Playing in Time: Essays, Profiles, and Other True Stories

by Carlo Rotella

  Briggs, who stands 6-foot-4 and weighs up to 270 pounds for a fight, has become addicted to his own power. He admits that he breathes more easily and moves better when he weighs 255 pounds, but he says, “I’m breaking bones in the ring at 270.” Carrying the extra bulk makes him look and feel more potent, but combined with his asthma, it also makes him more beatable, which helps explain why Liakhovich’s handlers let their man risk his title against him. Briggs can thank asthma for that too.

  “I haven’t been the fighter I could have been,” Briggs admits. “I didn’t have enough confidence, enough amateur experience. I never had the right coaching until now. The asthma was always on my mind. If I didn’t have asthma, I’d probably be one of the greatest fighters of all time.”

  It was late. The lights were dim in Briggs’s living room. He sat on the couch, an open laptop in front of him on the wooden chest. His asthma meds were still in a heap next to the laptop, where he had dumped them earlier.

  At this reflective hour, he talked of retiring. “It’ll soon be time for me to find happiness in my life, but I need to be financially stable enough to walk away from the game.” He’s “allergic to broke,” he said, and he has a family (two kids), a mortgage. Defending his title will bring paydays, and he’s under pressure too to carry the standard of the Black Hope.

  “Oh, I definitely feel it,” he said. “I’m the only guy with the punch and skill level.” During our conversations he sometimes dismissed his Black Hope talk as “marketing,” but at other times, like this one, he took seriously the notion of reclaiming an honor that belonged by rights to the line of Louis and Ali.

  He wasn’t the only one thinking about tribal honor. On his laptop, he took me on a tour of intemperate online boxing talk. I could practically hear Avar folk tunes swelling in the background when I read one post predicting that Sultan Ibragimov will be “way, way too tough for Briggs. . . . The kids from the Caucasus mountains grow up playing with guns, seeing their friends and family members murdered over minor insults. These kids are tough, mean, natural fighters. . . . So called ‘tough guys’ from underprivileged American backgrounds—the so-called ‘inner city ghettos’—are like helpless babies compared to the people of the Caucasus. . . . You can see it in the glint of the eye in these Caucasians. It’s scary, and it’s the reason why boxing dominance is leaving the U.S.A. for the East.”

  Briggs said, “I don’t get caught up in the race thing,” but he told me more than once that promoters and cable networks favor the Russian heavies because they’re white. He also enjoyed retelling the story of how he’d spread the false rumor that Liakhovich, known as the White Wolf, had called him a nigger. Briggs had been playing a pre-fight head game, trying to put his opponent on the defensive. At their postfight press conference, Liakhovich, plainly upset and still dazed, earnestly assured Briggs that he had never called him any such thing. “I smiled,” Briggs said, “and I said, ‘I know. I made it up.’ He was, like, ‘Whuuuh?’”

  Briggs doubted a similar move would work on Ibragimov. “This guy I’m fighting now, he’s more of a hard guy, or a wannabe. But I don’t care. I don’t care about that Russian mafia. Talk about, he’s had street fights, in Russia. Me, too. Bring it.” But a certain caution moved within Briggs’s bluster. He sensed that he couldn’t work Ibragimov, a fair-haired Muslim from a far-distant mountain land, like a regular white guy. The cultural reflexes, the leverage, felt different.

  The next afternoon, I visited Ibragimov during a training session at his gym, Seminole Warriors, in Hollywood, Florida, only a few miles away from Briggs’s house. At 6-foot-2 and 225 pounds, he’s a small heavyweight by today’s standards. His unpumped, uncut body has an old-school smoothness. Ibragimov is undefeated at the age of 32, but he has had only 21 pro fights, none of them against anybody particularly good.

  His manager, Boris Grinberg, who in his tropical shirt and shorts resembled Ernest Borgnine on vacation, said, “All his tribe, his people, from the mountains near Chechnya. He real Caucasian.” Dagestan is known for its freestyle wrestlers, but Ibragimov found his way to a government-run boxing gym at seventeen when he moved to Rostov. “Sultan has good pedigree,” Grinberg said. “He’s from basic Soviet school, but he’s more like American fighter, or black fighter with white skin. So fast, so powerful, always attack.” Ibragimov closes with an opponent rather than standing back at arm’s length in the traditional Eastern European defensive style. “Russian fighters take distance, stand up,” said Ibragimov, who’s taking lessons to improve his English. “American fighters go to fight”—he mimed bobbing and crowding. “I like.”

  Ibragimov, who won a silver medal in the 2000 Olympics, moved to Florida in 2002. He showed up at the gym on his first day in America, having flown in late the previous night. “They want him to spar,” Grinberg said. “First day. There was big black motherfucker”—he reached up toward the ceiling to indicate the man’s impressive size—“and Sultan smaller, with white skin, not so muscles. But Sultan knock him out, in first round.”

  They had something similar in mind for Shannon Briggs. Ibragimov said, “All the heavyweights so tall now. I like fight tall guys. I aim for body, head, everything.”

  The bout, originally scheduled for March but postponed to June 2 when Briggs came down with pneumonia complicated by his asthma, is shaping up as a good test for both fighters, whose strengths and weaknesses seem likely to mesh in volatile ways. The winner gets the belt and at least one more good payday; the loser falls back into the pack of contenders, where also-rans, used-to-bes, and could-have-beens mix with up-and-comers.

  The two men’s different paths to the ring, their converging histories, make for a good story, too. Narrative is crucial to boxing because the significance of any given bout, even a heavyweight title bout, is never built in. As opposed to the Super Bowl, which means just about the same no matter who plays in it, each fight has to be individually packaged for sale. What’s the story of Briggs-Ibragimov? Take your pick. The Black Hope versus the hard man from Dagestan; Brooklyn’s own versus rising immigrant; old head versus young lion; Shannon versus the Russians, asthma, and the decline of the American heavyweight.

  Briggs weighed 273 pounds when he fought Ibragimov, who outmaneuvered and outworked him on the way to an easy win by decision. Briggs retired after the defeat, then unretired and secured a title fight in Hamburg in 2010 with Vitali Klitschko, Wladimir’s brother. Briggs was badly beaten, ending up in the hospital with multiple facial fractures and a concussion. But his willingness to take punishment for the full twelve rounds, combined with his imposing muscular bulk, put him in line for more paydays as a trial horse for Eastern European heavyweights.

  * * *

  Original publication: “Shannon Briggs Says Nyet,” New York Times Magazine, April 15, 2007.

  After the Gloves Came Off

  THERE WAS BOXING AT the Castle, the converted armory on Arlington Street, on a warm night in mid-July. Perhaps 500 people filled the building’s main hall, filing into the rows of folding chairs set up around the ring or hanging around in the back drinking beer. Norm Stone stood near the pizza table, receiving. A boxer he manages, Joe McCreedy, a 22-year-old light-heavyweight from Lowell with a 5–1 record, was scheduled to fight later that evening.

  Everybody came by to say hello to Stone—reporters, cops, boxers, managers, trainers, fans. Men shook his hand, slapped him on the shoulder, introduced the family. Some unconsciously broadened their own Massachusetts accents to match his, which is of weapons grade. Women he’d never met before kissed his cheek, some diffidently, as if leaning into a cage to kiss a grizzly, and some boldly, as if they knew he was really a teddy bear.

  A solid fellow with a paunch and a shock of white hair, Stone cultivates a down-curving piratical mustache that makes him look like Hulk Hogan’s smaller, smarter, dirtier-fighting brother. His epic bug-outs have made him a celebrity in the fight world. Boxing fans have grown used to seeing Stone in a red-faced choking passion, trading punches and g
rappling with the opponent’s cornermen, restrained by security guards, screaming curses (You cuocksackah!) that non–New Englanders require subtitles to comprehend. Over the past two decades he has turned getting mad on his fighter’s behalf into an art form.

  From 1988 to 2005, that fighter was John Ruiz, a heavyweight from Chelsea with a dogged, mauling style. With Stone in his corner as manager, cut man, head cheerleader, sometime trainer, and full-time fount of contagious aggression, Ruiz rose from obscure Boston-area scraps to the world stage and a heavyweight title. Fans and the fight press and the TV networks all complained that Ruiz was boring in the ring and out, but he overachieved heroically, outworking and outlasting an impressive roster of opponents as he ran up a record that, as of this writing, stands at 41–7 with one draw. As much as for his unpretty fights, Ruiz became known for his and Stone’s rare mutual loyalty. Don King, the virtuosic maker and breaker of alliances who has promoted most of Ruiz’s bouts since 1998, told me, “They were like the Corsican Brothers. If you cut one, the other bleeds. When you got a person like Stone in your corner, the support is unparalleled and unprecedented.” But the fight world’s reptilian ethos acts as a solvent on any warm-blooded relationship, no matter how close. Even Stone and Ruiz didn’t stay together for good.

  For Stone, this Wednesday night at the Castle was a long way from championship fights in Las Vegas and seven-figure purses. The promoter running the show had agreed to put McCreedy on the under-card and pay him $800 only after the fighter committed to selling 75 tickets to his supporters. Still, ESPN2 was covering the main event, and McCreedy’s four-round bout had a chance to make it onto the broadcast, which would be a nice break for the kid. The cameras represented the attention of the wider world, a reminder that what happened here could matter to an audience that extended far beyond the handfuls of rooters from Dorchester or Haverhill who’d come out to cheer on their own. Stone himself was living proof of the connection between local and global. A son of Kensington Avenue in East Somerville, he had gone out with Ruiz into the great beyond, conquered it, and returned to his people. Today, the toughest guy in the neighborhood; tomorrow, champion of the world. That, after all, is the story of Stone and Ruiz, regular guys who made it big together. King called them brothers; other fight people liken them to a father and son, or a married couple. Before they broke up, that is.

  In 2005, not long after Ruiz lost his title by close and dubious decision to a plodding seven-foot Russian named Nikolay Valuev, Stone announced he would no longer manage Ruiz. He said he was retiring to spend more time with his grandchildren. One could imagine, of course, that he must have a life beyond boxing, and he was indeed married and had a son and daughter and two young grandchildren, but it was difficult to accept that Stone would relinquish his livelihood at the age of 54 to spend his days dandling little darlings who couldn’t walk or talk yet, let alone throw proper punches. Stone and Ruiz had come back from far more crushing setbacks than a controversial loss by split decision in Germany, where you have to decapitate a homestanding favorite and bury the head separate from the body in order to get the win. Ruiz was still a top-tier heavyweight, and he had lost and regained the title before. It seemed mysteriously out of character for Norm Stone to give up on him.

  The highlight reel of Stone’s raging meltdowns—and there have been many—includes the prefight brawl in 2003 with Roy Jones Jr.’s trainer over the selection of boxing gloves, and the drama at the Andrew Golota bout in 2004, during which Stone threatened to throttle the opposing trainer, cursed out the ref, and finally got himself ejected. On his way out he declared, on camera, “This is a fuckin’ fixed fight.” Then there’s his swan song, the Valuev fight in Berlin. After the decision was rendered, Stone ripped the belt away from the hulking new champ and raised it in mock triumph. I like to revisit online a photograph of the ensuing melee in which Stone appears wonderfully intent on delivering a claw-handed shot to the face of some foreign SOB. In the image, Stone pulsates with anger, and yet he also seems strangely relaxed, even fulfilled.

  Theatrical calculation went into these episodes, which Stone employed to protect his fighter’s interests, pump him up, and reinforce the bond between them (See how far I’m willing to go for you?). “If they’re on me,” Stone told me more than once, “they’re off him.” But the tantrums also brought Stone a great deal of attention. Once they became his signature, he seemed to feel obliged to satisfy the audience’s expectations.

  While Stone provided the histrionics and zingers, Ruiz, dubbed “The Quiet Man,” played it strong and silent and ground out the wins. The arrangement seemed to suit them. When at a press affair an opponent would say he was going to kick Ruiz’s ass and everybody turned to Ruiz for a retort, slow-mounting ire would flicker around the corners of his mouth and eyes, but, after a well-timed beat, it was Stone who responded. Ruiz would nod along, receding in on himself, the drummer keeping time behind the horn player.

  Whether managing Ruiz’s fighting career or conducting his own, more informal one in his roistering youth, Stone has never been an x’s-and-o’s man. He knows more about feeling than technique. I once asked him what attributes he values in a boxer, and he promptly answered, “First, the heart. Really, the balls.” Of “Irish, English, and French Canadian” descent, he grew up in Somerville, then left from 1967 to 1971 to serve in the Army in Germany and Vietnam. He had dabbled in boxing since first visiting a gym at the age of seven, but he was really a self-taught brawler. “I fought in the service,” he told me. When I asked what kind of fighter he was, he said, “I was a drunk fighter.” When I asked whether he was more of a tactical boxer or a free-swinging puncher, he said, “Depends what I was drinking. When I went into a bar, I expected to get in a fight. I didn’t always win, but I always fought.”

  After he got back home, Stone drove buses for the MBTA. In the early 1980s, he started hanging around with his friend Gabe La Marca at the Somerville Boxing Club, where he first encountered Ruiz, then a reedy, close-mouthed teenager. “I was sober a while by then. I seen this kid was riding his bike from Chelsea to the gym. To ride by Charlestown when you’re Puerto Rican, that’s something. We became friendly. I talked to some people, set up a salary for him.”

  Trained by LaMarca and managed by Stone, Ruiz started moving up and getting better. But even as he grew into a heavyweight to be reckoned with, he showed why he would always be difficult to sell as an attraction. “We’d drive six and a half hours to the fight and six and a half hours back, and not a word,” recalls Stone. “I knew what he was about. He wasn’t comfortable with people, and it was uncomfortable for everybody else. They complained about it. Made him a hard fighter to raise money for. But I knew he was gonna be good. He had it.”

  By 1996, Ruiz had put together a string of grueling victories that made it impossible to ignore him. He got his big break, a fight on HBO. The opponent was David Tua, a booming puncher well on his way to stardom. Beating Tua would set Ruiz on the path to a title shot. But Tua blasted him out in just nineteen seconds, still the only time Ruiz has ever been knocked out. “A lot of people lost confidence in him,” says Stone. “Nobody wanted him on TV. HBO hated him. I couldn’t sell him to a fuckin’ glue factory.”

  Humiliated, Ruiz sank into deep despair. He didn’t want to show his face at his own gym. Stone set to work on his fighter, convincing him that Tua had caught him with a lucky punch because Ruiz hadn’t warmed up enough before the fight. Stone promised he would never let that happen again. “I had to get him back into the gym to face his peers,” Stone says. “Took a couple of weeks. We sat down. We talked a lot. He didn’t do anything without me, I didn’t do anything without him. Finally, Johnny said, ‘Get me the toughest guy out there. Let me see what I got.’” Stone started him out with easy matchups, working him back up the competitive ladder. “I had to do the right thing. Build him up. Protect him, and my investment.” The loss to Tua had seemed like the end, but as Stone says now, “that’s the one that made us.”

  R
uiz, his confidence painstakingly rebuilt, went on another impressive streak after the Tua fight, winning eleven in a row over the next three years, ten by knockout, taking out several prospects and the fading former champ Tony Tucker. That earned him a title fight in 2000 with Evander Holyfield, a future hall-of-famer best known for defeating Mike Tyson. Ruiz lost on a debatable close decision, then beat Holyfield convincingly in a rematch, then fought him to a draw in a third bout. Ruiz emerged from this brutal trilogy with the WBA’s belt in hand, lost it, got it back, and defended it with honor, beating another series of talented big men—among them Kirk Johnson, Hasim Rahman, Andrew Golota, and Fres Oquendo—many of whom had been favored over him.

  Stone handled Ruiz’s business with comparable bulldog valor. “Stoney was always on me,” Don King told me. “Always on me. In the morning, Stoney. In the afternoon, Stoney. I couldn’t breathe. ‘Jawny! You gotta think of Jawny! Do this for Jawny!’ Tylenol made a million dollars off me with Stoney.” King laughed his Old Scratch laugh. “Stoney was always fighting for Johnny. He just wants his man to win. That’s why he gets thrown out of fights. That’s why he yells and screams. He became more of an attraction than Ruiz. It made him look bad, but no one can deny the fervent passion and love for Johnny Ruiz. Even to his own detriment.” A note of wonder had crept into King’s voice. He couldn’t fathom loyalty powerful enough to trump self-interest, but he admired it. “They say of lawyers that they’re supposed to fall on their sword for their clients. He must have daggers all through his ass.”

  Promoters and TV networks complained that Ruiz was a bad draw, but he still managed to earn some good paydays. With Stone at his side, he brought in more than $5 million in purses for the Holy-field trilogy, $1.5 million to wear out Johnson, another $1.1 million to soldier through a twelve-round boxing lesson from the incomparable tactician James Toney. It wasn’t Tyson money, but it added up. “If you look back over the history of the heavyweights,” says Eric Bottjer, a respected matchmaker who worked for King during Ruiz’s championship run, “there are a lot of guys with John Ruiz’s abilities who didn’t make a tenth of what he made.”