Irish Thunder

by Bob Halloran

  While Micky was bouncing around Lowell, in and out of Milloy, Lincoln, Bartlett, Daly, and Washington elementary schools, he was also bouncing in and out of boxing gyms. He started at the West End where Ramalho focused him on the fundamentals: the jabs, right hands, hooks, and uppercuts. Micky was a quick study.

  By the time he was twelve years old, he was training at the Billerica Boys Club. There he found a couple of friends in Leo Lydon and Ben Doherty. Back in 1949, Doherty was the first-ever Silver Mittens champion. He continued on to a brilliant amateur career, including a controversial battle with Larry Carney for the New England Championship of the Amateur Athletic Union. The fight was held at the Boston Garden, and Carney, who had already won the Golden Gloves and the Diamond Belt, was going for the triple crown of the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU). Doherty knocked Carney down three times, but still lost the fight. A newspaper account of the bout explained what happened:

  Ben punched his way into the finals with quick knockouts in the trials and semi-finals. He knocked Carney down twice in the second round and again in the third before the referee stepped in and stopped the fight at 1:56 of the third round because of a cut over Ben’s left eye.

  The story went on to say that “Doherty’s eye was cut but not bleeding at the time.”

  Meanwhile, Carney was taken to the hospital because his head was split wide open.

  Doherty was surprised that he didn’t win the fight by a knockout. He couldn’t believe Carney was able to keep getting up.

  “When you hit a man, you can feel it right up your arm,” he says. “I hit Carney with a beautiful right hand and I says to myself, ‘He’ll never get up.’ But he got up. He was a tough kid.”

  It was when he was coaching a team at the Billerica Boys Club that he first met Micky.

  “Micky was a classic boxer,” Doherty explains. “He had all the skills in the world.”

  Harnessing those skills was a combined effort from a multitude of tutors, trainers, and mentors. At different times Micky was trained by Ouchie McManus, Larry’s brother Micky Carney, Ben Doherty, and even a cop, Mickey O’Keefe, as far back as the Silver Mittens. But the person Micky listened to most was Dickie. Dickie, who would never reach his own potential, had a knack for tapping into Micky’s. He could get Micky to work harder, focus better, and stay in the gym longer.

  O’Keefe, who, in his role as a police officer, could have arrested Dickie any number of times but chose to hurry him along instead, says, “No matter how fucked-up he got on crack, when he made his way back to the gym, he was fine. He had a gift. He had a capacity to come back. If Dickie had trained, he could have been a champion. He wasn’t a great puncher, but he was quick.”

  Joe Lake, another local trainer and manager remembers Dickie much the same way.

  “When we were kids, Dickie used to go to the New Garden Gym across from the old Boston Garden,” Lake explains. “He was the only kid who could go in there shit-faced. He’d be drunk on a Saturday afternoon and start sparring ten rounds, and you couldn’t hit him with a bag of rice. He was that good. He had that much skill. If he lived the pure life like his brother, he’d have been a champion. Dickie had the great physique. Long, tall, lean. Micky was short for his weight division. He had short arms. He had a million things going against him, and he stepped over every hurdle. Whereas, with Dickie, his first hurdle was drugs and he never got over it.”

  And maybe Dickie was a natural. Despite his transgressions, Dickie sure knew a lot about boxing, training fighters, and getting in shape. He was able to pass a lot of that knowledge down to his younger brother. Micky was his own man, even as a boy, but he listened to Dickie, and often followed his lead.

  For example, when Micky was fifteen years old, he was jumped and beaten up just a few blocks from where he lived on Stevens Street. There were five assailants, and even though Micky was already becoming an accomplished boxer, they beat him badly.

  Dickie was livid when he learned what had happened. He took Micky to the home of each kid Micky had identified, and either by banging on the door or shouting from the street, he called each one out, alone. There would be no gangs to help this time. This would be a series of fair fights. It took about a week, but Dickie was able to persuade each boy to come outside. He then stood back and watched as Micky beat up each one of his attackers. The fights didn’t last long, and Micky was never jumped again. The point was made.

  Not long after that, Micky, in his junior year, dropped out of Lowell High School. Boxing tournaments, travel, and a general apathy and lack of supervision caused or enabled him to miss a lot of classes, and he was falling woefully behind. Besides, his future was laid out as smoothly as the roads he’d been paving. He would be a hot topper and a boxer. Neither profession required much formalized education. Sitting high atop a steamroller, Micky could go as far as the city limits. And with boxing, far beyond. He turned pro a few years later.

  Micky had a promising pro career. He had title shots. He fought on national television, but he was always one or two fights away from making any real money. So after six and a half years of too many hits and a few near misses, Micky did what every other boxer from Lowell had done before him, he quit. By 1991, he was back to paving parking lots, side streets, and highways.

  Micky sat on the roller and took a swig from a large water bottle, the kind his cornermen used to squirt into his mouth between rounds, and wondered if things would have been different if he had listened to the sage advice of his friend Skeets Scioli.

  Scioli was the president of the New England AAU for more than forty years, even as the organization became USA Boxing. When Micky was making the decision to turn pro, Scioli pulled him aside.

  Scioli recounts, “He’s the only fighter I ever talked to to tell him what to do and what not to do, because in this area here, they had a real bad reputation, selling drugs and all that jazz. This town here was bad. So I says to Micky, I says, ‘Look, get the hell out of Lowell. The town is getting buried with the drugs.’ I says, ‘If you want to be a decent fighter, get out. Get the hell out of Lowell.’

  “I said to him, ‘Look, you’re winning titles. You look like a pretty good fighter. You’re the only fighter I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen an awful lot of them in my day, that throws that left hook to the body, and you paralyze people with it! And that’s a very effective punch. Just make sure that you continue with that punch. And, ‘Get the hell out of Lowell.’”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Micky never did get out of Lowell. He stayed and fought. He won titles at the Silver Mittens and the Junior Olympics, as well as three New England Golden Gloves titles and two New England Amateur Boxing Federation titles. Still, his fights were not all relegated to the inside of a boxing ring.

  “I don’t know what it is,” says Richie Bryan, one of Micky’s closest friends. “Around here, everybody just likes to fight.”

  But one night in particular, Micky and Richie had been on their best behavior. Their double date at the VFW Hall was completely without incident. It was so uneventful that as they were leaving, Richie boasted to the girls, “See that? No fights.”

  Then he looked to his left in the parking lot and saw ten kids beating up one kid.

  “Oh, look. There’s one now,” he said.

  Upon further inspection, that one kid proved to be Tony Underwood. Richie rushed to his rescue, wondering why Micky wasn’t there to help, too. He finally looked over to see Micky aiding their other buddy Mike Thyne. Mike had been losing a five-on-one battle until Micky arrived. Now, it was an all-out brawl, one that Micky, Richie, Tony, and Mike would ultimately win, though Tony ended up getting arrested.

  This time, when the cops arrived, the arresting officer was a fan of Micky’s and a friend of the family. He was willing to cut Micky some slack, but he slapped the cuffs on Tony. Richie tells it this way:

  “When the cops showed up, they grabbed Tony. And Micky was like, ‘Let him go.’ He knew the cop, and so he was pulling on Tony and the cop was like,
‘You let go of him, or I’ll have to arrest you, too.’ The cop was a real nice guy, but he finally went to cuff Micky, and I pulled Micky away and got him in the car.”

  A few months after that, Micky turned pro, but despite his best efforts, the street fighting wasn’t over. The unsolicited challenges continued, and his friends started stepping between him and potential problems before they could get too far out of hand.

  “Once he turned pro, we had to keep Micky from hitting people,” Richie says. “We jumped in a lot more because we realized he was going to have some kind of career.”

  Another night. Another party. Another guy spots Micky and wants to go a few rounds with the big-shot boxer. On this particular evening, Richie steps up and tells the guy, “We don’t want any trouble.” As was often the case, the guy explains that he doesn’t have any problem with Richie, who is over 6 feet tall and about 200 pounds. For undisclosed reasons, his problem is with Micky, and he’s “gonna kill him.” Richie encourages the guy to go away, but the advice is unheeded.

  “He kept persisting, about four or five times,” Richie recounts. “He finally shoved Micky pretty good, and Micky had to defend himself.”

  The result?

  “Micky kicked the shit out of him.”

  It was the same story inside the ring. Micky wasn’t quite twenty years old when he dropped David Morin at the roller-skating rink in Lawrence on June 13, 1985.

  “I remember being real nervous, not throw-up nervous, just nervous,” Micky recalls. “But once you get in there, it all disappears and you go right to your training. I remember I hit him with a good body shot in the first round and tore the ligament in my left thumb. That bothered me ever since.”

  It was his first professional fight, and it almost didn’t happen. Micky’s originally scheduled opponent, Snooky Covey, dropped out on the day of the fight. Promoter Tom Marino, who had sold about a hundred tickets to the fight, drove all the way up to Gorham, Maine, to find a replacement. Morin was a glass cutter at Portland Plate Glass, and he couldn’t get off work early. Marino waited around until Morin’s shift was over at six o’clock. They raced to Lawrence for the eight o’clock fight, arriving just in time to dress, get taped up, and enter the ring. Two minutes later, it was time to go back to Maine. Micky had broken Morin’s ribs with that body shot.

  Dickie gets a lot of the credit for teaching Micky to throw to the body. He’d tell him, “Get in there, and hit him good. He’ll drop his hands, and you can go up top, and then finish back downstairs.”

  It’s the advice a lot of fighters are given, but Micky not only listened, he also threw the left hand to the body perfectly. Before he turned pro, Micky spent some time training with Sean Mannion from Dorchester, Massachusetts. Micky was only nineteen years old when Mannion was training to fight Mike McCallum for the World Boxing Association (WBA) light middleweight title. Mannion went to Lowell to get in a few rounds, and Micky kept hitting him with hard body shots. Mannion’s trainer actually halted the sparring session in the middle of a round and shouted, “Sean, stop letting him hit you in the body!”

  “Listen, you fucking asshole,” Mannion said. “I’m not letting him hit me to the body. It hurts too much to let him do it.”

  Micky was younger, and about fifteen pounds lighter, but Mannion said before going on to lose to an unbeaten McCallum in fifteen rounds, “That kid hits to the body like nobody I’ve ever been in with.”

  Two months after Morin, Micky was back fighting in his own backyard, this time, with three thousand supporters cheering him on.

  It was in August 1985 that Micky had his first pro fight in the Lowell Auditorium, the same place where he had fought and won so many times as an amateur. The Lowell Memorial Auditorium was built on East Merrimack Street in 1922 and renovated in 1984. It was an impressive structure erected in a once prosperous and proud city.

  On fight nights, the ring was positioned in the center of the auditorium. The theater seats climbed gradually from the main floor and only went back ten and twelve rows, so everyone on the lower level had a good view of the action. The balcony extended nearly to the ring, making front-row balcony seats the best and most sought-after tickets. It was an outstanding venue for boxing, the occasional riot notwithstanding.

  When Dave Ramalho, Arthur’s boy, fought Jimmy Farrell of Rockland, Massachusetts, for the New England featherweight title in March 1978, the fight was ruled a draw. Lowell fans who thought the Lowell kid had won the closely contested bout expressed their displeasure by throwing chairs, beers, and whatever else they could get their hands on. A mini riot ensued. Freddie Roach was there, and says, “Lowell’s a tough place. We usually got in trouble when we went there from the outside.”

  Welcome to Lowell, where anything can happen.

  Rocky Marciano fought at the Auditorium in 1947. Mike Tyson fought there in his Golden Glove days. Sugar Ray Leonard won there, so did Marvin Hagler. Each of them prepared for his battle downstairs in the boiler room, just like thousands of other kids whose greatest feeling in life would forever remain the night they landed a few good shots on the chin of some other twelve-, thirteen-, or fourteen-year-old.

  Fighters got dressed next to other fighters in the brightly lit makeup rooms for the theater productions. They had their hands taped and their gloves tied under the glow of several domed lights that outlined the large mirrors. Warm-ups, shadowboxing, meditation, and stretching were all done wherever a fighter could find the space. But there wasn’t any space. Each of the dozens of fighters brought a manager, a trainer, a family member, or all three. The bathrooms, makeup areas, and hallways filled up rather quickly.

  In their amateur days, their matches on any given night were made when organizers put numbered pills into a bottle and picked out two pills at a time. If a fighter was number seven, he learned at six o’clock that he was fighting number five at seven o’clock. “Good luck, kid. You’re on in an hour.”

  That’s how it had been for Micky throughout his amateur career, but as a professional in 1985, he had known for several weeks that he’d be fighting Greg Young on August 27—not that it did him any good to know. He didn’t have much information on the kid from Catskill, New York, other than that he’d only fought three times before, losing twice, and that he was coming in light, at 131 pounds. Micky fought most of his career at or around 140 pounds. He was a classic light welterweight, 5 feet, 8 inches tall, skinny legs, well-defined abs, and a strong upper body. And that’s about all the kid from the Catskills knew about Micky when he arrived, that and the fact that Micky’s nickname was “The Baby Faced Assassin.”

  “I didn’t want any nickname,” Micky says. “But I definitely didn’t want that one. The promoters just gave me that without asking, just looking to promote the fight, I guess. I asked them to change it, and the next time I showed up for a fight, I was “Irish” Micky Ward. I didn’t mind “Irish.” They just put it on the card one day, and it stuck.”

  The Baby Faced Assassin definitely got his career off to a good start, and Irish Micky picked it up from there. After knocking Morin out in the first round two months earlier, Micky’s battle with Young lasted until the fourth round, when referee Ed Fitzgerald mercifully stopped the fight at the 1:45 mark. Micky had inflicted enough damage. He had beaten Young up for a few rounds, then he threw a right hand, and a left hook to the body, and he finished him off when he came up and hit him with a good hook to the head. That knocked him out. Micky was 2-0 and looking for his next victim.

  Just a few days after his TKO of Greg Young, Micky was added to a fight card in Atlantic City. New Jersey regulations stipulated at the time, however, that a boxer had to wait at least ten days between fights, even if he had won. When Micky was filling out his licensing form for the Atlantic City fight, he failed to mention that he had just fought.

  He blamed his managers Bernie “Boss” Bergeron and Don DiRocco for failing to advise him more prudently, and for not knowing the New Jersey rules before accepting the fight. The commission
er at the time, Joe Walcott, suspended Micky indefinitely. Four months later, in December 1985, Larry Hazzard was sworn in as the new commissioner of boxing in the Garden State. He recalls:

  “I started getting all these phone calls about Ward—from a priest, from a policeman, from his mother—all asking me to reinstate Micky Ward. I didn’t even know who Micky Ward was, or what he’d done to get suspended, but there seemed to be a lot of interest, so I figured I’d better find out.”

  Within his first week in office, Hazzard reinstated Micky, permitting him to begin fighting in New Jersey, and more specifically, Atlantic City. In the first seven months of 1986, Micky fought there seven times.

  “We were going to Atlantic City almost once a month,” Tony Underwood remembers. “We’d drive eight hours down. He’d knock the guy out in the second round, and we’d drive all the way back. It got so we were asking him to hold the guy up a little while longer just so we could see more action. But Micky was too good.”

  He was fighting guys who either had losing records or less experience. They were easy fights, intended to build his confidence and his record. Micky was being managed rather well by his mother. And he had begun the prolonged difficult process of dropping Bergeron and DiRocco, his two original managers, who didn’t let go easily. Alice Ward had managed Dickie’s career for a few years, and with two daughters who had married professional fighters, she was certainly no stranger to the fight game. No longer a stay-at-home mom raising nine children, Alice was ready to throw her “baby” into the ring. She began as any mother would: very carefully.