In 2010, I travelled to Arlington, Texas, to attend Manny Pacquiao’s bout with Joshua Clottey at Cowboys Stadium. It was memorable for several things, and at risk of being lazy, here are three of them in a list.
1. For me, watching ringside, it represented the ever so slight decline of Pacquiao, and told me that the Cotto fight before – which I was also ringside for, in Las Vegas – was the pinnacle, and now he was just on the other side.
2. Bob Arum holding court in the bowels of the arena at about 1am. I was shattered, exhausted and desperate to go to sleep. But Bob, about a half century older than me, was lapping up the media’s questions when everyone else needed their beds. He was about 80 even then.
3. I was going through a horrible divorce, eating two peanut butter sandwiches a day and sleeping in my car while getting unfairly and unjustly cleaned out. While talking with a member of the British press, he sympathised with me, said he understood and could feel my pain. After all, he said, he had to decide which of – he slipped into conversation – his several houses/mansions he was set to lose in his divorce. Talk about tone deaf.
But I suppose what I remember just as much as anything was my efforts to track down old fighters. This is something I’ve done throughout my career. If there’s a big fight somewhere and I’m attending, you can bank on me scouring the area trying to find old boxers to tell their stories.
On this trip, I managed to find Curtis Cokes and interviewed him at his home. I couldn’t pin down Donald Curry, sadly, but one name I wanted really stood out and it was that of Donnie Fleeman. He was a former contender who boxed Ezzard Charles, Pete Rademacher and he actually became the fifth man to face the-then Muhammad Ali.
My old friend, Tom Jess, gave me an address for Fleeman, and a phone number, and I called. I reported back to Jess via email: “Quick update. I spoke to Fleeman yesterday and agreed to meet him at his place this morning. But he wasn’t there. Cokes was 11 miles away but the number didn’t work. I cold called him and he was in so interviewed him instead. His new number is 214 (I won’t include it here). I might go back for Fleeman in the morning but I think he sounded a bit like Harold Johnson... Not very good with the memory.”
Tom replied: “Thanks for the update. I would suggest you keep trying to get Fleeman. I hate to say it, but it could possibly be his last interview.”
So I did. I went back the next day and conducted this; the last interview Donnie Fleeman ever did.
THE peanuts fizzed as he poured them into a large glass of Pepsi.
A quizzical look spread across my face. My jaw dropped a little.
“Do you want some with yours,” Donnie Fleeman said, threatening to tip some in my ‘regular’ Pepsi.
“No, I’m okay,” was my bland response.
“You don’t know what you’re missing,” he said.
I thought I did.
