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Storyville! The Romance and Tragedy of Boxing.

Brit/Ire 
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#1 ·
I though I would create a thread sharing interesting articles on Boxing, with others who like myself were attracted to the sport by its Stories of Success , Tragedy and Inspiration.

Amongst the unsung heroes of American Urban culture, is the neighbourhood boxing coach..And there was a time when every neighbourhood had a gym. The Local Coach acted as a lighthouse, guiding young men away from the darkness of the streets and a potential life of prison and gangs towards success.

The following is one such story of the legendary neighbourhood coach from Harford connecticut Johnny Duke, it is written by "Ice Man" John Scully, I spoke toJohn some years ago on a forum he said the article was part of a book he was planning to write call the 'Ice Man Articles' unfortunately nearly a decade later it still does not seem to have been published, and John Scully has loads of interesting stories. so Here goes.

By John "The Iceman" Scully.

Johnny Duke story...
Duke was a guy from here in Hartford... passed away last year at, I think, 83... he was a REAL character of thegame, unlike ANYONE I have ever met...I have several stories on him inmy book...here is one of the favorites:

Johnny Duke Story #3:
At the Bellevue Square Boys Club you had some of the toughest guys ever to grow up in Hartford coming through there on a regular basis and boxing is one of those activities that for some reason just attracts people of all kinds. Mark Jennings was a kid from Bellevue Square who was in the gym in the late 80's and early 90's almost everyday, so often that he became an expected fixture at the gym each day even though he wasn't a boxer. Not that he didn't want to be one but the fact that he is permanently confined to a wheelchair made that impossible. That's not to say he couldn't compete physically, though. Johnny Duke made sure of that,

I am actually not even sure how this all started because I came around in the middle of Mark's run but I got used to Duke throwing up challenges on behalf of Mark to almost every guy that came to the gym, especially the bigger ,tougher looking guys. One thing about a boxing gym, especially with new guys looking to check it out, everybody thinks they are tough and that they are strong. Bellevue Square was certainly no different.

From his years and years of wheeling that chair around Mark had developed unusual arm strength and the proof was in the fact that we couldn't find anybody, no matter how big or tough, that could pin him to the wall using their arm strength against his. What would happen is that a couple of us would lift Mark out of his chair and steady him up with his back against the gym wall where he would wait for his designated challenger to come and take his turn. It went down like this: Mark would be there with his back to the wall and he would put his arms, bent at the elbows, straight out in front of him so that his opponent was able to grab a hold of Mark's forearms, wrapping his hands around Mark's wrists. When the person with the stopwatch would yell "Go!!" you had thirty full seconds to try and pin Mark's arms against the wall behind him and these matches got to be such a big thing that Duke would be like Mark's agent or manager or something and when someone new walked into the gym, especially a big and tough looking guy, Duke would be all over it.

"Oh, so you think you're a bad mother ------, huh?? Coming in here like you're Clint Eastwood or somebody, gonna' take over the gym. You're a tough guy? Well, I got a kid in a wheelchair that would kick your f------- a--, OK?? What do you think about that?"

And then Duke would call Mark over and everybody in the gym would stop what they were doing and come over, too, so they could start cheering Mark on while trash talking the new guy. It was like a circus sometimes and if you didn't know what was going on you would think we were all crazy. And the new guys, sometimes 250 pounds (including Clay-Bey and "Terminator" Earl Anderson) would have a look that said everything was all fun and games and he didn't want to hurt the kid so he would go along with the charade for the fun of it.

Duke would explain the rules and get everything in order, sometimes previewing what was about to take place like he was a ring announcer. Then, on cue, the guy with the stop watch would yell "Go!," and after a few seconds of trying to casually push Mark's arms behind him against the wall you could practically see the big guys saying to themselves "Wow, this little dude is stronger than he looks."

They would put extra juice into their push at that point and with the decibel level rising by the second all around them it was soon apparent that the big man was in trouble and almost as quickly as it started it was over and the ensuing celebration, each and every time, was as joyous as just about any world championship celebration that you have ever witnessed. Mark's smile was so big and wide, a good 3000 or so watts worth of teeth and happiness, that you didn't think he would be able to contain himself for much longer before he would collapse from sheer excitement. I promise you now that seeing and hearing all these guys, myself included, yelling Mark's name out loud as they cheered him on after one of his victories are some of the best memories I have from all my years in the boxing gyms. In all my years in the square I never saw him get defeated, either, no matter how big the opponent and, believe me when I tell you, these big dudes were trying as hard as they could to pin this kid. Mark just would stay so focused and determined and if he was going to fight for anything in this world it was going to be to stop them from pinning him.

After it was all over Duke would go over to his note book and, in front of everybody, check off another victim biting the dust, keeping track of Mark's career record. I am telling you, and I am willing to bet cash money right now on it, that the feeling of joy and accomplishment Mark felt each and every time, from the beginning of the negotiation all the way to the recording in the book, was equal to that of any world champion that you ever saw capture his belt on Pay-Per-View.

Johnny Duke gave Mark Jennings the amazing gift of feeling alive more times than I could remember or count.

So today (October 27, 2006) I am driving down Broad Street in Hartford with Mike-Mike (nine years after the gym closed and a good eighteen years after first seeing Mark in action) and we are literally on our way to the weigh-in at Foxwoods for his fight tomorrow with Adam Carerra for the USBA 122 pound title when we happened to see Mark (now about thirty years old) pushing himself along the sidewalk in his chair. So we pull over and stop to talk, telling him where we are headed, etc. Mark had been in the gym on hundreds of days with Mike-Mike all the way back to the 1980's and it is obviously a great source of pride for him to know that he comes from that gym with Duke and Mike-Mike and all the guys and he enthusiastically lets us know he is pulling for us and that he is going to let everybody know that he saw us on our way to the big battle.

As we are driving away I remember the battles he himself used to have on so many occasions at the old gym and I slow down the car and yell out the window back at him, just for fun, just to remind him of the old days one more time. "Mark, what was your final record at Duke's gym??," I loudly ask.

And as we slowly continue driving I, along with the rest of the block, can hear him happily and excitedly reply, with a huge smile on his face and his arm pumping into the air, "A hundred and seventy-two and oh!!"
 
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#2 ·
Some people might not know that Rocky Balboas coach, Mickey Goldmill is based on the real life character of the legendary boxing coach Freddie Brown he trained many great fighters including Roberto Duran...Here is a good article by William Nack for Sports Illustrated when Duran was preparing for his first fight with Sugar Ray Leonard.

From Hard Punches, a Life of Ease (part 1)

The hands that cradle Pedro the bunny on a patio in Panama will rock welterweight champ Sugar Ray Leonard in Montreal-says Roberto Duran

By William Nack


VIEW COVER

JUNE 16, 1980



ORIGINAL LAYOUT

Early of a morning five years ago, while training for a fight in New York, Roberto Duran put on his sweat suit, joined his perpetual shadow, Trainer Freddie Brown, and started out of the Hotel Mayflower to do his roadwork in Central Park. But it was raining when they hit the street. Not wanting to expose his fighter to the chill of the elements, certainly not on the eve of a fight, Brown waved Duran back inside.

"If it stops raining," Freddie said, "I'll call you."

Duran returned to his room, Brown to his. Half an hour later Brown peeked out the window and saw that the rain had stopped. He went to Duran's room.

"No rain," said Freddie. "We go."

Duran waved the trainer away. "No," the fighter said. Duran was overweight, as usual, and needed the work to trim down to 135 pounds, the ceiling for the lightweight division. Over the last few years-ever since Duran had pounded Ken Buchanan loose from his lightweight title in 1972-Brown had served not only as Duran's chief cut man, counselor and chaperon, but also as his conscience, a stern reminder that Roberto must work to win.

"Come on," said Freddie, "ya gotta go, ya gotta run."

Duran was standing at the door of the room, facing it, when he exploded in a rage. He suddenly threw his awesome straight right hand into the door. The thwack resounded like a thunderclap. On the adjacent wall a framed picture fell to the floor, its pane of glass shattering. Saying nothing, Brown left the room and headed for the lobby. Duran soon joined him and set out on his run.

"Duran's a funny guy," says Brown. "Hard to work with. He's definitely got a mind of his own. But he listens. He does. He listens."

Now it is May 1980, and Duran is still listening. It is midafternoon at Grossinger's in New York's Catskill Mountains. The fighter is moving around a ring in the middle of a circular wooden structure that serves as the resort's ski lodge in winter. There are flowers in the fields now, and on this drowsily warm spring day sweat beads the fighter's impassive face. Duran is preparing for the night of June 20, when he will climb into the ring in Montreal's Olympic Stadium to fight the World Boxing Council's welterweight champion, Sugar Ray Leonard, for the title. Duran is sparring, after a fashion, with one Simon Smith, who is throwing feather duster punches and running from Duran. Brown stands on the ring apron, his arms resting on the top rope, watching with mounting dismay.

Duran has already gone four rounds with Teddy White, a Leonard look-alike, pursuing him from one corner of the ring to another and howling like a hoot owl as he throws his punches-"Hoooo! Hoooo!"-but now he is slowing; the owl in him is asleep. He turns his back on Smith and walks away. Facing him again, he jams his thumbs into his trunks. He leans back, bends side to side, ducking and slipping whatever Smith throws. He shrugs. He dances a step or two. He raises his hands palms out, and parries. Brown snorts and stalks away from the ring as the round ends. Had someone offered him a pan of water, he surely would have washed his hands of this.

"Another round?" inquires Luis Henriquez, Duran's longtime friend and his interpreter.

"No," says Brown, waving the thought away. "The hell with it. He's not doing anything anyway."

Brown finds a wooden post 10 feet from the ring and leans against it, scowling at Duran as the fighter spars desultorily through another round. "He says he wants to measure the guy," Henriquez tells Brown.

"That's not the right way to do it," says Brown. "He leaves himself open that way. Do you think the guy he's fighting next month will let him do that?"

None of this is lost on Duran. He leans across the ropes and hollers at the audience in Spanish, "What a trainer I have! He wants me to throw everything without thinking. To hit me, Leonard has to throw punches. Leonard isn't going to fight me the way this guy fights. He's not going to run away from me."

"That's his way of resting," Henriquez says to Brown.

"I'd rather have him go two rounds on the heavy bag than do that," Brown says. "That's just wasting time...."

And the time was coming when there would be no time to waste. Brown is from the old school, and what annoyed him most was the failure of discipline, the fighter's casual manner. There was no doubt in the trainer's mind that in Sugar Ray Leonard, Duran would be meeting the toughest opponent of his life-a fast, crafty, intelligent and ambitious fighter. "The toughest without question," Brown says. And here, with the days dwindling down, Duran was sparring as if preparing to fight on an undercard.

Brown had been through these afternoons with Roberto Duran before. He had suffered the Panamanian's temperament, off and on, for nearly eight years-the arguments, the recriminations, the work stoppages and slowdowns, the broken training rules. On a number of occasions in Duran's years as a lightweight, Brown had to bring the fighter's weight from 165 to 135 pounds. "In the beginning it was harder than it is now," Brown says. "I had to watch him all the time. He did things he shouldn't do before a fight, like, you know, eating something he shouldn't."

Brown is sitting in his room in Duran's cottage at Grossinger's, about an hour after the training session with Simon Smith, and he is still nettled, but more subdued. "I'm not too worried, though," he says. "The fight's too far away. But he can do so much better. It's not a game. I don't play games. When he boxes good, I tell him. When he boxes bad, I tell him. We get into fights all the time. There were times when I was about to give it up. You try to help him, try to help him throw punches right, to do things right, and sometimes he says, 'Let me alone.' So you walk out. One day he's one way, one day he's another. Some days you can get everything out of him, some days you can't get nothing. You never know. You just have to leave him alone and go along. He listens, but he wants it his way."

There is a sharp rap on Brown's door. "Come on, Freddie," says the voice of Roberto Duran. "Let's go eat."

Brown rises from his chair and smiles. "He knows he did wrong," Brown says as he goes to the door. "He apologized. Like I was saying: sometimes you love him; sometimes you want to kill him."

Roberto Duran has been doing it his way, for the most part, since the street-urchin days when he surfaced as the resident roughneck of Panama City. Duran grew up in Chorrillo, a windblown slum of narrow streets and tumbledown two-story houses that lies on the east side of the mouth of the Panama Canal, across from Fort Amador. He is one of eight children. Roberto's father deserted his mother before he was born. As a youngster, with a sack slung over his shoulder, Duran used to swim the two miles to Fort Amador for daily raids on its bounteous mango trees. He would climb the trees, load the sack with the fruit and swim the two miles back. One day he almost drowned. Three hundred yards from the shore, encumbered by a particularly splendid harvest, he started to sink. "About three of us grabbed him and dragged him to shore," says Ruben Wallace, a friend of Roberto's. "He wouldn't let go of that damn sack."

Roberto sold the mangoes to help his mother raise the family. He shined shoes, too, and painted rooms and peddled newspapers. A natural entertainer, he danced and sang in the streets for passers-by. "I could dance and sing good," Duran says, "and I was great on the drums. I got pretty good tips."

He was less accomplished as a student. Practicing the overhand right was not part of the curriculum in his elementary school. "I remember in school one day, a kid came over to hit me and I moved. We exchanged positions, so his back was toward the steps. I hit him and he fell backward down the steps. And they threw me out." That was in third grade; he was 13. Duran never went back.

By then he had already met the two men who would develop him as a fighter. Duran first encountered Carlos Eleta when he was 10, at the foot of one of Eleta's coconut trees, whose fruit Duran was poaching. Eleta was a millionaire sportsman-a former tennis champion of Panama, the owner of a large stable of thoroughbred horses and an entrepreneur with holdings, at various times, in Latin American baseball, basketball and soccer teams. Eleta invited him into his elegant house, gave the youngster some money and sent him home. "He was such a cute little boy when he was young," Eleta says. Like Sugar Ray Leonard, whose interest in boxing was inspired by an older brother, Roberto first found his way into a gym by tracking his older brother Domingo. When Domingo quit, tiring of the routine, his trainer, Nestor Quiñones, urged Roberto to stay on. And he did. He turned pro at 16.

Duran brought to the ring everything he had learned in the schoolyards and streets. When Eleta bought his contract in 1971 for $300 from Panamanian Jockey Alfredo Vasquez, the young man's boxing experience had taught him a law that seemed as universal and immutable as that which grew hair on the coconut: when he let fly with his right, somebody went down. In school it was children sailing down staircases; in the prize ring, it was the other fighter. What applied in the streets, Roberto perceived, applied in the ring. He had few defensive skills and he used his left sparingly. He fought his way through the ranks, going undefeated in his early days as a professional on the strength of his raw talent. He doubtless would have continued to be more brawler than fighter had not Eleta, in 1971, persuaded 72-year-old Ray Arcel to come out of retirement and offer a hand in shaping Roberto.

Arcel had been one of the most respected conditioners and ring tacticians in American boxing. In more than 40 years in the fight game-until he grew tired and disillusioned with the direction the sport was taking and quit the ring in 1956-Arcel had handled 16 world champions, from Barney Ross to Tony Zale to Ezzard Charles. To these men, and to Duran, he preached the virtues of learning dexterity with both hands, and taught how the left sets up the right, how the two work in combination. Arcel had seen Duran fight and had liked what he saw. He agreed to help him, though only on a part-time basis. He didn't want to leave his job as a purchasing agent for an alloy company in New York City. Arcel suggested to Eleta that he hire his old friend Freddie Brown to assume the day-to-day job of preparing Duran for his fights; Arcel would join them near fight time to offer assistance.

All hands agreed. Brown, eight years younger than Arcel, had worked the corners of hundreds of fighters in a long and distinguished career; he was the cut man for Rocky Marciano in all his title fights. His four-point credo for Duran was: 1) The left is as valuable as the right if used correctly; 2) Boxing is the art of hitting and not getting hit; 3) It is not how hard you hit a man but where you hit him that matters; and 4) The speed at which you cut up an opponent is related to how efficiently you cut off the ring.

Roberto resisted taking advice, of course, and on the point of ambidexterity the trainers and the fighter argued vigorously. But he acceded to Brown's counsel, point by point, over the years. By the time he fought Buchanan for the lightweight title, Duran had learned the mechanics of cutting off the ring and the art of the jab. He was no longer a mere clubber. His only loss came soon after the Buchanan bout, by a decision to Esteban DeJesus in a non-title fight, but he was sick at the time. He met DeJesus twice after that and battered him senseless both times. In each of his first two fights against DeJesus, the Puerto Rican had dropped him with a left hook in the first round. Approaching the third fight in January of 1978, Arcel and Brown exhorted Duran to do what DeJesus least expected: to box the first few rounds. "We tried to explain to him," Arcel recalls, "that if he ripped and tore into DeJesus, Esteban would be waiting to nail him with the left hook." So Duran boxed, bewildering DeJesus, and worked inside, battering him with shots to the body. He knocked him out in the 12th.

That fight was Duran's last as a lightweight. In his championship years he had achieved a celebrity in Panama usually accorded diplomats and generals. On his return to Panama after winning the title, a crowd of 5,000 greeted him at the airport, including high officials of state. To the throng, he said, "El campeonato mundial pertenece al pueblo panameño." "The world championship belongs to the people of Panama." Thousands more lined the streets as Duran, waving from an open car, headed a parade that bore him to Chorrillo's slums.

The fame and money that began flowing to him in time elevated Duran and his family from poverty to relative splendor. Five years ago he bought a sprawling $150,000 home, with a stream flowing through his backyard, in the poshest and one of the most expensive communities in Panama, Nuevo Reparto El Carmen. He lives there with his wife, Felicidad, and their four kids. One of his neighbors is Arístides Royo, the president of Panama, who stops by once a week to visit Roberto and his 3-year-old, 680-pound pet lion, Walla, which he received as a gift from Rigoberto Paredes, the former head of the Panama racetrack. Duran was once observed leading the beast around the neighborhood like a dog at the end of a leash.

Duran owns two Pontiac Trans Ams, a Lincoln Continental and a Fiat; Felicidad has an Alfa Romeo. Duran also has a $25,000 van equipped with a stereo, television and telephone, which he uses to shuttle his entourage to and from the training gym. General Omar Torrijos, the Panamanian chief of the national guard, gave him the van after he knocked out DeJesus in their third fight. Duran is exempt from paying taxes in Panama, one of his rewards for being a champion, so what he takes in he takes home. He has money in the bank and has invested in real estate, his chief holding being a $250,000 apartment complex in Panama. His mother lives in a three-bedroom house he bought for her.

Duran has never lost touch with his roots. Though he moved from Chorrillo to Nuevo Reparto El Carmen, he didn't forsake the old neighborhood, which he visits frequently. His cook, a Frenchman, is from Chorrillo, and so are his three maids and the man who keeps the cars clean. "When he is home, Roberto goes to Chorrillo every day and hangs out with the guys," says Henriquez. And every Sunday he goes to Farfan beach, near Chorrillo. Duran "owned" that beach as a kid, in the way that ruffians own city blocks, and he owns it yet. Early on Sunday afternoon, after attending Mass, he packs his van with food and drink and drives to the beach, where whoever comes along may join the picnic. "Rice and peas, salad and wine and beer, but no liquor," says Henriquez. "And plenty of fruit juices and fried fish. He sets it on tables. He and his wife cook. When he gets there, the party starts." Duran plays dominoes, listens to salsa music and presides over the further greening of the legend he has created for himself.

He has come to be regarded, pounding for pounding, as perhaps the most dangerous fighter in the game, a ferocious and relentless master of attack. He dominated the lightweight division by means of paradoxical qualities: fury and finesse. This surely accounts for much of his mystique-that and his fearsome physical aspect. Duran is a cholo, a man of Indian and Spanish descent, and it is the Indian heritage that has shaped his countenance. His eyes are a lambent brown and his hair as black as the plumage of a crow. When he perspires in the ring, the hair mats, and as he lunges and bounces, it flaps like wings. Duran is built like a linebacker, with squat, powerful legs which are slightly bowed and seem too short for a disproportionately long torso, and broad shoulders riveted together by the bolt of a powerful neck.

It wasn't Duran's battle with weight that drove him to give up his lightweight title and become a welterweight, Eleta says, but rather the lack of opportunity to make as much money in the lighter division as in the 147-pound class. He had, quite simply, pounded the division into his own Tortilla Flat. So on Feb. 1, 1978 he abdicated his crown and joined the welters. Duran had a 62-1 record, with a remarkable 51 knockouts, but since he became a welterweight he has had but four KOs in eight fights. That fact raises one of several questions about Roberto Duran on the eve of the Leonard fight-to wit, is he as hard a hitter against bigger men? "I think a few boxers lost respect for me," says Duran. "Some said I lost my ability to punch with power. But let me tell you something: if a man is born with a good punch, a change in weight makes no difference."

Perhaps so; perhaps not. He dropped the former welterweight champion, Carlos Palomino, in their fight last June, but couldn't keep him down in what became a war. Duran takes a magnificent punch, but so does Palomino. "In the lightweight division it seemed like he was a tremendous puncher," Palomino says now. "But I didn't find him to be that kind of puncher as a welterweight. He's a good puncher, a strong puncher, but not a devastating puncher. He's good inside, very good, strong physically. The one thing that surprised me most about him was his quickness. And his defensive ability. He moves his head a lot, feints a lot. He's not an easy man to hit."

In the last eight years, Arcel and Brown both say, the sharpening of Duran's skills has been dramatic. "He's learned a lot," Arcel says. "He has developed tremendous ring sense; that's what makes him what he is. He's not just in there to throw punches. He knows what to do and when to do it. If he has to jab, he can jab. If he has to move, he can. If he has to take a punch, he can. When he's really in top, top shape, he's a devastating puncher. From the long layoff before the Palomino fight he might have lost a sharpness, the perfect coordination that he usually has, in his punches. And who knocks Palomino out? Duran might come close to knocking Leonard out.

Part 2 below
 
#3 ·
From Hard Punches, a Life of Ease (part 2)

By William Nack.


"Look," says Arcel. "Leonard is an excellent boxer. He's a master craftsman. He can do almost anything, but we don't know one thing. Can he stand up under the body-battering that he's going to get from Duran in the early rounds? If Duran hurts you and you're backing up and on the ropes, I'm telling you, he don't let you alone. He sticks to you like a plaster. He's that vicious. And he has the unique ability to get stronger as the fight goes on. When he's in top shape, after the seventh round you got to watch yourself. He gets his second wind and he can go like hell. You can't avoid punches when you're in there.

"It's the highest form of individualism there is. You're in there all alone. When you take a punch to the belly, you can't say, 'Time out!' You've got to be able to weather the storm. Can Leonard stand up? Can he take what Duran has to offer? That's the question."

The question of Duran's condition comes up endlessly. Generally, his fights fall into two categories: a) those Duran cares about, and b) those he doesn't care about. He got up for the biggest fights in his life: Buchanan, the second DeJesus fight, Palomino. Those for which he wasn't in shape have been deceptive, inspiring premature speculation that the fighter in the man was gone. But Duran would come roaring back. "I had seen Duran fight before he fought me and he looked slow and sluggish," recalls Palomino. "I figured there was no way he could go 10 rounds with me. But he was in shape, and for 10 rounds it was a war."

Roberto Duran is lounging in a lawn chair in front of his cottage at Grossinger's. Freddie Brown has just escorted him back from dinner. The 29-year-old former lightweight champion of the world, whose weight is 153 pounds after four weeks of training here, dismisses with a shrug his listless sparring session against Simon Smith. "Gloves, gloves, gloves," Duran says quietly. "You just get bored. Imagine going a month without rest-Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday-damn, you don't have the desire to throw punches anymore. They never give me a day off. I'm taking everything with calmness-at my pace. Everything is being saved for the day of the fight. If I do do things with ferociousness now, I won't have any sparring partners. What then? I do what my trainers tell me, but I also put in something of my own. It's not what they say only, but what I see in myself. Sometimes you don't want to fight. Understand? Sometimes the body wants to work and sometimes it doesn't. I have not yet started to throw hard. I should be in much better condition the day of the fight-not now. On June 20th I should be double what I am now-double!"

Duran clearly understands what is at stake. He has won important victories before, he says, but for this the world will be watching him for the first time in his life. Ken Buchanan was one thing. Sugar Ray Leonard, the American Olympic gold-medal winner and welterweight champion, is another. Duran could make $2 million from the fight-it will be shown on closed-circuit movie screens-to Leonard's $10 million. But the disparity, he says, doesn't bother him. "I'm not bitter over his good fortune," Duran says. "Why should I be?" If Duran wins, a return match would set him up financially for life. He knows this, too. But just as much at stake are pride and honor for their own sake. "I got into boxing to learn it," Duran says. "I'm not here to, to, to...climb up! No, no, no. I didn't enter the ring to get out of the gutter. Those are stories. I got into it because I liked it. I'm better than he is. I want to see him demonstrate, to show me, that he's world champion. For me he is not a world champion."

Leonard got where he is today, Duran says, without having really been in a fight. Leonard is living in a fantasy, Duran says, in a world in which he has yet to be tested. Wilfredo Benitez, who had been idle eight months before he fought Leonard, was no test, says Duran. Nor anyone before Benitez. "But he won't be living in a fantasy with me. Tell him, 'I never live in a fantasy. I live in reality.' To be where I am today, I've thrown many hard punches. Everybody has thrown some good blows at me. That is why I'm so strong. When someone throws a good punch, you feel it, but you try to shake it off-to assimilate it. You have to assimilate the blows. I've been hit by DeJesus, Hector Thompson, by Ray Lampkin, by Palomino, by a lot of fighters-but I'm still here. I assimilate. As the rounds go by I get stronger."

Duran's eyes are flashing now. "There is something in me. I'm Roberto Duran between the ropes! No one else! What I feel in the ring is to win." He laughs now. "Le quiero arrancar la cabeza!" Which is to say, "I want to tear off his head."

For Leonard he has no respect, Duran says, at least not as a fighter. "What is important to me is that he is going to have to fight with me," Duran says. "They say that he imitates Ali. They say he is the best in the world. I don't copy anyone. My ability is natural. I have always said that the person who copies another will always fall in the end. People are only going to see your copy. People will say, 'Look, he's a clown, he's nothing. He's doing the same as the other ones.' Forget it. But with an original, they will say, 'He's a natural, he created it.' Leonard's a braggart, a big mouth, a clown. I think this is going to be the first time in his life that he's going to really have a fight. Why should I respect him? What is he going to teach me? I've been fighting since I was eight. What is a kid born yesterday going to teach me? I was world champion for 6½ years. I've fought brawlers, speedsters, hitters and boxers. I know he's going to come to me and I'm going to take care of him. He thinks I am going to come out like I always do, but I have a few surprises for him; for me he doesn't have any surprises."

It has been said, Duran is reminded now, that he is vulnerable to three things: speed, the left hand and the man who fights a calculated fight. Duran sits up abruptly. "That is to say that nothing bothers Leonard?" he asks. He clasps his hands, as if in prayer, and looks skyward. "That is to say that Leonard is a god? We all have difficulties. Leonard has his, and I know what they are. The man who fights with one hand is dead. He does not have one hand, but he depends on one. His left. When he can't do what he wants, the fight is out of his control. Leonard has problems-in fact, many problems. But I don't intend to divulge them right now. I'm thinking about them and planning to take advantage of them. Arid I have not lost any of my spirit. I have not lost anything yet."

They call him Manos de Piedra, Stonehands, and for many he has been that. But this is in another city, in another arena, in another year against another man. They say this could be the prizefight of the decade and the decade has just begun. Once again, Roberto Duran will climb the steps to his corner of the ring. Behind him, draped in towels and carrying Q-tips and buckets, will come those two old men, fight trainers from another age-Freddie Brown, his thinning gray hair climbing in waves on his head, and Ray Arcel, slender and dignified. It will be out of their hands by then, all the plotting, all the calculating and the worrying, and in the hands of stone. "I have nothing to worry about," says Roberto Duran. "I am a man with two hands."
 
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#4 ·
Great articles @Dynamito

''Duran's eyes are flashing now. "There is something in me. I'm Roberto Duran between the ropes! No one else! What I feel in the ring is to win." He laughs now. "Le quiero arrancar la cabeza!" Which is to say, "I want to tear off his head."

I love this quote
 
#5 · (Edited)
Former light welterweight champ Saoul Mamby was one of Boxings fascinating characters, a Black Jewish guy from the Bronx managed by Don King and despit being managed by king he claims he still managed to remain financially stable ...stylistically he is what one would call a spoiler bamboozling and befuddling fighters, he even managed to get ranked in his 40's when causing a mild upset over contender Larry Barnes. He made history by fighting at 60...Despite being a journey man in the latter part of his career and suffering 34 losses he was stopped only once a testimony to his skills as a master spoiler.

Article originally published in USA Today ... https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwis6efW8PXNAhXKA8AKHZHYAGcQFggwMAE&url=http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/sports/boxing/2008-03-12-1281354489_x.htm&usg=AFQjCNFgyuiyYgYsId_zifwyuEmbr43qLQ&bvm=bv.127178174,d.ZGg

At the age of 60, Saoul Mamby fights on because that is what he does
Posted 3/13/2008 3:59 AM


By Tim Dahlberg, AP Sports Columnist
I guess I should be outraged, but somehow I'm not.
Saoul Mamby probably shouldn't be fighting, but he's been doing it for so long I'm not going to be the one to tell him to stop.

The grandfather of 11 first fought for money in 1969, a year he remembers well even if a lot of others don't. Once a world champion who fought on the same card as Muhammad Ali, he's fought around the world in places you'd be hard pressed to find on a map, but where he could always find a payday.

The other night he went 10 rounds with a man half his age down in the Cayman Islands. He took the fight on a few days notice, figuring that even a few months shy of 61 he could beat a guy who had lost 13 of his last 14 fights.

He couldn't, but at his age one more loss isn't going to deter him.

"I didn't get hurt or beat down. It's just that my tools weren't sharp," Mamby said. "Now that I've got 10 good rounds under me I'm ready to go again."

Just when that will be depends on the ability of his manager, Steve Tannenbaum, to convince a boxing commission somewhere that 60 is the new 30 and that a fighter shouldn't be discriminated against just because he's only a few months away from collecting Social Security.

That's been difficult in recent years, but Tannenbaum has a plan. He also has an opponent, though he still needs to find him.

"Give me a white guy with a decent record from the south," Tannenbaum says. "That's all I need."

In boxing, that's all anyone needs to sell a few tickets. Add a senior citizen to the mix, and start opening some more windows at the box office.

Just how Mamby got to this point should be a cautionary tale for anyone involved in the sport of boxing. The fact that he's now fought in five different decades and might be the oldest fighter ever to step into a ring should be cause for alarm.

I said should be, because you talk to Mamby and it all makes sense. Well, almost all.

His motivation goes back 40 years, to the jungles of Vietnam where newly drafted out of the Bronx he served in the infantry. He and his buddies would sit around, joke and laugh, and talk about what they were going to do after the war.

After seeing some of those buddies leave the country in body bags, Mamby made a vow to himself to lead the life he wanted if he got out alive.

"I don't want to be the shoulda, woulda, coulda," Mamby said. "Because when it's over, it's over. I made it out of a hellhole, so whatever I want to do I'm going to do as long as it's not hurting me or anybody else."

Sounds corny, sure. There's probably a dozen B movies in Hollywood based on the same principle, though no one got their brains scrambled while making them.

Mamby's brain isn't scrambled, either, which may come as a surprise for someone who's been in 85 fights, gone 15 rounds eight different times, and fought dozens of times in places when the only medical clearance needed was your ability to breathe and climb into the ring.

Mamby can do both, though his ring skills had deteriorated so much that he was suspended after a 2000 fight in North Carolina and fought only once, in 2004 in Thailand, before getting his comeback fight Saturday night against Anthony Osbourne in the Cayman Islands.

He lost a unanimous decision to a guy who can't fight, but he felt like a winner coming out of the ring when the crowd gathered to shake his hand and cheer him on after the announcer filled them in on his age.

It was another story to add to a collection that Mamby tells with little prompting and surprising eloquence for a man who has spent most of his life trading punches to the head. He'll tell you of defending his 140-pound world title in the fight just before Ali took on Larry Holmes in 1980, his fights in Madison Square Garden, and how he used to go into the backyard of opponents around the world to make a living.

The conditions weren't always great. But once when he took his title belt to Indonesia to defend against the local hero, and the fight organizers put him up in a luxury hotel and assigned a gorgeous young woman to take care of his every need.

Mamby smelled a plant. He had the girl wake him up for road work and drive him around, but nothing else.

"She was a beautiful woman, but I wasn't going to lose my title for one night of pleasure," he said.

That was a quarter century ago, and Mamby wasn't a young man then. The guys he fought are now all old and fat or dead, while Mamby walks around at 155 or so pounds and doesn't have a gray hair on his head. He eats steamed veggies, recently bought a juicer for his health foods and will talk forever about how important proper nutrition is.

"The man hasn't had a Dunkin' Donut in his life," Tannenbaum said.

Mamby is chasing a dream he shouldn't be chasing, but all boxers do the same thing. He wants to be a champion again, and feels that with a few fights he should be able to fight for one of the many titles out there.

That's not going to happen, just as he's not going to be fighting in Las Vegas or New York or anywhere else where they regulate the sport. His best hope lies in his well-used passport or Tannenbaum's ability to find that hometown fighter somewhere in the south where they might look the other way when they see his age.

Boxing isn't pretty at times; actually it's not pretty most of the time. I've been around the sport long enough to see the effects it can have on guys who take one punch too many, and I've seen young men killed in the ring.

So, yes, I should be outraged not only that Saoul Mamby is still fighting, but that there are places that will still let him fight.

I should be, but somehow I'm not.

----

Tim Dahlberg is a national sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at tdahlbergap.org

The Associated Press
 
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#194 ·


Saoul Mamby passed away a few days ago.

Here he is training for his comeback fight at 61... one of Boxings unique characters.
 
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#6 ·
Many of the younger fans may have read the name of the James Shuler Memorial gym, in Philadelphia many great fighters have trained there over the last 30 years...Here is the story of James Schuler whose life was tragically cut short.

Boxer's Requiem: Shuler's Corner Is Empty Now


By Sarajane Freligh, Inquirer Staff Writer

POSTED: March 28, 1986
By noon yesterday, the rain was falling in big drops that pelted the faces and washed away the tears of the hundreds who had gathered to bury James Shuler.

The cars queued bumper to bumper for many blocks and all along the crumbling sidewalk of 15th street as the people gathered in one great, grieving mass.

They filed into Second Pilgrim Baptist Church clutching handkerchiefs and tissues with which to dab their red eyes and bury their sad faces. They wound upstairs and through the sanctuary lined with the first flowers of spring, to where the body of James Shuler lay in a brass casket in front of the pulpit.

They filled the pews in the sanctuary of the church and the balconies above it, spilling out into the vestibule and along the staircases. They wanted to be comforted. On a Sunday, the church usually holds 1,200 people, but on this sad occasion, it held 1,500.

They came to bury James Shuler one week after he died at the age of 26 in a motorcycle accident on a city street not far from where he lived; seven days later, and still they wondered, why, why had it happened?

"Let us remember that only God has the answer to the question why," said the Reverend L. V. Johnson Sr., quoting from the book of Job. It seemed fitting that he had selected that text. Life had tested James Shuler, just as it tried the patience of Job.

It was a little less than three weeks ago that James Shuler fought Thomas Hearns in the arena at Ceasars Palace in Las Vegas. It was what Shuler had anticipated his entire career: a famous opponent, a lucrative paycheck and a live audience of 15,000. It was his chance, his big break, he often said. It was to be the gold medal that had eluded him because of the Olympic boycott in 1980.

Shuler lasted less than a round against Hearns, who felled him at 1:13 of the fight with a right to the head. A little later, Shuler shook Hearns' hand and called him a great champion. He told him that, now that all that was over, they should get together sometime, go out and have a little fun.

It was the last time the two talked. Thomas Hearns flew into Philadelphia yesterday, and he brought with him the North American Boxing Federation middleweight championship belt he had won from Shuler. He planned to give it to James' parents, Paul and Betty Shuler.

"I think that he deserved it a lot more than I did," he said. "It's been in the family a long time, a lot longer than I had it."

Shuler had compiled a record of 22 victories and one loss. In death he was remembered as a man of courage and dignity who had made the most of his short time on earth.

"Man has but a few days to live," said Mr. Johnson. "James Shuler gave his best during the short time that he lived. He did what he could when he could."

He was eulogized by President Ronald Reagan, who sent a telegram to the family that was read aloud to the congregation: "Shuler will be remembered with affection and admiration as a boxer whose skills, determination and courage made him first an Olympian and then a middleweight champion. But perhaps his most lasting legacy will be in the hearts of everyone who knew him as a true champion in life as well."

He was eulogized by Norman Spencer, the principal of Benjamin Franklin High school, who recalled the afternoon in September when James had attended a pep rally in his honor in the auditorium of his alma mater.

"James preached to them about having a goal, about being No. 1, just like he was," Spencer said. The family has ensured that a student will have that opportunity, by establishing a scholarship in memory of James Shuler, to be awarded yearly to an outstanding graduating athlete.

He was eulogized by the presence of hundreds who bid him a reluctant farewell. When the long service was over and the last amen had been said, the mourners walked in a ragged line past the open casket. They patted Shuler's shoulder or kissed his forehead. They knelt and prayed. Some wept silent tears while others wailed aloud the grief they were feeling: "James, our James," they cried.

When the coffin was finally closed, it was borne by nearly a dozen dark- suited men. Some of them were fighters, men who had sparred with James Shuler and grown with him in dim Philadelphia gyms. As they began their sad processional, their faces barely masked the misery they were feeling. Why, they wondered? And only God had the answer.
 
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#7 ·
TWEED SUITS AND GOLDEN GLOVES-FORMER BOXING CHAMP AL CERTO ON CHOOSING THE RIGHT WEAVE
MARCH 12, 2013 ADMIN

By Sally Deering


Al Certo in his Secaucus Tailor Shop with photo of himself and boxing legends

How many people can say Frank Sinatra's mother brought them into the world? Born in Hoboken under the watchful eye of midwife Dolly Sinatra (she was a neighbor), Al Certo was raised in Hoboken where he dreamed of being a dancer but, instead, built two careers as a professional boxer and men's tailor, Certo weaved back and forth between those two worlds until he eventually hung up his gloves and threw himself into herringbones and tweeds.

Certo's Custom Tailors has thrived in Secaucus for more than 50 years. Back in the day Certo's shop was two floors with eight tailors handling the orders; today, the top floor is now a pizzeria and Harsh Khindri who has been with Certo for 15 years handles most of the work.

"He's one of the greatest tailors I ever met," Certo says. "He has gold in his hands."

Certo's tailor shop is filled with sewing machines and along several walls are rows of hangers with yards of fabrics like cashmere, wools and cottons. Above the hangers is a line-up of photographs mostly of famous boxers who Certo knew from his years in the ring. Sometimes they came to Certo's shop to talk boxing and sometimes they picked out a suit. That's what boxing legend Muhammad Ali did.


Al Certo top row, right hand side of photo with many of boxing's legends.
"I got to be very close to Ali," Certo says. "He came walking in; I got all the pictures of the fighters on the wall and he says, 'where's all the black fighters?' We hit it off good. Ali had a 34 waist and a chest like, I would say 50-52."

Back in the day, Certo built a good reputation as a boxer, won the Golden Gloves in 1953 and turned pro in '56. He owned a gym on Washington Street in Hoboken during those years, too, but there came a time when Certo had to flip a coin and make a career-decision.

"What do I do, let this thing go and devote full time to the boxing? " Certo says, describing how he chose tailoring over boxing. Pointing to the 8 x 10 framed photographs that line the top edge of the walls, he says: "There's a billion dollars-worth of talent on that wall."

He's right. Black and white photos of the biggest legends in the boxing world like Ali, Joe Louis, Jake LaMotta, Jack Dempsey, Chuck Wepner, Jersey Joe Wolcott and Rocky Graziano are hung next to superstars like a young Frank Sinatra, who Certo dressed in his custom-made suits. Sinatra had a 29-inch waist at the time, Certo says. There's also a picture of Martin Scorcese, Joe Pesche, Ray Liotta and Rober DeNiro who visited Al while filming "Goodfellas".

"DeNiro was doing research on his role as Jake LaMotta in 'Raging Bull' and he knew I was a fighter and fight promoter and wanted to ask me questions," Certo says.

Certo is featured in several books including a popular new release "The Boss Always Sits in the Back" by Jon D'Amore who is a former Secaucus resident now residing in Hollywood. Friends since the 1980s, whenever D'Amore comes to the area for book signings, he hooks up with Certo.

"Since back in the late 1970s when I was 14 years old I've credited Al Certo with being one of the people responsible for my successful career as a musician that lasted until I retired from it in 1985," D'Amore says. "He booked my first group, The Mixed Expressions, made up of 6 high school teens from Secaucus and Weehawken, for our very first paying job at The Plaza Arena. Al and I have stayed friends ever since and it's been an honor to know him. Even now that I live in Hollywood, whenever I come back to New Jersey or New York City I always make it a point to stop by Al's shop and have a cup of coffee."

Although he built his custom-tailoring business in Secaucus, Certo's a Hoboken guy who remembers "when rents were $5 or $6 a month". He grew up on Monroe Street a block from the Sinatra family and it was Sinatra's mother Dolly who supplemented her income as a midwife and brought Certo into the world. His father, Al, a trombone player and mother Nettie raised 12 kids - Certo was a middle-child - and when Certo was big enough, he worked as a shoeshine boy near the Hoboken docks that lined the Hudson. In his early 20s, he married Lee Bernacci; they are together 64 years.

"I never wanted to be a fighter. I wanted to be a dancer," Certo says. "I was a good dancer with my sister Joanne. Once, we were at a dance in Hoboken and the whole dance floor got off and watched us dance. We were great."

Dreams of dancing like his idols Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire are now stored away along with memories of his days as a pro boxer, Light on his feet and in good shape, Certo looks like he still could wow 'em on the dance floor - an observation that he brushes away like a puff of lint on a lightweight wool.

"I'm 85," he says. "I got two left feet now."

Certo's Custom Tailors

Article originally posted in Riverview observer. https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&r...jNCNtHZmY_Ap3vclyKIR-Q&bvm=bv.127178174,d.ZGg
 
#8 · (Edited)
With all the talk of Eubank Snr and, Jnr... Here is an excellent and fascinating article from sports illustrated from 1995 it is pretty long but certainly worth the read on the story of Big Roy Jones Snr and Roy Jnr ... and there fractured relationship... Roy Snr in my humble opinion despite being a flawed character in many ways, is one of the best coaches in the business very underated today, I personally rate him higher then Floyd snr,...not many people know this but the likes of former champions Arthur Williams, Williamn Guthrie, Vince philips, Derrick Gainer all got their starts with Big Roy..."Ice Man" John Scully and the veteran coach Kenny Weldon both rate him very highly, John scully who spent time sparring with Roy Jones Jnr in the early years says he is one of the most unique boxing coaches he has come across.

ONE TOUGH BIRD ROY JONES JR., THE BEST BOXER POUND FOR POUND, WAS RAISED UNDER THE RULES OF COCKFIGHTING: WIN OR DIE
By Gary Smith


VIEW COVER

JUNE 26, 1995

Even with the three-inch steel spur running through his skull,
the rooster did not forget the secret. Even with the blood fever
making the dogs yip and the men close in howling, "It's over!
He's dead!" Even with the teenager's nervous fingers trying to
yank the metal from the rooster's brain, with the talons of the
other rooster at its throat. Even then....

The boy's heart was beating its way up his throat, but he
couldn't show his fear or sorrow for his bird. The boy's father
would smell it and carve it to shreds, for one thing, and for
another, the boy was 17 and planning to go to the Olympics to
fight the best fighters in the world. The triumphant rooster
flapped wildly, the blade on one foot ripping the air while the
other foot tried madly to extract its blade from the limp
bird's head. The teenager held his breath and tried again to
disentangle the roosters without getting slashed.

He could see that the men were right; the spur had entered near
one ear and come out near the other. But a shock went through
the boy's palms as he finally worked the blade loose: Crazy's
heart was still pulsing! "He's alive!" the boy called.

"Blow on him!" his father shouted. "Keep him warm!"

The boy blew up and down Crazy's spine and then set him on his
feet. Hallelujah, the damn rooster was still itching to fight;
the men stared in disbelief. Crazy struck and pulled back,
feinting, inviting his enemy in, remembering what most dead
cocks hadn't learned: the importance of distance, the
significance of space. The other bird lunged, exposed himself
... and suddenly was dead, and the boy was whooping, hugging
Crazy to his chest.

By the end of this story the boy will be a man, and there'll be
fighting roosters everywhere, hundreds of them in cages all over
his land. By the end he'll be known as the best boxer, pound for
pound, in the world, 28-0 with 24 knockouts, the super
middleweight champion whom some will call the best boxer since
Sugar Ray. Not Leonard. Robinson. "Forget Leonard," WBC light
heavyweight champion Mike McCallum will say. "This boy is faster
than Leonard. He hits harder, and he can knock you out when he's
going backwards. You'll see."

If you, the reader, are asking yourself, Roy Jones Jr.? The best
fighter in the world? Why have I barely heard of him? ... well,
that too, by the end of the story, you will see. You'll know,
like the rooster, all you need to know about distance.

To get there we'll have to travel way out into nowhere, deep
into the pine and oak and cornfields 25 miles north of
Pensacola, Fla. It's not a place for a fight story -- can you
name three American champions in the last half century who came
from forest and dirt? Boxing is the heart's cry for personal
space; everywhere out here there's space. You can't smell
desperation here. You won't find any boxing gyms.

Look closer. Smell again. It's 1979. Down by the washed-out
creek bed, in the clearing in the woods behind the little cinder
block house on Barth Road, there are pigs, dogs, roosters, a
bull, a horse ... and a homemade ring. There's a barrel of a man
with a dagger tattooed on his arm and a long piece of PVC pipe
in his fist. There's a skinny 10-year-old boy. Always remember
this: Nothing ever comes from nowhere.

The boy was five when this started. Big Roy on his knees,
cuffing and slapping at Little Roy, taunting him: "What's wrong?
Gettin' tired? Told you you were too little. Told you you
weren't quick enough. Oh, here we go. You cryin' again? Little
girlie-girlie cryin' again?" Yes, Little Roy was crying again,
crying rage and frustration at how easily his father dominated
him. He would promise his mother every day not to fight Big Roy
that night, but then his mind would start imagining new and
surprising angles of attack, shocking and unprecedented punches,
and by eight o'clock that night, fresh from his bath, he would
be flailing and sobbing in his pj's again. It wasn't fair. He
had to get close and risk, but his father didn't.

Now he's 10, with a fight coming up next week on Pensacola Beach
against a 14-year-old who's 16 pounds heavier. Nothing new. Big
Roy's always throwing him in over his head, daring him to be a
man, preparing him for the cruel sport that he, not Big Roy, has
chosen. Didn't Big Roy give him a shotgun at Christmas when he
was six, have him driving a tractor when he was seven? "Thought
I'd pass out cold when I saw that," the boy's mother, Carol,
says. Once when the two Roys were fishing, wading in surf up to
Little Roy's chest, Big Roy shouted, "Sharks! Two of 'em!" and
the boy dropped his rod and went thrashing for land. "What are
you doin'?" the father demanded. "Where's your rod?"

(Read the rest of the article here ... https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwivruDOh_jNAhVfOMAKHdIDAncQFggcMAA&url=http://www.si.com/vault/1995/06/26/204194/one-tough-bird-roy-jones-jr-the-best-boxer-pound-for-pound-was-raised-under-the-rules-of-cockfighting-win-or-die&usg=AFQjCNFN1ssBz78uwJaJVFkTMX6NM3eGEg&bvm=bv.127178174,d.ZGg
 
#10 · (Edited)
Yeah the article by Gary Smith ,on Roy Jones jr has to be one of the best boxing articles I have read...Almost hypnotic the way he has woven the Roy Jones story , together.
 
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#11 ·
Former light welterweight champ Saoul Mamby was one of Boxings fascinating characters, a Black Jewish guy from the Bronx managed by Don King and despit being managed by king he claims he still managed to remain financially stable ...stylistically he is what one would call a spoiler bamboozling and befuddling fighters, he even managed to get ranked in his 40's when causing a mild upset over contender Larry Barnes. He made history by fighting at 60...Despite being a journey man in the latter part of his career and suffering 34 losses he was stopped only once a testimony to his skills as a master spoiler.

Article originally published in USA Today ... https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwis6efW8PXNAhXKA8AKHZHYAGcQFggwMAE&url=http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/sports/boxing/2008-03-12-1281354489_x.htm&usg=AFQjCNFgyuiyYgYsId_zifwyuEmbr43qLQ&bvm=bv.127178174,d.ZGg

At the age of 60, Saoul Mamby fights on because that is what he does
Posted 3/13/2008 3:59 AM


By Tim Dahlberg, AP Sports Columnist
I guess I should be outraged, but somehow I'm not.
Saoul Mamby probably shouldn't be fighting, but he's been doing it for so long I'm not going to be the one to tell him to stop.

The grandfather of 11 first fought for money in 1969, a year he remembers well even if a lot of others don't. Once a world champion who fought on the same card as Muhammad Ali, he's fought around the world in places you'd be hard pressed to find on a map, but where he could always find a payday.

The other night he went 10 rounds with a man half his age down in the Cayman Islands. He took the fight on a few days notice, figuring that even a few months shy of 61 he could beat a guy who had lost 13 of his last 14 fights.

He couldn't, but at his age one more loss isn't going to deter him.

"I didn't get hurt or beat down. It's just that my tools weren't sharp," Mamby said. "Now that I've got 10 good rounds under me I'm ready to go again."

Just when that will be depends on the ability of his manager, Steve Tannenbaum, to convince a boxing commission somewhere that 60 is the new 30 and that a fighter shouldn't be discriminated against just because he's only a few months away from collecting Social Security.

That's been difficult in recent years, but Tannenbaum has a plan. He also has an opponent, though he still needs to find him.

"Give me a white guy with a decent record from the south," Tannenbaum says. "That's all I need."

In boxing, that's all anyone needs to sell a few tickets. Add a senior citizen to the mix, and start opening some more windows at the box office.

Just how Mamby got to this point should be a cautionary tale for anyone involved in the sport of boxing. The fact that he's now fought in five different decades and might be the oldest fighter ever to step into a ring should be cause for alarm.

I said should be, because you talk to Mamby and it all makes sense. Well, almost all.

His motivation goes back 40 years, to the jungles of Vietnam where newly drafted out of the Bronx he served in the infantry. He and his buddies would sit around, joke and laugh, and talk about what they were going to do after the war.

After seeing some of those buddies leave the country in body bags, Mamby made a vow to himself to lead the life he wanted if he got out alive.

"I don't want to be the shoulda, woulda, coulda," Mamby said. "Because when it's over, it's over. I made it out of a hellhole, so whatever I want to do I'm going to do as long as it's not hurting me or anybody else."

Sounds corny, sure. There's probably a dozen B movies in Hollywood based on the same principle, though no one got their brains scrambled while making them.

Mamby's brain isn't scrambled, either, which may come as a surprise for someone who's been in 85 fights, gone 15 rounds eight different times, and fought dozens of times in places when the only medical clearance needed was your ability to breathe and climb into the ring.

Mamby can do both, though his ring skills had deteriorated so much that he was suspended after a 2000 fight in North Carolina and fought only once, in 2004 in Thailand, before getting his comeback fight Saturday night against Anthony Osbourne in the Cayman Islands.

He lost a unanimous decision to a guy who can't fight, but he felt like a winner coming out of the ring when the crowd gathered to shake his hand and cheer him on after the announcer filled them in on his age.

It was another story to add to a collection that Mamby tells with little prompting and surprising eloquence for a man who has spent most of his life trading punches to the head. He'll tell you of defending his 140-pound world title in the fight just before Ali took on Larry Holmes in 1980, his fights in Madison Square Garden, and how he used to go into the backyard of opponents around the world to make a living.

The conditions weren't always great. But once when he took his title belt to Indonesia to defend against the local hero, and the fight organizers put him up in a luxury hotel and assigned a gorgeous young woman to take care of his every need.

Mamby smelled a plant. He had the girl wake him up for road work and drive him around, but nothing else.

"She was a beautiful woman, but I wasn't going to lose my title for one night of pleasure," he said.

That was a quarter century ago, and Mamby wasn't a young man then. The guys he fought are now all old and fat or dead, while Mamby walks around at 155 or so pounds and doesn't have a gray hair on his head. He eats steamed veggies, recently bought a juicer for his health foods and will talk forever about how important proper nutrition is.

"The man hasn't had a Dunkin' Donut in his life," Tannenbaum said.

Mamby is chasing a dream he shouldn't be chasing, but all boxers do the same thing. He wants to be a champion again, and feels that with a few fights he should be able to fight for one of the many titles out there.

That's not going to happen, just as he's not going to be fighting in Las Vegas or New York or anywhere else where they regulate the sport. His best hope lies in his well-used passport or Tannenbaum's ability to find that hometown fighter somewhere in the south where they might look the other way when they see his age.

Boxing isn't pretty at times; actually it's not pretty most of the time. I've been around the sport long enough to see the effects it can have on guys who take one punch too many, and I've seen young men killed in the ring.

So, yes, I should be outraged not only that Saoul Mamby is still fighting, but that there are places that will still let him fight.

I should be, but somehow I'm not.

----

Tim Dahlberg is a national sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at tdahlbergap.org

The Associated Press
I'm sure I was reading through the week that Mancini's team wanted no part of Mamby.
I know I read something and it was either about Mancini
I though I would create a thread sharing interesting articles on Boxing, with others who like myself were attracted to the sport by its Stories of Success , Tragedy and Inspiration.

Amongst the unsung heroes of American Urban culture, is the neighbourhood boxing coach..And there was a time when every neighbourhood had a gym. The Local Coach acted as a lighthouse, guiding young men away from the darkness of the streets and a potential life of prison and gangs towards success.

The following is one such story of the legendary neighbourhood coach from Harford connecticut Johnny Duke, it is written by "Ice Man" John Scully, I spoke toJohn some years ago on a forum he said the article was part of a book he was planning to write call the 'Ice Man Articles' unfortunately nearly a decade later it still does not seem to have been published, and John Scully has loads of interesting stories. so Here goes.

By John "The Iceman" Scully.

Johnny Duke story...
Duke was a guy from here in Hartford... passed away last year at, I think, 83... he was a REAL character of thegame, unlike ANYONE I have ever met...I have several stories on him inmy book...here is one of the favorites:

Johnny Duke Story #3:
At the Bellevue Square Boys Club you had some of the toughest guys ever to grow up in Hartford coming through there on a regular basis and boxing is one of those activities that for some reason just attracts people of all kinds. Mark Jennings was a kid from Bellevue Square who was in the gym in the late 80's and early 90's almost everyday, so often that he became an expected fixture at the gym each day even though he wasn't a boxer. Not that he didn't want to be one but the fact that he is permanently confined to a wheelchair made that impossible. That's not to say he couldn't compete physically, though. Johnny Duke made sure of that,

I am actually not even sure how this all started because I came around in the middle of Mark's run but I got used to Duke throwing up challenges on behalf of Mark to almost every guy that came to the gym, especially the bigger ,tougher looking guys. One thing about a boxing gym, especially with new guys looking to check it out, everybody thinks they are tough and that they are strong. Bellevue Square was certainly no different.

From his years and years of wheeling that chair around Mark had developed unusual arm strength and the proof was in the fact that we couldn't find anybody, no matter how big or tough, that could pin him to the wall using their arm strength against his. What would happen is that a couple of us would lift Mark out of his chair and steady him up with his back against the gym wall where he would wait for his designated challenger to come and take his turn. It went down like this: Mark would be there with his back to the wall and he would put his arms, bent at the elbows, straight out in front of him so that his opponent was able to grab a hold of Mark's forearms, wrapping his hands around Mark's wrists. When the person with the stopwatch would yell "Go!!" you had thirty full seconds to try and pin Mark's arms against the wall behind him and these matches got to be such a big thing that Duke would be like Mark's agent or manager or something and when someone new walked into the gym, especially a big and tough looking guy, Duke would be all over it.

"Oh, so you think you're a bad mother ------, huh?? Coming in here like you're Clint Eastwood or somebody, gonna' take over the gym. You're a tough guy? Well, I got a kid in a wheelchair that would kick your f------- a--, OK?? What do you think about that?"

And then Duke would call Mark over and everybody in the gym would stop what they were doing and come over, too, so they could start cheering Mark on while trash talking the new guy. It was like a circus sometimes and if you didn't know what was going on you would think we were all crazy. And the new guys, sometimes 250 pounds (including Clay-Bey and "Terminator" Earl Anderson) would have a look that said everything was all fun and games and he didn't want to hurt the kid so he would go along with the charade for the fun of it.

Duke would explain the rules and get everything in order, sometimes previewing what was about to take place like he was a ring announcer. Then, on cue, the guy with the stop watch would yell "Go!," and after a few seconds of trying to casually push Mark's arms behind him against the wall you could practically see the big guys saying to themselves "Wow, this little dude is stronger than he looks."

They would put extra juice into their push at that point and with the decibel level rising by the second all around them it was soon apparent that the big man was in trouble and almost as quickly as it started it was over and the ensuing celebration, each and every time, was as joyous as just about any world championship celebration that you have ever witnessed. Mark's smile was so big and wide, a good 3000 or so watts worth of teeth and happiness, that you didn't think he would be able to contain himself for much longer before he would collapse from sheer excitement. I promise you now that seeing and hearing all these guys, myself included, yelling Mark's name out loud as they cheered him on after one of his victories are some of the best memories I have from all my years in the boxing gyms. In all my years in the square I never saw him get defeated, either, no matter how big the opponent and, believe me when I tell you, these big dudes were trying as hard as they could to pin this kid. Mark just would stay so focused and determined and if he was going to fight for anything in this world it was going to be to stop them from pinning him.

After it was all over Duke would go over to his note book and, in front of everybody, check off another victim biting the dust, keeping track of Mark's career record. I am telling you, and I am willing to bet cash money right now on it, that the feeling of joy and accomplishment Mark felt each and every time, from the beginning of the negotiation all the way to the recording in the book, was equal to that of any world champion that you ever saw capture his belt on Pay-Per-View.

Johnny Duke gave Mark Jennings the amazing gift of feeling alive more times than I could remember or count.

So today (October 27, 2006) I am driving down Broad Street in Hartford with Mike-Mike (nine years after the gym closed and a good eighteen years after first seeing Mark in action) and we are literally on our way to the weigh-in at Foxwoods for his fight tomorrow with Adam Carerra for the USBA 122 pound title when we happened to see Mark (now about thirty years old) pushing himself along the sidewalk in his chair. So we pull over and stop to talk, telling him where we are headed, etc. Mark had been in the gym on hundreds of days with Mike-Mike all the way back to the 1980's and it is obviously a great source of pride for him to know that he comes from that gym with Duke and Mike-Mike and all the guys and he enthusiastically lets us know he is pulling for us and that he is going to let everybody know that he saw us on our way to the big battle.

As we are driving away I remember the battles he himself used to have on so many occasions at the old gym and I slow down the car and yell out the window back at him, just for fun, just to remind him of the old days one more time. "Mark, what was your final record at Duke's gym??," I loudly ask.

And as we slowly continue driving I, along with the rest of the block, can hear him happily and excitedly reply, with a huge smile on his face and his arm pumping into the air, "A hundred and seventy-two and oh!!"
Great thread mate.:clap:

Scully told me years ago his book was ready to go.
Sadly,I don't think he can get the backing he wants.
 
#12 ·
I'm sure I was reading through the week that Mancini's team wanted no part of Mamby.
I know I read something and it was either about Mancini

Great thread mate.:clap:

Scully told me years ago his book was ready to go.
Sadly,I don't think he can get the backing he wants.
That surprises me, John Scully is a very good writer and great story teller hopefully some publishing company will give him the support he needs.
 
#15 ·
The Road to Nowhere is based on a series of weekly articles Tris Dixon wrote for Boxing News years ago when Tris was living and travelling in America I read them back then...Subsequently compiled together and published as a book.
 
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#14 ·
Quarrymen: The Not-So-Sweet Science
By Robert Mladinich on August 20, 2012

Boxing is "a one-on-one confrontation with your life," Jerry slurred, "that you

In the early 1990s my first wife, who passed away in 1996, encouraged me to get back into boxing writing after a 10-year hiatus. Realizing that it was a good idea, I booked a flight to Las Vegas for the heavyweight title bout between Lennox Lewis and Tony Tucker in May 1993. I got there about three or four days early to take in all of the pre-fight hoopla.

The Internet had not yet been discovered and I remember being in awe of the boxing beat writers in attendance. I thought that guys like Michael Katz, Wallace Matthews, Bernard Fernandez, Ron Borges, Ed Schuyler and Pat Putnam, all of whom wrote about boxing for a living, had the best jobs in the world.

I made quite a few contacts and embarked on the second phase of my writing career, but the highlight of my trip was meeting Jerry Quarry. Although he had been enormously popular a few decades earlier, he entered the arena relatively unrecognized. When I introduced myself to him, he told me to take a seat and we chatted for several hours.

He was cognizant of his surroundings, extremely articulate and engaging, and a pleasure to be around. Little did I know that that night would set the stage for me becoming inexplicably linked to the Quarry clan, who would unwittingly provide a cautionary tale about the not-so-sweet science.

Jerry Quarry was unquestionably the most popular heavyweight boxer in history to never win a world title. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, he was an icon, the Great White Hope who battled such legendary champions as Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier, Ken Norton and Floyd Patterson in compiling a record of 53-9-4 (32 KOs).

Although Quarry never became a champion, his immense fame enabled him to secure high-profile product endorsements, as well as appearances on Bob Hope specials and guest-starring roles on such top-rated 1960s television shows as "Adam-12" and "I Dream of Jeannie."

Besides being as handsome as any Hollywood heartthrob, Randy Gordon, the former chairman of the New York State Athletic Commission, said that as a young man Quarry could not only "fight like hell, he could complete the New York Times crossword puzzle in 15 minutes."

Boxing historian Mike Silver recalled that in the late 1970s, after the first of several ill-fated comebacks, Quarry worked as a CBS boxing commentator and was "sharp, witty, charismatic and insightful."

But the countless punches Quarry absorbed during a whirlwind 17-year career, as well as problems with cocaine and alcohol, eventually took their toll. Just three years after I met him, it was widely reported that he was suffering from pugilistica dementia, the medical name for severe brain damage caused by repeated blows to the head. The insidious disease, which is similar to advanced Alzheimer's, had reportedly turned the once intelligent, vibrant, charming and good-natured fighter into a confused, childlike man.

In the spring of 1995, I interviewed Jerry at length at his brother Jimmy's home in Hemet, California. Jerry was living there because he was unable to care for himself. Jimmy, who was a loan officer at a bank, said Jerry would awaken each day and go for a long walk, which kept him near his peak fighting weight of 210 pounds. During his daily strolls he would engage gardeners or UPS drivers in conversations, all of which started and ended the same way.

"Jerry will ask them if they are boxing fans," said Jimmy. "Regardless of the answer, he will ask them if they ever heard of Jerry Quarry. If they say no, he will ask them if they ever heard of Muhammad Ali or Joe Frazier. They all say yes. Then Jerry says, 'Well, I fought them both.'"

While that sounded harmless enough, Jerry would inevitably get lost and have to be driven home by the police.

That same week, I also visited Jerry and Jimmy's brother Mike, who had been a top-rated light-heavyweight during a 13-year career that ended in 1981 and saw him compile a record of 62-13-6 (16 KOs).

At that time, another boxing brother, Robert, who was 17 years Jerry's junior and 12 years younger than Mike, was incarcerated in a state prison for theft and drug charges.

Robert fought professionally as a heavyweight from 1982 to 1992, compiling a record of 9-12-2 (6 KOs). His most notable opponent was Tommy Morrison, who stopped him in two rounds in Las Vegas in 1992.

In his heyday, Mike had resembled a teen idol but in 1995, at the age of 44, his once boyishly handsome face was battered beyond recognition. His eyelids were hooded, his nose was smashed, his once animated eyes were a dim blue, and the slabs of facial scar tissue gave him the look of a fire survivor.

He was working as a groundskeeper at the same church in which he worshipped in La Mirada, California. On this day he was lamenting over his misplacing of a lawn edger. Although he would have to make good on it, he was grateful that the church would "only take a little bit out of my check each week until it's paid for."

Most troubling, however, were his problems with short-term memory.

"My thoughts didn't synchronize well," he explained when describing why he had enrolled in a memory retention class. "I drive my wife to church, forget where I took her, and [try to] pick her up at the Anaheim Hilton. I couldn't remember anything. It has gotten better since taking classes, but I'm still no rocket scientist."

In better days Mike had done his share of broadcasting and product endorsements, and had hoped to parlay those experiences into a more lucrative and respectable post-fight career. But like so many fighters before and after him, he lived off what was left of his name for too many years and too many fights.

No beating was worse than the one he took from longtime light heavyweight champion Bob Foster in June 1972. Unbeaten in 36 previous bouts, and depending on one's perspective, blessed or cursed with youthful feelings of invincibility, Mike took the fight right to the much taller Foster, only to be knocked cold by a left hook in the fourth round.

"I did very good for three rounds," said Mike proudly. "I was doing the Ali shuffle and making him miss. In the fourth he hit me with a left hook that ranks with the best of all time. People say he got lucky. But he was a great champion, and I truly believe that luck happens when preparation meets opportunity; when you get paid back for all those extra miles you go. That just wasn't my day."

"That was the only time I was concerned I might have killed somebody," Foster told me a few years later at the International Boxing Hall of Fame. "I hit him with a left hook, and his eyes weren't moving. Then they moved in his head, and I only saw white. I said, 'He's dead!' My manager said, 'Business is business.'"

A few weeks before my visits with the Quarrys, brother Jimmy, then 50, had publicly announced the formation of a nonprofit organization called the Jerry Quarry Foundation. The foundation would raise enough money through fundraisers and corporate donations to pay pensions and provide health care coverage to disabled fighters. His poster boy, of course, was Jerry and, to a lesser degree, Mike.

Every penny of Jerry's approximately $3 million in career purses was gone, squandered by three ex-wives, child support, and no shortage of bad investments that included an office building in Inglewood, California, an apartment building in Orange County, and a condominium in Hawaii. At the time his sole income was $614 dollars a month from Social Security.

Although Jerry appeared all but comatose, Jimmy would regularly bring him to boxing functions where he would dutifully wipe drool from his mouth or tell reporters about Jerry's inability to handle the most basic human functions. This was certainly the picture that was painted for me during my home visit. Jerry seemed to be the mental equivalent of an eight-year-old, and a slow one at that.

He continually wanted to play-fight with Jimmy, making such childish boasts as, "I can take you." When Jerry offered crude, unconvincing arguments about his condition, it seemed that the words had been ingrained in his psyche because they spewed forth as easily as the jabs he could still throw on instinct alone.

"At least I can talk, man," Jerry said. "I fought Ali and Frazier, and they can't talk." For the record, Ali was, and still is, battling Parkinson's syndrome, while Frazier, who has since passed away but had taken his share of punches from the best in the business, was verbally adept at the time.

As kind and caring as Jimmy may have seemed to outsiders, many family members were simmering over his actions. One sister called the foundation a "ruse," and said Jimmy was using it for his own book and movie deals. More compellingly, she accused her brother of intentionally overmedicating Jerry whenever he was to be brought out in public.

Not long after my visit, Jerry's oldest son, Jerry Lyn, went to Jimmy's house and, according to Robert, "kidnapped him" and brought him back to more benevolent family members. Under the care of a doctor, they helped wean Jerry off the drugs that had rendered him all but zombie-like.

Months later, when I saw Jerry on television talking somewhat lucidly I was aghast that I, like so many others, had been duped by Jimmy. Those suspicions were only reinforced during an August 2003 trip to Bakersfield, California, where I interviewed brother Robert, the baby of the family, and father Jack, who for many years had been demonized by the sporting press for the integral role he played in the meteoric ascensions and cataclysmic declines of Jerry and Mike.

"I don't want to get down on a dead man who can't defend himself, but come on," offered Robert. "Jimmy and Jerry never really got along, and then suddenly when Jerry couldn't take care of himself anymore, Jimmy was his best friend? Jimmy was just taking advantage of Jerry to highlight himself. He once told me, 'This is how I can make my mark, the way Jerry and Mike made their mark.' So he's puts Jerry on Thorazine and shows the world how bad he is. He even sold his memorabilia and pocketed money from the foundation."

Read the rest of the article on Boxing.com .heres the link .... https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwjF_OGt-PjNAhUVM8AKHbgCDEIQFggjMAA&url=http://www.boxing.com/quarrymen_the_not_so_sweet_science.html&usg=AFQjCNH3okni1rql07Zg3bJfMv5es0_hpg
 
#17 ·
Before the internet age, there used to be full time boxing writers employed by the press and many of these guys were great story tellers writing for various publications and boxing journalism it self was an art form. In those days certain fights and fighters attracted you to Boxing but it was the writers who were the ones that turned you into a hardcore fan, not many of those Journalists are left and quite a few of them from Harry Mullan to Jim Brady are no longer with us...Now a days we get internet trolls like Scott Gilfoid or whatever his real name is posting on the net..or in the press we have Soccer reporters who dont have a clue about Boxing doubling up as Boxing writers when a high profile fight comes along. So in appreciation of all the great writers that have come and gone I thought I would just post this article Wallace Mathews a great writer who no longer writes about Boxing,.. posted a tribute to a former great in Jack Newfield, upon his passing.

Jack Newfield: Champion of the Underdog
By WALLACE MATTHEWS | December 22, 2004
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When Jack Newfield was preparing for what would turn out to be his last battle, his friend, the boxing trainer Teddy Atlas, offered to buy him a robe to wear in the hospital. Not a terrycloth, hospital-patient type robe, but the satin kind that fighters wear into the ring.

"What name do you want on the back?" Atlas asked. Newfield thought for a moment. He could have picked Sugar Ray Robinson, who, in his opinion, was the greatest fighter who ever lived; or he could have picked Muhammad Ali, a personal favorite; or he could have chosen Tim Witherspoon, a former heavyweight champion who became a close friend.

"Carmen Basilio," Newfield finally replied. "Toughest guy I ever saw." Tough. More importantly, an underdog, Jack Newfield's favorite cause. In his later years, Newfield, the veteran Sun columnist who died Monday night at 66, would be labeled a "liberal" and thought by some to be an anachronism, a relic of the failed movements and faded ideals of the 1960s.

In truth, Jack Newfield was an old-fashioned crusading journalist of the type that doesn't seem to exist anymore. He was wedded to no particular ideology or political party. If he was committed to any one thing, it was to standing up for the underdog, the little guy who couldn't stand up for himself.

Sometimes, the guys he fought for turned out not to be worth the effort, and as is often the case with people who fight the toughest battles, Jack Newfield lost nearly as often as he won. But he never stopped fighting those fights, because that is what guys like Jack Newfield do.

He was a man who understood that you can't fight City Hall, and yet still spent his life trying to. If Newfield had been a boxer, he might have been the type that Newfield the columnist crusaded for. That's what happens when you take on the likes of Don King and Ed Koch and Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg and Donald Trump and the fat cats of the New York State Athletic Commission.

Sometimes, like Basilio against Robinson on one glorious September night in 1957, you win. Most of the time, you get pummeled. All the time, you walk away knowing it was a fight worth fighting.

Those were the only fights Jack Newfield took on. He was a man with a great heart who loved boxing as a sport - "ballet with blood," he called it - hated it as a business, and cherished and respected the men who practiced it. He was a man who loved jazz and journalism, actors and activists, and was as comfortable with hit men as he was with police chiefs.

Newfield had only one consuming hatred: bullies. That was why he spent so many years exposing and writing about the misdeeds of King, who exploited fighters as if they were field hands.

That is why he tried so hard to bring down the Athletic Commission, which in its patronage-fattened ineptitude routinely endangered the lives of boxers and cheated the public. That is why he still held dear the memory of the Brooklyn Dodgers, baseball's greatest underdogs, while resisting the charms of the Yankees, the game's biggest bullies.

At heart, Jack Newfield was not so much a liberal as a sentimentalist. It may sound corny, but this is a world and a city that could use a little more corn and a little less cynicism, a few more softies, and a lot fewer bullies.

"The first time I heard Jack described as a liberal, I was shocked," Atlas said. "To me, liberals were celebrities who stood around talking about things that they never did. That wasn't Jack, that was just a label he fell under. I never heard him talk about a party or politics, ever. It didn't matter who you were; if he felt you were being treated unfair, and you needed help, he'd help you."

Indeed, Newfield's eclectic collection of friends crossed all ideological, racial, and social boundaries. At his frequent get-togethers to watch the fights in his West Village home, you would often find the likes of retired mob boss Sonny Franzese sitting near Budd Schulberg, of "On the Waterfront" fame, alongside Al Sharpton, and across the way a famous actor like John Cusack, or, on at least one occasion, Helen Mirren.

"He had his own rainbow coalition in his living room on fight nights," Atlas said. "He felt boxing was a great way station where everyone could find some common ground."

At Newfield's annual summer barbecue, you might find Jimmy Breslin rub bing elbows with Edward James Olmos or Omar Minaya deep in conversation with Fernando Ferrer. He knew how to be a friend and how to maintain a friendship.

If a friend of Newfield's was in trouble, he was there, not just to lend support, but to find a solution.

When I left my job writing a sports column for the New York Post in a flap over censorship, Newfield - who had been fired from there by Rupert Murdoch, a classic bully, for being a "liberal" - was among the first to call. Not to commiserate, but to move forward. He introduced me to Seth Lipsky, the president and editor of The Sun, and within a week I was writing a column again.

Jack Newfield loved to tell this one on himself: On the morning it was announced that the rights to his book, "Only in America: The Life and Crimes of Don King," had been purchased by HBO with the intent of making it into a movie, he found himself in the federal courthouse in Manhattan using a urinal adjacent to the one being used by none other than Don King, who was in the midst of being tried for income tax evasion.

King glanced at Newfield and let out that hearty, distinctive, sinister laugh. "Jack Newfield!" King bellowed in a voice that could be heard down in Foley Square. "I just read in the newspaper that I'm feeding your whole [expletive] family!"

Newfield laughed when he told the story because to a lot of people, and especially to King, that was what Jack Newfield was all about: Trying to "get" Don King, to make him his own personal Moby Dick, an adversary to feed off and ultimately destroy.

But that wasn't what it was about at all. It was all about standing up for the underdog and toppling a bully.

Carmen Basilio would understand.

Mr. Matthews is the host of the "Wally and the Keeg" sports talk show heard Monday-Friday from 4-7 p.m. on 1050 ESPN radio.

source ...New York Sun http://www.nysun.com/sports/jack-newfield-champion-of-the-underdog/6685/
 
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#19 · (Edited)
Michael Olajide Jr

Back in the late 1980's there was a host of young middleweights gunning for the top position the likes of Frank Tate, Iran Barkley, Michael Nunn...But the guy considered to be the best of the crop was Michael "The Silk" Olajide, a fighter with silky smooth skills and bags of charisma and the looks of a model . Unfortunately things did not pan out that way, although he was involved in much hyped fights with Frank Tate, Iran Barkley and Thomas "Hitman" Hearns he fell well short of stardom. Forced to retire from Boxing with horrific eye injuries, and permanently blinded in one eye (he wears an eye patch to this day), for most Boxers that would have been the beginning of a downward spiral of depression and drugs, but Michael Olajide is not like most boxers, this was just a new challenge and a new chapter in his life.

Michael with bills to pay had to improvise to earn a living, so he developed his own version of Boxercise, he combined Aerobics with Boxing and called it Aerobox, released some fitness DVDs to go with it (you can watch snippets on youtube) and quickly developed a small cult following as a fitnesss instructor.

A Few years later he partner shipped, with a former client and ballet dancer Leila Fazel and opened a gym that has become iconic called the "Aerospace Fitness Center" in New York. That Gym has become the go to place for Supermodels,....Michael Olajide has by default become the Alex Ariza of the Modelling world, all the top Super Models based in New York train with him, and he has been featured in all the top fashion magazines, and in the Sunday Fashion supplements of various Newspapers, he is now celebrated as a Fitness guru to the stars.

Decades ago Napoleon Hill wrote in his book 'Success Through A Positive Mental Attitude'.. That, "Every adversity contains the seeds of an equal or greater benefit". Michael Olajide perfectly symbolises that quote, unlike many of his peers he did not allow the demons of self pity to overwhelm him, nor did he turn towards Drugs and Alchohol to numb his pain, instead he took stock of his situation and made himself a success, the world title might have eluded Michael Olajide jr, but he has nevertheless become an inspirational champion in more ways then one.

you can read the story of his rise from challenging setbacks towards Success in an interview he gave a few years ago at the following link... here https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwjv_eSHq_rNAhXkB8AKHc8yDikQFggpMAE&url=http://fightnetwork.com/news/6375223:interview-with-michael-olajide/&usg=AFQjCNFIi8oVC4M-4ChHc31jhrI_AH9JeA&bvm=bv.127178174,d.ZGg
 
#20 ·
Here is just one story from the Chaotic life of Leon Spinks.. originally posted in the New york times by the veteran journalist Phil Berger.

BOXING
BOXING; Death at Hands of Elusive Foe
By PHIL BERGER
Published: July 29, 1990

ST. LOUIS-
The sign at the rear of the Northside Bombers Boxing Club says ''In Harmony.'' When Charles Hamm, the 52-year-old plumber who has run the place since 1978, first saw the sign, he liked the sentiment so much that he made sure the lettered poster board ended up on that wall of his storefront gym.

Harmony is a nice notion, surely. But on West Florissant Avenue, where the gym sits, harmony is a pretty elusive objective these days. The street courses through blocks of boarded-up and damaged buildings, an urban landscape promising more poverty and violence than anything resembling harmony.

From the day he opened the modest gym, Hamm, who lives one floor up with his wife, Jeridean, recognized the trouble that was out there on the streets. And like a Pied Piper, he fought it by cruising the North Side ghetto in his van, urging the youngsters loitering on street corners to try boxing.

Some boys came to the Bombers gym for the challenge of the sport, others for the hamburgers that the mild-mannered Hamm would buy after a day's training was done. Leon Calvin was 8 years old when he first showed up in 1979.

For the next 11 years, Calvin was a regular at Hamm's gym, learning enough about the manly art to turn pro a month ago. But last Sunday morning, Calvin's career was cut short when he was shot to death on a bridge connecting East St. Louis, Ill., and St. Louis. Police found him in a car at 5:30 A.M.

The death of Calvin, the son of the former heavyweight champion Leon Spinks Jr., underscored not only the pervasiveness of inner-city violence but also the random nature of it, which makes the quest for success by the young inner-city athlete a bit of a roulette spin.

For Calvin, a 6-foot-1-inch light heavyweight who some thought had the potential to be a world-class boxer, the abrupt ending was, of course, a personal tragedy. But in the context of his famous father's difficult life, it stood as another sad twist in the chaotic Spinks tale. For Hamm, Calvin's death was a sorrow compounded by the time and attention he had invested in the fighter, a commitment that was never easy.

Back in 1979, when Hamm first encountered him, Calvin was a good-natured youth with a radiant smile, but possessed of a mischievous side as well. He tended to use the cuss words that Hamm forbade and sometimes hit other boys while just standing around. ''Even bigger boys,'' Hamm said, ''he'd hit 'em pretty hard, which irritated me. When you got a gym, you got to be careful. You can't let anybody get hurt.''

Hamm, a former boxer who does not drink, smoke or use profane language, had to order the boy out of the gym on more than one occasion. Calvin kept coming back, though. And somewhere in that first year, Hamm found out that Calvin's father was Spinks, who in 1978 was the heavyweight champion of the world.

His curiosity piqued, Hamm began watching more closely to see whether this boy from the 1900 block of nearby East John Street had his father's spark for fighting. Calvin proved he did. As an amateur trained by Hamm, he won two St. Louis Golden Gloves titles. But the promise Calvin showed as a boxer was threatened by what he did outside the ring.

Like his father, who had been called Neon Leon because of a tendency to party when he should have been training, Calvin was something of a good-time Charlie. He was an expert dancer, good enough to win formal contests.

''Around when he was 14, 15,'' Hamm recalled, ''that's when you'd look out the window and see a crowd collecting. You'd figure there was a fight going on. But no, it'd be Leon just dancing, with the music coming out of what we call ghetto blasters, those boom boxes the kids have.''

As Calvin grew older, he continued to dance, going to clubs and house parties. Hamm warned him about the late hours he was keeping, and the questionable characters, some of them gang members, who were part of that social circle.

Two years ago, while at a party, Calvin was shot in the abdomen by a friend who was aiming for somebody else. Surviving that, he was arrested this past year and charged with illegal possession of a handgun. The case was pending when Hamm persuaded Calvin to turn professional in June.

''At the time he turned pro, I set him down right in front of me at my house and talked to him,'' Hamm said. ''I told him, 'Back away from those parties.' He told me, 'Mr. Hamm, it takes time, I just can't stop everything.' I told him, 'Just start doing it. That's all the time it takes.' ''

On July 10, Calvin, 1-0 as a professional, fought Jordan Keepers in Merrillville, Ind. In the audience that night was his father. It was the first time that Spinks - who over the years had spent little time with his son - had ever seen him box. That absence accounted, in part, for the detached reaction Calvin had when Spinks stopped by the dressing room before the fight to wish him well.

But after Calvin scored a third-round knockout and a jubilant Spinks was the first man into the ring, the son was more receptive. He hugged his father and smiled.

Off that victory came an offer of a three-year promotional deal from Cedric Kushner, the New York-based promoter of the world-champion welterweight Marlon Starling.

At home throwing shadow punches, Calvin told his brothers Darrell, 17, and Corey, 12: ''They bring 'em here, I'll knock 'em out.''

On July 21, the 19-year-old Calvin had a late afternoon workout at Howell's gym just outside the city limits. That evening, he went to a party and, around midnight, returned home. Not for long, though. When Darrell Calvin saw his brother head toward the front door, on the way to a nightclub, he told him not to go. ''He had a fight coming up July 30,'' said the younger brother, ''and needed to get his rest. But he told me, 'I ain't gonna stay out long.' He left by himself.''

Leon Calvin never made it back to East John Street.

Zadie Mae Calvin grew up in the same Pruitt-Igoe projects in St. Louis that Leon Spinks Jr. did. Spinks was only 17 when Ms. Calvin gave birth to her Leon, the first of the three sons she had by Spinks, whom she never married. In 1978, when Corey was born, Spinks, married by then to another woman, would upset Muhammad Ali and become heavyweight champion of the world.

In some of his earliest interviews back then, Spinks would make pained references to his past and in particular to a disappointing relationship with his father, Leon Sr. Leon Sr. and his wife, Kay, were separated when Leon Jr. was young. The father's sporadic contacts afterward tended to disappoint and eventually to alienate the son. ''I remember I stayed with him one time and I did something,'' Leon Spinks Jr. said. ''He hung me on a nail and hit me across the face with some cord of some kind. It put a long mark on my face. He told me he was sorry. But ever since then, I didn't like him. O.K., I had done wrong. But why'd he have to scar me up?''

The father was, Spinks said, ''in and out of trouble all the time,'' and he affected Spinks's self-esteem, even from a distance. Like his father, Leon Spinks Jr., even as champion, would have his share of trouble. Within six weeks of defeating Ali, Spinks was sued by a motel for unpaid bills, was sued for back rent by his landlord in Philadelphia and was arrested for driving the wrong way on a one-way street in St. Louis.

That turmoil would be constant in a pro career that saw Spinks lose the title in his first defense of it and then fight on until 1988. By then he was a chronic loser, boxing for a pitiful fraction of the millions of dollars he had made and lost. In contrast, his brother, Michael, who won the heavyweight title from Larry Holmes in 1985, would go on to earn $13.5 million in a 1988 bout against Mike Tyson.

Through those years, the Calvins of East John Street struggled. Their welfare payments were supplemented by what Zadie Mae's mother, Aline Pickett, earned as a nurse's aide while she lived with them.

The relationship with their fighter-father was disappointing, Darrell Calvin said. Except for annual Spinks family reunions, Leon Spinks Jr. was rarely in touch with them. Then, two years ago, after Spinks invited his three sons to spend time with him in Detroit, the visit ended badly.

On his return, the story that Leon Calvin told was that when his father turned down his request for money and he pursued it with Spinks's latest wife, Betty, Spinks got physical with him. Calvin's attitude toward his father hardened.

''He'd tell me,'' Hamm said, '' 'My daddy was heavyweight champion, and we ain't got nothing.' I wasn't the type to give him ill feelings but I'd say, 'O.K., Leon, look at yourself.' ''

This was a reference to the two young children that Calvin had fathered and from whom he remained mostly distant.

What male guidance the Calvin boys and their half-brother, Steve, received, would come from Hamm, in whose gym all of them boxed. While Hamm was raising two sons and a daughter of his own - all of them in their 20's now - he was nurturing the Calvins. Likable though he was, Leon Calvin had an unpredictability, much like his father's, that seemed to invite hard consequences.

When, for instance, the police stopped a car he was driving and found a handgun inside - a weapon that, Hamm said, belonged to a friend of the fighter's - Calvin was drinking, in plain view, a large bottle of beer.

Hamm tried hard, though, to keep Calvin on the straight and narrow, hiring him as a plumber's helper so that he would have spending money. But in East St. Louis last Sunday morning, Leon Calvin got into trouble that Hamm could not fix.

Like the Illinois State Police, Hamm found the facts about Calvin's last hours difficult to ascertain. Questioning friends of the fighter who, he thought would know what happened, he encountered resistance.

''I'd ask for details,'' Hamm said. ''They didn't know.'' As he pressed for answers, the details of the final night began to emerge. Calvin, it turned out, was friendly with members of a street gang called the Crips. At a party on Saturday night, he had been present when a member of a rival gang, the Bloods, was badly beaten.

By Sunday morning, as the scene shifted to an East St. Louis club, there would be another fight involving the gangs that would be quelled, at least until the place closed in at 5 A.M. At closing time, as the youths spilled out into the streets, gunfire erupted. Calvin jumped into the car of a woman friend, who drove hard toward the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Bridge, which spans the Mississippi River.

''There were two other cars with friends of Leon's that were being shot at,'' Hamm said. ''Gunfire was ringing as they were going across the bridge. They forced the car Leon was in to the side of the road. The girl driving, she jumped out and ran, and the person in the other car went to shooting.''

A few days after the shooting, Capt. Phil Kocis of the Illinois State Police said Hamm's version of the events was basically correct.

Last Thursday night, Calvin's body lay in an open casket at the Foster Funeral Home in St. Louis, a Golden Gloves medal hanging from his neck, a pair of miniature boxing gloves on his chest. On the street in front of the mortuary, Leon Spinks Jr. did not want to go into detail about the relationship he had with his son.

''I loved him,'' he said. ''I'm glad I got to spend time with him. It's too bad it got cut short, though.''

Source.. New York Times ...https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&r...s1FuJ0K7Th6swPWCipHgZg&bvm=bv.127178174,d.ZGg
 
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#22 ·
A bad case of Injustice Anthony "2 Guns" fletcher has been in prison for nearly three decades, here is one of a series of articles by Ivan Goldman of BoxingInsider the link to the website: .... https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwiFvva41PrNAhWDLMAKHZvXAUEQFggjMAA&url=http://www.boxinginsider.com/columns/ex-philly-fighter-anthony-fletcher-railroaded-2-decades-ago-sits-forgotten-in-pa-cell/&usg=AFQjCNEP-bp6_eFsXpcz-FDbwM3n21x7nQ


Ex-Philly Fighter Anthony Fletcher, Railroaded 2 Decades Ago, Sits Forgotten in Pa. Cell

By Ivan G. Goldman


Anthony Fletcher, ex-lightweight from Philadelphia, ex-soldier, and a victim of deplorably sick justice, is a discarded member of the boxing fraternity who was railroaded and forgotten 20 years ago by an out-of-control District Attorney's Office.



Entombed in a tiny death row cell inside SCI Greene Prison in Waynesburg, Pennsylvania, he's not allowed to mingle with other convicts. Fletcher sifts through old memories because he doesn't have sufficient sensory surroundings to create new ones. He files his own briefs once in a while but can't untangle himself from the web of legal incompetence that entrapped him long ago. Unlike former cause célèbre Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, Fletcher wasn't proficient at organizing others to take up his cause and has suffered horrifically for it. Every once in a while he mails me a photocopy of some document relating to his case, maybe just to prove he exists.

Fletcher was convicted and sentenced to death by lethal injection on a charge of first-degree murder largely on the strength of eyewitness testimony from Natalie Renee Grant, who was facing charges of retail theft and prostitution. After the court convicted him of first-degree murder, she walked away on probation. A standard deal.

Fletcher is one of countless steamrolled defendants I cover in a book coming out from Potomac Press called Sick Justice: Locking up Millions in the Land of the Free, but it won't be out for a year or so. If Fletcher's going to get any help, now would be better than later.

What happened on the street that night in March 1992 has been dimmed by time and Fletcher's botched defense. He always admitted shooting small-time crook Vaughn Christopher but maintained he acted in self-defense. Christopher, Fletcher said, had earlier stuck up a crap game, taking $50 from him, and when he saw Christopher later, Fletcher threw a punch and Christopher pulled the pistol. They both wrestled for it, Fletcher said, and the gun fired, striking Christopher in the leg and right side. The wounds shouldn't have been fatal. No one informed jurors that Christopher bled to death in the hospital after his mother, a Jehovah's Witness, denied him a crucial transfusion on religious grounds.

One of the ironies of our system is that innocent defendants are particularly tempted to go to trial, which means they'll likely serve harsher sentences because juries usually convict criminal defendants, who then pay a price for not accepting a plea bargain. And Fletcher, then 34, insisted on a trial. He didn't believe an American court would convict him. But his attorney, who wouldn't let him testify, barely cross-examined Grant and didn't even challenge her hearsay testimony. The judge let it slide too.

Fletcher, who grew up in south Philadelphia, joined the Army straight out of high school. He learned to box in Germany and became a highly successful amateur. After his discharge he turned pro at age 24. Overcoming his late start, he fought his way into world-class ranks. But then bad choices and bad luck took over. He suffered a detached retina, was busted for cocaine possession, was partially paralyzed by Bell's Palsy, and was shot four times while sitting in a car watching a playground basketball game in southwest Philadelphia. A companion sitting behind the wheel was fatally wounded. The attack might or might not have been drug-related.

Through all this Fletcher competed as a fighter, but eventually age was too great an adversary. He retired in August 1990 at 24-4-1 (8) after being stopped in his last two outings by Donald Stokes and Oba Carr.

Fletcher's case wasn't terribly unique in 1992, a time when crack ruled south Philly streets. The prosecutor offered a typical bargain - to bring the charge down to third degree murder if he'd agree to a sentence of 10 to 20 years. The district attorney at the time was execution devotee Lynne Abraham. "Abraham's office seeks the death penalty virtually as often as the law will allow," said The New York Times Magazine in a July 16, 1995 article headlined "Deadliest D.A." She once posed on the cover of Philadelphia magazine cradling a submachine gun.

Later it turned out that key facts in Fletcher's case were hidden from the jury. Others were manufactured, plain and simple. For example, the prosecutor preposterously claimed Fletcher was called "Two Guns" because he carried two guns on the street, but any Philadelphia fight fan could have informed the court that it was a boxing alias referring to his ability to land telling shots with both hands. There was a dreadful communication gap between Fletcher and his court-appointed attorney Stephen Patrizio. Remarkably, Patrizio never even corrected the bogus tale about Fletcher's alias. Patrizio subsequently confessed to a host of other trial errors. Probably the most grievous was his failure to object to the judge's flawed instructions to jurors. The judge was supposed to inform them they could find Fletcher guilty of voluntary manslaughter or involuntary manslaughter instead of murder. An objection at the time might have led to a much lighter sentence or given Fletcher excellent grounds for appeal. A competent attorney always looks for such gifts, but the defense never tore off the wrapping. In a deposition taken from him later, Patrizio made it clear that his principal strategy was to take the deal and after that he ran out of ideas.

Other disturbing issues include the disappearance of vital physical evidence after it was sent to the medical examiner's office. Hard-nosed detectives who looked at it later all agreed that with or without Grant's dubious testimony, circumstances didn't merit a first-degree charge, which requires premeditation.

Because of his earlier cocaine conviction and the playground shooting that came later, police considered Fletcher just another drug dealer who needed to be taken off the street, and when Christopher was shot they found their lever. If they could get him sentenced to death, so much the better. But looking back after all these years it's difficult to argue that keeping him locked up any longer makes sense and even tougher to make a case for lethal injection. If you think about it, he's no longer being punished for his alleged crime but for refusing to take the deal. Had he done so, he'd have been free long ago.

Robert Cassidy, a former associate editor of Ring magazine, wrote about the holes in Fletcher's case in the August 2000 issue of The Ring. Ake Sintring, who lives in Sweden, read the article and eventually formed a group to work in Fletcher's behalf. Sintring brought the case to my attention.

Reversing a conviction is a steep uphill climb, particularly when the defense attorney fails to lay out grounds for appeal during the trial. Fletcher got caught in a perfect storm. Although Patrizio did an awful job defending his client, somehow his mistakes were deemed not quite grievous enough to win a new trial. So the case has withstood legal challenges even though the charges were never fairly tested.

It's impossible for a reasonable person to conclude that Fletcher, now 55, received justice back then or is getting it now. Ironically, had Fletcher punched a little harder and didn't have those four losses, he'd have been a well-known lucrative commodity, not another disposable black man, and this tale would have unfolded differently.

We have some very solid lawyers working in the boxing community. If any of them wish to look into this further, I can be reached at ivangoldman@yahoo.com

Boxing Insider:
 
#23 ·
Well written article by Steve Springer of the LOS ANGELES TIMES about the tragic death of Jimmy Garcia in a fight with Gabriel Ruelas,


Boxers' Fate: One Dead, One in Despair : Sports: Gabriel Ruelas was just doing his job. But it killed another fighter.

May 20, 1995|STEVE SPRINGER | TIMES STAFF WRITER

LAS VEGAS - Carmen Garcia couldn't take her eyes off Gabriel Ruelas' hands. As he spoke and gestured, she kept her eyes glued to his fists.

It was last Monday, the first formal meeting between the two. Ten days earlier, Ruelas had fought her son, Jimmy, the Colombian junior-lightweight champion. Ruelas had won the bout when it was stopped in the 11th round.

Jimmy Garcia had been fighting for his life ever since, finally losing that battle early Friday when he died of brain damage at University Medical Center.

Ruelas had been uncomfortable meeting the family, and Carmen Garcia's behavior Monday in a Top Rank boxing office wasn't helping the situation.


Finally, her eyes moist from crying, she spoke to Ruelas through an interpreter, pointing to his fists: "I want to see you, but it's been hard for me, because those hands killed my son."

To Ruelas, the words were like a blow to the stomach.

"I understand what you say," he told her, "because I myself feel guilty, but nobody can change what happened. As fighters, I believe all of us know the risks when we get into in the sport. I didn't go in there to kill somebody."

Garcia said she had warned her son about Ruelas.

"I always told Jimmy not to fight you," she said to Ruelas, "because in Colombia, they say that you have knives in your hands. . . .

"They say that you cut up fighters bad in the face."

Ruelas, 25, insisted it wasn't true.

Carmen said her son wouldn't listen. "He kept telling me, 'Mom, I'm going to win the title, no matter what. I'm going to buy you a house. I was born to be a fighter. I would rather die than leave boxing.' "

At that point, Ruelas recounted, Carmen Garcia looked him in the eye.

"Why didn't you let him win, Ruelas?" she said. "You already won the title."

They talked for about an hour, the guilt-ridden fighter and the anguished mother, and slowly her rage dissipated. Finally, the small, middle-aged women with gray hair and pain on her face leaned over and gave Ruelas a hug.

"Whenever I see you fight," she told him, "I will see my son in you. And I will pray for you too."

It was supposed to be a glorious night for the Ruelas family. Brothers Gabriel and Rafael had grown up in such poverty in Mexico that they had no shoes as youngsters. After coming to California, Gabriel, then 12, was selling candy door to door in North Hollywood when he knocked on the sliding glass door of Ten Goose Boxing, a mom-and-pop operation trying to get off the ground on a suburban cul-de-sac. Within two months, both Gabriel and Rafael, who is a year younger, were regulars at Ten Goose, dreaming of careers of their own in the ring.

The night of May 6 was to be the high point of that dream. Rafael was fighting Oscar De La Hoya for the lightweight championship in the biggest bout involving Los Angeles fighters in two decades. And Gabriel would be on the undercard, defending his World Boxing Council super-flyweight crown. The whole family was in attendance.

Gabriel Ruelas was especially nervous.

"You always have butterflies," he said. "But this time, I was really nervous and I think it was because Rafael was fighting afterward. I wanted to get this guy out of there so I could go out and watch Rafael fight."

It didn't happen. Garcia, 23, absorbed all the punishment Ruelas handed out. "I was making it harder on myself," he said. "I was surprised at how well he took the shots. Just in the first round, I hit him 20 or 30 hard punches. Hard. I hit him on the jaw so hard one time I could feel the bone through my glove.

"But I never saw an expression on his face that would tell me this guy is hurt. I've fought many times and I've hurt guys. I'll see big expressions on their faces where I know they're hurting. But this guy, I didn't see any of that."

Finally, referee Mitch Halpern stepped between the fighters in the 11th round and ended the one-sided match.

"Usually when they stop fights, it's when you're throwing a barrage of punches and you don't get any punches back," Ruelas said. "But I wasn't doing what I usually do. That's why I didn't really think he should have stopped it at that time. I thought he should have waited. I wanted to get a devastating knockout. . . . I was kind of disappointed that he stopped it. After I learned what happened, I was glad. That's what referees are supposed to do."

Garcia collapsed after the fight and his condition quickly worsened. He underwent brain surgery because of swelling in his brain that night.

Ruelas tried to visit Garcia in the hospital that night and again the next day, but only relatives were allowed into his room. When Garcia's father, Manuel, and his brother, Manuel Jr., arrived, Ruelas requested permission to see Garcia.

"I felt bad asking them, because I felt so guilty," Ruelas said. "I wouldn't have even blamed them if they would have started punching me. But the father was very nice. He said, 'Sure.' "

Ruelas went into Garcia's room alone.

He began speaking to the fighter, who was in a coma.

Read the rest of the article here...! http://articles.latimes.com/1995-05-20/news/mn-3987_1_gabriel-ruelas/2
 
#25 ·
Strength and conditioning coaches maybe dime a dozen today..But 30 years ago having a seperate strength and conditioning coach, was still a novel concept back then the Boxing Coach was responsible for the conditioning...!

Interestingly Phil Berger who passed away in 2001 at the age of 58 from colon cancer, as well as being an author of several books, also wrote the screen play for the Boxing movie the price of Glory.


PHIL BERGER ON BOXING; HOLYFIELD USING NOVEL TRAINING FOR STAMINA
By Phil Berger
Published: July 2, 1986

On July 12 in Atlanta, Evander Holyfield will fight for the World Boxing Association junior-heavyweight title (190-pound limit) against the champion, Dwight Muhammad Qawi, in only the 12th fight of his career.

Since that career started, in November 1984, Holyfield (11-0 with 8 knockouts) has been so skilled at dispatching his opponents early in a fight that he has never gone 10 rounds despite having fought several bouts scheduled for that distance. Holyfield's longest fight was an eight-rounder last July 20 over Tyrone Booze.

That leaves Holyfield, who is the first boxer from the 1984 United States Olympic team to go for a world title, with the psychological barrier of having to fight 15 rounds against Qawi.

To quell whatever doubts Holyfield might have about his ability to go 15 rounds, Shelly Finkel (who serves as a consultant) and Lou Duva (who is chief of training) put Holyfield on an intense physical conditioning program more than a month ago, conducted by Tim Hallmark, a fitness specialist from Houston.

''Traditionally, fighters jog behind a car for three to four miles to get in shape,'' said Hallmark. ''But that's not even close to the best way to condition a fighter.''

Hallmark's way is a nonstop 90-minute morning workout that employs stationary bikes, treadmills and equipment that simulates the act of climbing. ''We'd work at varying rhythms,'' said Hallmark. ''Fast, slow, fast, slow. Just like a fight is.''

Holyfield said Hallmark's sessions were so arduous that for the first two days he considered quitting. ''I told myself, 'I don't have to go through this to be a boxer,' '' he said. ''I felt like giving it up. Then I thought, 'If I can master this, then I can get in there and tear Qawi apart.' ''

Hallmark's gauge to Holyfield's progress was the fighter's heartbeat. ''When Evander fights, his heartbeat goes up to 190 beats a minute,'' Hallmark said. ''When he first started with me, his heartbeat dropped to 150-155 between rounds. Now, it's down to 140-145 between rounds. The lower the heartbeat drops, the more the body has recovered. The recovery rate is the true sign of fitness.''

For Holyfield, who had a second, more traditional, workout each afternoon in a gym, the true sign was the 15 rounds he sparred one day recently against four partners. ''It showed me,'' he said, ''that the exercising built my stamina.''

Followers of the manly art, even casual fans, know that as fight night nears, fighters tend to turn reclusive and their moods take on an edge. Like Greta Garbo, they want to be alone. Usually. In September 1981, Thomas Hearns was on the verge of the biggest fight of his career, a unification bout for the welterweight title against Sugar Ray Leonard at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, Nev.

On the afternoon before the fight, Bob Halloran, a vice president of Caesars, recently recalled, Halloran wandered into the health spa at the hotel-casino and heard raucous voices from an adjoining room, where a half-court game of basketball was in progress.

''And there in the midst of a heated game,'' Halloran said, ''twenty-four hours before he was to fight Ray Leonard, there was Thomas Hearns running and jumping about, risking an elbow to the eye, a damaged finger, who knows what?''

Although Caesars Palace had taken out insurance against contingencies that might cause a cancellation, the establishment's objective was to stage a big event rather than collect insurance dividends. Accordingly, Halloran phoned Emanuel Steward, the manager and trainer of Hearns.

Very quickly, Steward arrived at the health spa and immediately retired Hearns as a basketball player.

''Steward looked pretty grim when he saw what Thomas was up to,'' said Halloran.

Marvelous Marvin Hagler plans to announce today in Brockton, Mass., whether he will fight Sugar Ray Leonard. . . . The next bout for Donald Curry of Fort Worth is expected to be a defense of his welterweight title. Bob Arum, Curry's promoter, said that the fight was scheduled for Sept. 27 in Las Vegas and that Curry would pick an opponent from a list that includes Lloyd Honeyghan, Maurice Blocker and Simon Brown. . . . If the World Boxing Association permits another Fort Worth fighter, Stevie Cruz, its new featherweight champion, to bypass his mandatory defense against Antonio Esparrogoza, Cruz will give Barry McGuigan, the former champion, a rematch. Arum said that the bout would probably be held in November in the United States. . . . Tyrell Biggs, the heavyweight who suffered a cracked collarbone during his victory over Jeff Sims on March 23, was to have returned to the ring on July 24 in the Felt Forum against Dave Jaco. But the fight was canceled when Biggs's doctors said he needed more time to mend.

 
#27 · (Edited)
Bon Hazelton a former George Foreman opponent had both legs amputated because of Steroid abuse.

Steroids turned former boxer into anatomical mess...

by Tom Cushman
May 9, 2004

Before Duane Bobick (1970s) and Gerry Cooney (1980s) came along to serve heavyweight boxing as prominent, and ultimately forlorn, examples of the Great White Hope syndrome, there was Bob Hazelton. At 6-foot-3 and a willowy 180 pounds, the blond, Hollywood-handsome Hazelton in the late 1960s was rushed though his first five professional bouts and into an undercard match on a show starring his South Philadelphia neighbor, Sonny Liston.

That entertainment took place on Dec. 6, 1969, at the Las Vegas Hilton. Before the aging Liston was rendered supine in the main event's eighth round by Philadelphia journeyman Leotis Martin, Hazelton had fielded a shot that caused the interior of his mouth to disintegrate. Blood everywhere. Bout stopped at 2:56 of Round 1. The winner: a menacing Liston disciple named George Foreman.

"My manager (Johnny Eddy) had told me Foreman weighed 190," Hazelton, now 55, recalled recently from his home in Dutch Lake, Minn. "George actually was 230. I had some decent skills, but I needed to get bigger."

Severing ties with Eddy, Hazelton went off to England, where - with extensive pharmaceutical assistance - he got much bigger. Told he was ingesting vitamins, Hazelton instead was swallowing dianobol tablets. Graduating to injections of deca durabolin, he eventually saw his weight soar to 235 on a body that was sculpted muscle.

While in Vegas for a fight in 1977, Hazelton was informed by a physician that what he'd really been taking were steroids. By then he'd noticed developing problems with his legs. "Looked like I had varicose veins," he said.

Hazelton would compile a 19-7 record, including a split of two fights with former light heavyweight champion Bob Foster, before circulation problems forced his retirement in 1980. Obtaining work as a bodyguard for rock groups, Hazelton continued using steroids until his weight nudged up to 305.

"Bob continued what he was doing until circulation loss was almost total," says Dr. Jason Reed, a Minneapolis internist who has been Hazelton's doctor for the past eight years. "But blood clots began to form. There was hardening of the arteries. He had at least two, if not three, mild heart attacks."

In 1986, Hazelton's left leg was amputated. Once a prosthesis was in place, he resumed his bodyguard role, and the steroid injections. His right leg was removed a year later. And, problems since are never-ending.

"Since I've known Bob, he's had over 50 surgical revisions," said Reed. "Steroids promote bone loss. Every time they operate there are slivers of bone to be removed.

"Steroids also can bring about changes to the immune system. People become more susceptible to infection. And there's pain. Bob battles that every day."

Hazelton doesn't suffer in isolation. During a conversation some years ago, Las Vegas-based Dr. Carl Meisenheimer told Hazelton that use of steroids by adolescents can stunt growth. "It definitely will put on muscle," the doctor said, "but if you haven't reached your full skeletal growth, which most of us don't until we are about 20, then the steroids will close up growth plates at the end of the bones. If, for example, you are 5-8 when you begin taking the drugs, you probably won't grow much taller - even if your genes are programmed by heredity to make you 6-3."

Since 1989, Bob Hazelton has been delivering that message and related ones to any youth group willing to listen - using himself, his wheelchair and artificial limbs as points of reference. Through experience, Hazelton knows there's a flourishing black market for steroids. "I can dial up dozens of places they can be obtained on the Internet," he said.

Given his story and appearance, Hazelton figures to command more attention than most with a teenage audience. "But, you have high school athletes seeing records shattered by steroid-boosted pros and there has to be temptation to go that route," he said.

"Much of my problem came from overuse - from seeing positive results and thinking, 'I can do even better if I increase the intake.' Some college and professional athletes who are users undoubtedly have knowledgeable people advising them as to how much is too much.

"High school kids won't know this. They're the ones most likely to go my route."

As an invited witness, Hazelton in March offered his message to a congressional committee chaired by Rep. Howard Coble, R-N.C., that's investigating the steroid problem and its ramifications, including the tainted shattering of hallowed records.

"Ninety percent of the time, I can identify a guy who's on the stuff by the cut of muscles, by how he looks around the face and neck," Hazelton says. "Do I have a problem with all these baseballs flying out of parks? All I can say is I feel sorry for the (Roger) Maris family. And, that I think we're at a point where we need two sets of records."

Now in the Congressional Record is Hazelton's version of a phone call placed in February to the office of Bud Selig, commissioner of baseball. Offering to appear at spring training camps so millionaire sluggers could see firsthand the potential long-term physical toll of steroid-complemented performance, Hazelton says: "I was told by someone on Selig's staff, 'It's none of your business. We'll handle it.' "

Contacted earlier this week, a spokesman for Major League Baseball said no one he'd quizzed could remember a conversation with Bob Hazelton. "That doesn't mean one didn't happen," he added. "Hundreds of people work here."

It would be a positive if even one of them acknowledged recognizing the powder keg on which their game is sitting.

http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/

Former U-T sports columnist Tom Cushman writes occasionally for the paper. He can be reached at tcushmant@gbronline.com

 
#28 ·
L.A. Then and Now / Cecilia Rasmussen
In Boxing, Gym Drew Them All
January 11, 1998 |Cecilia Rasmussen

For more than half a century, it was a musty pugilistic monument--preserved in liniment and sweat--where generations of Los Angeles prizefighters learned the lessons of "the sweet science."

The Main Street Gym, on the edge of skid row, was the rattiest workout venue in the city (some said the world), but it also was the most famous. "World Rated Boxers Train Here Daily" read a sign at the entrance. It was where young boys with little education and lots of heart came to train and listen hungrily to boxing tales from the old men who had spent more than half of their lives there.

The grimy little gym, where the bells bonged every three minutes and the dirty wooden floors creaked, drew some of the greats and not-so-greats who didn't know a left hook from a fishhook. It opened in 1933 at 321 S. Main St. as the successor to the Spring Street Newsboys' Gym. The building burned down in 1951 (while the night watchman slept), and the gym moved across the street to 318 1/2, atop the old Adolphus Theater.

There were other gyms in the city, but none had Main Street's reputation. At various times, fabled champions Rocky Marciano, Floyd Patterson, Jack Dempsey, Muhammad Ali (then Cassius Clay), Joe Frazier, Jim Jeffries and Sugar Ray Robinson trained there.


But it was the gym's proprietor, former featherweight Howie Steindler, who ran the place with unquestioned authority--like a drill sergeant in boot camp--and kept it going with the help of two savvy sidekicks, Arthur "Duke" Holloway and Rip Rosenburrow.

Steindler was an amateur fighter in New York before drifting to Los Angeles in 1942, when he began working as a crane operator at the shipyards. Later, as a prop man for RKO Studios, he met George Hansford, a former featherweight professional, whom Steindler trained for a successful comeback.

Drawing on his years of experience, Steindler took over Main Street Gym about 1960. The feisty, crusty and often sarcastic manager/trainer kept a lock on his phone and the gym's office in his pocket. He cultivated a tough guy persona, but was known up and down skid row as a soft touch for a hard-luck story.

In the beginning, to make ends meet, he also worked as an auto mechanic, chauffeur and cabdriver.

It was risky navigating the street in front of the gym with the Union Rescue Mission nearby. But Steindler kept a billy club hanging on the wall in case of trouble. Occasionally, a bum would find his way up the stained marble stairs, where Steindler or one of his assistants would eject him with just a few harsh words--except on rainy days.

Holloway, a big man with a big cigar and derby, trained and nurtured some of the greatest, including Joe Louis, whom he trained back into shape after the champ was discharged from the service after World War II.

Routinely, young boys peered through a crack in the door, straining for a glimpse of their heroes, while others paid a dime or two for admission to watch sparring matches and champs readying for a fight at the Olympic Auditorium, Hollywood Legion Stadium or Wrigley Field.

Before Jack Johnson, the first black heavyweight champion, died in 1946, he hung out at the the gym, flashing his gold-toothed smile at the young tough youths. At different times, cocky heavyweights would coax the 60-year-old man into the ring. He would strip to the waist and put on his 16-ounce gloves. Johnson never threw a punch. He just stood there and picked off with his gloves every punch thrown at him.

In 1977, Steindler, 72, locked up the gym, walked down the dirty marble staircase and got into his new Cadillac for the last time. On the street near his Encino house, he was jumped by unidentified assailants. They beat him savagely, smothered him by pushing his face into the car's seat cushion, robbed him and threw him on the floor in the back seat. They then parked the car on the Ventura Freeway, near the Laurel Canyon Boulevard offramp in Studio City.

Theories of what triggered the slaying of the local character were numerous. Steindler had longed to manage a world champion, and he had finally managed to achieve his ambition with featherweight champ Danny "Little Red" Lopez. He also managed his brother, Ernie "Indian Red" Lopez, treating them both more like sons than meal tickets. But not everyone shared Steindler's happiness, and there was talk of a contract hit.

Adding fuel to such speculation was the fact that Steindler tried to contact state Sen. Alex P. Garcia (D-Los Angeles) the day before his death to discuss problems he was having with the State Athletic Commission.

The slaying remains unsolved.

Steindler was the model for the archetypal old trainer played by Burgess Meredith, whose character managed Sylvester Stallone's character, Rocky Balboa, in the "Rocky" movies. Scenes for all three films were shot in the Main Street Gym, as were those for "The Main Event" and other movies.

It was a place of bruises and dreams, spit and blood, and its ambience for the movie industry was perfect. Life-size cutouts of champions and a poster of boxers Joe Louis and Max Schmeling lined the peeling walls. A sign on the wall read: "Please do not bring children under 8 years old in the gym. We don't want anyone smarter than us in here."

Steindler's daughter, Carol, a lifetime boxing fan, assumed control of the gym after his death, managing it until 1984, when it was demolished for a parking lot.

She then managed another Main Street Gym, behind the Olympic Auditorium at 18th Street and Grand Avenue, until that too was torn down, closing a colorful chapter in boxing history.

http://articles.latimes.com/1998/jan/11/local/me-7336
 
#29 ·
Blind Trainer Builds Boxers
March 31, 1985|JUDITH HAMILTON | Times Staff Writer

The gym--tattered, cramped and smelling of sweat--is filled with young boxers. Some are jumping rope. Others are pounding on punching bags. Two others are in the ring, trading jabs.

Amid it all stands Canto Robledo, owner, manager and trainer of Crown City Stables, who is shouting out instructions to the fighters in the ring. Robledo is intense. This is his gym. These are his fighters. This is his life.

"My dream is to get a champion of the world," said Robledo, 72. "If I had a world champion, I would have quit already."

It has been the same dream for almost 50 years, ever since a series of boxing injuries blinded Robledo, a one-time bantamweight champion of the Pacific Coast. Ironically, Robledo said, the sport that cost him his sight is the very thing that keeps him motivated today.


"I got into boxing and I love it very much," Robledo said. "The gym's kept me going."

At last count, Robledo said, he had trained about 500 fighters, including 200 professional boxers--all in backyard gyms that Robledo has had built as he moved from home to home in Pasadena over the years.

Today, the gym sits behind the Robledo home near Fair Oaks Avenue and Orange Grove Boulevard. About 20 young boxers are in training. They range in age from 12 to 25--youths off the street who aspire to either boxing fame or better self-defense. Three have had professional fights. Others have had amateur bouts. All mix easily with older men who visit the gym to keep themselves in shape.

"There's a bond," said Robledo's son Joe, who helps with the training. "My father may not see with his eyes but he has inner vision. He has insight. My dad can, and does, teach boxing.

"I think these guys (Robledo's professional boxers) have a shot. I want to get a world title for him. I would like to put the gold belt around his waist."

The elder Robledo said the closest he has come to a world champion was in the 1940s, when he trained his two brothers, Joe and Seferino. Joe fought for the bantamweight world championship in 1943, but lost. Seferino was the bantamweight champion of California in 1945, but never fought for the world title.

Robledo said he treats all his fighters like family. He clowns and jokes and scolds and tells them not to give up on their dreams. And if he thinks a boxer is good, he heaps encouragement.

"We're good friends," said Joey Olivera, a seven-year Robledo protege who is fighting professionally in the lightweight division. "He taught me everything. He got me out of the north side (Pasadena) gangs. He even calls me at night to make sure I'm not out on the streets."

Olivera, 21, is known professionally as "The Pasadena Kid." He has won 13 of his 17 bouts. Robledo said he trained Olivera the same way he teaches all his fighters--he starts with the art of self-defense, jabbing and balance.

While a fighter is shadowboxing, Robledo will grab the youth's shoulder, and judging from the fighter's movements, will correct his routine. Robledo said he teaches by intuition, from experience and by the balance of the fighter.

Scrappy in Childhood

A boxer with proper balance, Robledo said, will have more powerful and speedier punches. Robledo applies this same method when he has fighters throw punches at his padded hands in the ring.

Robledo said he loves working with kids from the street because it takes him back to his own youth. He said that growing up near Santa Fe, N. M., he was continually in one scrape or another. When his family moved to Pasadena in 1922, Robledo said, he just naturally found his way to a neighborhood gym and started to box.

At 16, he said, he was so good at boxing that he turned professional, even though it meant telling boxing officials he was 18 and legally old enough to fight. Robledo was nicknamed "TNT" in reference to the explosiveness of his punches. His style not only earned him a dynamite nickname, but also made him a dynamite attraction. Robledo fought 44 fights in six years, winning 33, losing 8 and battling to a draw 3 times.

"I went in throwing punches--boom, boom, boom. I didn't stop," Robledo said.

Founder and columnist of Ring Magazine, Nat Fleischer, writing in a 1931 edition, called Robledo "a two-fisted puncher who takes a punch to give one." Luis Magana, an official of the Olympic Auditorium in Los Angeles, said that he remembers Robledo as a bruiser.

'A Real Crowd Pleaser'

"If the going got tough," Magana said in an interview, "Robledo forgot boxing and he would slug it out. He was a real crowd pleaser."

Robledo speaks of his fighting years--1929 to 1935--with panache, recounting his first eight-round fight against Foster Manila in the Pasadena Arena; his 1931 bout with Chalky Wright, who later became featherweight world champion, and his match against one-time flyweight world champion Midget Wolgast. Of those three fights, Robledo won the first two and lost the third.

Read the rest of the story here >> http://articles.latimes.com/1985-03-31/news/ga-18860_1_robledo/2
 
#30 ·
Boxing: How Kirkland Laing went from hero to zero in 30 years

Kirkland Laing shocked the world when he beat the great Roberto Duran. Three decades on, a lifetime of drink and drugs has taken its toll


It was not meant to end the way it did the night Roberto Duran, the great Roberto Duran, fought Kirkland Laing in Detroit on 4 September 1982. Duran and his people were between super-fights, the loss to Sugar Ray Leonard was 10 months earlier in a fight that made him $10m, and Laing, fresh from a win at a sporting club in Solihull, was selected as an ideal sacrifice.

Laing had won and lost the British welterweight title and was considered, even by 1982, a lost cause by people inside British boxing. He had been thrown out of gyms by irate trainers, rumours of his drug use were rife and for all his immense talent it looked like he would never be the fighter that many glimpsed. An attempt to deny smoking weed one day in the Royal Oak gym was comically exposed when it was pointed out to Laing that he had a giant spliff tucked behind his ear.

"I was mixed up and too young to be serious," said Laing. "My head was too easily turned by girls and things and people took kindness for weakness. Too many people did that."

When Laing got on the plane for the fight in Detroit against Duran he had been a pro for seven years, had lost just three of his 27 fights. He was 28 and given no chance of beating Duran; there were serious calls for the fight to be scrapped, fearing serious harm in the ring. Duran needed a warm-up for a planned November showdown with the unbeaten Tony Ayala Jnr, a fight worth millions. Ayala was famous for his antics in and out of the ring, including knocking out his stricken victims' fathers and cornermen.

Duran had a similarly colourful history, including a brutal knockout of a horse and kneeing Ken Buchanan in the privates during a world title fight in 1972. Duran had also been the first man to beat Leonard.

It was against a backdrop of neglect that Laing and his long-suffering trainer, Joe Ryan, arrived in the desolate city of Detroit for a fight that Mickey Duff, Laing's manager, was convinced his man could win. "I looked at Duran's fights and not his age," said Duff. "I knew that his boxing age was different and that in boxing terms right then, Duran was an old man." Duran was 31, an idol in Panama and a former world champion at two weights, including 12 defences at lightweight.

"Duran was the only man that Kirk ever feared and that fight was the only one where he gave up drugs and concentrated," said Ryan.

Duran, meanwhile, was having some problems away from the ring with a battle for his services taking place between Bob Arum and Don King. However, he looked suitably mean, moody and fit at the weigh-in, where he was in excess of six pounds heavier than Laing. He also bragged about knocking out Laing and then doing the same to Ayala, Marvin Hagler and then Leonard in a third fight.

In 2003, when Laing had been out of the ring for nine years, I went in search of him in Hackney to film a BBC documentary. It seemed like a simple mission at first; I had an address or two, a number or two and various east London boxing people had seen him. I was wrong, it took three days and two nights to track him down. "He looks like a black Santa Claus," one of many dossers told me. "He's in a bad way," another claimed.

Laing had been grabbed but not charged by the police during a raid on a local crack house a year or so earlier. The police were unable to give me an address. I eventually had a call at 3am from Laing and arranged a meet the next day. He was late and when he arrived he was in a sad state. I bought the beers.

"I beat Roberto and then I was meant to fight for the title," he said, standing and throwing the exact punches that had confused and hurt Duran that night in Detroit. "I was good, man, I was good that night."

He was brilliant, actually.

Laing put on a simply amazing performance to beat Duran in every area. It was not a smash-and-grab raid as many have chosen to believe. It was a proper fight and at the end of 10 rounds Duran dropped his head, knowing he had blown his multimillion-dollar fight with Ayala. In round 10, Laing went for the stoppage, which annoyed Duran but delighted the crowd who had booed Laing's arrival. Laing beat the living legend on points and celebrated wildly with Ryan and Duff.

It should have been the start of something special.

In 2003, Laing sat on a park bench with me and denied that he had gone missing after the Duran fight. "I was in the gym waiting for fights, but they never happened ... and then I heard that fights were offered. It was just a case of mistakes, I never vanished," Laing claimed.

However, the people around him remember it differently. Duff and Ryan insist that they tried hard to track Laing down. "I had fights lined up, good fights," claimed Duff.

It was reported that Laing was in New York, then Jamaica, and then he was sighted in Nottingham, where he was from, and Hackney, where he lived. "I was still close to the gym, waiting for a fight," Laing told me. Meanwhile, Duran got serious and had a couple of quick wins before an unexpected event affected him. Ayala Jnr had signed to fight for the world title against the unbeaten WBA light-middleweight champion Davey Moore, a fight that had been part of Duran's plans before the Laing defeat. However, Ayala Jnr was found guilty of rape and was sent to prison for 17 years. Duran replaced him, battered Moore, made a million dollars and was, by June of 1983, a world champion again. Laing was still missing.

"It was hard for me to see that, to know that Roberto had the world title and I had nothing," added Laing. In November 1983, Duran made $5m in a super-fight with Hagler; the defeat to Laing had apparently been forgotten.

Last year, I asked Duran about the Laing fight and I noticed an instant change in his eyes, which told me that he had not forgotten the night he got a beating from the British boxer.

"A good fighter, a good man. What he do now?" Duran asked. It is a good question.

Laing was finally back in the ring one year after beating Duran. He accepted a risky fight in America against the much bigger Fred Hutchings and was badly knocked out in round 10. The British Boxing Board of Control suspended his licence and he spent four days in hospital recovering. It was not the end of Laing's boxing career and he fought another 27 times, winning the British title and European titles before vanishing once again.

"I should be the champion, Roberto said that. I should be the champion," Laing told me. A few days after I finished filming I got another call in the middle of the night. This time it was not Laing, it was his then girlfriend. Kirk, she told me, was in intensive care, having fallen from a balcony at the flats. The "fall" was shrouded in mystery. Laing made a slow recovery and returned to Nottingham in 2004 to be near his family. He told his biographer that it was an accident: "I was partying." He remains in Nottingham, a recluse and one of British boxing's best fighters, and a man capable one memorable night in Detroit 30 years ago of beating a living legend.

The Independent https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&r...4.html&usg=AFQjCNHriHOU_80SmXp_FmPFPlmFtJLNJg

 
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