Holder of the world record for the fastest KO in history
by Nundy Giusti
Aurel “Al” Couture was a professional boxer who made history in his home city of Lewiston on September 29, 1946, when he knocked out middleweight Ralph Walton of Montreal with a single punch in the quickest knockout ever recorded. The elapsed time between the opening bell of the first round and the end of the knockout count was 10 ½ seconds, a record still standing today. Walton was a well-regarded journeyman who’d recently jolted, but still lost to, the featherweight champ Willie Pep. Fans reading the sports pages next morning had a hard time grasping how Walton could’ve been flattened so quickly, including the ref’s ‘10 count.’
Math professors at Bates College in Lewiston questioned the accuracy of the count. Couture visited them on campus to set them straight. First off, he said, skeptics assumed that the two fighters were seated on stools in their corners when the bell rang, and that wasn’t the case.
As Couture explained to a sportswriter, “After the referee gave us instructions at center right, we both turned toward our corners, shadow-boxing a few feet from the corners, but neither of us went all the way.” When the bell sounded, the fighters leaped forward. But one of Walton’s corner men called him back for his mouthpiece. As Walton then turned back to face Couture, Al was already on top of him, unleashing a left hook to the jaw that drove Walton to the canvas. The lightning-quick knockout, long inscribed in the Guinness Book of World Records, will likely stand for all time. Boxing rules have since been revised to require a fighter scoring a knockdown to go to a neutral corner before the ref begins the count.
As a young reporter for the Lewiston Sun, I remember seeing the handsome, personable and popular Couture saunter into the newsroom many a night around 11 o’clock to talk with the writers on the sports desk. He was a gregarious figure around Lewiston-Auburn, where he was widely known by the nickname “Shiner,” a result of all the black eyes he acquired over the years. He’d been fighting since the age of 15, turned pro at 17, and by his 18th birthday he’d won 72 of 80 bouts. During a pro career spanning 15 years, he fought the astonishing total of 296 bouts, winning 282 of them. He hung up his gloves for the last time in 1953 at the age of 30, after losing to Paul Pender. At his retirement, he held both Maine state welterweight and middleweight titles.
One of the kids he hung around with as a youngster was Mike “Schoolboy” Green, who, like “Shiner,” later became a boxer. But he refused to meet Couture in the ring, explaining that the two were good friends who’d grown up together and had often joined forces in battling foes on the streets of Lewiston.
In 1949, with France’s Marcel Cerdan as world champ, Couture ranked sixth among contenders for the middleweight crown. This was three notches higher than the ranking assigned to Jake LaMotta, who rose to subsequent acclaim as world champion, and whose life and career became the subject of what film critics consider one of the best movies of the l980s, Raging Bull, starring Robert DeNiro as LaMotta. Couture’s own brush with Hollywood came in the ‘40s, when he performed as a stand-in for John Garfield during fight scenes in the superb film Body and Soul.
Born in 1922, Couture was one of 19 children of Michael and Meyeliece Couture of St. Melachie, a hamlet near Sherbrooke in Quebec Province. They moved to Lewiston when Al was six months old. In Canada, his father moonlighted as a champion fighter to help support his large family. He was known as “Coon” Couture because of his wild-looking head of hair, sort of raccoon-like, some thought.
Al interrupted his career to serve in the U.S. Army for three years during World War II as a physical arts instructor in California, and also boxed on behalf of his battery. Anticipating his retirement from boxing, he learned photography back in Lewiston, landing a job with Le Messager, the French-language newspaper. After divorce from his first wife, he met a striking blonde, Carol Beal of Greene, a small town adjacent to Lewiston. Pete, his son from his first marriage, became a professional bowler, and now lives in Florida.
Carol worked for the phone company in Lewiston. When she moved to Hartford to work for the Southern New England Telephone Company, Al quickly followed her. They were married on Christmas Eve of 1954 in Millerton, New York, and lived in Hartford for several years before moving to suburban Glastonbury. In recent years, they divided their time between Connecticut and Florida.
Thanks to his skill with a camera, Al became chief photographer for the State of Connecticut, serving under four governors. He was on first-name terms with scores of state officials, commissioners, employees, and legislators.
During this period, my husband Frank and I (he’s also a former reporter for the Lewiston Sun), became friends with Al and Carol. We joined in a social/charitable organization of which Al was the unelected president. It was known as Frank’s Sausage Club. A brunch was held every Sunday at Frank’s Restaurant in downtown Hartford. The owner was another friend of Al’s. Couture asked for money from the members of the club, and tacked the bills to the ceiling of the dining room. After several weeks passed, and a few hundred dollars accumulated, it was collected by Al and turned over to local causes.
Al was known for his civic work. He and Hartford’s famous featherweight champ, Willie Pep, were friends who organized the Connecticut Boxing Hall of Fame. Couture was instrumental in bringing boxing back to Connecticut after it’d been legally banned since 1965. He was the founding president of Ring 49, a boxing-oriented club which sponsored numerous benefits to help children in need.
After a quarter-century of state service, Al retired as Connecticut’s chief photographer. He and Carol, also retired, were vacationing with family members at Popham Beach in Maine in the summer of 2000 when Al fell ill and was admitted to Midcoast Hospital in Brunswick. A week later, on August 6th, at the age of 77, he suffered a fatal heart attack.
From a Lewiston street kid to professional boxer, to soldier, skilled photographer and humanitarian, Al Couture was a man of many accomplishments. What brought him enduring recognition, though, was the super-quick knockout he delivered in Lewiston in 1946 — a feat later celebrated in the Ripley’s Believe It or Not syndicated series of illustrated features which appeared for years in newspapers across the country.
