An update to this column: A funeral Mass for Tom Coulter will be held Monday, Aug. 10, at 10 a.m. at All Saints Church, 1340 Lancaster Ave., Syracuse. Friends are welcome.
Going back 45 years, Frankie Liles shared a room in the old Kennedy Square housing complex with his younger brother, Blue. Every night, Liles would use a pen or whatever tool he had available to etch more deeply the same message in the wood railing of his bunk bed, where he slept above his brother:
FRANKIE LILES IS GOING TO BE THE CHAMPION OF THE WORLD.
It happened. A kid who went into middle school with no particular dream or discipline found boxing, and became a super-middleweight champion. Speaking by telephone Thursday from California, Liles said the walls of his childhood bedroom were covered with posters of such legendary fighters as Muhammad Ali, Sugar Ray Leonard and Roberto Duran.
He grew up to know those men not as heroes, but as friends and peers, as demonstrated by many images on his Instagram page. He laughs with appreciation at how impossible it all seems, how this child from a gray concrete housing complex rose to fight in some of the great arenas in the world. He works now as a trainer, in Los Angeles — teaching the benefits of fierce discipline and subsequent soul-cleaning fatigue both to skilled young fighters and to classes of recovering addicts.
Liles, 61, wakes up each day grateful for that sense of purpose, and for the whole arc of how it came to be. He credits many mentors and teachers, particularly this one guy who ran a boxing gym in Kennedy Square, carved from a space that once served as a chapel for residents.
Instead of a goodbye, Liles ended our long phone conversation by saying:
“Thank you, Tom Coulter.”
Or as Coulter so often called himself, with noisy gusto:
“The king!”
At 95, Coulter died in Syracuse last Sunday after an extended illness, according to his daughter Julie. “He had a wonderfully long life,” she said, which included not only his international prominence in boxing but deep roots in local distance running that made him a familiar figure to such legends as Boston Marathon pioneer Kathrine Switzer.
I knew Coulter as a bigger-than-life Syracuse presence for many, many years. A coach on a first-name basis with many boxing legends had a similarly warm relationship with thousands upon thousands of everyday people in Syracuse. Coulter and his business partner, Bruce “Spike” Nulle, ran the Remedy — an old-school tavern on Seneca Turnpike — for 42 years, until they decided to close it down and retire 11 years ago.
Above all else, Coulter was famous for what he accomplished in the ring. As he told me in 1996 at the Atlanta Olympics, where I was writing for The Syracuse Post-Standard and Coulter helped coach a successful USA boxing team, he had no reason to pursue the “blood money” or prominence of a professional career as a coach or trainer.
“I’ve got a million dollars worth of travels and friends in my life,” Coulter said. “I’m the king. I’m a rich man. This is worth a million bucks to me.”
At SU, in a choice that began simply as a way to stay in shape between running seasons, his life changed when he joined a boxing team led by coach Roy Simmons Sr. Coulter was a friend and teammate of Oren Lyons, now an internationally known faithkeeper for the Onondaga Nation. According to the Greater Syracuse Sports Hall of Fame, Coulter’s 10 varsity athletic letters at SU — representing both boxing and the running sports — established a school record.
As for Simmons, he offered a lesson Coulter tried to bring to Liles and every other kid he trained:
“He’d be wrapping your hands and talking to you and he’d make you believe you could be better than you are,” Coulter told me of Simmons when I wrote the column, from Atlanta. “And he understood a coach had to know how to laugh.”
Coulter lived that lesson, in the gym and at the Remedy. While he was involved in coaching many unforgettable Olympic boxers — including George Foreman and Riddick Bowe and Floyd Mayweather — his most profound contribution was undoubtedly through his role with the old Syracuse Friends of Boxing, which produced many amateur Golden Gloves fighters of national caliber.
Liles and so many others recall it vividly: The moms of Kennedy Square, understanding what was happening inside, were glad to see their teenage sons walk through the door of Coulter’s gym.
“Tom didn’t sugarcoat anything for us,” said Liles, who spoke of how Coulter’s emphasis on interval training was of sweeping importance. He used to call Coulter “the grim reaper” because of his dire forecasts for any fighter whose commitment to those workouts didn’t match Coulter’s high expectations.
Liles, over the years, would still check in with Coulter. He also knew Ray Rinaldi, another Syracuse youth boxing coach and teacher who died in recent weeks, leaving Liles to describe those back-to-back deaths as a loss of staggering magnitude.
“These were influential guys,” Liles said, putting them on a list of selfless youth coaches that included such mentors as the late Phil Monti. “They kept the love of the sport alive.”
Julie Coulter said her father — despite all the demands on his time — brought that same energy to his family, when his kids were growing up. Julie spent much of her adult life in the greater New York City area, but she moved back to Syracuse after the pandemic to be around her folks, who were grandparents in the closing years of a great love story.
Tom and Sharon Coulter were married for 72 years. They met at Syracuse University, where Coulter received a track scholarship based on his high school running prominence in Queens, and was soon part of a national championship cross-country team at SU. Sharon went on to become an educator and administrator with Catholic Charities.
The couple raised three kids — Julie’s siblings are Tom and Christine — in a house they built on Roe Avenue, where Julie remembers Coulter as a wonderful dad who was “always there for us.”
He loved music, and often banged out tunes for his kids on an old piano in the garage. “We made all our Halloween costumes from scratch,” Julie said, describing how Coulter would help them become, say, a Tootsie Roll or a spider or a gigantic daisy in time to make the rounds for trick or treating. The Coulters always hosted a big family Thanksgiving gathering, with the chance for gratitude serving as Coulter’s favorite holiday of the year.
After the Blizzard of ’66, she said, her dad went out there with a shovel, then dug a subway-like tunnel through their yard that served as a destination for every awestruck girl and boy on the block.
Sharon Coulter died two years ago. She was from Chaffee, a hamlet near Buffalo. Coulter grew up in Queens, where his father served as an elevator repairman in New York City.
Despite the big city roots, Coulter quickly fell in love with Syracuse once his running prowess brought him to the university, Julie said. The family hasn’t finalized its plans for a memorial service, but the response will undoubtedly resonate from every neighborhood in the city: Julie remembers how Coulter used to invite young fighters from Kennedy Square to their house for dinner, “how our family home was there for everyone.”
She said Coulter was deeply affected by the conflict and struggle in the heart of so many American cities in the 1960s, and he believed one direct and lasting means of helping kids was through the passion and discipline of boxing – “the discipline, the fundamentals, the work ethic,” as Liles said.
“He lived such a complete life,” said “Spike” Nulle, whose home for decades has been an apartment across the turnpike from the Remedy. In a space crowded with books, Nulle displays a framed photo that shows him alongside Coulter — both men, to keep with Coulter’s theme, wearing crowns — on a table in the living room.
In 1973, Nulle was a young guy, an Army veteran with dreams of becoming an English teacher. Coulter was running a restaurant in Ithaca, Nulle’s hometown, which is how the two men met. One day, Coulter called to say he was opening a Syracuse tavern in a Seneca Turnpike landmark that was built as a bank and later served as a pharmacy.
Nulle agreed to sign on, as a partner. They called the place “The Remedy,” behind the idea — just like a drug store — that you felt better once you went inside. They filled the barroom with a wild mixture of ornamental bric-a-brac, including a World War II smoke bomb they decorated like a Christmas tree.
In many ways, Coulter had two separate pieces to his working life — his boxing world and his regulars at the Remedy — but one aspect absolutely overlapped:
At the bar, he brought that same Roy Simmons Sr. philosophy to every customer in the place. He was a boisterous guy who not only listened but could make a bad day feel better instantly. In the Remedy — as in the gym — he’d say with joy:
He was the king.
“It’ll be a personal loss to so many people,” Nulle said of his friend’s passing. Eleven years ago, I wrote a column about the Remedy, when it closed. One of my favorite Coulter stories is how — if a new customer asked if the Remedy offered a selection of craft brews — Coulter would respond:
Absolutely.
Then he would pour them a Busch draft, which was the only choice.
That is who he was at the bar, and at the gym. “A very tough guy,” said Lyons, the Onondaga faithkeeper. He recalled how they both sometimes fought at 139 pounds at Syracuse, where Simmons taught them: “Keep your head up, keep your left up, or they’ll come in with a left and knock you out.”
As Liles will attest: Coulter didn’t drop his head. He and Nulle were so close to their customers that over the years the two men started keeping a memorial list, handwritten and tucked into a folder, of every customer whose name showed up in the obituaries.
Coulter used to joke that the most important thing about the list was: He and Nulle weren’t on it. Even after the Remedy closed, Nulle kept the list going. It’s now at 241 names, with the most recent entry being Dan Romagnoli of Onondaga Hill, who died in June at 88.
Thursday afternoon, the list was sitting on a coffee table in Nulle’s apartment. One of these days, he’ll get a pen and he’ll add the name of the “The King,” but — as you understand — give Nulle a little time:
Sometimes, after you take a punch, you need a beat to breathe.
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