Todd: Boxer Alex Hilton was gifted with talent, but cursed by alcohol
It was a life torn from Greek tragedy — if the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides were performed, not in outdoor amphitheatres in ancient Greece, but in seedy roadside bars in small Quebec towns, in cheap motels where Alex Hilton and his brothers slept in dresser drawers as infants, in boxing rings from Montreal to Las Vegas, in bloody battles under the bright lights circled with cigar smoke, and in the most dour and dangerous of prisons.
The second oldest of the boxing Hilton Brothers, Alex died early Tuesday at 61, the mixed family legacy he inherited woven into his life and death.
Like most of the Hilton brothers, Alex was touched with ability by the boxing gods — and robbed of success by a fatal flaw shared by brothers Davey and Matthew, an inability to handle alcohol and stay out of trouble.
Younger brother Jimmy Hilton (the only one of the five brothers who never turned pro) announced the death in a heartbreaking Facebook post.
“Words cannot explain the shock and sadness that we all feel for the loss of our beloved brother and son and one of the best true men I have ever known. Alex Stewart Hilton passed in his sleep today at age 61, he was the best son, brother, friend that has ever lived and will be sadly missed loved and cherished forever. I love you my brother, may the angels protect and keep you safe and I will see you in the next life.”
So linked are the brothers that it is impossible to write about one without writing about all of them.
Like his brothers, Alex was boxing by age 5 under the tutelage of his father, Dave Sr. The training paid off: Davey Hilton, the oldest and most talented, became world champion, as did the hard-punching third brother, Matthew. Alex himself became a Canadian middleweight champion.
As they grew, the Hilton brothers graduated from sleeping in dresser drawers to sharing beds in their father’s trailer as they travelled hundreds of kilometres to boxing tournaments.
Make that crowded beds. When he was riding high in the 1980s, Matthew told the Los Angeles Times that he had “learned to fight in bed. I mean, I’d wake up in the middle of the night after Alex or Davey had run an elbow in to my mouth or something, so I’d wake up fighting. We’d fight for a minute or two, a lot of yellin’, the other brothers would wake up, break it up, then everyone would go back to sleep.”
“There’s no taking away from what they accomplished in the ring,” former world champion Otis Grant said Tuesday. “Two world champions and one Canadian champion, that’s their legacy, along with the other stuff. And Stewart had talent, too. He probably would have been a world champion if he had lived.”
Stewart, however, died at 17 with his companion on Sept. 4, 1986, when his car ran into a bridge abutment and exploded.
Stewart’s death was never linked to alcohol, but the family curse pursued them all. In 2007, Alex was sentenced to six months in jail for assaulting and threatening a police officer and for breach of probation for an incident that happened the day after he had been released from jail.
“In spite of good intentions,” lawyer Clemente Monterosso told Montreal Municipal Court at the time, he headed for a bar and consumed “five or six quarts or beer.” Police were called to the Sport Rock Café in Montreal’s Ville Émard neighbourhood after Hilton threatened patrons and overturned tables and chairs. He pleaded guilty to three counts of uttering threats and one of assaulting police by spitting and to eight counts of breaking probation conditions.
On the very long list of Alex’s brushes with the law, that was a relatively minor incident. Even Matthew Hilton, once described by columnist Réjean Tremblay as the “white sheep” of the family, eventually succumbed to the curse of alcohol.
And yet, as anyone who dealt with the Hiltons would attest, when sober they could be gentle, amiable and as polite as gentlemen brought up in English public schools.
“When they weren’t drunk,” Grant said Tuesday, “they were the nicest guys you ever met. Say what you will about them, they had a following here. No matter what happened, their following stuck with them.”
Grant and Alex Hilton fought in the same weight class but never met in the ring. “There were times we could have fought,” Grant said. “but it never came off. He was a brawler. You didn’t have to look for him in the ring, he was always right in front of you. I loved fighting guys like that.”
Had they fought, Grant would have won handily but he would have had his work cut out for him because like his brothers, in the ring, Alex could take a punch.
It was outside the ring, with the family tendency to punch his way through life, that Alex, like his equally famous and infamous brothers, was unable to beat his toughest opponent. Himself.
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