by Bob Halloran
Never having been a champion before, Micky was unaware of the appropriate protocol. So, he was understandably shocked and upset when Neary’s handlers walked into the locker room and retrieved the belt, claiming that it was the ex-champion’s personal possession.
“I didn’t know what was going on,” Ward told the Boston Globe. “I said, ‘Hey where you going with that belt? That’s mine!’ Then they told me that when you win a title you get your own belt to keep. The new champ gets the belt in the ring, but the ex-champ gets it back later. Too bad, because it was a nice fit, it felt good. I would have loved to have brought it home to Lowell.”
But Micky went home as a champion albeit without a belt. He put a down payment on a new house on Upham Street in Lowell. He swam in his new pool, played with his dogs, and trained for his next fight. Five months later, he still hadn’t received his championship belt. Sal wrote the British Board of Boxing Control, which was in no hurry to ensure that the man who took the belt from their favorite son got one of his own. Still, finally, the belt was shipped from London to Glen Feldman at the WBU headquarters in Connecticut. The belt changed hands a few times and ended up at the West Farms Mall in Avon, Connecticut. So Sal and Al drove down to pick it up and delivered it to Micky personally.
“Here. We thought you needed something to hold your pants up.”
That was a good day in a career filled with hard days and a life filled with bad days.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
It was good to be Micky Ward, and that hadn’t always been the case. He was a world champion living in his new home, and he was in love. He met Charlene Fleming, a Lowell native, through an acquaintance of his father. She was a natural and gifted athlete in her own right with more medals than Micky. Hers were won in track and field in which she was a stand-out high jumper. Now, she was Micky’s girlfriend, back from an exciting trip to London and living in Micky’s new home on Upham Street.
After the Neary fight, Sal recalls Micky telling him, “Now you’re gonna get paid.” But Sal says he responded, “No. Let’s wait for the next one. I have a house and an automobile. I’m okay with finances. And here you are, always working hard in your life. I want you to be able to buy a house and feel what I feel. I want you to feel all the good of being a professional athlete.”
And now it was time for the next one. Once again, discussions centered on the possibility of Micky fighting Arturo Gatti.
“Yeah, if the money’s right,” Sal told the Boston Herald at the time. “Let’s face it. Micky’s the world champion now. He has some leverage. That’s what you become champion for. HBO vice president Lou DiBella told me he’d love to make a Ward-Gatti fight at the FleetCenter. I’ll get together with DiBella and Cedric Kushner Promotions and see what’s in store, to see what’s best for Micky.”
HBO is where the money is in boxing. Micky owed much of his success to ESPN and Top Rank, but his earning potential on basic cable was limited to the tens of thousands of dollars. HBO and pay-per-view boxing matches brought the ceiling up to six and seven figures. DiBella and Kushner were part of the group that helped make the Ward-Neary fight on HBO, and Sal was looking for them to do something like that again. The problem, however, was that DiBella was no longer with HBO.
In May 2000, DiBella walked away while being pushed out the door. HBO bought him out of his contract for a few million dollars, and gave DiBella the right and the opportunity to sell programming to HBO. Basically, he was given some dates. All he had to do was go out and make the fights.
Just prior to DiBella’s split with HBO, it was announced that Micky was going to return to London to fight Eamonn Magee on the undercard of the Lennox Lewis-Francois Botha fight on July 15. Three newspapers in London and one in Dublin reported the news that was news to Micky and Sal.
“All of a sudden I’m getting calls from all over the world,” Sal told George Kimball of the Boston Herald. “I don’t know how they could announce a fight over there when we’d never even talked about it. We’d been negotiating for possible fights with Philip Holiday and Antonio Diaz for later this year, and there was briefly the possibility of Micky filling in against Kostya Tszyu on July 15 if [Julio Cesar] Chavez couldn’t make it, but they didn’t offer enough money. Right now I’m planning on putting Micky on a July 14 ESPN2 show at Hampton Beach. We’re not fighting Magee, and we’re not going to London.”
They didn’t go to Hampton Beach either. Instead, Micky went to a large bingo hall at Foxwoods Resort Casino in Connecticut and fought Diaz, a twenty-four-year-old Mexican American from California. Diaz suffered a couple of defeats early in his career, but hadn’t lost in more than four years. He also held a share of the IBA light welterweight title. At the time, there were five championship belts, and the IBA’s was the weakest and least prestigious of the group. Micky’s WBU belt was fourth on the list.
Neither belt was on the line that night. But Micky had to give his up because WBU president John Robinson wanted Micky to defend the title against a British contender, someone like Magee. Instead Micky took the Diaz fight for nearly double the money and was stripped of his belt. Ward-Diaz was on the undercard of a “Prince” Naseem Hamed fight on HBO’s Main Events pay-per-view broadcast, and it was worth 175 thousand dollars to Micky.
“In my way of thinking,” Sal explains, “we’re gonna get a good half-million-dollar fight. Right now, we’re going after money. We could have held on to the belt and fought in England for one hundred K, or we could go after Diaz and get De La Hoya.”
A cash grab was exactly what Micky wanted, too. He told Ed Gray of the Boston Herald a day before the fight, “I want to get something out of boxing after all the years I’ve put into it. I don’t think it’s a game. Any fight can be my last fight. I look at things realistically. I’m thirty-four. I’ll be thirty-five in October. I didn’t start fighting fifteen years ago when I was nineteen. I started when I was seven. There’s a lot of wear-and-tear.”
Despite neither championship belt being on the line, the August show-down was billed as a “Battle of Champions.” Diaz came out in a brown-and-gold robe with matching trunks. He was booed lustily by the pro-Ward crowd when ring announcer Michael Buffer introduced him. Micky, voted the “Comeback Fighter of the Year” in 1999, was welcomed with loud cheers. He acknowledged the support by punching vigorously in his corner. He was in white trunks with black trim, still sporting a reddish goatee.
Micky came out swinging. He was snapping off more jabs than usual. Diaz did the same, and his left jab was more effective. He showed good head movement, but his feet were relatively still. Micky did not park himself on the inside as he had done in recent brawls. His respect for Diaz’s punching power was evident. Micky was less willing to take his power shots. He wasn’t gambling with this kid who had won twenty-six straight fights, eighteen of them by knockout.
“Micky, you gotta punch more,” Dickie said after Micky had lost the first two rounds. “When you’re on him, you’ve got to punch. Don’t take unnecessary punishment. Move your head. Push his head down. Be mean. This is your life right here.”
Diaz wasn’t wincing or flinching the way other opponents had done when stung by Micky. Instead, he stung right back. Diaz was 34-2. Micky was 35-9. That’s a combined eighty fights of experience and plenty of acquired toughness.
In the fifth round, Diaz began to put on a boxing clinic. His jabs were right on the money. He followed straight rights with hard lefts. He was throwing combinations of punches and each one was hitting its mark. Finally, Micky landed a big right hand. The final minute of the round was a wild display of aggression. Dozens of punches were thrown by both fighters. First Micky hit Diaz three or four times. Then Diaz returned fire. The crowd that paid to see violence was getting its money’s worth.
“We may see a standing ovation at the end of the round,” the broadcast announcers said during a verbal exchange. “This is exquisite stuff, in terms of the energy of both fighters. It’s amazing. . . . These guys are like wind-up toys. They ju
st keep going.”
As the bell rang, the crowd did, in fact, stand in appreciation of two warriors who had just exhibited what boxing, toughness, and courage are all about. Both corners thought that their fighter finished the furious flurry with the advantage.
“He’s tired,” Joel Diaz told his son. “Listen to me. He’s tired. He gave it all he had in that round. He’s done.”
Meanwhile, Dickie put his face within inches of Micky’s, looked him straight in the eye, and said, “This is your game! All right. This is it. You’re the champion. All right. He thinks you’re old. You’re washed up. You get fresh now, Micky. He is dead! He is dead! He has nothing. He’s a little boy now. He’s dead!”
Diaz won the first four rounds on the outside. But by the sixth round, he was in the brawl. Micky made the challenge, “Can you take everything I’m willing to take?” And Diaz chose not to back down and went toe-to-toe.
“I’m beating him up the middle,” Micky told Dickie in one of the few times Micky ever spoke in his corner.
“I know you are,” Dickie answered. “Stay right there. Shoot up the middle. Boom, boom, boom! All right? Big hooks to the body, not so wild.”
In the eighth, Diaz leaped off his feet and brought a stinging left uppercut with him. Micky’s head snapped back violently. Blood immediately began flowing from Micky’s nose. A right and a left hand followed from Diaz. Micky was hurt. His nose was probably broken. This was when it became evident that Diaz was the fresher fighter. Micky’s punches had lost a little of their steam. Micky’s nose was gushing blood for the final two minutes of the eighth round. The cut above Micky’s nose just above the bridge looked deep enough to require stitches, but Gavin got it to stop bleeding.
“I know you’re tired, but suck it up!” Dickie shouted without compassion. It is the appropriately emotionless pronouncement that this situation called for and when Micky heard it, he knew his brother was telling him the truth. It reassured him.
“I wasn’t 100 percent for Micky last time, only 20 percent,” Dickie admitted before the fight. “Now that I’m back, I’m giving 110 percent. I do everything I can do for him. That’s why I run with him, spar with him. I missed out. Now I do it all for him. Fighting’s a lonely game. When you have someone to do stuff with you, it’s a plus.”
Micky clubbed Diaz with an overhand right on top of his head. Diaz swung with a wild left hand and fell to the ground. It was ruled a slip, not a knockdown, and it happened because Diaz threw a punch while he was still dazed.
Smoger called time and asked for a towel. He dropped to his hands and knees and wiped up the wet spot left by Diaz’s sweat-soaked body. But it wasn’t enough time for Diaz to recover. When Smoger summoned the fighters to return, Micky leaped in and landed a hard left followed by a big, big right. The bell sounded. Diaz was woozy, but he found his way back to his corner. His father sprayed him with water while the blood from a deep cut over his left eye raced down his face.
“He’s dead tired, Mick,” Gavin said before the last round. “You’re the champion.”
Dickie added, “This is where you come through. Do it!”
Dickie slapped Micky in the face and Micky shook his head vigorously to pump himself up. He was summoning everything he had left. Diaz was doing the same.
The tenth round opened quietly and finished with a bang. With two minutes to go, Micky and Diaz started firing unceasingly at each other. Each landing a series of blows. They paused a few times, took deep breaths, and then fired again. Micky seemed to be scoring more. None of his punches were especially damaging, but they were landing. It had been a very close fight since the fourth round, and if Micky won the tenth, it could be the deciding factor.
As the bell rang ending another bloody battle, Micky and Diaz hugged each other. They had earned one another’s respect. Smoger stepped in and with three heads touching, he said, “Oh boy, did you guys put on a great fight. God bless you both.”
Micky put his arm around Diaz’s shoulder and escorted him back to his corner. Then Micky ambled slowly over to his own, where Gavin continued to work on the cut above his nose for several more minutes. Dickie sprayed water on Micky’s face and into his mouth, and they all waited for the decision. The winner of this classic battle was very much in doubt.
Finally, Michael Buffer grabbed the microphone and moved to the center of the ring.
“After ten grueling rounds, once more let’s have a round of applause for these two warriors in the ring. . . . We go to the scorecards. Tommy Pazmarek scores it 96-93. Gwen Feldman has it 95-94. Melvino Lathan has it 96-93. All for the winner by unanimous decision, Antonio Diaz!”
Micky had fought bravely, but he had lost. It seemed like a fair decision, though it could be argued that Micky lost the first four rounds, and then won four or more of the final six. Still, Micky lost gracefully, and Diaz won the same way.
“Micky!” Diaz called out, approaching Micky for another hug. “Great fight. You’re a champion.”
Blood was still dripping from Micky’s cut as Larry Merchant made his way into the ring for the post-fight interview.
“It was tough,” Micky began. “That’s what it’s about though. I don’t get no easy fights. He don’t get no easy fights either. I mean this is it. They pay to see us fight. They pay the big guys all the money. What do we get? We fought the best fight there is.”
Merchant, oblivious to the steady stream of blood that was flowing even more freely down Micky’s face, asked Micky what would be next for him.
“I don’t know. We’ll sit back and see. It’s a tough loss. I trained hard for it. He was the better man tonight. I give him all the credit in the world. No hard feelings. He’s a good man, good fighter. I wish him all the success in the world. And I’ll be back maybe. We’ll see. I don’t know.”
It was a loss. And the feeling in boxing circles had generally been, if you lose on HBO, you don’t get back on HBO. But Micky was still an enigma. He was tough and talented. And he was someone that people knew and appreciated and would pay to see. “When we lost to Diaz, man, you want to see a sick manager,” Sal said. “I knew all of Lowell was going to bust out. Everybody was going to come down on me like the world was coming apart. We gave the belt up and lost the fight.”
But moods throughout Lowell improved as the offers started coming in. Ultimately, Micky turned down a one-hundred-thousand-dollar payday when he bypassed an opportunity to fight John-John Molina on a Lennox Lewis undercard. Instead, Micky agreed to challenge the WBC junior welterweight champion, Kostya Tszyu, in February 2001. Micky would make 235,000 dollars and his debut on Showtime. And even though the fight was tentatively scheduled to be held in one of the Connecticut casinos, Micky and Sal planned to train for five weeks in Big Bear, California.
A month after the fight was announced, however, Micky was pushed aside. Tszyu was simultaneously negotiating with Sharmba Mitchell for a junior welterweight unification bout, and that fight fell together before Micky’s fight with Tszyu was finalized.
“If Micky had beaten Diaz, he probably would have gotten Kostya Tszyu—which wouldn’t have been good for him,” Al Valenti figured. “The path he wound up on was the right one.”
Russell Peltz would not have recommended the Diaz fight to Team Ward, but he had already been squeezed out of the picture. Instrumental, even vital, to getting the Reggie Green and Shea Neary fights, Peltz was dismayed to learn that Al and Sal had cut a new deal with Cedric Kushner.
“You put us on Broadway,” Peltz said to Valenti. “And now you give it to Cedric, just because he’s got the show. What did you do?”
What Al and Sal did was try to partner Micky with the guys who could bring in the most money. Kushner acted quickly getting Micky the Diaz fight, and it looked like a good money move at the time. Peltz says he would have done things differently.
“Things got a little touchy between me and Al,” Peltz recalls. “I told Al, ‘Diaz is a bad fight. Don’t take the fight. You can’t win this fight.’ So of
course, Micky goes out and fights a better fight than I thought he’d fight, but he loses. And afterwards, Al blames it on Micky’s girl. He says he was spending too much time with her, and he wasn’t properly prepared. But I told him not to take that fight. It was a stupid fight.”
Kushner had helped Micky earn 275,000 dollars for two nights work, but instead of pushing Micky into another big-money fight, Kushner helped get Diaz a title fight on HBO against Shane Mosley. Diaz was knocked out in the sixth round and never fought another contender. History would reveal that Kushner had backed the wrong horse.
The Ward-Diaz fight was in August 2000, and the following month, Al Valenti went to Sydney, Australia, to attend the Summer Olympics. Upon his return, he learned that there was nothing going on for Micky. Valenti had plans to do another show at the beach in July, and he was confident that he could get Micky a good fight, something on par with Reggie Green, but that would be eleven months of inactivity. He needed to find something before that.
Foxwoods Resort Casino had an open date on May 18, 2001, and Micky was welcome to fight there for the fourth time in his career, but Valenti still needed to find an opponent.
“I come across the name Steve Quinonez,” Valenti said. “And I call Sal and I tell him about the kid. He had a good record. He’d be good for TV. So I went to ESPN with Quinonez. They really weren’t too thrilled with it, but it was Micky, so they went for it. I went to Foxwoods and I made the deal, and we’re set.”
The choice of Quinonez served several purposes. It was a payday, albeit small—thirty thousand dollars. Quinonez had a record of 23-5 that would look good when ESPN flashed it on the screen. Valenti expected Quinonez to be an easy mark for Micky. And, Quinonez was a lefty. Both WBA champion, Sharmba Mitchell, and IBF champion, Zab Judah, were southpaws, and Team Ward still had those fighters in their sights.
Quinonez, a thirty-year-old from California, was not known as a big puncher. Of his twenty-three victories, only ten were by knockout, a relatively low number given the low quality of his opponents. Compare that to Micky, who counted twenty-six knockouts among his thirty-five victories. Still, Quinonez had a dream.
