The Travelin’ Man Chronicles: "Doubles" Begin
By Lee Groves
The first ESPN boxing "doubleheader week" kicked off last week, and it proved to be an aeronautical and emotional roller coaster. It was a trip filled with contrasts between the ropes and beyond them on many levels. We saw prospects emerge, ring veterans falter and novice pros seek their place in the pecking order, a place that lasts only as long as the time between fights. For more details on what happened, read this week's two-part installment of "The Traveling Man Chronicles."
Tuesday, April 15: Football players know all about "two-a-days," the tortuously intense phase of training camp involving morning and afternoon practices. These days the process is less arduous only because players keep themselves in shape year-around as opposed to their predecessors, but the tradition of two-a-days remains a vital rite of football culture.
In that vein, the 2008 ESPN boxing season began its own version of two-a-days as it kicked off its slate of Wednesday-Friday telecasts. For many, the next four months will be a blurring succession of airports, hotels, rental cars and fight arenas that surely will test their endurance as well as their patience with the perpetually embattled airline industry.
For everyone involved in the Traveling Circus the pressures of preparation and performance are escalated. The production crews must walk the demanding tight rope of technical perfection not once but twice every week. The on-air talent must gather and present information on twice as many fighters yet do so with the same level of professionalism and enthusiasm, a charge that could get difficult during the later stages of this annual odyssey.
For the punch counters – at least this one – the additional demands are limited to the logistics of being on the road five days per week as opposed to three. I do need to pack more clothes and do so in a way that allows me to avoid checking bags, thus skipping the horrors and delays of baggage claim. Because CompuBox has a well-stocked roster – and because company president Bob Canobbio is mindful of the strains of travel – the two-a-weeks will only be an occasional phenomenon.
Still, I was offered – and I accepted – the assignment of doing this "double" that began with Wednesday's card at the Manhattan Center’s Hammerstein Ballroom in New York City and ended with Friday's show at the Buffalo Run Casino in Miami, Okla. One couldn't ask for a much bigger contrast in terms of pace, culture, geography, climate and accessibility. The first four assets are self-explanatory but the fifth needs further illumination.
My route from West Virginia to New York was an exercise in simplicity: A two-and-a-half hour drive to Pittsburgh International Airport, a 90-minute flight to LaGuardia and a 300 yard walk across an elevated bridge to the Marriott. But my route from New York to the "other" Miami was far more complex. A 90-minute flight from LaGuardia to Philadelphia, a three-hour journey from Philly to Kansas City and a 50-minute trip from Kansas City to Joplin, Mo., capped off by a 34-mile drive from Joplin to Miami – and that’s if everything goes well.
As difficult as the journey to Miami would be, the degree of difficulty in getting home was even higher. Because of Joplin's limited slate of flights, and the multi-layered string of planes necessary to get me back to Pittsburgh at a decent time of day, I had to schedule a flight for 5:45 a.m. Because I would unlikely be back at my hotel until late I had to decide whether to catch a few hours of sleep at the hotel or stay up and catch a few winks on my flights. But those were issues for another day.
After checking into my room, I completed my other major goal for the day – finishing another future Closet Classic. When I stopped working for the newspaper, I thought that I would have problems finding ways to occupy the sudden influx of free time. In the last 14 months I've discovered that if one is properly motivated he will find plenty of avenues to stay productive. The big difference between then and now is that my time is spent doing things for which I have great passion as opposed to my previous life where I was driven only by my professional sense of obligation. The gulf between those two attitudes is immense, but that explanation of how that applies to my life will be saved for a future date.
Wednesday, April 16: I awakened to a brilliant cloudless sky, though the view from my window was dominated not by the gorgeous New York skyline but by the hotel's heating and cooling systems. But I'm not one to spend lots of time gazing at scenic views; I am a working guy and as such I spent most of the morning cranking out copy on my laptop and brainstorming about new story ideas. One always has to be on his toes in the boxing business, whether it takes place inside the ring, at the negotiating table or, in my case, before the keyboard.
The common challenge is maintaining that creative edge that will make you attractive to your audience. For writers, that entails producing entertaining and informative copy week after week while for boxers it calls for a dynamic combination of performance and persona. In this age of diverse entertainment options athletes must go beyond the norm to get noticed, and that certainly applies to the fighters involved in tonight's main event – Peter Quillin and Antwun Echols.
The undefeated 24-year-old Quillin has a taste for history (his "Kid Chocolate" nickname is a tribute to the former two-division king of the 1930s), candy (he throws Hershey's Kisses to the crowd after every bout) and blasting out opponents (14 knockouts in 17 wins – all within two rounds). But those who gathered at the Hammerstein Ballroom wanted to see if Quillin would hammer by far the best and most experienced opponent of his career.
The 36-year-old Echols was once where Quillin is. As a middleweight prospect in the mid-1990s, "Kid Dynamite" rebounded from a disastrous pro debut (a one-round TKO to Anthony Ivory) and blew up his next 13 opponents, only one of which lasted past the third round. A close decision loss to the unbeaten Chris Johnson and a draw against future 168-pound champ Eric Lucas proved to be temporary roadblocks as he strung together eight more knockouts before losing a decision to IBF middleweight champion Bernard Hopkins in December 1999. Echols then avenged his loss to Ivory (W 10) and stopped Lionel Ortiz in seven to earn another crack at Hopkins, which ended in a foul-filled and bizarre 10th round TKO defeat in December 2000.
Echols found new life as a super middleweight with victories over Charles Brewer (KO 3), Kabary Salem (W 12) and Richard Grant (KO 3) that earned him a rare third shot at the brass ring, this time against WBA champ Anthony Mundine. But it was not to be for Echols as he lost a unanimous decision, and since then he has been a dangerous, if not always successful, gatekeeper. Entering the Quillin fight, Echols had posted an unusual record of one loss and three draws in his last four fights, including a 10-round stalemate against the unbeaten Michael Walker in his last outing in Marksville, La. – on Leap Day no less.
As he aged, Echols developed an attack based more on volume than power, perhaps because he no longer had the reflexes to reliably line up and release the knockout shot in the necessary time frame. He scored just one stoppage in the last five-and-a-half years because he was no longer a kid and his fists no longer carried their full complement of dynamite. But while he lost the gifts of youth, the benefits of experience and wisdom enabled him to craft a new blueprint that afforded him the luxury of piling up points and inflicting damage in small bits while he waited for his dying embers to detonate. It was a suitable but imperfect approach given his recent record, but it did allow him to stay in the sport for a little while longer. And his reward? A steady diet of ambitious up-and-comers whose sole mission was to transform him into a down-and-outer.
I used the hotel's car service to get to the arena and I arrived shortly after 4:30. For the second consecutive Wednesday, the telecast was conducted on a "live to tape" basis to accommodate a live baseball game but I still had some time to kill before the 8 p.m., start. A good part of it was spent with judge Julie Lederman, who happens to be a faithful reader of the Travelin' Man Chronicles. We chatted at ringside while she filled out her judging slips along with New York State Athletic Commission Chairman Ron Scott Stevens, who was seated a few feet to our right.
The last time I saw Lederman was at last month's card in Salamanca, N.Y., where white-out conditions eventually produced three inches of snow as well as tricky driving conditions. She related a story in which she and fellow judge Steve Weisfeld had problems negotiating the slippery roads.
"I kept saying, 'oh my God, why I am doing this? Why did I agree to do this? This is crazy!'" she recalled. "But Steve is a very safe and cautious driver so we got there OK, though he was holding on to the wheel pretty tight." As for me I arrived at the hotel before the brunt of the storm hit, but I've driven through enough snowstorms to sympathize with their plight.
Judges typically arrive at the arena several hours before the show, not only to prepare their slips but to also attend a meeting headed by the chief commissioner to make sure everyone is on the same page. Teamwork is a must with judges, Lederman said, and in that spirit friendships often are formed. A few minutes later Melvina Lathan arrived at ringside and Lederman presented her with a personalized plastic luggage tag complete with a rendering of a boxing glove. Lederman said a friend of hers made these and thought it would be a great gift given the amount of traveling judges endure each year. She was right.
