Irish Thunder

by Bob Halloran

  “Yeah,” Micky said. “It’s dangerous where we go, too.”

  Stooped over, walking gingerly, and wincing occasionally, it was hard to imagine these were the same men who only two hours earlier had been willing to endure pain and fatigue beyond the limits of most people. Their minds had taken them to a place where it was okay to fight with a broken hand or with nauseating double vision.

  When Arturo left the hospital, he was thinking about his next fight. He had spent that last year of his career preparing for, and fighting, Micky Ward. He had made more than a million dollars for each of the three fights, and since he had looked very impressive winning the last two encounters with Micky, Arturo figured he was ready to fight for a title. He did that six months later. In January 2004, he beat the previously undefeated Gianluca Branco for the vacated WBC light welterweight title. Micky was in his corner that night.

  Arturo successfully defended the title twice, knocking out Leonard Dorin and Jesse James Leija. Both fighters retired after their losses to Gatti.

  Then Gatti was knocked out by Floyd Mayweather Jr. trying to defend his title a third time. Later, fighting for the seventh consecutive time at Boardwalk Hall in Atlantic City, Gatti won the IBA welterweight title from Thomas Damgaard of Denmark. Again, Micky was there to lead Arturo out of the dressing room and into the ring. Their friendship is still going strong.

  Arturo’s career still had plenty of life in it after his trilogy with Micky. He was well-respected and well-known before those three fights, and he continued to entertain fight fans long after Micky had retired to Lowell. But Arturo’s legacy, like Micky’s, will always be tied to the thirty rounds they spent together.

  “Micky solidified Gatti’s place,” Kathy Duva explains. “He took him to a whole other level. I don’t know that Gatti would be where he is today. Together, their sum is greater than the parts. That made both of their careers. They’re icons. They both are, and neither of them would be, without the other.”

  As Gatti continued to make millions, Micky began to pay for his. As Micky ages, he’ll have to worry about pugilistic dementia. The thousands of punches he took to the head and his occasionally abusive alcohol consumption are conspiring against him in that regard. But his first physical challenge after retiring was his double vision.

  “Arturo hit me in the head hard,” Micky remembers. “I could feel it, but I didn’t really get dazed. But soon I started seeing double. I saw two or three Gattis the rest of the night. I kept trying to shake it off, but it didn’t go away. I wasn’t complaining, I was just telling Dickie because it was so amazing. It was weird . . . and it never did go away. The doctors at the hospital after the fight couldn’t do anything for me. They thought maybe I had taken a thumb to the eye, but I knew that wasn’t it. So I went to see Dr. Francis Sutula and he tells me that when I got hit, my brain shifted in my skull. That was causing the problem.”

  And Micky fought with his brain in the wrong place for at least three rounds, and he continued to live in that condition for fifteen months after the fight. After seeing a series of doctors who correctly diagnosed his problem but hoped it would correct itself over time, Micky was referred to Dr. Sutula by Harvard boxing coach Doug Yoffe, whose wife, Patti, had been the ring doctor in Micky’s fight against Vince Phillips. And in the words of Dr. Sutula, an oculoplastic surgeon at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary in Boston, “Micky was really screwed up.”

  “This was acute trauma,” Dr. Sutula said. “Micky didn’t have any of this double vision before that fight. If the brain or head has been knocked around a little bit, and it’s sort of shifting around in the cerebral spinal fluid, you get hit in the front part of your head, but your brain moves back against the skull and then moves forward again. Micky’s brain moved inside his skull. The back part of the brain hit the skull. That messed up his fourth nerve. When fourth-nerve injuries occur, which happens in cases of trauma, you would see it on one side, but he had it on both sides, and he had it asymmetrically. Seeing it bilateral and asymmetrical was really kind of odd. Having it on both sides suggests the trauma happened at least twice. When this occurred, it must have been very hard for him to fight. The only thing that would have saved him is if one of his eyes was swollen shut. That would have gotten rid of the double vision.”

  The most obvious result of all this brain shifting and nerve damage was that Micky’s eyes didn’t move together. Sometimes treatment for Micky’s type of injury involves simply putting a patch on one eye. It’s a familiar and common practice. When one muscle is gone, what doctors try to do is to weaken the other muscle to create balance. Micky chose not to wear a patch.

  Instead he learned to live with vertical double vision. Certain gazes were worse than others for him. If he looked up and to the left, it was impossible for him to tell which was the correct image and which was the double. He simply got in the habit of tilting his head toward one shoulder and keeping his head down. That kind of body posture and head position began causing bad neck pain and headaches. When it became intolerable about six months after his fight with Gatti, he consulted Dr. Sutula for the first time.

  “You could see the problem just in the physical exam,” Dr. Sutula said. “We used prisms, tilted his head, and watched how his eyes were moving. It was obvious.”

  Initially, Dr. Sutula recommended the same course of action that the previous doctors had: do nothing and see if the nerve injury would heal itself over time. But almost a year after first seeing Dr. Sutula, there was no change. So, on September 16, 2004, Micky underwent surgery to get his eyes to move together again. After enduring the frustration, inconvenience, and pain caused by double vision, Micky came out of surgery, once again with a singular focus. He had to thank Kathy Duva and Carl Moretti of Main Events.

  Fighters commonly receive a one-year limited-liability insurance policy to cover themselves in case of injury during a fight. But because so much time had passed between the injury and the surgery, Micky’s policy had lapsed. His insurance company refused to pay the ten thousand dollars in medical expenses. Moretti learned of the situation, talked to Duva, and Main Events paid the bill. Micky, who had brought the best out of Arturo Gatti, also managed to bring the best out of others. Main Events did themselves proud, and Micky could now walk with his head held high, too.

  “When I saw him the day after the surgery,” Dr. Sutula said, “his wife, Charlene, said to me, ‘He doesn’t have his funny head position anymore. ’ He still had some double vision in extreme conditions, but that went away. And he still has excellent uncorrected visual acuity, twenty-twenty in both eyes.”

  For the first time in fifteen months, Micky could see things clearly. He knew he had friends at Main Events. He knew Lou and Sal were men he could trust. Micky had finally figured out who the good guys were. They were his friends Richie Bryan and Tony Underwood. They were men like Skeets Skioli, Cleo Surprenant, and Al Gavin. And Micky knew that when it came to good guys, there was none better than the man he had left behind.

  “I’m here because someone likes me for who I am,” Micky told the audience at his retirement party at Foxwoods in the fall of 2003. “Someone who was with me from the beginning.” There Micky paused. He waited until he knew he had everyone’s attention. Maybe he waited just to tantalize Sal and Lou and Dickie and Alice and anyone else who thought he was talking about them.

  “Mickey O’Keefe,” he said finally.

  The name hung in the air for a moment. Not everyone at the retirement party knew who Mickey O’Keefe was, and many of the people who did know him weren’t happy that Micky had singled him out for such high praise. Sal expected to hear his name. After all, he was the one who invested his own money in the Hampton Beach fights and who made the connections with Al Valenti and Lou DiBella. Lou figured it might be him since he was the one with the HBO dates that made Micky his millions. Dickie assumed it would be him, because he was the one who introduced Micky to boxing as a seven-year-old, and who trained him for his most lucrative fights.
And of course, Alice was his mother and his first manager. She’d been with him every step of the way. How dare Micky put that cop ahead of her when doling out credit.

  “I just about fucking cried,” O’Keefe recalls. “It meant a lot to me to hear him say that in front of those people. But all I did was get him doing push-ups, pull-ups, and dips. He did the rest.”

  The more Micky did, the further he moved along his journey, the more he learned. He learned that nearly everyone involved in his boxing career took a little piece of him. First, it was his mother and Top Rank who guided the first half of his career. Then it was his brother who made a better living than most ex-cons because Micky was willing to go through torturous workouts and masochistic fights. Then it was Sal and Al and Lou who enjoyed huge paydays each time Micky got his. That’s what made guys like Cleo, Richie, and Mickey so special.

  “Mickey didn’t want control,” Micky says of the cop who began the journey with him only to be dropped off in the middle of the climb. “All he wanted was what was best for me. . . . I know if it weren’t for Mickey O’Keefe, there’d be no Micky Ward. People might not want to hear it, but it’s the truth. . . . When I look back, it hurts that Mickey wasn’t there at the end.”

  O’Keefe’s friend Danny Gilday agreed with Micky Ward and took it a few steps further.

  “If it wasn’t for Mickey O’Keefe,” Gilday says, “Micky Ward would never be back fighting. Dickie Eklund will tell you it was him. Alice Ward will tell you it was her. Sal LoNano will tell you it was him. But it was Mickey O’Keefe. If Mickey O’Keefe doesn’t get involved with Micky Ward, he’s a street person in Lowell. He’d be an alcoholic and an addict like his brother. I have no respect for Dickie. He’s a thief. He’s been a scumbag his whole life.”

  Those were harsh words concerning Dickie, but for a time, Micky might have agreed. While Micky was training for the third Gatti fight, Dickie showed up at the gym one day with several pieces of paper.

  “Here, Micky,” Dickie said as Micky was stepping into the ring for one of his sparring sessions. “You need to sign this.”

  “Sign what?”

  “It’s a movie contract,” Dickie explained. “They want to make a movie about my life, and they just need you to sign this so you can be in it.”

  “Can’t we talk about this later?” Micky asked. “I can’t sign anything with my gloves on anyway. Just show it to me later.”

  Dickie returned a few nights later with the same demand: “Sign this, Micky.” Again Micky turned him away. He was busy training for the last fight of his career, and he didn’t have time to read over some document.

  “Why do you keep bringing this to me here?” Micky asked. “I don’t want to be bothered with this shit when I’m in here. I certainly ain’t gonna take the time to read it when I’m working.”

  “C’mon, Mick,” Dickie implored. “You don’t have to read it. It’s just a release. Everybody who’s gonna be in the movie has to sign one.”

  Micky didn’t respond. He simply began pounding the heavy bag, and he kept pounding away until Dickie finally got the message and walked away. The conversation repeated itself on two other occasions.

  Finally, Micky and Dickie met Dorothy Aufiero, a principal of Scout Productions and Edgartown Ventures at Aufiero’s office where she confirmed for Micky what Dickie had been saying. They wanted Micky to play a small role in the film, and for that, they needed his name on some documents. Micky left Aufiero’s office that day with a five-page legal agreement and a one-thousand-dollar check. He didn’t sign the document, nor did he read it, but he cashed the check.

  A week later, Dickie badgered him again about the movie deal. It was now three weeks before the fight with Gatti, and Micky was getting a little testy. He pulled the document out of his gym bag, quickly scribbled his name on the dotted lines, and threw the document at his brother.

  “There! Are you happy now?” Micky shouted. “Take the fucking thing and get out of my face!”

  What Micky didn’t know at the time is that he had just been duped into giving away the rights to his own life story.

  Micky didn’t realize what had happened until two months later, in July 2003, when several Hollywood producers began negotiating with Sal and Lou to make a separate movie about Micky. Actor Mark Wahlberg, a Massachusetts native, was involved in those negotiations, and he had already agreed to let Dickie train him to play the part of Micky.

  Scout Productions got wind of the plans for a movie about Micky, and their attorneys quickly issued cease and desist orders. After all, they believed that they had the rights to Micky’s life story. They even had a five-page legal document signed by Micky that verified it.

  Micky hired a high-powered attorney and filed suit in Middlesex Superior Court asking a judge to declare the contract void. Micky didn’t sue Dickie directly, but his lawyers contended in the lawsuit that Dickie was involved in the deception.

  “These people defrauded Micky Ward,” said attorney Harry Mannion, of the Boston law firm Cooley, Mannion, Jones. “They knew exactly what they were doing, and they used his own brother to perpetrate that fraud. What was done to Micky Ward by these people is worse than anything that was done to him in the ring.”

  “It was unconscionable,” Mannion continued in the Boston Globe. “We have investigated this thoroughly. Micky had no idea what he was signing. There was no way he could have understood the legal language in that contract. He was purposely misled to believe he was only agreeing to be in a film about his brother.”

  This one hit Micky in the gut. People had been willing to sell Micky’s body, one piece at a time, for years. Now, his own brother was willing to sell him out for one more payday. Micky couldn’t deny it, and he couldn’t defend it, but he certainly could explain it. When asked why his brother would be willing to scam him, Micky said directly, “Because they threw money at him.”

  Scout Productions hired BWR, a public relations firm, which issued a statement claiming, “There were no misrepresentations or false statements made to Mr. Ward . . . and numerous witnesses can corroborate that no false statements were made, including his brother.”

  Ultimately, the lawsuit was dismissed in November 2003 when Micky and the production companies reached an agreement that was financially beneficial to Micky. The new deal included option payments and percentages of the movie’s gross, and Lou and Sal were added to the project as technical consultants. Once again, they had helped negotiate a lucrative deal for Micky in which they would also be paid.

  “The story of Micky and Dickie has the potential to be a great film,” Lou said. “I’m happy we’re all on the same page. Micky is happy his whole team is involved.”

  But Micky wasn’t happy. He remained estranged from his brother, no longer truly able to trust him. As Micky was approaching retirement, Dickie was back on the streets. On May 20, 2006, some believe Dickie fought twenty-eight-year-old Dennis Bilodeau outside Captain John’s tavern on Westford Street in Lowell. The fight took place in the dark shadows of the bar just after 1:00 a.m. Bilodeau, described as a loving father, was later found unconscious with severe head wounds. He was flown by medical helicopter to Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, where he died the next day of blunt-force trauma to the head. His death was ruled a homicide.

  Two days after the bar fight, on a sunny Sunday afternoon, Dickie was arrested outside of his house at 217 Wilder Street in Lowell. He was picked up on an outstanding warrant for allegedly beating his girlfriend. While in custody, police asked Dickie what he knew about Bilodeau’s death. Dickie told the cops a variation of what he told the Lowell Sun prior to the third Gatti fight.

  “I turned my life around in prison,” Dickie defended himself. “I haven’t had a beer, and I’ve been off the cocaine for eight years. There was a time when I never thought I’d be able to tell anyone that. I just thank Holy God.

  “The fact I’m off the booze and drugs doesn’t mean I’m a better person than somebody who can’t beat their addiction,�
�� Dickie added. “The only person I’m better than is the guy Dickie Eklund used to be.”

  But that wasn’t true. He was forced to stay clean for nearly five years in prison, and he kept himself clean and mostly sober for nearly five more after his release, but by 2005, the dubious star of High on Crack Street was star-ring in another self-destructive role. He was back on crack.

  Police questioned Dickie about Bilodeau’s death for several hours, before finally releasing him. They described Dickie as either a suspect or a witness, but they didn’t have enough evidence to charge him with anything. Instead, police arrested thirty-three-year-old Heather Jaynes and charged her with perjury. Jaynes is the daughter of former championship boxer Beau Jaynes and the niece of both Micky and Dickie. She was at Captain John’s the night of the fight, and police believe that she was protecting someone, probably Dickie. Jaynes was released after her father posted a one-thousand-dollar-cash bail.

  On July 2, 2006, Dickie was arrested by Lowell vice detectives and charged with possession of crack cocaine.

  According to the police report, Dickie made a call from a phone booth on the corner of Dover and Branch Streets. It was a phone booth known to detectives as one frequently used for drug activity. Dickie and an unidentified woman then got into a cab that took them to a nearby location on Lincoln Street. There, Dickie walked with an Asian male and made what appeared to be a drug transaction. It was twelve o’clock in the afternoon.

  Dickie returned to the cab, and when police pulled it over, they say they could smell freshly burning crack. They searched Dickie and found a glass tube, still warm and with crack residue on it. Police believe Dickie swallowed the rest of the crack he purchased when they pulled over the cab. The woman with Dickie and the cab driver were not taken into custody, but Dickie was arrested for possession and released on forty-dollars bail. A free man once again, Dickie returned to the gym where he was training some of Lowell’s young fighters, impressionable teenagers who looked up to Dickie and hoped that he could do for them what he claimed to have done for Micky.