When Royce was renamed Dupont Street

Only Irving Ungerman could have combined poultry and boxing.

“Chickens have always been my business and fighters my hobby,” Toronto’s “Chicken King,” as the headline writers liked to dub him, once quipped. He excelled at both, and pretty much everything else, thanks to his energy and tenacity. A streetwise scrapper who left school at Grade 8, Mr. Ungerman pulled himself out of poverty to make millions in the poultry and egg business and rubbed fists with some of boxing’s top sluggers as a manager and friend.

The man about town knew everybody, it seemed: Police and politicians, showbiz types, business titans, sportswriters and athletes. He made friends with all of them and met them with a schmooze and a clap on the back. Known for his roguish grin and fat Montecristo Cuban cigar that he would smoke and chew down to the stub, he was like a character out of central casting.

Even as he oversaw the family chicken and turkey empire, Royce Dupont Poultry Packers, Mr. Ungerman managed a solid stable of fighters: former Canadian welterweight champion Donovan Boucher; Canadian and Commonwealth welterweight title holder Clyde Gray; and, most notably, the indestructible Canadian heavyweight champ George Chuvalo, who battled the greatest names in the sport: Muhammad Ali, George Foreman, Joe Frazier, Floyd Patterson – the sort of wallopers and legends the fight game no longer breeds.

“Chuvalo never would have fought some of those giants no matter how good he was, if not for my schmoozing,” Mr. Ungerman boldly wrote in Think and Respect, his published memoir, the title of which was his personal motto. The two men would have a nasty falling out.

Fighters were drawn to him. Rocky Marciano once stayed at the Ungerman cottage in Muskoka, Ont. Visiting the family’s Toronto apartment, Mr. Ali gently asked which way Mecca was so he could pray.

“Do you know my great and wonderful friend, the chicken plucker from Toronto?” onetime heavyweight champ Joe Louis once inquired of Toronto business fixture Paul Godfrey in Las Vegas. “Give him a big hug for me.”

Mr. Ungerman “was not only a good friend but he was [also] like a father to me,” Mr. Gray recalled. “A good manager.” Passionate too. In one of his fights, Mr. Gray recalled, Mr. Ungerman got so angry at the officiating that he jumped into the ring, began fighting with the referee and got tossed. “He was always there whenever I needed him.”

His generosity was legendary. He raised and gave away untold sums to hospitals, community groups, the Salvation Army, medical research, to nearly anyone who asked. Once, his hospital roommate lamented that his life was in danger because he could not get an expensive heart valve. The next day, Mr. Ungerman cut the hospital a cheque for $30,000.

He was committed to many Jewish causes, including co-founding Toronto’s Beth Sholom Synagogue. He also helped save the city’s Santa Claus Parade, along with business executives George Cohon and Ron Barbaro.

When the department store chain Eaton’s announced in 1982 it was ending its sponsorship of the annual event, Mr. Ungerman kicked into gear, beating the bushes for money, floating ideas, tapping high-powered friends. As a founding director of the rescued parade, he would ride along on the route wearing a red clown nose, handing out candy to kids, probably having a better time than the kids. Tomorrow’s parade will be the 111th.

“My father had the biggest heart of anyone I have ever known or likely ever will,” said his daughter Temmi Ungerman Sears. “He loved life with such passion, and he loved to give, unconditionally and unrestrained.”

His wiry 5-foot-6 frame was a study in perpetual motion. “The two things he did were talk and move,” said his son, Howard Ungerman, a Toronto lawyer, shaking his head. “He never stopped talking and moving.”

The talking was often peppered with malapropisms, recalled retired sportswriter Jim Kernaghan. Somebody “really got his dandruff up,” Mr. Ungerman might say, or, referring to a promoter, “He’s a lesbian or Lebanese or something.”

His office was a frenzy of souvenirs, framed pictures, fight memorabilia and awards galore. It was “as if he had been everywhere, maybe all at once,” eulogized his rabbi following Mr. Ungerman’s death in Toronto on Oct. 27 at the age of 92.

The “little guy was a giant,” lauded Liberal MPP Mike Colle in the Ontario legislature. “As they say in Yiddish, if you don’t mind, he was a true mensch – a wonderful human being. He was charitable, he was generous and he loved this country and he loved this city. He was the last of a breed. We’re going to miss you, Champ.”

He was born weighing a touch over a kilo in Toronto’s cacophonous Jewish neighbourhood of Kensington Market, the second youngest of seven children, on Feb. 1, 1923, to Isaac and Jennie Ungerman, who had quit Poland for Canada nine years earlier. The couple opened a kosher butcher shop on Kensington Avenue but went broke after extending credit too freely. Isaac Ungerman peddled scrap and chickens, desperately trying to keep his family fed and clothed.

In 1934, the clan decamped for Royce Ave., where they opened Royce Avenue Poultry and Egg Market. When Royce was renamed Dupont Street, the business became Royce Dupont Poultry Packers. Swastikas would be daubed on the store windows.

Meanwhile, bullies feasted on tiny Irving. “Guys used to hit me all the time – I was a little guy – and I would come home crying,” he recounted to Toronto writer Bill Gladstone a few years ago. “And my brother would hit me because I didn’t fight. So I went to the Y on Brunswick Street and I learned how to fight.”

And how. A local tough who hurled anti-Jewish taunts his way was beaten bloody, and “Erwin Ungy” took to the sweet science, winning, by age 16, a city boxing championship. At all of 105 pounds, he was, fittingly, a featherweight.

When war came, he joined the Royal Canadian Air Force and boxed in exhibition matches against the Army and Navy, winning a slew of trophies. Shipped to England for the D-Day invasion, he was accidentally shot by a friendly Sten gun, the bullet travelling through his forearm, severing an artery and leaving him deaf in his left ear. He spent the invasion in hospital.

Back home, the family business awaited. So did an especially reliable employee, Katica Chuvalo, who plucked chickens for 2 1/2 cents a bird, roughly $30 a week. She would occasionally bring her young son George to work, to be babysat by Mr. Ungerman’s father. By the mid-1950s, the hard-punching kid had reignited Irving’s love of boxing and at age 27, Mr. Chuvalo asked Mr. Ungerman to manage his career. It was a relationship that continued for 13 years.

Mr. Chuvalo’s chief claim to fame was his toughness: Through 93 fights, some of them outright wars, he was never knocked down. And to this day, fight fans debate the Ali-Chuvalo bout at Maple Leaf Gardens on March 29, 1966.

Mr. Chuvalo lost, but lasted an admirable 15 rounds, with Mr. Ali’s camp wondering whether the Canadian’s jaw was made of granite. Mr. Chuvalo boasted he had gone dancing with his wife after the fight, while his opponent had to check into a hospital with bleeding kidneys. Still, one writer said Mr. Chuvalo’s face at the end of the fight resembled “a bucket of balls at a driving range.”

Mr. Chuvalo did not return calls for this obituary. To the Toronto Sun, he said, on Mr. Ungerman’s death, “He’s not my favourite person.” In his autobiography, he bitterly called Mr. Ungerman “my so-called manager,” in part because he didn’t consider the Commonwealth title worth pursuing.

Even so, Mr. Ungerman fretted about his fighters like a mother hen.

“I worry about things I can’t control,” he would write. “I worry that I am not worrying about a worry that I never thought to worry about. I worry about everything.”

Maybe that helped, for he had an “uncanny knack for the boxing business,” remarked G.M. Ross, founder and editor of the boxing news website Canadian Boxiana. “I know it wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows,” Mr. Ross went on. “I know he and George Chuvalo had a falling out. I don’t know all the details.”

Ultimately, Mr. Ungerman will be remembered “as one of the good guys,” Mr. Ross said. “Folks like [him] and Chuvalo kept boxing in the limelight here in Canada. Ungerman set them up, Chuvalo knocked them down. At one point, at least, they were one heck of a team.”

There would be an Ali-Chuvalo rematch in Vancouver in 1972. Mr. Ali won that, too, but again, Mr. Chuvalo went the duration.

In all, Mr. Ungerman was in the corner for about 100 fights and five world championships. “He would take us kids along,” recalled his daughter Shelley Sukerman. “I would watch like this,” she said, covering her eyes and peeping through spread fingers. “But there was my dad, bobbing and weaving along with his fighter.”

Mr. Ungerman’s involvement extended to other sports. He was on the committee that planned the 1972 hockey Summit Series between Canada and the Soviet Union. That same year, while not on the working committee, he used his clout with “high-profile mucky-mucks,” as he put it, to begin securing a major league baseball team in Toronto.

In 1988, he and a brother sold 70 per cent of the poultry business to Maple Leaf Foods, the rest four years later. His idea of retirement was frenetically tending to his land deals, investments and an art collection that included several Group of Seven paintings.

Accolades were bountiful, including induction into the Canadian Boxing of Hall of Fame and the Order of Ontario, in 2000. He is survived by his wife of almost 70 years, Sylvia (née Rothstein); children, Shelley, Howard and Temmi; seven grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.

“I’ve lived a remarkable life,” Mr. Ungerman wrote in his memoirs. “Sure, there are some things that I wish I could change, but that’s life. I made mistakes and I made good decisions, but I’ve never claimed to be perfect.”

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