Irish Thunder

by Bob Halloran

  Micky was the champion, albeit the WBC Continental Americas champion, for whatever that was worth. And he defended the title with a unanimous twelve-round decision. When the decision was announced, O’Keefe lifted Micky in victory once again, and the championship belt was draped around Micky’s waist. Back in the locker room, Micky thought about how grateful he was for the opportunity, for the victory, for the second chance, and for Mickey O’Keefe. As Lake, O’Keefe, and Micky left the building, they were met by about two hundred people waiting for Micky, hoping he’d say hello and sign his name in assorted autograph books or on programs, shirts, baseball caps, and in some cases even cleavage. Micky did stop, and he signed for everyone there. He talked to every kid and made sure the fans got what they wanted. It took nearly two hours. Only then did Micky return to his room and fall instantly asleep.

  There was no giant celebration this time, no ride back to the Highland Tap. Micky felt good, but he couldn’t deny that this victory wasn’t as sweet as the first one against Veader. Beating Veader was a nice payday for a struggling street worker, but it was not a brilliant career move.

  Veader fought only once more, nearly a year later, beating a mediocre Daryl Lattimore at the Strand Theater in Providence. Veader finished his career with a record of 31-2. He was a pro fighter for seven years, but the twenty thousand dollars he took home from the two fights with Micky was the most money he ever made. It should have been different.

  “I stopped because I just got frustrated,” Veader says. “They kept me in limbo. . . . I had a daughter from a previous relationship, so I just had to start working. I made more money working. So I decided I’m just gonna go back to driving a truck like I’d always done. Look, I never thought I was going to be this undisputed greatest fighter, but I always liked my chances against anybody I fought. . . . Obviously I wanted to win a title, but it just didn’t happen. I feel I got a lot out of boxing. . . . And it was fun. But I did think I’d have more of an opportunity to make some money, not be rich, but just some money. And basically, I just walked away with nothing.”

  And that’s the slim margin of difference in the world of boxing. Ron Borges explains it this way:

  Veader thought the first fight was his night to shine. He didn’t know he was going to find out that he was in there with a different animal. Veader fought bravely that night. But in the second fight, he made a clear decision that he was not going to get stopped by this guy. If you’re a halfway decent boxer, you can go a hundred rounds with Joe Louis. . . . You’re not going to win the fight, but he’s not going to knock you out. You have to be somewhat complicit in your own demise. I think [Veader] realized that if I can’t beat this guy, I can’t beat the top guys, because this guy isn’t even among the top guys. And he wasn’t. Micky was a top guy in certain things, his willingness to take the punishment, and his ability to take it, and of course the body punch. Plus, his resiliency in life. Most people would have crashed and burned, the people around him certainly tried. If Valenti hadn’t come around when he did, Micky probably would have crashed. Micky needed somebody who cared about him a little bit. I’m not saying Valenti is Mother Theresa with a beard, but he wanted him to win some fights. He could make some money.

  And Micky was ready to cash in, but he knew things needed to be different this time. He needed better management. Mickey O’Keefe was a wonderful friend and a great trainer, but he wasn’t an experienced manager or a well-connected one. Joe Lake was committed to Dana Rosenblatt. And Micky still harbored a grudge against the guys at Top Rank.

  This time Micky was going to take control. That meant surrounding himself with people he trusted, which made his next move all the more curious. Micky solicited the help of an unlikely suspect, a guy with no experience in the business of boxing whatsoever, a guy who ran a cab company in Boston, a guy whose greatest qualification was that he was friends with Micky’s father. Micky asked Sal LoNano for help, and just like that Team Ward was under new management.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “Sal LoNano wants you to believe he’s connected to the mob. I don’t think he’s connected to his balls.”

  That was Danny Gilday’s assessment, and one that Mickey O’Keefe shares. O’Keefe was suspicious of LoNano as soon as he started hanging around the gym when Micky was working out.

  “What the hell are you coming around here for,” O’Keefe challenged Lo-Nano one day before the first Veader fight.

  “I’m just making sure Micky’s okay.”

  “Well, who the fuck are you?”

  “I’m a friend of his father. He asked me to keep an eye on Micky.”

  O’Keefe wanted to throw him out. His years on the police force told him that the tall round man with the round face, black curly hair, and the large fingers was up to no good. But Micky didn’t mind him being there, so O’Keefe kept his mouth shut.

  LoNano was the owner of J. J. Automotive in South Boston and the Independent Taxi Company. He’d attended most of Micky’s early fights and got to know Micky’s father, George. Micky thought that he was a decent guy and a successful businessman, and at his father’s prompting, Micky asked Sal to get involved with his career. Their meeting took place inside Micky’s pickup truck in the parking lot of the Ninety Nine Restaurant in Lowell.

  “You know something, Sal,” Micky began, “other than Mickey, I just don’t have any faith and trust in the people that I’m with. I feel like they’re taking my money. It happened before, and I don’t want it to happen again. I can’t fight and worry about my money.”

  Micky was looking for an honest man in a dishonest world. He thought he’d found one to work with him and Mickey O’Keefe, so he continued.

  “I’d like you to come on and be my top advisor.”

  LoNano had been in business for twenty-five years, but he admitted to Micky that he might be out of his element when it came to giving advice to a professional boxer.

  “What does a top advisor do?” Sal asked. “I mean, Micky, I’m only being honest with you.”

  Micky didn’t really know either. He only knew that he wanted Sal to stick around, to help guide him, and to be involved in the major decisions regarding his career. He also wanted Sal to keep an eye on the money trail.

  Sal didn’t agree to anything that day in the pickup truck, but he did call Bruce Trampler of Top Rank and, with Micky’s authority, asked him to send a copy of all of Micky’s checks. After a quick evaluation of the records, Sal discovered that twenty-five hundred dollars were missing that Micky didn’t know about.

  “They had taken twenty-five hundred dollars out, not once, but twice,” Sal says. “I showed Micky and said, ‘This is what’s going on, buddy. This is what they’re doing.’”

  “Sal, I want you to manage me,” was all Micky said.

  Sal was floored. He immediately felt the pressure that comes with the fear of failure. He wanted to help Micky, but he was afraid of the responsibility. He would be entering unknown territory and if he failed, it was Micky who would suffer most.

  “I gotta be honest with you,” Sal said. “I’m a fight fan. I love the fights. I love you as a fighter and as a human being, but do you know what you’re asking me?”

  “Sal, I need someone that I can trust. I can train. And believe me, Sal, whatever matches you want to make, I’ll fight. I’ll fight anybody.”

  “Yeah, but buddy, it’s not as easy as what you’re telling me.”

  Sal accepted, and like Joe Lake before him, he sat down with Micky’s mom to lay out the ground rules. Micky wanted him to be in charge, so he would be in charge. No questions asked. Once again, Alice stepped aside and gave Sal the go-ahead to navigate Micky’s career.

  Sal turned out to be a quick study. His initial apprehension was replaced by a nervous energy and acute curiosity. He asked questions of everyone. He wanted to know about Micky’s diet and his training regimen. He introduced himself to all of the major players in the fight game, including promoters, managers, and other trainers. He eventually fou
nd one of the best cutmen in the business, Al Gavin, to begin working Micky’s corner. And it was Gavin who gave him the confidence that he could be successful as a firsttime manager.

  “Don’t worry about it so much, Sal,” Gavin said. “You’ll be a good manager, because you’re not a fighter. If you were a boxer, and then you wanted to be a manager, the whole thing would be a cluster fuck.”

  And in just a matter of months, Sal delivered the goods, or perhaps more accurately, the goods were delivered directly to him. It was Labor Day 1996, five weeks after Micky’s second victory over Veader, when Al Valenti received a phone call from Ron Katz.

  “I’m gonna make Micky Ward and Chavez,” Katz blurted.

  “You’re gonna make Ward and Chavez,” Valenti repeated. “Wait a minute. Before you do anything, I did all the work bringing Micky Ward back, and now you’re telling me you’re making Ward and Chavez?”

  “I’m just telling you that’s what’s going on,” Katz explained.

  “Where are you going to do it?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe in Boston.”

  “Well, that would be a nice consideration,” Valenti said. “Then at least maybe I’d get to promote the thing.”

  A few days later, Valenti’s phone rang again. This time it was Sal.

  “Let me ask your opinion,” Sal began. “Can you trust Ron Katz?”

  “I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw him,” Valenti said. He was still upset about not being involved in the Ward-Chavez plans.

  “Well, how much do you think Micky should get to fight Chavez?”

  “Well, you’re asking me a loaded question here,” Valenti began. “Because if I throw out a number, you’re gonna have that number in your head, and it’s only my opinion. I’d rather not give you a number, but I will tell you it’s worth money. It’s not a title fight, but it’s worth some real money.”

  Armed with this vague information, Sal negotiated with Bob Arum and Top Rank for Micky to fight Julio Cesar Chavez in Las Vegas for the biggest payday of his life—one hundred thousand dollars. Micky signed a contract to fight on HBO on the same card as James Toney and Montel Griffin who would battle for the WBU light heavyweight title. Micky was back in the big time.

  Chavez may have been the best there ever was. He began fighting professionally in Culiacan, Mexico, in 1980, and he went fourteen years and ninety-one fights before experiencing defeat. Along the way he won and defended titles in the super featherweight, featherweight, lightweight, and light welterweight divisions. By 1996, he had fought in twenty-six championship fights and won them all. He finally lost a split decision to Frankie Randall when he was knocked down for the first time in his career and was penalized one point in both the seventh and eleventh rounds for low blows. He avenged the loss to Randall four months later, and he didn’t lose again until Oscar De La Hoya bettered and battered him in June 1996, knocking him out in the fourth round. After that loss in June, Chavez was looking for paydays and contenders. He began by knocking out Maine’s Joey Gamache in October. For that fight, Chavez earned 1.5 million dollars, all of which went to the Mexican government to cover back taxes. He needed another payday and another contender, and this time he chose Micky Ward. It was the best moneymaking opportunity of Micky’s career, and if he won, he could start thinking seriously about a title shot with De La Hoya.

  Micky needed to be ready for this battle. He needed to prepare as he’d never prepared before. And since the fight would be in Reno, Nevada, Team Ward, now consisting of Sal, Mickey O’Keefe, and Jimmy Connolly, another trainer, went out to Big Bear, California, for six weeks.

  “I’ll never forget Big Bear,” Sal says. “When we first got up there, you have to get used to the atmosphere. It’s ten thousand feet above sea level. As soon as we arrived, we went shopping for groceries, and I was leaning on the cart, stumbling all over the place, trying to catch my breath. Micky’s looking at me and he says, ‘For Christ sakes, what are you drunk?’ I couldn’t get my feet going. It took me a day to get used to it.”

  Big Bear was boxing heaven for Micky. The surroundings were beautiful, and there were no distractions. He wasn’t in Lowell anymore. He didn’t work a ten-hour shift and then try to squeeze a training session in late in the evening. No friends and family calling him all the time or invitations to go out drinking. In fact, there was no alcohol in the cabin where the four men stayed. There were no temptations; only the work mattered. This is what Micky missed in the first part of his career. This is what Ben Doherty and the men from Rhode Island had offered him when they wanted to financially back him as an investment. This is what the best and highest-paid professional boxers did to get ready for a fight. And Micky was right on the edge of breaking into that circle of great fighters. Beating Chavez would put him in the center.

  So Micky got up every morning at 4:30 for his five-mile run. He returned for a healthy breakfast and a serious training session with O’Keefe and Connolly, who, as expected, weren’t getting along. O’Keefe never warmed to the idea that Sal had taken charge, and he resented the fact that Sal had brought in another trainer to help. O’Keefe didn’t think he needed any help.

  “It was a fucking nightmare from the beginning,” O’Keefe remembers. “You could feel something wasn’t right. Sal’s there telling me about the mother, and that he’s gonna be the spokesperson. I knew then something was up. Then Jimmy Connolly says to me, ‘I’m gonna have Mick doing this and this, and I need him to do that.’ I says to him, ‘Jimmy, did something change since last week. I thought I was the trainer.’ And he says, ‘Well, Sal wants me to do it.’ Fuck that! I tell him, ‘I don’t care what Sal does. I don’t care what you do. I know Micky better than any of you. I’ve been working with him every day. When nobody else is there, it’s Micky and me.’ So right off the bat, that set the tone. Thank God for A.A. I went to meetings every night just to calm myself down.”

  There was obvious tension in Team Ward. O’Keefe put himself on the outside of Sal and Connolly, but continued to keep his focus on getting Micky ready. Micky worked hard and tried to relieve some of the tension with some practical jokes.

  “He put toilet paper in my shoes,” Sal explains. “I had told him my feet were sore, and then the next morning I couldn’t put my sneaker on. He says, ‘You got the gout. We gotta take you to the hospital.’ I believed him. So, I’m like sweating bullets, I’m so nervous. He’s walking around saying, ‘Sometimes they gotta cut the foot off with the gout.’ I’m like, ‘Don’t they have some pills they could give me?’ And he’s like, ‘Yeah, but sometimes it doesn’t work, Sal. They might have to take the foot right off.’ Then all of a sudden he says, ‘Let’s go to the hospital.’ So, he goes to his room to get ready to leave, and I took my sneaker off. That’s when some of the toilet paper comes out, and I yelled, ‘You bastard!’”

  Micky says he was fully prepared to take the prank all the way to the hospital. “That would have been great!” he laughs.

  But the laughter stopped on December 1, five days before the fight. Chavez had pulled out. Chavez had been paid a half million dollars in advance by promoter Bob Arum, but he wasn’t going to fight.

  “One of the Chavez people was in the gym watching Micky work out,” O’Keefe recalls. “And they’re seeing this devastating left hook. I’m not saying Chavez would be afraid of that, but his people might be. If you see sparring partners going down and looking like they’re gonna puke, it gets to you.”

  That’s not the excuse Chavez gave, however. Chavez claimed to have hurt his hand during a training session. He delivered a doctor’s note written in Spanish to Top Rank that, when translated, simply said “hand injury.” But there were reports that if Chavez truly did hurt his hand, he hurt it while beating up his brother-in-law. Chavez was embroiled in a custody dispute with his wife, and he may have kidnapped his son. It was more likely personal problems that caused him to pull out of the fight.

  Top Rank’s Bruce Trampler delivered the news to Sal. Sal sat Micky
and Mickey down at the kitchen table in the Big Bear cabin and simply said, “We’re not fighting Chavez.”

  The room went quiet. Sal didn’t know what to say next, and Micky and Mickey were too stunned to speak. Finally, after Sal gave a brief explanation of the reasons he’d been given, O’Keefe slammed both palms down on the table, stood up, and said, “Fuck it, Sal. Let’s go home.”

  But it wasn’t that simple.

  “We can’t—” Sal began.

  “What do you mean we can’t? It’s easy. We pack up, and we get the hell out of here.”

  “There’s the expense money,” Sal said.

  “What the fuck do I care about that?” O’Keefe shouted.

  “We’re gonna have to pay them back the twenty thousand dollars,” Sal explained. Micky was just sitting there listening to his two handlers sort this out.

  “Why would we have to pay that back?” O’Keefe was incredulous. “I thought that money was given up front. It’s not our fault there’s not gonna be a fight.”

  “No, they said we’d have to pay it back if there’s no fight, but look, they’ve got another kid for us.”

  O’Keefe didn’t like the sound of that. He’d come out to Big Bear and missed his wedding anniversary in order to get Micky ready for a fight with Chavez. Micky was ready. The strategy was in place. Now, a few days before the fight, they were going to throw somebody else at them.

  “Who’s the kid?” O’Keefe asked.

  “Manny Castillo.”

  “A Mexican?”

  “Yeah, I think so.”

  “Jesus Christ!” O’Keefe exclaimed. “Are you kidding me?”

  “So, he’s Mexican. What’s the problem?”

  “Do you know anything about the Mexican fighters, Sal? Them Mexican fighters, they fight the fights so they can get in the gym and fight. They’re tough. And they come to fight.”

  “We’ll be all right,” Sal said directing his comment more to Micky than to O’Keefe.