by David P. Greisman
Jeff Lacy stood in a dimly lit room in Connecticut the day before his most recent fight, a long time separated from the years that made his name, a name that had long since diminished in value.
“I’m still here,” Lacy told an interviewer from the EsNews video channel, railing against the doubters and critics who he said had no idea what fighters like him go through.
“I’m not going back to where I was,” he said at another point. “I’m going to make it better than ever.”
He was asked about the next evening, about his bout with undefeated light heavyweight Sullivan Barrera.
“You’re going to see the best of me that I can give you tomorrow night,” he said.
Lacy was knocked down in the first round and battered for much of the 11 minutes it took until the fight came to an end in the fourth.
The saddest part is that Lacy was right. That is pretty much the best he can give anymore.
He is now fodder for prospects, a former titleholder whose past accomplishments, however distant, somehow add value to the records of the men who beat him. It is why he was on the undercard of a Fox Sports 1 broadcast last year, lasting barely five minutes with Umberto Savigne. And it is why he was on the undercard of ESPN2’s “Friday Night Fights” last week against Barrera, a prospect promoted by Main Events.
A press release Main Events put out prior to the broadcast included the kind of language that tends to be used to describe opponents who are expected to lose.
“Undefeated Cuban Sensation Sullivan Barrera Takes on Veteran Jeff Lacy,” read the headline within.
“Lacy, 37, made his professional debut in 2001 and remained undefeated for over five years,” read part of the press release, glossing over the precipitous decline that had taken place in the nearly nine years since he suffered his first loss. The only one of Lacy’s fights since then to merit mention was a decision last December over Timothy Hall Jr. There was no context given, nothing saying that Hall was just 9-18. Context is not the job of a promoter.
“He is a former world champion and a tough competitor,” promoter Kathy Duva was quoted as saying within.
Lacy’s crowning achievement and humbling defeat came within 15 months of each other. He won a vacant world title at super middleweight a decade ago, defeating Syd Vanderpool by technical knockout in October 2004. He defended it successfully four times, fighting often. Two months after capturing the belt, he outpointed Omar Sheika. Three months after that, he stopped Rubin Williams. Five months after that, he beat Robin Reid. Three months after that, he made short work of Scott Pemberton.
Four months later, in March 2006, he traveled to the United Kingdom for a unification bout with Joe Calzaghe.
Those who predicted Lacy to win saw him as a rising power-puncher, while Calzaghe had his doubters or people who just weren’t familiar enough with him. Calzaghe promptly showed his class — and exposed Lacy’s limitations — by dominating Lacy over the course of the fight, winning all 12 rounds on the scorecards.
Sure, it was a loss to a future Hall of Famer. But it was also the beginning of the end.
Lacy returned against Vitaly Tsypko in December 2006, winning but tearing his left rotator cuff, hampering the vaunted left hook that earned him his nickname. He was out of the ring for a year, returning at the end of 2007 to take a decision over Peter Manfredo Jr., the former runner-up of boxing reality competition “The Contender.” In July 2008, Lacy won a majority decision over Epifanio Mendoza. That was enough to put him into an elimination bout that November against Jermain Taylor, the former 160-pound champion coming off consecutive losses to Kelly Pavlik.
Lacy lost a wide decision. CompuBox credited him with landing an average of just six punches per round.
Even his next bout, a majority decision victory over Otis Griffin in April 2009, couldn’t dispel the opinion that Lacy was on the decline. Griffin felt he was robbed on the scorecards. An online search shows that there were at least a few others who shared Griffin’s opinion.
That August, Lacy was the designated opponent for Roy Jones’ continued comeback tour. Jones was five years removed from the end of his light heavyweight reign, a 40-year-old clearly past his best days, no longer great enough to win more than one round against Calzaghe but still talented enough to make fools of lesser foes. Jones showboated against Lacy, controlling the action for 10 rounds until Lacy’s trainer stopped the bout.
It was a demoralizing defeat, but not the worst he would suffer. In December 2010, after a layoff of nearly 15 months, Lacy faced Dhafir Smith, a journeyman with a record of 23-19-7. Smith won a clear decision.
It was a bad way to end the year. But the beginning of 2011 put everything else in perspective. Lacy’s brother Hydra killed two police officers before turning the gun on himself.
Jeff Lacy put out a heartfelt statement, then took some much-needed time off, a sabbatical that allowed him to be with his two young sons.
“They [his sons] happened at the perfect time in my life because there was everything going on and I needed something else to focus on,” Lacy told Thomas Gerbasi of BoxingScene.com in November 2013, as he was getting ready to return to the ring. “Boxing was not doing it for me … All the I’s weren’t being dotted and the T’s weren’t being crossed, and I was putting myself in a deeper hole to killing my legacy and not being 100 percent.”
Lacy won quickly over a 20-16-2 opponent named Martin Verdin. But just because he was back in the ring didn’t mean that he was back in old form. The next bout was against Savigne. Lacy, old and undersized and shopworn, was dispatched quickly. He soon proceeded to lay out a theory that the Savigne he’d seen at the weigh-in before the fight had been replaced by a lookalike brother who was even bigger and stronger.
Despite that, he was back in the ring two months later, returning on a card in Washington, D.C., in September 2014. Except his bout was called off at the last second, when the commission shut down the bout because the promoter hadn’t provided it with the money to pay the fighters.
Lacy came to the ring anyway, picking up a microphone and saying he was ready to fight. His opponent also came out. Everyone was ultimately ushered out of the arena. Lacy said he’d been promised $10,000 for the bout.
“I didn’t do everything that I’ve done to fight for free,” he said.
He also wasn’t fighting for the kind of paychecks he had received a decade before.
Yet he continued to fight, beating Hall last December and then going in against Barrera this past Friday.
His career has been done for years now, even if he hasn’t realized it. The writing has long been on the wall. He speaks with an edge in his voice and a chip on his shoulder, yet there is a disconnect between his heart and his body.
He stood in that dimly lit room and spoke with emotion. The next night he walked to the ring in Connecticut, motivated to prove people wrong but unable to do so.
The 10 Count
1. Of course, Jeff Lacy is far from the only fighter to step into the ring long past his best days. Countless names continue on and on and on for smaller and smaller paychecks at a cost to their legacies and their brains.
Danny Williams never achieved the heights that Lacy did — he beat Mike Tyson in 2004, was beaten up by Vitali Klitschko later that year, and had some notable wins in the United Kingdom. He has long been done, yet he continues. Since December 2011, Williams has won just twice and lost 15 times.
I bring this up because of the self-aware yet sad quotes Williams recently gave to a reporter from Boxing News magazine:
“I wanted to retire many years ago but I’ve got two daughters in private school and it’s costing me a bomb to keep them there. The only way I can keep them there is fighting, and it’s not even fighting, it’s embarrassing myself. That’s what I’m doing, I’m embarrassing myself. I’m like a prostitute. I go to these countries who are buying Danny Williams, but they know I’m no longer Danny Williams, and that’s why they want me to go. I’m not Danny Williams anymore.”
I feel for a man who needs a way to make a living and support his family, but at the same time fighting legally is a privilege. If Williams isn’t willing to protect his own health, then the job of protecting him belongs to the organizations that somehow are still licensing him.
2. Yesterday was the biggest day in the NFL. Today, you’re reading a column on a boxing website. Our country is becoming increasingly aware of the repercussions of concussions and hard hits suffered in football. It can be difficult to reconcile the joy we get from watching the drama of such brutal sports given what that brutality means for the athletes participating in them.
“Repeated blows to the head are linked to smaller brain structure volume and slower processing speed,” wrote Kevin Iole of Yahoo! Sports in an article last week related to a continuing study into the brain health of professional fighters.
“The initial results show a correlation between slower processing speeds and smaller brain structure volume with being punched in the head. However, it hasn't been determined whether A) the smaller volume and slower processing time is because of shrinkage related to the head trauma or B) if those born with smaller volume and with slower processing times are at greater risk.”
The study continues, and according to a press release on the Cleveland Clinic website it is expanding to a facility in Ohio that will allow for even more advanced scans of fighters’ brains.
Years ago I wrote about a documentary related to boxers and head trauma called “After the Last Round” — that can be seen at http://bit.ly/fw082211
I have a feeling that just as we’re now hearing more and more about the conditions of former football players, we’ll soon see more awareness of retired boxers and mixed martial artists.
This is something worth monitoring. And thinking about.
3. Former super middleweight titleholder Mikkel Kessler has announced his retirement, citing his inability to get a rematch with Andre Ward or a third fight with Carl Froch.
“These are fights that motivate me,” he was quoted as saying, while other opponents just didn’t motivate him.
Kessler was between the proverbial rock and hard place. He needed to put together a good run against other contenders in order to put himself back in the running for potential fights with Ward and Froch. After all, he hadn’t fought since his rematch loss to Froch in May 2013. Yet he wasn’t willing to get in the ring with those other contenders.
He made the right choice to retire. Fighters who aren’t as motivated are fighters who end up putting themselves in more danger. Kessler had a very good career, with his only losses coming against top opponents (Joe Calzaghe was the first to beat him).
Now I’ll just need to find another fighter to give me a good excuse to cover a bout in Copenhagen.
4. Everyone is taking a bite out of the Big Apple.
Wladimir Klitschko will defend against Bryant Jennings on April 25 at Madison Square Garden.
Danny Garcia will face Lamont Peterson on April 11, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that bout ends up at Barclays Center in Brooklyn.
And last week Bob Arum of Top Rank said he was looking at a March 21 card in The Theater at Madison Square Garden featuring Terence Crawford and Nicholas Walters in separate bouts.
That’s three cards in the span of six weekends. I wonder what the turnout will be for those events, if they come off on those dates and in those locations. New York City is a big market in terms of population, yet I wonder if there are enough boxing fans to make all three shows a success at the box office.
It can work. And I hope it does.
5. Boxers Behaving Goodly: A combined boxing and mixed martial arts card held last week in St. Louis raised money for charity and was made up of “police officers, firefighters and emergency medical personnel from Missouri and Illinois,” according to the city’s Fox 2 television station. The charity supports the families of emergency responders who die in the line of work.
And former junior-welterweight titleholder Chris Algieri visited kids last week at the Stony Brook Children’s Hospital.
6. Boxers Behaving Badly, part one: Police last week were still searching for Edison Miranda after the former contender was one of 29 charged under a federal indictment with being connected to drug trafficking, according to Puerto Rican newspaper El Nuevo Día.
Miranda is accused of money laundering. “His job was to bring the money back and forth,” a special agent was quoted as saying in the article, via Google Translate.
Miranda challenged for a middleweight title in 2006, losing to Arthur Abraham, then was stopped by Kelly Pavlik in 2007. That marked the end of his time toward the top, though he did still face big names in losing efforts with a rematch loss to Abraham in 2008 (TKO4), a decision loss to Andre Ward in 2009, and a third-round stoppage loss to Lucian Bute in 2010.
He then went up to light heavyweight, dropping four of five to prospects capitalizing on the faded name (with the defeats coming against Yordanis Despaigne, Isaac Chilemba, Tony Bellew and Eleider Alvarez). Last year he moved up to cruiserweight, dropping a decision to Yunier Dorticos and then scoring his first win in years with a first-round knockout of the 0-4 Daniel Noguera.
Miranda is now 34 years old and is 36-10 with 31 KOs.
7. The best line I saw on this story came via a tweet from Top Rank executive Carl Moretti:
“I guess he’s about to find out what his real Miranda rights are.”
8. Eight years ago, Jermain Taylor was the middleweight champion while Kelly Pavlik and Edison Miranda were soon to fight for the right to challenge Taylor.
Today, Taylor is somehow a titleholder at 160 pounds again but has gotten himself into serious legal trouble with two alarming shooting incidents, all while people wonder about whether the past damage he took and a brain bleed have contributed to his behavior.
Pavlik is retired and noted his own health issues, all while having multiple dates in court due to alcohol-related charges.
And Miranda is done as a notable prizefighter and has authorities seeking to take him into custody.
9. Boxers Behaving Badly, part two: Former junior welterweight/welterweight Eamonn Magee has been found guilty of grabbing a woman by her hair, dragging her to the ground, and kicking and striking her, according to Northern Ireland newspaper The Belfast Telegraph. A sentencing hearing has been set for February.
The incident happened at an apartment in July. Magee “had left a bar with [the victim] and her boyfriend to go back to a mutual friend's flat,” the report said. Magee claimed the woman assaulted him first, but the judge said he didn’t believe the 43-year-old former fighter.
Magee has a history of violence against women. Last year he was sentenced to four months in jail, only to have that sentence suspended, after being convicted of assault for kicking his ex-wife. The judge in that case also dismissed a charge of theft; Magee had been accused of taking some cash and a key to his ex-wife’s house. Another past case saw him sentenced to a year for grabbing a woman by her hair and attempting to throw her down a set of stairs, the Telegraph reported at the time.
Magee, 42, left the sport in 2007 with a record of 27-6 (18 KOs). He lost a decision to Ricky Hatton in 2002.
10. In football, the craziness of fake media members asking athletes questions is called Media Day. In boxing, it’s every post-fight press conference.
“Fighting Words” appears every Monday on BoxingScene.com. Pick up a copy of David’s book, “Fighting Words: The Heart and Heartbreak of Boxing,” at http://bit.ly/fightingwordsamazon or internationally at http://bit.ly/fightingwordsworldwide . Send questions/comments via email at fightingwords1@gmail.com