with Roy DeCarava, Jose Torres, John Hope Franklin and more on Jan 1, 2010
with Bob Jackson, Jose Torres and David Remnick on Jul 9, 1997
Jose Torres is a Puerto Rican former boxer and the first Hispanic ever to win the world light heavyweight championship.
Torres joined the U.S. Army when he was 18 years old, where he learned to box. As Puerto Ricans have been United States citizens since 1917, he represented the country while serving in the U.S Army at the 1956 Olympic Games. As an Olympian, he won a silver medal as a junior middleweight. Torres debuted as a professional in 1958 with a first round knockout of George Hamilton in New York. Twelve wins in a row followed, ten of them by knockout. Torres continued on his streak until 1963, when he suffered his first loss to Florentino Fernandez, the only boxer ever to beat Torres by a knockout as a professional. In 1965, Torres became the third Puerto Rican world boxing champion in history and first Latin American to win the Light Heavyweight title, knocking his opponent out in round nine. Torres retired after 1969.
In his years after retiring from boxing, Torres became a representative of the Puerto Rican community in New York, meeting political leaders, giving lectures and becoming the New York State Athletic Commission’s Commissioner from 1984 to 1988. In 1990 he became President of the World Boxing Organization, and he performed as President there until 1995. Torres is also a member of the International Boxing Hall of Fame, and regularly contributes a column for El Diario La Prensa, a Spanish language newspaper in New York City. Torres is the author of Sting Like a Bee, a biography of Muhammad Ali.
Source - Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jose_Torres
