So, I was trying to figure out a way to write about the death of actor/comedian/musician Davy Jones this week in Gap Shots & Whiffs.
For those that are not in the know, Jones was the lead singer for the enduring band The Monkees who died this week at the age of 66.
However, this is a sports column and figuring out a link between Jones and sports took a little doing. Still, I figured out a way.
Behold, my homage to Davy Jones.
Truly, I don't think I can remember a television show that was on back in the early 1970s that wasn't must-see TV for anyone in my age group. The Monkees were formed in the 1960 as America's answer to the Beatles, only they were more of a manufactured image — this by their own assessment. Still, as musicians, the Monkees do not get as much credit for the work they did as they deserve. Even though they did work on most all of their own songs themselves — Peter Tork played various instruments, Michael Nesmith played guitar and Mickey Dolenz drums — they did also employ studio musicians to fill out the sound.
Jones sang and played ... well... played tambourine and maracas mostly.
The TV series only lasted from 1966-68 but managed to win two Emmys before it was canned. Then, just like the Batman and Star Trek, it went into syndication and became legendary. After 58 episodes, the band then made the movie Head that Jack Nicholson helped co-produce and wrote in 1968. I happen to really like the soundtrack to this particular movie.
To me, the movie and TV show is all comedy that stands the test of time to this day, and a great way to grab a piece of, and get a good feel for, what the 1960s really were like.
Anyway as far as the sports crossover goes, believe it or not, Jones was at one point an apprentice jockey at the age of 14 at Newmarket Racing Stables. However, before he could get that career off the ground, he took a job as an actor. Having pointed that out, he did manage to win a race later on in life on a horse named Digpast in 1996 at Lingfield Park and he also was allowed to gallop the horse Love Dancing for trainer Burk Kessigner at Churchill downs at one point.
Other than that, I have nothing more than the two times that Jones played the role of a boxer — once in an episode of the TV show from 1966 entitled The Monkees in the Ring and the other from the movie Head. In the show, he goes by the name of Dynamite Davy Jones and is just Davy in Head. According to a source on the internet, Jones was actually a boxer at one point in his career — fighting once in the lightweight class at Newmarket.
Regardless, both skits have pretty much the same story in that Jones is fighting in a fixed match with gamblers and thugs ready to take him out if he doesn't cooperate. In Monkees in the Ring, Jones wins three fixed fights in a row to get a meeting with the champ.
Media: Davy, how does it feel to be fighting the champ?
Jones: Well, I was brought up in the slums and I had to fight my way out of filth and poverty.
Mike Nesmith: Davy, you were raised in a residential area.
Jones: I had to fight my way out of a residential area.
Nesmith then finds out that Jones' three fights were fixed but Davy doesn't believe him. Previous to his venture into fighting at all, Dolenz tried to talk Jones out of it by telling him, "hey, you know boxing is really bad for maraca players."
Ultimately, the end scene plays out the way all Monkees episodes ended — with a song and a kooky/crazy sequence of events. This time it was to the song "I'll be back on my feet again", with Davy fighting the champ and Mike and Micky in the right fighting other thugs.
The skit in the movie Head ends somewhat similarly, except that Mikey is the lone one in the ring knocking everyone out, a la the Three Stooges episode — Punch Drunk — when Curly hears the song Pop Goes the Weasel.
In the Head skit, Jones starts a fight with the waitress at the commissary of the filming studio when he says, "What you say you and me go someplace where we won't bump into each other again", and it ends with him in the boxing ring with Sonny Liston. That's funny in and of itself because Jones stood about 5-3 and Liston (portraying himself) was a former heavyweight champ who stood 6-1. The irony there is that Liston was a much hated man, even when he beat Floyd Patterson at Comiskey Park in 1962 to claim the heavyweight belt. He was even rumored to be running with organized crime in his heyday, but I digress.
In between the slug from the waitress and the last one from Liston and before Dolenz goes berserk, there is a cut-to scene where Annette Funicello tries to talk Davy out of his boxing career in favor of being a violinist.
Jones: What am I going to do, play violin in two-bit clubs all my life? Forget what father and mother say about Carnegie Hall.
Annette: But you play so beautifully
Jones: Not good enough. Don't you understand, at this (boxing) I could be a champ?
Annette: And you have to? Their way?
Jones: That's right. They pick the round and I pick the guy.
He then picks Liston who pounds the stuffing out of him before Dolenz intervenes.
Good, pure slapstick sprinkled with cerebral humor.
For his singing and dancing, acting and sense of humor, I think I speak for many when I say Davy Jones will be missed.