Roger Donoghue, Date of Birth, Date of Death
TweetRoger Donoghue
American boxer
Date of Birth: 20-Nov-1930
Date of Death: 20-Aug-2006
Profession: boxer
Nationality: United States
Zodiac Sign: Scorpio 
About Roger Donoghue
- Roger Donoghue (November 20, 1930 – August 20, 2006) was a prizefighter who taught Marlon Brando how to box for his role in the 1954 movie On the Waterfront. Donoghue was born in Yonkers, New York.
- His father, an Irish immigrant, was a taxicab driver. Donoghue began boxing in a ring set up in the back of a pool hall.
- He won 29 or 31 amateur bouts, and turned professional at age 18.
- Of his first 27 professional fights, he won 25.
- His purses covered college tuition for his brother and sister. Donoghue's first fight in Madison Square Garden was on August 29, 1951.
- Donoghue's opponent was another 20-year-old, George Flores, whom he had knocked out in a match two weeks prior.
- Donoghue knocked out Flores in the eighth round.
- The blow resulted in Flores' death on September 3, 1951.
- Donoghue gave his winnings from that match to Flores' family, and New York instituted the requirement that boxers take a 30-day break from the ring after being knocked out. A friend of Donoghue's, writer Budd Schulberg, once asked him how far he might have gone as a fighter if not for the Flores incident.
- "He said, 'Well, I was pretty good, but I have that Irish skin and I cut pretty easily.
- I guess I could have been a contender,'" Schulberg told the New York Daily News.
- "He didn't make a big deal of it, but it really stuck in my mind." And Schulberg used the line in his next screenplay, "On the Waterfront." Director Elia Kazan agreed to pay Donoghue $75 a day to coach Brando in boxing.
- After Brando's first lesson, Donoghue said he had the actor "shooting straight jabs, and he's already learning to hook off the jab.
- I can make a hell of a middleweight out of his kid." Donoghue also taught James Dean boxing moves in preparation for a role patterned after Donoghue in a film project that died when Dean was killed in an automobile wreck. Donoghue died in Greenport, New York of complications from Alzheimer's disease wife, Faye Moore a famous equestrian artist.
Read more at Wikipedia