by Bob Halloran
The room was dark except for the bright lights shining down on the ring. Micky appeared from the darkness wearing white trunks with a black stripe down either side. Thirty-four-year-old “Cool” Vince Phillips entered the ring in shorts striped in purple and silver. Phillips carried a record of 36 and 3, but he was unbeaten at 140 pounds. His only losses occurred when he moved up to welterweight. He and Micky both weighed 139 pounds for this fight.
Micky was already winning the first round when he landed two chopping overhand rights. The second one stopped Phillips in his tracks. As he paused to absorb the blow, Micky smacked him with a left hook to the jaw. It was a defensive lapse by Phillips, and it cost him. He came out in the second round a bit more cautious. By the end of the second round, however, Phillips started to find his range. He threw a vicious straight right hand that Micky seemed to catch on his forearm, but the force of the intended blow pushed Micky back against the ropes. Phillips followed in pursuit and started banging Micky with a cascade of lefts and rights. Micky blocked some. Others found their mark. Micky countered with effective lefts, but he received worse than he gave.
“Keep the heat on!” trainer Kenny Adams yelled at Phillips between rounds. “Don’t let this guy rest. Keep the heat on! You’re looking beautiful, baby. Beautiful. Just go out there and keep the heat on!”
Phillips stayed on the attack. Micky turned southpaw. That was his customary move, but this time it had even greater purpose. One of Phillips’s losses was to a guy named Anthony “Baby” Jones out of Detroit who effectively switched to southpaw and managed to beat Phillips four years earlier. That was in Jones’s backyard of Auburn Hills, Michigan.
But Phillips wasn’t confused by the switch at all. Instead, he pounded Micky’s right ribcage with solid left hands, and continued to sneak in some powerful rights. Micky stood his ground, landing a few good countershots of his own, but the fight turned suddenly with about fifty seconds remaining in the third round.
“Oh, and there’s some blood over the left eye of Micky Ward,” fight play-by-play man Dan Dierdorf exclaimed.
“And he’s bleeding badly. You see it dripping on him,” Alex Wallau of ABC’s Wide World of Sports said. “He pawed at it once.”
The gash was nearly two inches long, spanning Micky’s entire left eyebrow. Micky continued to fight. He was sure his corner would be able to get the bleeding under control between rounds. But with twenty-five seconds still to go in round three, Phillips landed another straight right hand directly on the cut.
“That really rocked him,” Dierdorf commented.
The referee, Dick Flaherty of Massachusetts, stared at Micky’s cut for a few more seconds, and then decided the ring doctor needed to take a look at it. He called time-out and brought Micky over to see Dr. Patti Yoffe, one of the few female ring doctors in boxing. She pointed a small flashlight at the cut while O’Keefe wiped the blood away with a towel.
“He’s fine,” O’Keefe said hopefully.
But when O’Keefe used a Q-tip dipped in adrenaline hydrochloride to try to close the cut, Yoffe wasn’t so sure. She saw the loose skin lap over the cotton swab and flinched. The cut was deep. She continued to examine it, looking very concerned and shaking her head. Micky knew what she was thinking.
“Let me go on. Please,” he implored. “Let me go.”
“It’s too deep,” Yoffe said over the crowd that was growing restless. “It’s too deep.”
“I don’t care. Please. One round. Let me go one more round!”
Yoffe shook her head. “No. You can’t go on,” she said to Micky, and then she looked over at Flaherty and said, “This fight should be stopped.”
O’Keefe fired the towel to the ground and shouted, “Oh, come on! Let him go! This is bullshit! He’s fine! C’mon, he’s fine!”
Barely two minutes had passed since the cut first opened up, and only five minutes ago, Micky was winning the fight. Now, it was over. He threw his hands down in disgust and walked toward the center of the ring. There he was met by Phillips who wrapped his arms around Micky’s waist and lifted him into air. But Micky’s disappointment and Phillips’s jubilation would have to wait. By now the crowd had realized what had happened, and several loyal Lowell supporters began throwing cups and bottles of beer into the ring. A few chairs were tossed toward the ring as well, but didn’t get that far. Micky was first to recognize the danger. He jumped out of Phillips’s arms and began beseeching the crowd to stop. He raced over to the ropes and yelled at the instigators in the balcony, most of whom were friends and family, and ordered them to stop.
“Sal got hit with a cup of beer,” Micky recalls. “My stupid fans. It was mostly my family up above. Phillips didn’t deserve this. He’s a world champion. He comes into my hometown. Why do this to him? It ain’t his fault.”
Meanwhile, O’Keefe the cop pushed Phillips to the ground and used his own body to provide cover for him.
“They were all throwing things into the ring,” O’Keefe said. “I’m covering guys so they don’t get hit. I’m not gonna let anything hit him. I don’t give a shit what it is they’re throwing. You don’t know what you’re gonna get hit with.”
The potential for riot, at first real, was quickly suppressed. Fans stopped throwing things into the ring and simply chanted, “Bullshit! Bullshit! Bullshit!”
Meanwhile, Micky’s cut was no longer bleeding. It had only taken a few minutes, and already the trickle of blood stopped. That would lead to speculation that if Micky were allowed to get to his corner, the cut could have been controlled, and the fight could have continued. After all, there were only eleven more seconds to go in the round when Flaherty stepped in.
“He couldn’t go on,” Yoffe said. “It was a bad cut, so I’m the bad guy. His vision was already blurred.”
It didn’t take Micky long to realize that Yoffe had done him a huge favor. When O’Keefe brought Micky to nearby Massachusetts General Hospital, the attending physician let them know that the cut would require eighteen stitches, twelve on the outside and six on the inside.
“At first I didn’t agree with the stoppage,” Micky recalls now. “But when I went to the hospital to get stitched up, the doctor said, ‘If she didn’t stop the fight when she did, you might have lost your eyesight. Your eyes might have been messed up for life.’ The damage is a millimeter away from muscle. Once you get into muscle and cut into there, your eye could get dislodged. So, in hindsight, it was good that she stopped it.”
Meanwhile, in the immediate aftermath of the fight, promoter Bob Arum was blinded with fury.
“She panicked!” Arum blustered. “You don’t stop it on the first cut! If this fight was in California or Nevada or New Jersey, they wouldn’t have done that. If it opens again, then you stop it. You ask why so many fights are in Nevada or New Jersey and it’s because you get competent people. Sure, next round it’s probably over, but you let him go back to the corner and give them a chance to stop the bleeding. Vince Phillips was cut worse in the Tszyu fight. There’s a different standard in a title fight. I really have to question whether we should have women doctors at ringside.”
Arum not only questioned the use of female officials in a male sport, he also vowed never to bring another title bout to Massachusetts.
His views were not shared by the Massachusetts state boxing commissioner, Bill Pender, who said, “Arum is woefully inadequate to judge a medical situation. Dr. Yoffe is one of our better ring doctors, who doesn’t waste any time getting right in there to attend to injured boxers. I probed the cut myself, and it was long enough, deep enough, and actively bleeding, with approximately one centimeter of exposed bone, to convince me the bout had to be stopped. I totally agree with Dr. Yoffe, and I would do exactly the same thing. Also, this thing about female doctors disturbs me, and I believe Arum could be sued for what he’s said.”
In the end, the squabbling and second-guessing after the fight didn’t matter. Micky had lost. He lost this fight and the opportunity for the next one, whic
h could have been his first six-figure payday against Tszyu. That was the frustrating part of boxing that nagged at Micky. Each loss seemed to hurt twice.
Micky thought about why he returned to boxing. At first, it was because he was dissatisfied with how his first career had ended. That led him back to the gym where he hoped he could one day make some decent money. But the further he got back into it, the more he realized that he was in this for a championship. He wanted to know how far he could go, and he wanted to go to the top. The paper championship he won against Veader wasn’t the top. That wasn’t even close. He wanted a real title, and it crushed him to watch another one slip through his grasp.
Just as he had lost the USBA light welterweight title to Frankie Warren, the IBF InterContinental welterweight title to Harold Brazier, and the USBA light welterweight title to Charles Murray, Micky had lost another shot at a legitimately recognized championship. But even more than the others, this was a fight Micky was sure he could have won. He was never much of a bleeder. His face tended to just swell up, rather than open up. But fate had intervened on his night at the Roxy, when he suffered the worst cut of his career. It felt like his real destiny was to always be tantalizingly close to realizing his dream.
He thought about these things while the doctor stitched him up at Mass General. O’Keefe, sitting in the corner of the room, thought about these things, too. He knew how hard Micky had worked, and he thought that the kid deserved better.
“How’s it look?” Micky asked about the black stitches and the purple welt over his left eye.
“Geez, and I thought you were ugly before,” O’Keefe teased. “But this is almost unbearable.”
“I’m gonna end up looking like you,” Micky responded. “That sucks.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Dickie sat alone in his prison cell. His eyes were closed. His head leaned up against the cold cement wall. And his hands clutched several pieces of paper. They were letters written to him by family members. One of the advantages of having seven sisters and a brother is that when you go to jail, mail call is something you can look forward to.
Dickie’s eyes were closed because he didn’t have to read the letters anymore. He had read them so many times, he knew them all by heart. The pages were filled with the typical news about marriages, kids, and jobs. There was gossip about friends who had gotten into or out of trouble. There were stories about Dickie Junior’s T-ball exploits. But mostly, the letters were about Micky’s career: who he had knocked out, how he got screwed by the ring doctor, and who he was going to fight next.
Most of the information in the letters was redundant. Dickie had heard it when his mother and son came to see him. The visits were a little less frequent now that he’d been moved to the Plymouth House of Corrections almost ninety minutes from home, but he saw them often enough to know all about Micky’s prospects and about Sal LoNano.
“Why’d you let Sal get his claws into Micky?” Dickie had asked his mom during visiting hours once.
“Micky wanted him because his father wanted him. What can I tell you? Things seem to be going pretty well,” Alice said.
“You really think so? Christ, Ma, from where I’m sitting, all I can see is Micky beating a bunch of stiffs and then getting robbed by Chavez or Sal. Who knows what happened there? And then he gets a title shot, but no real money with it. He should be doing a helluva lot better than this. And he would be if I was with him.”
The last sentence just hung there for a while. Alice was unsure how to respond. Her impulse was to bark at Dickie and tell him, “First of all, you can’t be with him, because you screwed up so royally and now you’re in here, and second of all, things weren’t so great when you were with him the last time.” But Dickie looked so good these days. He was all cleaned up. He had put some weight on. And he was being permitted to leave the prison every once in a while to talk to troubled kids. So Alice thought better about berating him.
“You’re right, Dickie,” she said. “Once you can start training him again, I’m sure he’ll go right to the top, and you’ll be right there with him. It’ll be wonderful.”
That was the singular thought that pushed Dickie daily. When the walls closed in on him, and he grew so emotionally fatigued that he could barely roll off his cot in the morning, he thought about getting back into the gym with his brother. His dream to make Micky a champion gave Dickie a purpose. In fact, he dreamed it so often and so hard it already seemed real, and that made him smile as he folded up the letters from home and put them neatly in a shoebox under his bed.
“Just a little while longer,” he thought. “With good behavior, I’ll be out in another year or so, and then it’ll be me and Micky—straight to the top. It could have been me, but it’ll have to be Micky instead.”
There were several letters from Micky in Dickie’s shoebox. In fact, there were more letters than visits. Micky didn’t come very often, which suited Dickie just fine. He didn’t like his little brother seeing him in the crack houses, and he didn’t like Micky to see him in jail either, but it bothered him less and less as his physical condition improved and as he moved to minimum-security prisons.
“In jail he was always talking about how good he felt,” Micky remembers. “And you could see it. You could tell from his body, because when he first went in there he looked awful, like a skeleton or something. Skull face. That’s what crack does to you.”
When Dickie was feeling good, everyone around him felt good, too. He had that kind of infectious personality, energetic and quick to laugh. He was smart, sharp-witted, possessed a keen memory, and he could read people. He couldn’t get a read on Sal just yet, but he liked that Micky was with Mickey O’Keefe.
“That was a good move, Mick,” Dickie told him. “He’s a good guy. He don’t drink, and he’s got you in shape. He’s good for you now, and then I’ll get out and take you the rest of the way.”
But it was after the Vince Phillips fight that Micky had to tell Dickie that O’Keefe was once again out of the picture. Sal and O’Keefe were able to put their differences aside for only a short period of time, long enough to get ready for Phillips. After that, there was more palpable tension during workouts, more arguments about what the best move for Micky would be, and more problems with the power structure within Team Ward.
“I’m the manager. You’re the trainer,” Sal constantly reminded O’Keefe.
“Then what the hell do you have Connolly and all these other guys hanging around for?” O’Keefe would ask.
“They’re all good for Micky, and as his manager, I say they stay.”
“Let ’em stay. I’m outta here.”
This time, O’Keefe was out for good. There’d be no coming back.
“I went home and told my wife, Donna, when he’s done with his career, I’ll be there,” O’Keefe says. “Until then I don’t want to be around. I left right before the Mark Fernandez fight. Sal and I fought about him being in the corner, and he says to me, ‘I don’t want to work the corner. That’s not what this is about.’ You tell me. Was he in the corner?”
Eventually, yes, but Sal was not in the corner the night Micky fought Mark Fernandez at Foxwoods Casino Resort in Connecticut. It was April 14, 1998, the same night Andrew Golota knocked out Eli Dixon as the main event, and the same night that twenty-year-old Zab Judah improved his record to 15-0 with a second-round knockout of Angel Beltre.
Fernandez was merely a tune-up for Micky who had been inactive for eight months and was scheduled to fight Judah in June. Judah was an unbeaten and untested young star on the rise. He wanted to fight Micky in order to remove the “untested” label, and Micky wanted to fight Judah because it was a title shot, albeit a less prestigious title. Micky and Judah would vie for the vacated USBA junior welterweight title. It was a perfect match, but it took a while to come together. Sal was taking Micky away from Top Rank and doing most of his negotiating with Main Events promotions instead.
If Micky beat Judah, he wouldn’t need Top Rank to fi
nd a significant payday, and he didn’t plan on losing to the soft-hitting, though lightning-quick southpaw from New York. Still, waiting for Judah and watching other fights fall apart had left Micky inactive and potentially rusty. So when the fight with Judah was rescheduled for June, he grabbed the Fernandez fight on short notice. And despite having fought just three weeks earlier, Judah did the same. That put Micky and Judah on the same undercard just two months before they would be opposing each other as a main event.
Of course, the fight with Judah and the twenty-five-thousand-dollar payday that went along with it could be in jeopardy if Micky didn’t take care of Fernandez first. Fernandez was nearing the end of a long, unspectacular career. He was thirty-seven years old and entered the ring against Micky with nine losses in his last twelve fights. Simply put, Micky couldn’t afford to lose to this guy.
In Micky’s first comeback fights, he weighed between 142 and 148 pounds. Since then, he had been tipping the scales very consistently at 140 pounds even. For the Fernandez fight, Micky was as ripped and muscular as he had ever been. He was a sinewy 143 pounds. His training with O’Keefe had gone well, and he continued the program long after O’Keefe left. He was ready for this fight and had another friend back with him in the corner. Richie Bryan was the second man in, and he squirted water from a bottle into Micky’s mouth while the referee, Johnny Callas, gave the pre-fight instructions.
