Willie Pep, featherweight boxing champ, dies at age 84

Willie Pep, a featherweight boxer whose card-shark-quick hands, fast feet and puff-of-smoke prowess at evading punches made him an artist in the ring, died Thursday at a convalescent home in Rocky Hill, Conn. The hall-of-fame fighter suffered from Alzheimer's disease. He was 84.

"He was probably the greatest pure boxer that ever lived," Miami boxing historian and archivist Hank Kaplan said.

Nicknamed "Will-of-the-Wisp," Mr. Pep won 230 fights, 65 by knockouts. Losing only 11 bouts in his 26-year career, with one draw, he was twice featherweight champion.

After turning professional as an 18-year-old in 1940, Mr. Pep won 62 consecutive fights before losing a 1943 nontitle bout against a heavier fighter, a middleweight named Sammy Angott.

"Sammy Angott was a spider," Kaplan said. "He'd hit you, hold you, wrestle you, not let you fight your fight."

Mr. Pep, usually a master of finesse, lost on points in a 10-round decision.

"Until the day he died, Willie hated this guy [Angott]," Kaplan said. "If it hadn't been for him, he would have had 135 straight wins."

Mr. Pep became the undisputed world featherweight champion in June 1946 after a 12-round knockout of Sal Bartolo.

Born Gugliermo Papaleo in Middletown, Conn., in 1922, Mr. Pep dropped out of school at 16 and won two Connecticut state championships, as a flyweight in 1938 and a bantamweight in 1939. At 5-foot-6 and 130 pounds or less as a pro, he won 53 consecutive fights before defeating Chalky Wright in 1942 for the New York State Athletic Commission world featherweight title. After the loss to Angott, Mr. Pep won 73 successive fights.

During World War II, he served in the Navy for seven months before receiving a medical discharge for a punctured eardrum. He then was drafted into the Army.

In 1946, he almost died when a plane in which he was a passenger went down during a New Jersey snowstorm. With a broken back and a broken leg, he temporarily was paralyzed from the waist down and spent five months in a body cast. He was back in the ring a month after the cast came off.

Mr. Pep lost his title in 1948, in the first of four memorable fights against Sandy Saddler, a tall, slender Harlem fighter who was relatively unknown at the time.

Mr. Pep regained his title in a rematch the next year.

Saddler won the third match, in 1950, after Mr. Pep suffered a shoulder injury that ended the fight in the eighth round. In 1951, Saddler knocked him out in the ninth round of a savage, foul-riven fight in New York. Mr. Pep exited the ring that September night to whispers that he had taken a dive.

Insinuations that he might have thrown a fight came up again in 1954, after he went down for the count in the second round of a bout against 20-year-old Lulu Perez.

Mr. Pep sued Newsweek for $75 million, claiming he had been libeled. He lost.

He continued boxing until 1959, then came out of retirement in 1964 as a 43-year-old.

"A guy shouldn't lay around just because he is over 40," he told the Post in 1965. "I was 134 [pounds] when I quit, but I shot up to 160 eating spaghetti and meatballs. That food has killed more Italians than all the wars put together. Now I am down to 137. I eat spaghetti once a week."

He won 43 fights and lost five in those twilight years of his career, against mostly forgettable opponents. He fought for the last time, a loss, in March 1966.

In retirement, Mr. Pep worked occasionally as a boxing referee and served as a boxing inspector in Connecticut. He was elected to the National Italian American Sports Hall of Fame in 1977 and the International Boxing Hall of Fame in 1990. The Associated Press named him one of the five best boxers of the 20th century.

Mr. Pep was married six times, including once in Elkton, Md., in 1950, when he skipped out on a scheduled bout to marry 22-year-old Dolores Von Frenckll.

Survivors include his wife of 15 years, Barbara Papaleo of Wethersfield, Conn., and four children.