By Norm Frauenheim-
John McCain’s name will be added to the Boxing Writers Association of America award for courage, alongside Bill Crawford, a Medal of Honor winner.
McCain also is one of five nominees for the award, which will be presented at the Writers’ (BWAA) annual dinner in 2019.
The BWAA voted to add the former Arizona Senator’s name to the award and nominated him for it at meetings in Los Angeles and New York earlier this month
McCain, a longtime boxing fan and leading advocate for boxing regulation, died at his northern Arizona home on August 25, just hours before an ESPN-televised card in Glendale, Ariz., featuring Jose Pedraza’s upset of Ray Beltran.
When news of McCain’s death was reported, Top Rank immediately staged a haunting 10-count, a touching moment remembered at ringside as a Requiem for a Heavyweight.
In comments to 15 Rounds, The Ring and The Los Angeles Times, Top Rank’s Bob Arum called McCain “the boxing Senator.’’
McCain, a Republican, and retired Nevada Senator Harry Reid, a Democrat, joined forces for passage of the Muhammad Ali Boxing Reform Act, a legislative attempt at protecting a fighter’s finances and health.
McCain also expressed his interest – and frustration — in boxing on the Senate floor. After Timothy Bradley’s controversial decision over Manny Pacquiao in 2012, McCain grabbed the bully pulpit and suggested that the federal government investigate judging.
McCain, a boxer at the Naval Academy, also worked tirelessly for a posthumous pardon of Jack Johnson, an iconic heavyweight champ who had been jailed for violating a 1912 law, the Mann Act, which prohibited the transportation of women across state lines. Johnson, a black man, had been seeing a white woman.
McCain had been pursuing the pardon since 2004. It finally came in May, three months before he died at 81 from brain cancer. President Donald Trump didn’t mention McCain when granting the pardon.
The newly named John McCain & Bill Crawford Award for Courage bring together two heroic figures from different eras, yet with similar experiences. Both were amateur boxers. Both were Prisoners-of-War.
Crawford won the Medal of Honor in 1943 for taking out three German machine-gun nests during combat in Italy. He was captured and presumed dead. Initially, the Medal of Honor was awarded to his father. While in captivity for 19 months, Crawford knocked out a German guard with punches he threw as a Golden Gloves boxer.
Later in life, Crawford went to work as a janitor at the Air Force Academy. More than four decades after he took out the German machine guns, President Ronald Reagan awarded him the Medal of Honor in person during a 1985 Air Force Academy graduation. An Academy grad went on to write a book about him, titled A Janitor’s Ten Lessons In Leadership. Crawford died in 2000 and is buried on the Academy’s campus near Colorado Springs.
Like Crawford, McCain also was a POW. McCain, who is buried at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, MD, was captured by the North Vietnamese after his fighter-jet was shot down over Hanoi on October 26, 1967.
At the time, his father, Admiral John Sidney McCain, was stationed in Hawaii as CINCPAC – Commander-in-Chief Pacific. The North Vietnamese offered to release John McCain. But he refused. He was beaten. He was tortured. He survived. On March 14, 1973, McCain finally came home, a profile in courage then and nearly 46 years later a perfect complement to Crawford.
