“Honestly, guys, this is going to be great,” I said as I left the bar at Forlini’s restaurant in Catskill.
It was July 13, 2001, and I was walking to a room around the back of the ‘resort’ where there was a TV for anyone who wanted to watch some sport.
Now, I had a sneaking suspicion that Micky Ward versus Emanuel Augustus was going to be an absolute riot.
They were boxing in the ESPN main event in Hampton Beach and I was living and breathing the sport.
I could see things through the crystal-clear lens of a man (sic: boy) who was 22 and thought he knew it all. I thought I could see good matches when they were made. It was not at all uncommon for me to pick the winner of a fight and name the round, or only be one or two rounds out.
I felt I lived in a boxing matrix. I was so consumed by it.
And when I knew Ward was fighting Augustus, I thought one word: banger.
I was living in Catskill to train with Kevin Rooney. I was a huge Mike Tyson fan in my youth – before the really crazy stuff came along – and I always loved the way Cus D’Amato spoke about fear and embraced it. None of my other trainers did. On the contrary, one of my coaches told me, aged 19, for one last big round, to imagine I’d got home and someone had murdered my parents and raped my girlfriend.
Now, that might have worked for some boxers, but I thought it was pretty grim and it didn’t serve to motivate me. I was much more an arm-around-me sort of guy. If someone believed in me as a boxer, I felt I could do something. That is, in part, because I was so willing to learn, practise and do anything I was told – with the exception of imagining my parents were dead and my girlfriend had been brutally attacked.
Anyway, I spent a few months with Rooney and I’d come to stay at Forlini’s. They gave me a bed in an outbuilding in exchange for doing menial jobs around the place, from gathering ice for the bar to cutting the grass and cleaning the swimming pool.
Freddie and Mary, who owned it, were a delight. Safe to say, they took me in.
Still, as I encouraged everyone to gather around the screen, I found myself there, on my own, for the first bell. Oh well.
**
Micky Ward strolled out of his corner and nonchalantly threw an overhand right from the 15th row. That set the tone.
You see, Ward was a brawler, a persistent menace with one of the best left hooks downstairs the sport has ever seen and, a paver by day, never took a step back.
Augustus was nuts. He would dance, showboat, win fights he should have lost and flatten guys who were expected to beat him. His mixed record served only to highlight his mood, not his skills.
He had, after all, given Floyd Mayweather fits in a fight Mayweather would often refer to as his hardest.
That Augustus showed up against Ward and there were two stories that night: one taking place about 200 miles away and the other unfolding in the back of Forlini’s – and both were magical.
Within 20 seconds, Augustus was on the ropes and Ward was on his chest – and they were both letting the leather fly. I bloody knew this was coming.
**
Within 90 seconds, you could hear the excitement in Teddy Atlas’ voice on colour commentary and he shouted for the first time within two minutes. When they describe a phone-box fight, this is what they talk about.
Ward pounded his gloves together when they walked away from one another and here’s a stat for the ages: in that first round, in which Ward had thrown more than 100 punches with 20 seconds remaining, not one was a jab.
Ward was busier, but Augustus – then Emanuel Burton, by the way – was more accurate. And the self-styled “Drunken Master” often smiled despite having to work his socks off to stay in the fight.
Micky bled from the nose in the third and Burton grinned after Ward attempted a double jab and fell short of landing with real purpose. Lowell’s Ward kept switching stances this way and that, and Micky pinned Augustus on the ropes before Augustus battled back off them. It was war.
The crowd at Hampton Beach was invested and so was I. I ran into the bar and urged some of the regulars to come through.
“You gotta see this,” I enthused.
