Irish Thunder

by Bob Halloran

  “I have to get straight,” he said over and over again. “I have to get straight, and I will. This time, I’m gonna get the help I need. This is a fight I’m not gonna lose, God damn it!”

  He was bailed out again, but returned a few weeks later when he was caught attempting to rob a drug house.

  It took twenty-seven arrests and a rap sheet five pages long before Dickie was finally sent away for a long time. He was sentenced to eight years, of which he served a little more than half. He was facing a life sentence but accepted a plea bargain on charges of carjacking, kidnapping, and armed robbery with a sawed-off shotgun. He also pleaded guilty to carrying a firearm without a license, breaking and entering at night with the intent to commit a felony, larceny under 250 dollars, unlawful possession of ammunition, and possession of burglary tools.

  His court appearance was originally scheduled for a Friday, St. Patrick’s Day 1995, but Dickie was late for court and quite obviously drunk, so the judge postponed the hearing until after the weekend. The following Monday, Dickie heard the news that his freedom now belonged to the state, and said, “I just want to get this over with and get on with my life.”

  In a temporary holding area, Dickie was allowed a visit from his son, Dickie Jr. In their most tender father and son moment, Dickie laughed and said, “C’mon, hit me in the nose. Real hard! C’mon, give me a knuckle sandwich right now, right in the nose.”

  Dickie Jr. didn’t comply, opting instead to wait until his father gave him a little kiss and said good-bye. The boy left with the grandmother who would raise him. Alice had raised nine children of her own, and she willingly accepted the responsibility of a tenth child to nurture—and an eleventh. Dickie’s other son, Tommy, now just over a year old, would also need someone to be responsible for him. Alice could only hope that these boys would turn out better than the son who appeared before her in a green jumpsuit and an unashamed smile on his face.

  “Good-bye, Dickie,” Alice said. “Maybe this is for the best. You’ll come out stronger and healthier. I know you will, honey. You’re a good boy.”

  Dickie listened to his mother’s words, and he believed them. He was a good boy. But he had failed to become a good man. He was thirty-seven years old, and he was destined to hear the clanging of a jail door closing behind him several times a day for the next several years. What had happened?

  “Drinking was what screwed me up,” Dickie told the Boston Globe. “When I’m standing on the street with a beer in my hand and people walk by, I feel like two cents. I think, what happened to me? The only time I’d get arrested was when I was drinking. . . . You leave a bar and something happens. It hurts, how I screwed up. I screwed up my life. That’s how people talk. Everybody sees me, they say, ‘Dickie, how are you doing?’ Then they walk past and they’re saying that you’re doing too much drugs or doing too much drinking. If you box here, you’re a bum, really.”

  Dickie blamed the booze and the drugs for his plight, and he never gave up the dreams or the fantasy about himself, or about Micky. He never stopped believing that he had what it took to be a boxing champion, never admitted that part of what it takes is the discipline to stay away from the booze and the drugs.

  Alone in his jail cell, staring at the corroded toilet and the sink that never seemed to have hot water, Dickie remembered the words he’d told Boston Globe reporter Ian Thompsen following the Cosmo incident some seven years ago.

  “Micky won’t leave me,” Dickie said. “We’re going to stick together. I’m going to make him champ. I’m positive. I know what he’s going to do. I know we’re going to make it. He ain’t going to be drinking booze or doing any drugs. He ain’t, and I’m going to stop myself from doing it. I’ll be in the gym with him every day if he needs me. I know all the bad things that can happen now. You can’t get a better guy to teach you than that. I’ve got to be more on the ball now. It’s not just myself now. Look, name one trainer that does everything I do for him. I run with him. I go down and spar with him. I taught him everything he knows, and everybody blames me. Everybody thinks it’s me, that if I’m out partying, Micky’s going to be out. Everybody talks about me hurting Micky Ward. Micky Ward is what I made him. At least I sure helped him. I’m dead serious. Micky could be a millionaire. He can’t miss being champion. He’s going to be back.”

  But as Dickie sat in jail, he couldn’t deny that so far he’d been wrong on nearly every count. And it was right then and there that Dicky started dreaming about getting out of jail, and making Micky a champion. It wouldn’t be too late. With good behavior, Dickie could be out in less than five years. Micky would only be thirty-four years old then. That’s old, but not too old. “It could happen,” he thought. That was the dream that he fixated on while enduring the muscle tremors.

  The withdrawal symptoms had begun soon after his lockup, and for the first two weeks he felt like he was going to die. Intermittently, he even wished that he would. The pain he felt was worse than anything he had ever experienced in the ring. If he could keep his hands in front of his face when fatigue demanded that he lower them, if he could withstand a brutal shot to the jaw and simply smile and continue to stalk his assailant, then he was certain he could handle depriving his body of crack. But what he didn’t know was that part of the “crash” was a hypersensitivity to pain. So the bad back, the aching legs, and sore hands that were part of his life as a boxer were rising from chronic and tolerable to acute and torturous. And the Walpole prison he was transferred to wasn’t exactly a posh rehab clinic. Dickie wasn’t about to receive any sympathy from the prison guards. There would be no trips to the sick ward, no extra food to quell his cravings, no substitute drugs to help ease his landing.

  “Those guards just listened to me scream night after night,” he said.

  Like any crack addict deprived of his addiction, Dickie experienced insufferable nausea, headaches, and vomiting. He was disoriented, paranoid, and depressed. And those were on the good days. Every day he yearned for a piece of the rock. He knew it would alleviate his anguish. But he also knew it was a dead end. He says, “I used crack once. The rest of the time it used me.” The echo of the cell door slamming shut seemed to go on forever.

  His cell was a little less than half the size of a boxing ring. When Dickie was feeling better, he found he had room to stick and move in there. He could shadowbox. He could do push-ups and sit-ups on the cold, cement floor. He could do dips on the edge of the bed, which was bolted to the floor.

  As Dickie’s health returned, so did his passion for boxing and keeping in shape. He started heading down to the prison’s gym on a daily basis. There he found a few fifty-year-old heavy bags and speed bags that had been put there so that the inmates would hit the bags instead of each other. Once Dickie started going to the gym, he began training some of the inmates. He tells the story this way:

  “I trained everybody. They all knew me. So, I’m training guys who weigh like 275 pounds. In three days, these big guys are hitting the bag like boom, boom, boom! It was beautiful. Then one of the guards comes up to me and explains why they weren’t going to let me do that anymore. He says, ‘Look at it our way. If a fight breaks out, they’ll kill us. Look at the way you’re training these guys.’ So, they got rid of all the stuff, and I couldn’t train anybody no more.”

  Meanwhile, Micky was also spending a lot of his time in jail. He had studied for and passed the high school equivalency exam and became a prison guard at the Billerica House of Correction. Richie Bryan, who had been working there for several years, helped get him the job.

  “I didn’t really like it,” Micky says. “It’s just that I wasn’t used to being inside all the time. It was a tough job to have.

  “I went to school with a lot of those guys,” he continues. “A lot of them were from Lowell. It was a little weird, because I used to hang out with these guys. But they were all pretty respectful. I think it helped that when you’re around boxing, you’re around rougher people. Plus, I was a regular guy in there, not a
celebrity. I only had to break up one fight the whole time I was in there.”

  But Micky didn’t like the job, and soon after his boxing career ended, Laurie left him and took Kasie with her. There was no big blowup, no last fight. Laurie just tired of living with a prison guard barely making minimum wage. So, she drove north and took up with a man thirty years her senior. At first, Micky was depressed. Then he was determined. He quit his job at the prison and started making plans to return to the ring.

  Nearly two years into his retirement, Micky started nosing around the Lowell gyms again.

  “I’m just looking to stay in shape,” he’d tell anyone who cornered him. “I don’t like carrying around this beer belly.”

  In truth, however, he was at the gyms to test his hands and his stamina, and to find out if he still loved boxing. He needed to know if his body, now almost thirty years old, would fail him if he tried to return. So he worked out and renewed some old acquaintances. He knew that if he were seen around the gyms enough, someone would make him an offer he couldn’t refuse.

  With no offers forthcoming, Micky continued working the three-ton rollers throughout the streets and parking lots of Lowell. His days were long, beginning at five in the morning. Instead of hitting the hills of Shedd Park, Micky was showing up to work as part of a road crew. He wasn’t a boxer anymore. There were no more questions about his last fight or his next fight. There was still plenty of respect for what Micky had done, and for the kind of hard worker and friend that he still was, but the awe was gone. Micky could feel it.

  After putting in his ten to twelve hours during the cold days of New England winters and hot, humid days of New England summers, Micky would make his way over to the gym and spend a few hours either working out or hanging out. He was in no hurry to make it home to an empty house. So he stayed at the gyms past dinnertime and then frequently made his way out to the bars.

  Micky was most comfortable inside the Highland Tap. It felt a little strange walking into a place where your picture is on the wall, but owner and proprietor Cleo Surprenant had always been a big fan. He loved box-ing, and Micky was special because, according to Cleo, he was such a good kid, and he kept himself clean.

  “There was a lot of temptation for him out there,” Cleo says about Micky. “But the only habit he had was after a fight, he’d drink all night. That’s normal. He’s a kid. He worked hard for what he got. He might have gone further though.”

  Cleo had always looked forward to Micky’s arrival at the bar, so one day when he didn’t show, Cleo figured, “Maybe he’s getting more serious about his training again. I’d sure like to see that kid get another chance.”

  But Micky wasn’t training. He was in the hospital fighting for his life. There had been an accident at work.

  Micky’s crew was paving a Cosco parking lot, and Micky was working with the heavy roller, as he’d done thousands of times before. Nearing the completion of the job, Micky threw the tamper off the back of the roller. The tamper was a thirty-pound metal pole attached to a flat, rectangular bottom that was used to compress the new tar in the few areas that the roller had missed. It was time for the touch-up work, and as usual, Micky was hustling.

  He tossed the tamper, expecting it to fall flat on the ground, and then he quickly jumped down off the roller. It was a maneuver he’d done so many times, he didn’t even think about it. It certainly didn’t seem dangerous, yet based on Micky’s own calculations, what occurred actually had a 10 percent chance of happening.

  “You know, nine times out of ten that tamp’s gonna fall to the ground and lay there on its side,” Micky says. “But this time, as I jumped off, it stayed standing straight up in the air.”

  Micky landed ass first on the top of the metal pole. “It didn’t go up my ass or anything, but just to the side of my butt,” Micky says. The downward force of Micky’s body weight caused the pole to rip a one-inch gash in his rear end and travel four inches into his rectum. The pole toppled over with Micky attached to it. He laid there, scared and in more pain than he had ever felt before. He couldn’t remove the pole, and the pole was impeding his movement. He couldn’t get up. He couldn’t roll over. He couldn’t even inspect the wound. All he could do was lie there crying out in pain and waiting for help to arrive. His coworkers reacted quickly, and an ambulance appeared on the scene in a matter of minutes.

  The paramedics first made sure that Micky wasn’t paralyzed; then they removed the pole. Micky’s rectum was ruptured, and the large gash began bleeding profusely. They packed the wound and then rushed Micky to the hospital, where doctors performed emergency reconstructive surgery on his bowels.

  “I really could have been killed,” Micky says matter-of-factly. “As it was, I was about an inch away from spending the rest of my life with a colostomy bag. Sometimes I think about people threatening to ‘Rip you a new one.’ I guess that’s what happened to me. The damn thing ripped its own hole, and I had a new one.”

  Micky had only just recently stepped up his training regimen, and had grown much more serious about a comeback to boxing.

  “I couldn’t do anything,” he recalls. “I had a visiting nurse come every day and pack my butt with peroxide and saline and water. . . . For a long time I wasn’t thinking about a comeback. I was thinking about my ass. What a pain in the ass!” He laughs. “Finally, I started to walk again, but I couldn’t do any real training because of the pressure. I couldn’t cough or laugh or anything. You know all the power comes from your ass when you throw a punch, and I couldn’t do it.”

  The year was 1993. Micky was laid up in his bed for the next four months. Dickie was in jail. And Micky’s father, George Ward, was on his way to prison. Ward had been charged and convicted with defrauding an eighty-year-old woman with Alzheimer’s disease out of her entire life savings, more than ninety thousand dollars, and in a separate charge, an eighty-nine-year-old woman claimed that Ward took her for more than twenty thousand dollars.

  Ward was a fifty-four-year-old roofing contractor who ran a business called Boston Slate and Coppersmith. Massachusetts State Police conducted a year-long probe into the company and determined that Ward routinely promised to do roofing work for elderly clients and then took their money without doing the job. The group of contractors used a “point man” who identified vulnerable targets, and then each of them charged for work that was never done. Ward pleaded guilty to larceny charges stemming from one case and was sentenced to two to four years in Middlesex County Jail. While there, he was awaiting trial on additional charges in Massachusetts.

  In that particular case, eighty-nine-year-old homeowner Edith Lowney told the Lowell Sun in October 1993, “He put me in the truck with another man and took me to the bank. He was always demanding money. And he didn’t really repair anything.”

  Ward was charged with two counts of larceny, indicating that he took twenty grand from Lowney and did what amounted to one-thousand-dollars worth of work.

  “That was my savings,” Lowney said.

  Ward was caught when he brought Lowney to the bank and demanded ten thousand dollars in cash. The teller was suspicious and persuaded Ward to accept a check. Then the teller spoke to a social worker who cared for Lowney, learned what was going on, and stopped payment on the check.

  During the time he was laid up and wiping his ass with cotton balls, Micky had a lot of time to think. Mostly what he found himself thinking about was returning to the ring. On the surface, he was a street paver out on workman’s comp. But underneath, somewhere in his heart and his gut, he was still a boxer. Micky didn’t lie in bed dreaming about winning titles or making millions. He didn’t long for the days when he was recognized on the streets or the nights when strangers bought beers for him in the pubs. He would close his eyes and see the dingy locker rooms where he had sat on rickety wooden stools while his brother or Richie or Mickey O’Keefe wrapped his hands. He could feel the fine silk of his robes brushing against his chest and his back as he strode out to the ring. He could smell
the smoke wafting above the crowds, could see the lights, could remember every opponent and nearly every punch. He dreamed about punching and getting punched, defending and attacking. As his body healed, his mind focused. He was ready.

  With his father and brother in jail, Micky once again turned to Mickey O’Keefe. O’Keefe was working a detail in front of a firehouse on the same day that Micky was paving out front.

  “How’s the gym going?” Micky asked O’Keefe, referring to the gym he’d opened up in one of Lowell’s toughest neighborhoods. It was a fourth-floor walk-up on Mount Vernon Street simply called the Lowell Boxing Club.

  “Good,” O’Keefe responded, not mentioning the fact that none of the kids who trained there were ever charged a dime. “How are you doing? How’s the ass?”

  Micky laughed, acknowledged that it was still a little sore, and said, “I was thinking of maybe coming down to your gym. You know, just to work out a little bit.”

  “Great. We’d love to have you.”

  O’Keefe didn’t know whether Micky would make it down to his gym or not. He was merely happy that his friend had recovered from the accident and that if he did come to the gym, he’d be able to show some of the young kids there a few moves in the ring. Those kids looked up to Micky Ward more than they looked up to a cop anyway.

  But it wasn’t long after their chance meeting that O’Keefe was in the storeroom of the gym and overheard one of Micky’s cousins telling another fighter that Micky was putting the word out that he’d be interested in a fight if something came up. O’Keefe stepped out of the storage area and volunteered, “Hey, if Micky ever needs me, tell him to give me a call.”

  Micky called, and the partnership was created.

  “Look, you want to work out, the place is yours,” O’Keefe said. “I’ll give you a key, so you can come and go as you please. Give it three weeks, and we’ll see where we’re at.”

  Micky took the key and was at O’Keefe’s gym every day for the next twenty-one days. The first twenty-four hours were spent with O’Keefe’s recommended approach of, “Let’s see where we’re at.” The next twenty days were serious training sessions. Micky’s workouts intensified. The time he spent on the heavy bag increased. The distance he ran grew longer, and the time he ran got earlier. The pop and the snap in his punches returned. He was in training. But training for what? There were no fights to prepare for. There weren’t even plans to get a match made. And training with whom? O’Keefe was there from the beginning, but he wasn’t a professional trainer. He worked with kids. The only professional experience he had was the few times he worked Micky’s corner as Dickie’s assistant. Still O’Keefe was prepared to help Micky come back.