When you look back on it now, it was lunacy. I was living in Atlantic City, as close as you could be to being broke while being able to stay alive and I’d not spoken to anyone back home in months.
Life for me was training in between the Atlantic City Police Athletic League Gym and the Pleasantville Recreation Center and trying to do just about anything I could in the sport.
But one day, having had one interview published in Boxing News, with Micky Ward, I thought I would try to do three in a day.
Now I was not in a position to pitch anything. I had no idea if anyone would speak to me or if Boxing News would take anything else from me. I would write the pieces, send them in and hope they made the grade.
I also knew that there was no space for fan-style pieces in serious boxing journalism. No one wanted to read what a twenty-year-old kid thought would happen if Mike Tyson fought Jack Dempsey, or whether Lennox Lewis was “overrated.”
I had to offer something unique and that, I decided, was interviewing old fighters.
A couple of years earlier, I met an autograph collector from New Jersey called Tom Jess. He was at the International Boxing Hall of Fame with bantamweight legend Jeff Chandler and told me he had a few addresses and numbers for retired fighters. He sent me a list and, being an absolute nobody, I looked longingly at the names and imagined what it would be like to meet some of these incredible fighters.
It was a dream.
*
It was a year or so on and I had these names and addresses in front of me. Autograph collectors back then would share newsletters and swap information about celebrities from all walks of life and would speculatively send items off to addresses to be signed and returned. Somethings came back – signed no less – some did not. It was pot luck.
Well, I had three addresses on this morning in late 2002. One was of former middleweight contender Rocky Castellani, and it was in Atlantic City. One was a number for ex-middleweight champion Joey Giardiello, and one was for Chandler. I only knew Chandler’s information, an address, to be up to date.
But this was in an era before mobile phones and using the internet was not as commonplace as it would become.
*
It started, paper map from the bus station in hand, with a long stroll down the famous Boardwalk to Ventnor to visit Castellani. That went well enough and is a story for another day. It culminated with a bit at the end which was one of the most memorable sections of my book, The Road to Nowhere, with me eventually tracking down Chandler in Philly.
The middle part of it all might have been the most haphazard stroke of luck I’d had in a while.
After speaking to Rocky, I made my way to a phone box and called Joey Giardiello. He said he would see me and he was in Cherry Hill. He told me to call when I arrived and he would come out and meet me. That instigated a walk back to the bus station so I could get a ride to Cherry Hill, which was on the route to Philly, where I held hopes of meeting Chandler later in the day.
I arrived in Cherry Hill and called Joey, who handed me over to a friend of his. He was an Englishman called Peter Green, and he said he’d been invited to join us because he was a friend of Joey’s and a countryman of mine. That made things very easy.
My instructions were to make my way to the Diamond Diner and they would meet me there and it all felt rather surreal.
I had been around a lot of fighters by this point, but it was crazy to think I was in Rocky Castellani’s house in the morning and then about to have lunch with Giardello just hours apart. Ironically, they had boxed each other in 1951 with Rocky climbing off the canvas to win a decision over 10 rounds in Scranton, Pennsylvania.
I arrived at the diner shortly before they did, and when they came in, Peter and Joey embraced me like an old friend and Joey started chatting up the waitresses.
He smiled and joked and, not long after being seated, he was talking about desserts and sweet things.
I played the straightest and most boring bat I could and ordered a chicken salad. With hindsight, it was a ridiculous choice. I’d not had anything of significant sustenance for weeks but was too polite to pick anything else. Plus, I was not assuming anyone else was paying and that was the cheapest selection.
And then, with our orders taken and the seventy-two-year-old Giardiello being reined in from flirting with the staff by the similarly-aged Peter, we started to chat about Joey’s life and career.
While I was familiar with Joey’s accomplishments, there is no question I looked into what he’d done even more in the aftermath of his portrayal in the film The Hurricane, with Denzel Washington playing Rubin “Hurricane” Carter in the lead role. But we will get to that.
*
“Are you looking for me?” smiled the small man with short white hair and a cosy looking autumnal golfing jacket.
It was Joey Gairdello and rather than shake my hand, he opted to embrace me.
I told him I’d just seen Rocky, and that Castellani had told me he was going to make a comeback to fight Joey again.
“Is that what he said?” Joey smiled. “I beat the shit out of him but I didn’t get the decision. It’s a long time ago now.”
As we sat down and ate, with Joey charming any waitress that came close to the table, he went through his story. He talked about joining the army and then deserting the forces because he missed his friends and couldn’t settle in. He was in the 82nd Airborne Division and was ultimately given a dishonourable discharge.
That saw him start his pro career and he boxed 33 times in his first three years as a pro, and as Joey talked, occasionally you could see patrons at other tables start to listen to his stories and sometimes he was stopped mid-flow with a visitor to the table who said: “Hey, Champ.”
Joey’s colourful stories tumbled from him and he spoke about everything. I even ventured to ask him about his suspected ties with organised crime figures.
“If I was with The Mob, they didn’t do a very good job because I was always begging for a title shot,” he insisted. “I was the top contender for a long time but no one would fight me. The Mob was meant to be able to help people get title fights, weren’t they?”
There was a hint of a smirk when Joey said it.
Joey had been born in Brooklyn but later moved to Philadelphia and he fought a long list of top fighters and some of them several times.
He fought Gene Fullmer to a bloody draw, defeated Sugar Ray Robinson to finally get his rating as No. 1, fought Dick Tiger four times and, of course, defeated Rubin Carter in a fight he deservedly won but that Hollywood producers telling the ‘Hurricane’ story took liberties with, making it look like Joey won because of racist judges.
Joey won a lawsuit over that, and that had happened not too long before we met.
Recalling the movie premier, Joey said: “I climbed out of my chair and felt like shouting, ‘That never happened.’”
Press cuttings at the time revealed Joey had been a worthy winner.
In his 97-26-8 (30 KOs) record, Joey boxed the likes of Wilf Greaves, Juan Carlos Rivero, George Benton, Henry Hank, Ralph Dupas, Peter Mueller, Terry Downes, Spider Webb, Del Flanagan and Holly Mims.
He got robbed on the road a few times, but by the early 2000s he could smile about it all.
“The one thing I will say,” he added. “My mangers were the bravest guys in the world. They didn’t give a shit who I fought. They made me fight all the toughest guys around… In those days the champions could fight. They were all good fighters. These days I don’t many of them and it seems everybody is a champion.”
*
As we said our goodbyes in the entry hall to the diner, I asked Joey if he’d stop and pose for a photo. On his insistence, we had one together. Then he wanted one of me, Peter and himself. Finally, as he left the diner, I said I might just need one of him on his own. He relented and stood there, on an autumnal midday in Cherry Hill, held his hands in a fighting pose, and I snapped him with the crisp blue air in the background. I was buzzing. What a day. Now it was on to Philly to find Jeff.
*
I was so grateful for everything Peter had done, bringing Joey, encouraging conversation and also picking up the tab at the diner, that we stayed in touch until around 2010.
Throughout that time, he’d give me sporadic updates on Joey.
