A STEP BACK: Ray Mancini and Duk-Koo Kim

September 16, 2012 A Step Back By MARK KRIEGEL As a boy, Ray Mancini would pore over his father’s scrapbook, a collection of brittle-brown newspaper clippings and sepia-toned glossies, inevitably pausing to study the photograph of his father as a young fighter, his features bloodied and swollen, the right eye clenched shut like the seam of a mussel shell. “I didn’t win ’em all,” Lenny Mancini would tell his son. “But I never took a step back.” The elder Mancini had been a No. 1 contender in the abundantly talented lightweight division. But his dream of a title shot ended Nov. 10, 1944, near the French town of Metz, when he was hit with shrapnel from a German mortar shell. Four decades later, his son entered the national consciousness. Ray called himself Boom Boom, too, just like the old man. But coming out of Youngstown, Ohio, at the cusp of the 1980s, Ray also represented those felled when the steel belt turned to rust. As refracted through the lens of television, he became The Last White Ethnic, a redemptive fable produced by CBS Sports. Mancini won the lightweight title with a first-round knockout live from Vegas, the broadcast sponsored by Michelin (“the company that pioneered the radial”), Michelob (“smooth and mellow”) and the Norelco Rototract rechargeable. That was 1982. He was only 21, but already a modern allegory, as bankable as he was adored. Then he fought Duk-koo Kim. Kim had hit the Korean exacta at birth: dirt-poor and dark-skinned. But the prospect of a title shot seemed to ennoble him. He became fierce for the sake of his family. At the time of the Mancini fight, his fiancée was pregnant with their son. If only Kim had taken a step back, he might have lived to see that boy. These days, Ray is likely to be found at a trattoria in a Santa Monica strip mall. He’ll likely be joined by one of the regulars — the playwright David Mamet; the actor Ed O’Neill, an old friend from Youngstown; or maybe Ray-Ray, now 15, the youngest of Mancini’s three children. Occasionally, patrons pull the waiter aside and point at Ray. “What was he in?” they ask. “That’s Ray ‘Boom Boom’ Mancini,” the waiter says. “Lightweight champion of the world.” “He’s the guy who killed the guy, right? The Korean?” DUK-KOO KIM was born July 29, 1955. At age 2, he survived the virus that killed his biological father. When he was not yet 5, his mother — Sun-nyo Yang, whom he’d remember as “a woman of great misfortune” — left his stepfather. On the morning Sun-nyo fled with Duk-koo, she carried all their possessions on her head. Finally, at sundown, they stopped in a town 18 kilometers from the demilitarized zone that separated North and South Korea. Banam was a poor fishing village. But to Sun-nyo and her children, the townsfolk must have seemed well off. “I was not embarrassed when I saw my mother begging for food because I was so hungry,” Duk-koo wrote. It was in Banam that Sun-nyo met her last husband. His name was Kim, the most common of Korean surnames. He was a farmer and a fisherman, with a small patch for rice and an old boat he would take out into the East Sea for mackerel, cuttlefish and octopus. Home was a block from the shore — a ramshackle house with a thatched roof and walls fashioned of mud and plywood. A partitioned cinderblock structure in the yard served as both an outhouse and a shelter for the family’s most valued possession, a cow. Duk-koo became the youngest son in the new family. In the summer, he would swim out under a blazing red sun to catch fish and scallops. In the autumn, he’d fry locusts to eat as a snack. In the winter, with snow covering the mountain that rose behind Road No. 7, he and his brothers would corral rabbits and bludgeon them with sticks. Elementary school was a shameful experience; his tuition was usually in arrears. “I would ask my mother for some money, and each time, she would say she didn’t have it,” Duk-koo recalled. “She would hit me every time I asked.” He didn’t fare much better with his fellow students. Duk-koo fought often but not well. These fits of ill-temperedness would often conclude with a teacher pinning a letter to his shirt and parading him around the school. Duk-koo later recalled in his journal: “One new brother used to drag me around forcing me to fight with other village kids. The older kids enjoyed watching our fights, and I despise them even today for it.” He left Banam as a teenager and found his way to Seoul, where he lived under a bridge for a time and subsisted on crackers. Eventually, he held jobs as a welder and a peddler of chestnuts, pogo sticks, palm-reading manuals and ballpoint pens. But it wasn’t until he wandered into the Dong-ah boxing gym that he found a place where he could exploit his rage and ambition. The country’s premier gym, it was run, in an iron-fisted way, by a former fighter named Hyun-chi Kim. “I noticed he was worse off than the others,” Hyun-chi says of Duk-koo. “I didn’t think he was fighter material.” Duk-koo’s aptitude for pugilism was not immediately apparent. He didn’t have heavy hands. He wasn’t fast, or possessed of great stamina. But Yoon-gu Kim, a welterweight, vividly recalls the first time he really hit Duk-koo. Duk-koo just smiled. “He was more strong-willed and ruthless than others,” Yoon-gu says. Duk-koo didn’t train so much as endure. As he wrote in his journal, “Poverty is my teacher.” ONE FLIGHT ABOVE the Dong-ah gym was a tea company, which employed a bookkeeper named Young-mi Lee. She was pale and proper, very pretty, and very Christian. For Duk-koo, gaining her favor seemed slightly less probable than winning the championship of the world. They bumped into each other on the stairway. Young-mi could feel his eyes on her, but she was not the least bit interested. “My parents weren’t so ambitious as to wish to have a doctor or a lawyer as a son-in-law,” she says. “But they wanted me to marry a regular salaryman.” Definitely not a fighter. “I refused to see him,” Young-mi says. “I avoided him.” But Duk-koo remained undeterred, if slightly deluded, with a talkative arrogance that belied his station in life. He spoke as if he were destined for fame and fortune, in love and boxing. He responded to Young-mi’s reticence with love letters. Good ones, too. “They opened my heart,” she says, recalling a line from the first one she received: ...When a man cries because his heart aches, the whole world, heaven and earth, cries with him .... Before agreeing to a date, Young-mi issued a test: “I made him pledge then and there he wouldn’t box again,” she says. He swore he would not. Young-mi had no intention of actually making him quit. “I could see how much he loved boxing,” she says. “It was the thought and the commitment that counted — that he could even think about quitting.” Still, the testing wasn’t done. Young-mi’s disapproving father invited Duk-koo to the family’s home to make his case. Duk-koo told his story, as he’d written it in his journal. Young-mi’s father found Duk-koo, an avid reader of novels and histories like the Samgukji, the history of China’s three ancient kingdoms, to be surprisingly articulate. “He was quite persuasive,” Young-mi recalls. “My father had fled from the north during the Korean War and experienced much hardship. So after hearing about the life that Kim had, he gave in.” Korean fighters were not supposed to have girlfriends. It was considered bad form, as romance was thought to corrupt the fighting spirit. Hyun-chi Kim, the gym’s owner, considered disciplining Duk-koo when he found out about Young-mi. Just the same, neither he nor anyone else at Dong-ah could deny the strangely salutary effect the relationship had on Duk-koo. “He was even more diligent once he got a girlfriend,” recalls Yoon-gu. He would talk for hours with Sang-bong Lee, a featherweight whom he had befriended, arriving at a pugilistic philosophy not unlike the ancient Hwarang warriors, who eschewed the idea of retreat in battle. “Stepping back was shameful,” Sang-bong says. By now, several years into Duk-koo’s tenure at Dong-ah, his stablemates were having trouble reconciling the itinerant hillbilly who arrived in 1977 with the fighter now challenging for the Oriental and Pacific Boxing Federation title. Duk-koo was not a great fighter, but after meeting Young-mi, he became a brave one, and his unanimous decision over Kwang-min Kim on Feb. 28, 1982, made him the World Boxing Association’s No. 1 contender. Duk-koo used the proceeds of the Kwang-min Kim fight to buy a real suit and rent a two-bedroom apartment for him and Young-mi. By the spring of 1982, the couple was discussing marriage. They had engagement parties for her family in Seoul and for his in Banam. But Duk-koo was never happier than the day he hosted a barbecue at the apartment he now shared with his fiancée. “He was full of confidence, and so much pride,” says Seo-in Seong, another Dong-ah fighter. “He believed that the whole world was his.” In early November, Young-mi found herself on a second-floor balcony at Incheon International Airport. In observing that ancient Asian prohibition against fighters taking lovers, she could not be seen with Duk-koo’s modest entourage, or by the gaggle of reporters following them as they boarded their flight to the United States for the Mancini fight. Her fiancé had made news with intemperate remarks that he would beat Mancini, that only one of them would return home alive. “Either he dies,” Duk-koo said, “or I die.” READ THE REST OF THE STORY AT: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/17/sports/families-continue-to-heal-30-years-after-title-bout-between-ray-mancini-and-duk-koo-kim.html?_r=1&hp