Irish Thunder

by Bob Halloran

  Announcer Jim Lampley summarily derided Micky for continuing to circle the ring, openly mocking him when Micky did stop long enough to engage.

  “Oh, he threw a punch,” Lampley said with mock surprise. “He threw a left hand to the body.”

  And Merchant wasn’t finished. “Isn’t the Boston Marathon coming up soon? As I watch Ward, I keep thinking of running and stuff.”

  It was an embarrassing two rounds. Micky may have been following orders, but he appeared to be running scared.

  “This is dreadful, dreadful stuff,” Lampley offered. “But it is the theater of the unexpected. Maybe by the end it will be a barn burner.”

  But round three was just more of the same.

  “People are paying to be entertained, and they’re not getting it,” HBO fight analyst Harold Lederman said. “Mitch Halpern should call time. I mean, this guy’s running away. It’s awful. So, it’s up to the referee really to get this guy to fight. And he should. He should just stop it, and say, ‘If you don’t fight, you don’t get paid.’”

  By the start of the fifth round, Micky had only landed a total of twelve punches. Perhaps, thinking it was time to stop running, Micky found what appeared to be an opportunity. He fired off a right hand, but it only grazed Sanchez. The attempt left Micky slightly off balance and unprotected. Sanchez countered with a booming left uppercut, and Micky dropped instantly to one knee. He stood up quickly, but Halpern gave him a standing eight count.

  “Are you all right?” Halpern asked staring straight into Micky’s eyes.

  “Yeah,” Micky said with a nod.

  Micky didn’t appear hurt, but he returned to bouncing and running around the ring.

  “This is really one of the saddest kinds of fights in boxing,” Merchant lamented. “Micky Ward is thirty-one years old. He’s here because he needs the money. He’s taking a beating. He’s getting humiliated. It is part of the game that is in no way ennobling or uplifting.”

  Between the sixth and seventh rounds, Halpern did go over to Micky’s corner and tell him he needed to start fighting or a point would be taken away, and eventually the fight might have to be stopped. Micky had lost all six rounds of a scheduled ten-round fight. There was no way he could win the fight on points. He’d have to earn a knockout, and if Halpern didn’t see some effort in that direction, there really was no sense in continuing.

  “C’mon, Micky! You’re not going to get hurt,” Connolly said. “Look, we’re losing six rounds. They’re gonna stop the fight. Is that what you want? You want me to stop it? I’m gonna stop this fight, Micky. I swear to Christ, I’ll stop it!”

  Micky reacted angrily, “Don’t stop this fight. Don’t you ever stop this fight!”

  Micky stood up and pounded his gloves together. He couldn’t hear Sal yelling from his position in the front row, “You gotta go out there and go to the body, Micky! You’re running around too much! Don’t run around anymore. Go to his body!”

  Midway through the seventh round, Micky landed a hard left to the body. It went undetected by most of the people in attendance and watching at home, but Sanchez flinched. It wasn’t obvious, but Micky noticed it. He saw just enough in that flinch to know he had hurt Sanchez. How much did he hurt him?

  “Well,” Micky thought. “I guess I’ll just have to find out.”

  Ten seconds later, the fighters moved in close. For one of the very few times in the fight, they stood toe-to-toe. Micky tapped Sanchez in the head with his left hand, and then dropped it downstairs to the ribs. It was his patented move. The tap to the head served no other purpose than to make Sanchez forget about protecting his body for a moment, and the shot to the body served to remind Sanchez that he should never leave his ribs unprotected. It was a ferocious hit to the liver, and Sanchez went down in a heap.

  He began crawling along the floor in agony. He looked like a soldier wounded in battle trying to crawl back into his foxhole.

  “What am I looking at?” Merchant said while trying to take his foot out of his mouth.

  Sanchez continued crawling around long after he was counted out. Sal jumped into the ring and gave Micky a giant bear hug, pure adrenaline helping him lift Micky high into the air.

  “Unbelievable,” Lampley said stunned. “It is the most unlikely knockout you will ever see. Now is that a lucky punch or did Micky Ward just make idiots of us all with a spectacular piece of strategy?”

  Sanchez was still on the canvas, curled up in a fetal position for several minutes. Finally, the stool was brought to him, and he was helped onto it. Micky took a moment to kneel down in his corner to pray. He was left alone until he blessed himself with the sign of the cross and got up to see the crowd that had gathered in the ring behind him.

  “This is one of the most extraordinary things I’ve ever seen in boxing,” Merchant admitted. “You can’t make it up, folks.”

  Ring announcer Michael Buffer put the period on the end of the sentence by saying, “Ladies and gentlemen, referee Mitch Halpern reaches the count of ten as the pride of Lowell, Massachusetts, climbs off the deck to win by knockout victory at 1:53 seconds of round number seven. KO winner, Irish Micky Ward.”

  Micky returned to the locker room, and before the reporters arrived to ask their questions, Sal had one of his own.

  “Micky, you ran all freaking night. What was that all about? I mean, we told you to stay away for a few rounds, but not all freaking night.”

  “I know. I know,” Micky responded. “Once I started doing it, though, it was hard to stop. When I was afraid you guys were gonna stop the fight, I knew I had to do something.”

  “That’s why I was yelling to you, ‘Go to the body! Go to the body!’ I was just excited. What else was I gonna tell ya? I’m not a corner guy or a fighter or a trainer. I don’t know what else to tell ya.”

  When Micky was showered and the reporters were allowed into the dressing room, Micky told them, “I’d hurt him with one left hook earlier, and I heard him grunt, so I knew I might be able to do it again, but I had to keep my distance because he’s so strong. Heart and fucking soul, man. Never give up. My shoulder was a little sore and I couldn’t get off, but I wouldn’t quit.”

  Some twenty-five hundred miles away, a squinty-eyed man with a bushy mustache sat down in his living room. First, he had been up screaming at the television about whoever the hell it was who’d told Micky to run away for six rounds. Then he was up on his feet counting along with the referee Mitch Halpern. “. . . eight, nine, ten. He did it! Donna, he did it!”

  Mickey O’Keefe stayed on his feet applauding long after his wife came in to see the many replays of the knockout. The happy couple stood there for a few minutes basking in the glow of another Micky Ward victory. Donna knew that her husband was part of it, even if he felt like he wasn’t. While she was thinking, “Micky Ward wouldn’t be there raising his hand in victory if it weren’t for the man right here holding my hand,” O’Keefe was thinking, “Look at that son of a bitch Sal. He’s got no more right to be there than a pig’s uncle. Makes me sick.”

  O’Keefe didn’t stay up to watch Whittaker retain his title with a unanimous decision over De La Hoya. He went to bed, and he slept well that night. He had no regrets, unless regret was wishing things could be different.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  A winner has options. Now, with nine straight wins, including two against formerly undefeated fighters, Veader and Sanchez, Micky was being viewed as a winner. He shed the label of journeyman and proudly slapped one on that read “contender.” Of course, there was more than one path to a title fight.

  A match with Vernon Forrest was the first option presented to Micky. Promoter and manager Lou Duva offered Micky forty thousand dollars to take that bout. Meanwhile, a Denver-based promotional company known as America Presents tried to gauge Micky’s interest in a fight with Rafael Ruelas in July. Sal was ready to lunge at that opportunity, but he was getting a sense that a bigger fight might be dropped in his lap. He thought he had it when Micky was
offered one hundred thousand dollars to fight Pernell Whittaker, but HBO vetoed the match. Micky was looking for something bigger, but so was HBO.

  Finally, Arum showed up with an offer for Micky to fight Vince Phillips for the IBF junior welterweight title on August 16. The fight would either be in Atlantic City or at Foxwoods in Connecticut, and it would be televised on ABC.

  “The winner probably fights Kostya Tszyu in Australia in December for some big money,” Arum said.

  Joe Lake was involved in the negotiations for the Phillips fight, finally settling for a fifty-thousand-dollar purse for Micky, but it was the last time Lake would involve himself in one of Micky’s fights.

  “Alice started calling me every night asking, ‘What are we going to do next?’” Lake said. “It was every fucking night! I told her, ‘I thought we already discussed this. I don’t have a mouse in my pocket. We aren’t going to do anything. I’m doing what I’m doing. I thought you were staying out of this.’ And she’s like, ‘Well, I just want to be kept informed.’ Jesus Christ, what a pain in the ass! It was exactly what I didn’t want when I started with this thing.”

  Even if Lake could have withstood her involvement, he couldn’t stand Sal’s. Like O’Keefe, Lake was immediately suspicious of the new guy coming around the gym, and those suspicions never waned.

  “Do me a favor, buddy,” Lake told Sal during a workout one night at the World Gym in Somerville. “The kid’s trying to work out. I’ve gotta get him through a workout. I don’t need you fucking constantly in his ear. Step aside. You got someplace you can meet him somewhere, do that. Wait for him. When he’s done and he’s out of the shower, he’s all yours. I don’t even know you.”

  “I’m a friend of his father’s,” Sal said, repeating what he had told O’Keefe. “Why are you so concerned about me coming around?”

  “Well, first of all, I run the gym, and I don’t know you from a hole in the wall. And second of all, yeah, you’re damn right I’m concerned.”

  Lake didn’t believe it when Sal told him that Micky’s dad wanted him to look out for Micky’s best interests.

  “I know George Ward,” Lake says. “And he doesn’t give a fuck about anybody. He doesn’t care about his kids, or he would have taken care of them instead of being in and out of the joint. So I knew that was fucking bullshit, and Sal’s a fucking con man. Sal was just a piece of shit, but at least then I knew what he was all about.”

  But for Micky it was all about the fifty-thousand-dollar fight, a title shot, and the tremendous potential for so much more. Truth be told, if Micky had fought Pernell Whittaker, he probably would have lost, and then he would have taken a few steps backward to smaller fights and smaller purses. Instead, he took on a more beatable opponent. He fought for a recognized title, and he held on to the possibility of taking giant steps forward with a large payday against Tszyu or Whittaker down the road.

  Ron Borges wrote in June 1997:

  [Fifty thousand dollars] may not sound like much, and in the grand scheme of prizefighting it isn’t, but for most boxers, a purse like that is as much a dream as a title shot is. It comes to far too few fighters, and Ward long ago grew to understand that. This is a fight about opportunity, an opportunity it seemed he might never get when he retired several years ago, his hopes beaten down by tough losses, bad hands, and the kind of family management that leads most fighters right where Ward was—driving a paving truck on hot afternoons.

  Micky never seemed to mind the heat or the paving, and he went right back to it. The combined purses for Sanchez and Phillips would be eighty thousand dollars, but after expenses were deducted and Uncle Sam grabbed a piece of the action, there wasn’t a lot left over. Micky still needed to earn a living. He was simultaneously rebuilding his career while helping to rebuild his hometown. In a strange reversal of fortune, the same city that had fallen and taken Dickie down with it was now making its comeback right along with Micky.

  In 1993, during Micky’s retirement years, Wang Laboratories declared bankruptcy and sold its world headquarters in downtown Lowell for a mere 525,000 dollars. During that same year, Lowell Police Chief Ed Davis began to realize that his department was up against street-level Dominican drug distribution networks run by people with prior military experience, which meant that SWAT teams were required to serve every search warrant. But over time, landlords evicted drug-selling tenants. Abandoned cars were towed. Broken windows were replaced. And Lowell began to look like a city making a comeback. Once the streets were safe again and the drug problem dissipated, life in Lowell began to improve. The former corporate headquarters for Wang, which initially couldn’t find a permanent tenant because cars were stolen from the parking lot with such regularity, eventually became the new Cross Point Towers in 1996. And less than seven years after its initial sale, the eighteen-story building sold for 100 million dollars. Lowell’s reputation as a safe and prosperous city was returning. The downtown area was revitalized, and its troubled past appeared to be just that—in the past.

  And it wasn’t just Micky and Lowell that were making comebacks. It was Mickey O’Keefe as well. If he was going to return, things would have to be different. Whatever the reason, Sal swallowed some of his pride and asked O’Keefe back.

  “You can call the shots as far as the training goes,” Sal promised. “And you’ll be first in the corner.”

  “That’s all I ever wanted,” O’Keefe said. “I’ll see you guys at the gym tomorrow night.”

  The gym these days was the Somerville Boxing Club. Upstairs were two boxing rings, three heavy bags, and two speed bags. It was newer and cleaner than most of the places in which Micky had worked out. And hanging on the wall, not far from the photos of champions like Roberto Duran, Hector Camacho, and Wilfredo Benitez, were the words: LUCK IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN PREPARATION MEETS OPPORTUNITY.

  This was Micky’s opportunity, and he wouldn’t mind if he had a little luck on his side. Vince Phillips was as tough an opponent as Micky had ever faced. Phillips was an immensely talented fighter who had squandered the early part of his career because of a drug addiction. His abuse of cocaine kept him out of the ring from November 1993 to December 1994. But he won his fight against drugs and went on to win the biggest fight of his career, stopping Kostya Tszyu in a huge upset in the tenth round on May 31, 1997. It turned out to be Ring magazine’s “Upset of the Year,” and it occurred six weeks after Micky’s upset victory over Sanchez. It made perfect sense to put two fighters together who had provided shocking knockout victories and see what would happen. Micky, of course, wanted the fight because when Phillips beat Tszyu, he became the IBF champion, and that was a title he would put on the line against Micky.

  “Micky knows he was in a tough position in his last fight, and he’s in a tough position now,” O’Keefe explained. “None of these guys offering him fights want him to win, but he’s got nothing to lose and I know if he’s in shape, and if he hits you with that hook to the body he can take anybody out. It’s like being shot by a bullet.”

  Sanchez knew that. Veader knew it, too. And so did a host of others who had stood in front of Micky. And O’Keefe was certain that Phillips would learn the same lesson.

  “I believe this is his destiny,” O’Keefe told the Globe the day before the fight. “Here’s a kid that’s worked harder than anybody. He’s the best-conditioned athlete in New England right now, bar none. Micky Ward’s put time and blood and heart and soul in it. When he wins, he deserves it, because when the darkest days came, he overcame it and he did it himself.”

  “I just stuck in there and did what I had to do,” Micky added. “I took the fights, the ones I wasn’t supposed to win. So it’s nothing new to me now. I’m probably a big underdog going into this one. That’s fine. I’ll be thirty-two in October. If things, God forbid, don’t work out for me in this fight here, I don’t know. I don’t know. Things don’t look good, put it that way. This is a make-or-break. Do it now. This is a world championship fight. I have to do it now, or I’ll prob
ably never do it.”

  Indeed, destiny appeared to be getting involved in Micky’s career once again. Days before the Chavez fight, he was told that there would be no Chavez to fight. Hours before the Saoul Mamby fight, he was told he’d get Mike Mungin instead. And so when the phone rang three weeks before the Phillips fight, Micky answered with trepidation. O’Keefe sounded very somber on the other end. Micky was nervous. He knew that Phillips had received nine stitches on his nose after his tussel with Tszyu and there was concern about the cut healing in time, so he figured he was about to lose his title shot.

  “I’ve got some news for you, Mick, about the fight,” O’Keefe began. “Are you sitting down?”

  “Shit! What is it this time?”

  “Well, things didn’t work out scheduling-wise in Atlantic City, so . . .”

  “What about Foxwoods?” Micky interrupted. “I don’t care. I’ll fight him anywhere.”

  “Anywhere?”

  “Yeah, I’ll fight him on the moon if I have to. You know that. What the hell are they trying to pull this time?”

  “Well, they want you to fight him at the Roxy. Right there in Boston. How’s that sound to you?”

  “Better than the moon. Christ, you’re a shit, you know that, Mickey. You had me scared to death.”

  “Yeah, I thought that was fun. You didn’t think that was fun?”

  “Well, maybe when my heart goes back up to my chest, I’ll think that was fun. Right now, I think you’re a shit.”

  “That’s my boy. It’s gonna be a big night at the Roxy.”

  “Helluva fight,” was all Micky said as he hung up the phone, relieved and laughing. O’Keefe got him pretty good with that one. “The little shit.”

  The Roxy is an intimate setting that can only accommodate about a thousand people. It’s a throwback to the days of club fighting. The inside of the Roxy is similar in appearance to the Lowell Auditorium or the Blue Horizon in Philadelphia. Each has a balcony surrounding the ring, and particularly at the Roxy and the Blue Horizon, the balcony hangs over the ring. It places a lot of people extremely close to the action and can create an excessively boisterous and rowdy environment. And that’s exactly what you had when the Roxy filled up with about 85 percent Lowell natives. The balcony was full, and there was standing room only on the floor. The fans were all there to see Ward get another shot at a title. The full bar was simply an ancillary benefit.