was hit in the head by a steel bar while at work and, a year later, was kicked about the head by military police while serving in the army.

As his wife, Doris, lay dying in 1992, her last request was for the photograph that had hung in a Wollongong hall of sporting fame but was lost sometime during the 1950s.

A year after his grandmother’s death, Phill Critcher was drinking in what was then Miller’s Hotel in Oak Flats when the owner tapped him on the shoulder.

‘‘He said he had something for me but I couldn’t ask any questions,’’ Critcher said.

‘‘I said I didn’t work like that, but he said it wasn’t ready and maybe I should decide when I saw it.

‘‘About six months later, I was in the pub again and I got another tap on the shoulder. I went into his office and there was an oval brown package sitting on his desk. He pointed to it and told me to open it.

‘‘It was the return of the photo that the family had been looking for since the 1950s.’’

Though Gaudiosi gave Critcher the gloves a year ago, it was the death of Critcher’s father – also called Russ – in April that inspired him to research the King of Kembla.

‘‘I wanted to research this old man so Phill would know where his father got his toughness, even though it wasn’t boxing toughness, it was life toughness,’’ Gaudiosi.

So he commissioned University of Wollongong researcher Natalie Matosin to write a short biography.

‘‘Russ Critcher was one of Australia’s greatest boxing legends,’’ she wrote.

‘‘Not only did Critcher hold the Australian welterweight title, but also he held it during the 1930s, which was one of the most difficult periods in Australian boxing history.

‘‘There is no doubt that Russ Critcher’s impressive record has left a lasting imprint in the history of Australian boxing.’’