Irish Thunder

by Bob Halloran

  “We don’t even know anything about this guy,” O’Keefe argued. “There’s no tape. What’s his style? We’re gonna throw Micky up against someone he’s never seen or heard of before? It makes no sense.”

  It made even less sense the day of the fight, December 6, 1996. It was several hours before Micky was scheduled to enter the ring. Micky and Mickey were in the dressing room when Sal entered, clearly dismayed. The expression on his face was as if someone had died. It was the money.

  “I’m sorry, Micky,” Sal began. “There’s nothing I could do. But they’re not going to give you the one hundred thousand dollars for this fight.”

  “What the fuck, Sal!” O’Keefe yelled.

  “Yeah, Sal, what are you talking about?” Micky asked.

  “Arum just told me that we signed a contract to fight Chavez for a hundred grand. Now he tells me, ‘No Chavez, no hundred grand.’”

  “So, what are we fighting for?” O’Keefe interjected.

  “Ten.”

  “Ten?”

  “Ten!”

  “That’s bullshit, Sal! That’s bullshit and you know it! C’mon, Micky, let’s get the fuck out of here. You and me. Like it’s always been. You and me are walking out of here together right now!”

  But Micky didn’t move. He was watching ninety thousand dollars drain out of his bank account. In his mind, he’d already put the money in there. He was planning on buying a house, a nice one, in a nice neighborhood in Lowell, somewhere close to his mom and to the Highland Tap. There were some houses off Stevens Street that had some nice backyards. He’d thought about owning one since he was a kid, and he was close a few years ago. But when Laurie and Kasie left, he lost some of the desire to be a homeowner. And the money had gotten tight in a hurry. With rent and child support, there wasn’t a lot left over from a road paver’s salary.

  Micky just sat there with his head down. He needed a moment to let his dream die. Micky was calm. O’Keefe was a wild man, ranting and pacing. And Sal began to sweat. Deep down he knew that O’Keefe was right. He knew he wouldn’t allow a bait-and-switch maneuver like this to screw him in his other business dealings, but this was different. There was the twenty thousand dollars that was already gone that would have to be paid back. Micky and Mickey weren’t going to do it. That would be on him.

  “Christ, twenty K’s a lot of money,” he thought. But he couldn’t tell Micky to fight. O’Keefe wanted to take that decision out of Micky’s hands, but that’s exactly where Sal put it.

  “I’ll fight him,” Micky says.

  “Of course you’ll fight him,” O’Keefe said. “You’re Micky Ward. What the fuck else are you going to say? But this is crazy! We take this fight, and we’re all a bunch of patsies. . . . Sal, you can’t let him do this.”

  Years later Sal would say, “It was a bad business decision, but we took into play that Micky wanted to fight, and he was ready. It wasn’t about the money. It was about beating this kid and moving on to the next fight.”

  “You’re on such a high,” Micky added. “Then the fight gets canceled. So you don’t want to fight, but you want to fight because you’re ready. You want the money, too. Ten grand is ten grand, you know? You’re not fighting the big-name guy now, so the money gets cut. But what are you going to do? You still have to pay rent. I needed to make the money. I still have a daughter. You have to make money somehow. What am I gonna do, just come home and make nothing? He was a tough kid from East L.A. I fucking nailed that kid.”

  Micky took the fight, but it cost him. He lost ninety thousand dollars, and more.

  “In the first round,” Micky explains. “I throw a body punch at him. Right there, the tendon ripped off the bone. It was my left thumb, and it killed. It felt like an M-80 went off in there. I had to go nine rounds with that. My thumb was huge when I was done. Now, I’ve lost my left hand, which is my bread and butter. I kept throwing it anyway because it was numb. I couldn’t feel it anymore.”

  O’Keefe was the first man in the corner that night with Jimmy Connolly working as the assistant. O’Keefe was aware of Micky’s thumb injury as soon as it happened. He could read it on Micky’s face, and it was confirmed when Micky didn’t throw the left again for the rest of the first round.

  “What’s the problem, Mick?” O’Keefe asked as Micky sat down on his stool.

  “My thumb. It hurts bad.”

  “Don’t worry about it. We’re gonna be fine,” O’Keefe assured him.

  “This kid is gonna stick and move. He’s not gonna stay around long enough to get hit. He’s gonna stay away from you and slip. You watch. He’ll plant that elbow to protect himself. So, get him upstairs.”

  O’Keefe was upbeat and positive for the one minute he had Micky’s attention in the corner. But as Micky returned to the center of the ring for the start of the second round, O’Keefe spotted Sal in the front row, and gave him a look as if to say, “This is your fault, you son of a bitch.”

  “You know, between rounds you only have a minute,” O’Keefe explained later. “But you really only need about fifteen seconds. You get him over there. You sit him down. You wet him up. You let him relax, take a breath. You get him ready, and then you say, ‘Are you ready? All right, here’s what you gotta do. He’s throwing that jab. Throw the double jab. Get underneath, hook, hook, move.’ Micky knows what to do. He just needs to hear it before he goes back out there.”

  Micky lost the first four rounds on all the judges’ cards. This was going as badly as it could.

  “Look at me,” O’Keefe said to Micky between the fourth and fifth rounds, but Micky didn’t seem to focus. “Look at me!”

  Micky was still not listening. “Look at me. Focus on me. Forget about the crowd. I just want you to win this one round. Go out there and box him. Stop trying to take him out. Box him!”

  Micky won the fifth round, and the sixth, and the seventh. He could no longer feel the pain in his left thumb, and he was throwing well with both hands. In the eighth, Micky dropped Castillo with a left hook. Castillo jumped back up clapping his hands together, smiling through his mouthpiece.

  “It was like he was glad that I hit him,” Micky said. “That kid was tough. I won, but I paid the price, because of my thumb, and the ninety thousand dollars gone.”

  Micky ended up winning the fight on a split decision, but there was little jubilation in Ward’s camp. Micky had ruptured a tendon in his thumb, and he had struggled to beat an unranked, unheralded, unheard-of boxer. His big-money fight had been snatched away from him, and there was no way of knowing if he’d ever get another one. Micky was disappointed. Sal was worried. O’Keefe was pissed.

  “Instead of making a hundred grand, Micky makes ten,” O’Keefe states with some incredulity. “That’s what they said. I’d like to know.”

  O’Keefe’s anger and suspicion reached a boiling point after Team Ward had flown back home and landed at Logan Airport. O’Keefe, who had left for Big Bear about three weeks after the other three guys, including Connolly, needed a ride home, but he was insistent that he wouldn’t take a ride from Sal.

  “You coming home with us?” Micky asked.

  “I wouldn’t get in that fucking car with them if my life depended on it. No way, no how. I’m still too fucking pissed.”

  “Are you mad at me, too?” Micky said with a hint of schoolboy in his voice.

  “Yeah, I am, Micky. How could you let those guys do that to you? You’re gonna fight Chavez for a lot of money, and you ended up fighting this other guy for chump change? How do you know for sure the hundred grand wasn’t still out there on the table only somebody else picked it up?”

  “Who? Sal? He wouldn’t do that.”

  “I’m glad you can be so sure. I’m not. I’ve been a cop for too many years. Nobody’s above suspicion, Micky. Nobody but you and me. Where were these guys for the past two and a half years when it was just you and me in the gym every day, and fighting for four hundred bucks? You couldn’t find those little shits then, but they’r
e around now. They’re around to make money off of your blood and your sweat. Don’t you forget that, Micky. Don’t ever forget that.”

  There was a heavy snow falling, but the two men seemed not to notice. They stood there quietly for a moment, the silence broken by Sal blowing the horn as he pulled up in the car. It was time to part ways. Before Micky jumped in the car with Sal and Jimmy, and O’Keefe went off to call for his own ride, O’Keefe took a deep breath of cold New England air. He exhaled with a short, strong burst, shook off the cold, and said:

  “Look, Micky. I’m not really mad at you. I just want to kill those bastards, and I’m trying not to say too much. Go home. Get some rest. Then we’ll see about that hand, probably needs surgery, you know. Then we’ll see when we can get you back in the gym.”

  “All right, Mickey. And just, you know, thanks for everything. And it’s just that I didn’t have a choice. I had to fight or I’d end up with nothing. Again.”

  The two men gave each other a quick hug and a slap on the back, and Micky got into the back of Sal’s car. Sal avoided eye contact with O’Keefe, who remained on the curb long enough to watch the car pull away. There it was, both literally and symbolically, Sal was taking Micky away from him.

  LoNano would be side by side with Micky from this point forward, but he was never made to feel welcome by the surrounding influences in Micky’s life.

  “I took money from my business to help this kid out,” LoNano says. “And still I was getting shit on from the people of Lowell.”

  There were reasons for that, valid or otherwise. Sal was an outsider. He wasn’t from Lowell, wasn’t part of the inner circle, and had no boxing experience whatsoever. Even though Micky had asked him to guide his career, the public perception was that Sal had somehow weaseled his way in and forced O’Keefe out. It was a bad decision to fight Castillo, and Sal was held accountable. There was also the little matter of ninety thousand dollars that was a cause for great suspicion. The big stranger with the gold chains around his neck had only been in the picture for a few months, but already money was missing, O’Keefe was out, and Micky had a bad thumb.

  “I got everybody pissed off,” Sal says. “All of Lowell is ready to come down on me because O’Keefe is a Lowell cop, more popular than me. I came into his town and I erupted his world. It wasn’t about Mickey O’Keefe, and it wasn’t about Sal LoNano. It was about Micky Ward, and I had a job to do. I’m nervous, because I don’t want to ruin this kid’s career. I always said, ‘I was with Micky Ward because I believe in him.’ That’s what drove me to stay with him.”

  Fortunately for Micky, Bob Arum also believed in him. Arum first brokered a deal with Chavez and promoter Don King to get back his five-hundred-thousand-dollar advance, and then he looked for a way to make amends for Micky’s lost wages and missed opportunity.

  “Maybe it will all work out for the best,” Micky said hopefully. “Because putting me on this card was kind of a makeup to me from Mr. Arum.”

  The makeup date was April 12, 1997. After a short time off to have his thumb surgically repaired and healed, Micky would fight on the undercard of the Pernell Whitaker-Oscar De La Hoya welterweight championship fight at the Thomas and Mack Center in Las Vegas. As a way of making things right, it was a sincere effort on Arum’s part to give Micky another opportunity, but it didn’t quite make up for the disparity in paychecks four months earlier. Ward would be paid thirty thousand dollars to fight undefeated Alfonzo Sanchez. It was expected to be a severe test. Sanchez had won his first sixteen pro fights, fourteen of them ended in knockouts before the end of the third round. “Pancho” Sanchez was strong, very strong.

  “Hey, look, I’m thirty-one years old,” Micky said before the fight. “There’s no point in taking easy fights at this stage. I need to find out where I am. This is a reality check. You can’t keep fighting nobodies or you’ll never know who you are.”

  Micky knew the truth. If he lost, he wouldn’t be done. He could still make decent money as the opponent on the undercards of main events. He was talented and entertaining enough for that. But if he lost, he knew he might never be able to convince anyone that he deserved a shot at a legitimate title.

  “Micky’s got heart,” Jimmy Connolly told the Boston Herald days before the fight. “He’s been screwing around his entire career, but he knows every fight is an important fight now.”

  Connolly was the trainer chosen to talk to the press this time around, because for the first time since Micky began his comeback, O’Keefe would not be in his corner. That was emphatically decided one afternoon at the West End Gym in Lowell.

  “Mickey,” Sal said to O’Keefe. “I’m not trying to piss you off, but I thought you should know that we’re gonna go with Jimmy as the first man in the corner. You’ll be the second.”

  “What the hell are you talking about? Fuck that! I’m not the second man. I’ve been training Micky forever.”

  “I just think Jimmy’s got more experience,” Sal explained. “We could be on our way to the big time, and I don’t want to take any chances.”

  “And what experience do you have, Sal? Who the fuck are you, anyway?”

  “I’m a businessman, and I’m making a business decision. It’s nothing personal.”

  “Of course it’s personal. It’s me and Micky. That’s personal. Micky’s a person, and I’m a person, and we’ve been in this thing for years. Now you come in here and start telling me I’m second? That’s horseshit. I’m no second.”

  “Well, that’s the way it’s gonna be.”

  O’Keefe knew that this was Sal’s big power play. Sal was trying to get him to quit. Truth be told, the growing tension in the gym every day wasn’t good for Micky. It was making everyone uneasy, and it was nothing more than another nonconducive, unwanted distraction. But O’Keefe wasn’t ready to quit, not without a fight.

  “Did you know about this, Micky?” O’Keefe shouted as Micky finished pounding the heavy bag and walked over to officiate the argument.

  “Yeah, Mickey. I’m real sorry about that. It’s just that Sal thinks this will be better.”

  “Oh, that’s what Sal thinks, is it? When the hell did you stop knowing how to think for yourself? Do you think it’s gonna be better? You think having that guy talking to you between rounds is gonna be better? C’mon, Micky, who knows you better than me? Who can get you to listen better? Who knows your style and what works for you better than me? Who? These fucks?”

  Micky didn’t have answers for any of those questions, at least not any that he could express at that moment. In his heart, he knew that O’Keefe was his most loyal and trusted friend. But loyalty had never been especially profitable for Micky. O’Keefe was an inspirational leader and a great motivator, but Sal was getting things done. After all, he was about to make decent money, and the promise of much more was right there in front of him if he won. He didn’t want to hurt O’Keefe, but he felt that he had to listen to Sal’s advice. He was going with his gut this time, not his heart.

  “Mickey, it doesn’t have to be like this,” Micky said to his friend. “You can still work the corner. I’ll know you’re there. I want you there. You know? I need you there.”

  “Well, there’s no way I’m gonna be there if that guy’s there,” O’Keefe said without hesitation. Then he laid down the ultimatum, “Look, Micky, you have to decide. It’s Sal or it’s me. One of us is walking out of here right now. If it’s me, so be it.”

  And so it was. O’Keefe didn’t know it at the time, but Micky had already signed a contract with Sal. The contract made Sal Micky’s official manager with certain rights and privileges to decide things such as who would be in Micky’s corner. It was a preemptive move that Sal made in anticipation of a power struggle such as this one. In the end, Micky didn’t have a choice, unless he wanted a legal battle. He’d been there before with Gagliardi, and he wasn’t going through it again.

  “I’m staying with Sal. I’m sorry, Mickey.”

  O’Keefe turned, grabbed his t
hings, and walked out. In the next few weeks, he received several calls from Micky and his mother asking him to please come back.

  “That’s it for me,” O’Keefe told them both. “Let Sal work the corner. He wants to be in the corner anyway. This is his big chance to be in the limelight. Let him have it. I’m out.”

  It wasn’t easy for O’Keefe to walk away, but the right thing to do hardly ever is, and it was the right thing for him. O’Keefe knew who Dickie was, and certainly didn’t want to deal with him when he got out of prison. He had enough experience with Alice to know who she was, and she had worn him down before. The writing was on the wall. Mickey O’Keefe stood to receive all of the blame, none of the credit, little of the money, and all of the bullshit. So he walked.

  Micky was disappointed, but he moved past it quickly. Boxing was a rough game, and O’Keefe was a tough guy. He’d be fine. No sense worrying about what had already happened. It was time to focus on what was about to happen—the Sanchez fight.

  For the ninth fight of his comeback, Micky entered the ring in an emerald robe with white trim. He was wearing green trunks as well. The white Irish kid who could fight was playing up his Irish heritage as much as possible for the national audience. Tonight, his fight with Sanchez was leading off the broadcast. And with Whittaker and De La Hoya waiting in the wings, the number of viewers was sure to be in the millions.

  In the first round, Micky circled the ring, making himself a moving and nearly unhittable target. Roy Jones Jr., a member of the broadcast team for HBO, said, “Sanchez looks like one of those heavy-hitting Mexicans who don’t have a lot of speed, but have a lot of power.”

  Micky and his corner were aware of that reputation, and they weren’t looking to find out the veracity of it in the first three minutes. The crowd at the Thomas and Mack Center didn’t wait to voice their displeasure. They started booing Micky before the end of the first round. Micky landed just one of fourteen punches in round one.

  “What I’m thinking is this could be one of those David Copperfield fights,” HBO Analyst Larry Merchant began. “You know, David Copperfield the magician. You wish he was here so he could make this fight disappear.”