Irish Thunder

by Bob Halloran

  Dickie never identified his accomplice, and he was never found.

  “Anyway, I’ve got this musketlike thing. It’s not even a real gun, but he thinks it is. I put the gun to his head, and by this time, the girl already had the money. So, I went in his car to see if he’s got anything else. He’s got golf clubs in the back, so I throw those out on the street. We got about seventeen hundred dollars and a set of golf clubs.”

  That’s Dickie’s story, and he’s sticking to it. The victim, a Pepperell man, told police he had stopped to use a pay phone on Appleton Street, and that Dickie and his accomplice forced him back into his car and took him to Grand Street where they robbed him of 150 dollars.

  “That’s bullshit,” Dickie says. “The girl stuck her tongue out, and he came into the house, just like all the rest of ’em. He was there to pick up a hooker.”

  In both accounts of the story, the Pepperell man was released unharmed and went straight to the police, directing them to the apartment where the robbery took place. The police knew right away who they were looking for.

  “The next thing we hear is the cops are coming, so I run into my sister’s house and hide in the closet,” Dickie continues. “The cops come by and asked if she’s seen me, and she says ‘No.’ But I seen her. I was looking out through the closet door, and I seen her. She kind of moved her head in my direction while she was saying ‘No.’ I mean, I know she tipped them off. That’s all right.”

  To support his account, Dickie says he could have taken the matter to trial, and it would have been revealed that his fingerprints weren’t inside the car.

  “I never carjacked him, but I wanted it to go away.”

  He also claims that the police coerced the prostitutes into testifying against him by telling them that they wouldn’t have anything to worry about, granting them immunity, and offering them a new place to live. The cards were stacked against him, so he gave in, but it’s very important to him that people believe that he only jumped out of a closet with a fake shotgun, and that he didn’t bring his victim to the Grand Street apartment.

  “I did my time. Thanks buddy, you saved my life, but I hope he didn’t go home and give his wife AIDS, because all those girls on that corner had it. They all died.”

  Meanwhile, Dickie survived. He survived while wearing a green jumpsuit with white socks and flip-flops. In prison, he had two beds, no cellmate, and he says he didn’t sleep for the first year. He was unable to escape the truth that put him there, the guilt and remorse of what he had done, and the stench emanating from the toilet located just a few feet from where he slept. A man who had spent so much time in the stench and squalor of crack houses considered that toilet the ultimate indignity. “I fought Sugar Ray Leonard! Took him the whole ten rounds, too!” He thought to himself, and then he mumbled, “And now I have to shit in full view of anyone walking past those bars.”

  Dickie never even approached his full potential as a fighter or as a man, but the final bell had yet to ring. There was still time for both himself and his brother. As soon as he heard that awful clang of the cell door slamming hard behind him, Dickie started dreaming about training Micky again and, this time, turning him into a champion. That was also Micky’s dream, but he would have to get started toward making it a reality on his own.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Micky Ward could have been the junior welterweight champion of the world, but he had failed to make his dream a reality. He came from Lowell, a home to users, abusers, and assorted other losers. He had seen so many around him fall and fail. He had had a run of bad luck, bad management, and lingering chronic pain in his hands. He had absolutely no idea what his potential for greatness was, because nobody around him had ever reached his potential. If he quit, who would notice? Lowell had a lot of quitters, but Lowell also had a lot of fighters. Dickie Eklund was both. Micky Ward was a fighter.

  So, as he sat on top of a three-ton roller preparing to pave another street in his hometown, his body dripping with sweat as if he were once again training for a big fight, Micky began wondering why there were no more big fights. There hadn’t been for nearly three years, and there was nothing on the horizon. Nothing hurt quite like the stomach punch of untapped potential. Micky Ward looked down the highway he had just made smooth. He was good at his job. Heck, he’d be doing it since he was fourteen years old when he went to work for his mother’s brother, Gerry Greenhalge, at the Ideal Paving Company. He was paid by the day back then. Fifty bucks was good money for a teenager in 1979. It was here that he began to demonstrate that he liked a good challenge.

  Fourteen is too early to be entrusted with a large piece of machinery, but when he showed up to help his uncle one day, he told the foreman he had used a roller lots of times before.

  “Climb on up then, son.”

  Micky was initially startled and confused, but he was in the habit of doing as he was told, especially when he could make a buck doing it. So he climbed up on the roller and got it moving in the right direction. He was scared and repeatedly looked over the side to see how high up he was.

  “What are you doing up there, kid?” the foreman yelled. “You’ve got to keep that thing in a straight line. You’re screwing it up!”

  When Micky climbed down, he had more time to explain what he meant when he said he had used a roller many times before.

  “I used a hand roller,” he said. “I’ve never been up on one of those before. But I’d sure like to try it again.”

  And he did. Over time, Micky became adept at paving roads. He liked it too. It was an honest day’s work, and it helped bring a level of peace to his otherwise turbulent life. These were troubled times in the city of Lowell.

  Lowell was incorporated in 1826, but travelers had been visiting there and settling there since 1653. Some thirty miles northeast of Boston, Lowell was named after Francis Cabot Lowell, an innovative industrialist and inventor of weaving machines. At the confluence of the Merrimack and Concord rivers, Lowell was a perfect setting for the cotton textile mills of the nineteenth century. Nearly six miles of power canals were built, braiding their way through the city, and once the mills began lining the Merrimack River and Pawtucket Falls, the city grew quickly. Some forty mills, five and six stories high, dominated the Lowell landscape, and by the outbreak of the Civil War, Lowell was the second-largest city in New England and the industrial center of the United States. The city’s cultural and ethnic diversity stemmed from the vast number of people who came from central and southern Europe, eager to work in the mills.

  An unknown Scottish visitor echoed the sentiments of many who considered Lowell one of the wonders of the world when he said, “Niagara and Lowell are the two objects I will longest remember in my American journey, the one the glory of American scenery, the other of American industry.”

  Leader of the “beat generation” and noted author, Jack Kerouac, wrote five books that were largely set in Lowell. It was his hometown, and he did a lot of his writing and drinking at Nicky’s Bar on Gorham Street, just around the corner from the Highland Tap. Nicky’s was owned by Kerouac’s brother-in-law, Nicky Sampas.

  In one of his novels, The Town and the City, he refers to Lowell as “Galloway”:

  The Merrimac River, broad and placid, flows down to it from the New Hampshire hills. The grownups of Galloway . . . work in factories, in shops and stores and offices and on the terms all around. The textile factories built in brick, primly towered, solid, are ranged along the river and the canals, and all night the industries hum and shuttle. This is Galloway, mill-town in the middle of fields and forests.

  Lowell was a city that sprang up along the river and marched triumphantly toward the industrial revolution. It was a leader, strong, proud, and fearless in its heyday. But that was not the Lowell that Micky Ward grew up in.

  Micky was born October 4, 1965, and by then Lowell had already begun a steady decline, one that eventually brought this spirited city to its knees. The Lowell that Micky experienced as a child was wild,
violent, and lawless. The city’s cultural diversity, which had always been one of its strengths, was becoming its greatest weakness—and potentially its fatal flaw. No longer were the immigrants merely bringing a cultural richness to the city, they were importing problems.

  Joining the French Canadians in Little Canada along the Northern Canal and the Greeks in the Acre along Market Street and Poles, Portuguese, and Russian Jews in various little communities within the city were the Southeast Asian immigrants and the Cambodian refugees. Ed Davis, a police officer who was on the streets during the drug wars of the 1980s and later became the police superintendent, gave a speech in August 2000, saying:

  Lowell’s population may well be more heavily Cambodian than that of any other city in the country. Mostly hardworking people with a tremendous desire for education and a strong work ethic, some of their children have, unfortunately, gravitated toward gangs. This has resulted in turf battles that turned deadly. Young children were killed in drive-by shootings. With other groups, the drug problem surfaced and became intractable; prostitution and related violent crime became common throughout the city.

  That’s the Lowell Micky knew, the one in which a twelve-year-old boy could ride his bicycle to the park and pass prostitutes and drug dealers along the way. Junkies were already gathering every morning on Lagrange Street, less than a mile from City Hall. Like some sort of new-wave, degenerate coffee klatch, the addicts packed into alleyways between public housing complexes and tenement buildings. They were there before the school buses rolled by, and they were still there as the police cars cruised by as well. Crack houses were opening up in what used to be respectable neighborhoods. Drugs, crime, and violence had infiltrated the city limits, and the children were exposed to it.

  “The drugs were right there, in your face all the time,” says Tony Underwood, who was one of Micky Ward’s closest friends growing up. “It could have been avoided. Anything could have been avoided, but it was very easy where we grew up. It started with pot, and then it was the cocaine and the crack. Right through the eighties.”

  At fourteen, Micky had very little trouble getting into bars, and if he and his friends were turned away by the Cellblock or J.J.’s, there was always the Cosmo or the Highland Tap. And there was always the Townhouse. After all, Micky’s parents were usually there. Alice and George Ward liked to go out and immerse themselves in the drinking, partying culture, and they didn’t seem to mind if their underage children were with them as full participants.

  So, at fifteen or sixteen, Micky would often stumble home at two or three in the morning after a night of drinking. And it wasn’t uncommon for him to return home bloodied after having found himself in the middle of a violent, street-fighting brawl. Those were the nights when the police would show up, not with the sole intention of breaking up the fight as quickly as possible, but to inflict a little punishment of their own, and to send a message to the young punks who were disrupting another Lowell evening.

  “I was arrested a few times,” Micky’s friend Underwood says. “No felony or drug charges, but I’ve been around. And the cops would always come up, grab us, and beat the shit out of us in the early eighties. Micky, too. They knocked Micky around quite a few times. Lots of times, we had to stand there and watch our buddies get beat up.”

  Sometimes the fights could have been circumvented with a little wisdom or diplomacy, but Micky never took a backward step in the ring, and he wouldn’t do it in the street either. Micky’s personality was dominated by his childlike playfulness and his desire to have fun and make people laugh, but he also had a bit of a mean side to him. If somebody thought that they could look at Micky and say, or even so much as think, “You ain’t nothing,” Micky would tear him apart. Although history usually blames Micky’s ill-fated night at the Cosmo for his fragile hands during his boxing career, friends admit, “He was always busting up his hands in street fights.”

  Having garnered a certain amount of hometown fame as a Golden Gloves champion by the time he was fifteen, Micky was a target when he went out. Wannabe-tough guys would fixate on him, noting how small and young-looking he was, and figure knocking down the little boxing star was a way to build themselves up. Although Micky wasn’t the guy looking for trouble, he didn’t seem to mind when trouble found him.

  “We’ve seen years and years of a lot of street fights with Micky,” says Underwood. “Very rarely did Micky ever lose a street fight. He probably weighed like 130 pounds back then, and he took on some 200-pounders, but Micky would always win.”

  Sometimes the fights were quick and easy, such as the night when Micky was still only sixteen years old, and a big kid described as a “real monster” confronted him at a house party. Micky tried to walk away, but the monster was dead set on proving he could beat Micky Ward. He didn’t.

  “The other guy kept pushing and pushing and pushing,” says Richie Bryan, another close friend of Micky’s. “Finally, Micky had to do what he had to do. He knocked the kid out.”

  Sometimes street fighting can be a matter of life and death. For instance, there was a night when Micky and his friends were out on the house-party circuit, a small group of sixteen-year-old boys looking for a place to hang out, drink beer, and find willing girls. They made their way to a two-family house off Wilder Street. They were supposed to meet some girls on the second floor, but nobody was home yet. While Micky and his friends were waiting outside, some guys on the first floor gave them some lip—nothing explosive, but sparks were about to fly.

  Tony Underwood entered the house alone. He had found an open door, and simply walked in. He didn’t have time to look around because he was immediately met by another boy who slammed a gun in his chest. Tony’s instinct wasn’t to run or to shout out for help or even to piss himself. He did the first thing that came into his head: he punched the kid in the face. Maybe the gun wasn’t loaded, or maybe the kid just wasn’t in a killing mood, but he didn’t shoot Tony. Instead, six vicious teenagers who were either drunk or high and were looking to beat the crap out of someone surrounded him.

  Tony held them off for nearly ten minutes, wondering if his friends were going to help him, not knowing if they even knew he was in there fighting for his life. Finally, the cavalry arrived. Micky led the charge and started knocking people down. Bodies were flying. Blood was spewing. Bones were cracking. The violence was frightening. The damage to people and property was extensive. But Micky’s gang won the fight decisively.

  Again, their instincts were not to flee the scene, nor did they ever think to call the police or a rescue squad. Instead, by the time the fight was over, the girls on the second floor had arrived, so the combatants went upstairs to clean up. The boys talked and laughed and traded stories about what had just happened and reassured one another about how tough they had all been, and a few of them even wondered if there were any dead bodies downstairs. They knew that was as bad a scene as they had ever been a part of. With so much blood, so many punches thrown, kicks landing, and heads cracking on the floor, they all wondered if this time things had gone too far.

  The first ambulance came within the hour. From their perch on the second floor the boys listened as two of the victims were loaded onto stretchers and taken to the hospital. The second ambulance came a few minutes later, and a third ambulance arrived while the second was still being filled with injured teenage boys. In all, five kids were taken to the hospital that night, none of them seriously hurt, all of them treated and released. But there would be more flashing lights arriving at the house off Wilder Street that night.

  The police showed up and started asking questions. They were given the answers that they expected. “I don’t know who did it.” “We didn’t see anything.” “Whoever did it must have left already.” The police, glancing past Tony Underwood’s swollen cheek and beyond Dave Mendosa’s fat lip and ignoring the abrasions on both of Micky Ward’s hands, listened to the lies, turned, and walked back down the stairs. There would be no arrests made that night.

&nbs
p; If they couldn’t get these boys tonight, chances are they’d find them soon enough inside the Laconia or the Cosmo. No matter how much trouble these Lowell kids found or averted, no matter how many near-death experiences, or how many times they got hurt or arrested, they kept coming back for more.

  How does a teenager walk through a war zone like that? Without fear, that’s how. No backing down. Hit them before they can hit you. A child growing up in Lowell had better learn how to fight, or how to run. Micky started fighting when he was seven years old at the West End Gym.

  When Art Ramalho wasn’t working with Dickie, who by then was fifteen years old, he was showing Dickie’s scrawny little brother a few things.

  “I started Micky Ward out when he was seven years old,” Ramalho says. “He was carrying Dickie’s bag. I’ll never forget it. It looked like he was dragging the bag. That’s how small he was.”

  Small or not, his heart was already big enough for battle. So, with boxing gloves that climbed up to his elbows, little Micky Ward stepped into an undersized ring at the Lynn Harbor House and prepared to duke it out with a tough ten-year-old kid from Dedham, Massachusetts, named Joey Roach. Roach was also part of a boxing family. He and his brothers, Freddie and Pepper, would combine to fight more than six hundred amateur fights, each taking a turn at the professional circuit as well. Joey turned pro ten years after his fight with little Micky. Freddie became a top-ranked featherweight contender and a highly respected trainer. Pepper hung out for a few years with Dickie Eklund, developed a drug dependency, and ended his pro career after only ten fights.

  On that Saturday afternoon at the Lynn Harbor House in 1972, a small crowd gathered to see two small boys go toe-to-toe. It was the last time Micky would ever step into a ring afraid. Micky’s family was out in full force hoping to detect the start of something special. They watched as Micky connected with the first punch he ever threw in competition. He fought courageously, if not wildly, for two rounds. After six exhausting minutes of windmill punches, and off-balance haymakers, the scheduled three-rounder was called on account of rain. Micky and Joey both received medals for their bravery and sportsmanship.