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Crazy story. Good thing she didn't know the Basilio counter.
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Yea, she wasn't prepare for the moves...she was strictly an offensive machine
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I have to find it...I have it on my comp somewhere. Hammer was coolComment
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That's right...I knew it was going to make big news...shows you mob mentality, though..they were holding me back in the upper left corner and the whole time I was trying to get away, get loose and get CRAZY lol.....i was in the moment....glad I didnt, thoughComment
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I need to have someone put the ENTIRE clip of that on for u allComment
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HERE'S ONE, (edited to fit on here):
How many times have you read about a pro athlete that wanted to be paid to sign an autograph? I know of a few. How about all the guys that didn't attend certain functions unless they were paid to do so?? I know of a few.
I know of a former legendary world champion, for example, that I was going to have come to a function for some kids (he would have only had to drive less than twenty minutes to get there) but he declined the offer pretty much because there was no money in it for him.
I know an amateur kid, a U.S. Olympian, who was at a fight show one night not that long ago and when the boxers in attendance were introduced to the crowd it wasn't long before people in the crowd wanted autographs. This kid, though, stated that he wasn't going to sign unless people paid him for his autograph!
Not all guys are like that but, unfortunately, you don't always hear about the ones that are not. You will now, though, because I believe that the word "champion" can conjure up a lot of different images. Some people think of champions and guys like Marciano, Louis, Ali, Leonard, Hagler and Trinidad come to mind. They are the "superstar" champions, the elite. But there are other types of champions, too. There are guys out there that are world championship level boxers but they are not particularly pleasant people and in some cases they are, for lack of a better word, out and out jerks. I know of one former world heavyweight champion who several friends of mine have dealt with in person and they came away shocked and, let's say, less than impressed. One of them was present at the "International Boxing Writers Association" dinner a few years ago in New York City and he told me he was standing right there when Iran "The Blade" Barkley was walking around afterwards getting some of his fellow champions to sign his program book and when a former heavyweight champ was coming off the dais and "The Blade" asked him to sign it he was given a flat out "NO" right there in front of several equally surprised people. I told that story to some friends of mine from Montreal and one of them proceeded to tell me how he drove about five or six hours to the Roy Jones-Merqui Sosa fight in 1996 at MSG and when he saw this same former champ present at ringside he approached him and politely said something like "Hey, Mister ****, How are you?" The champ didn't even turn to look at my friend and it was so blatant that my friend just assumed that the guy didn't hear him (even though he was less than two feet away). So he moves a little bit over to his left so he would be very obvious to the champ and again tries to start up a conversation and again the so called "champ" ignores him as if he was invisible. When my friend finally realized what was going on he let the champ verbally have it and as a result his image of his now former idol has never been quite the same.
Imagine Ali doing that to a fan? (Of course not!)
In 1999 I was doing a state amateur tournament at my gym in Hartford, The San Juan Center, and I wanted it to be special. I remember when I was a kid and being at tournaments and seeing different boxers there and it was always an exciting time to box in front of these guys, having them witness as you did your stuff. Sugar Ray Leonard was at the 1986 National PAL tournament one time when I fought there (in 1986) and Frankie Randall, Bernard Taylor and Clint Jackson were in the audience at the Nationals Golden Gloves in 1987 when I made it to the finals. I always remembered it as adding something to the event that these established guys were there to watch us amateurs try to make it to where they are. As a result, when I do amateur shows now I often try to get some of the local and regional pros to come by and make appearances.
Seeing how I was doing an amateur championship tourney at that time back in 1999 I decided I wanted to get someone who at one time was a great amateur and my first choice was Mark Breland. So I am on the phone with him in the gym one day and we are making plans for him to come up and during the conversation he just happened to ask me about his former rival Marlon Starling. "How's he been doing?" I said "Well, I am looking at him right now across the gym and he seems to be doing good." Now, as far as I knew, he and Marlon had never even really spoke before other than at the press conferences for their fights. So I call Moochie over and tell him there is someone on the phone for him, a blast from his past. He gets on and disguises his voice. He and Mark go back and forth for about a minute before Marlon realizes who it is and gets all excited. "Mark? Mark! What's up, Mark?!!? How you been??" They talk for a while and when he gets off the phone Marlon is still happy excited to have spoken to a former opponent who he shared the ring with on two occasions in world title fights.
So on the designated day of the tournament Mark drives more than two hours from deep in Brooklyn to get to my gym in Hartford. I had this bio on him drawn up with a black and white copy of a picture of him that I hand out to everyone in the crowd and when they introduce him to the crowd it takes about two full minutes for the ring announcer to read off all Mark's amateur accomplishments. The crowd gets to buzzing more and more as each title and accomplishment is read off and by the time the guy finished reading it all Mark has a crowd of people around him wanting him to sign the photo and take pictures with them. Earlier in the night I had went to hand one of the photos to a tough looking guy, about twenty years old, but he just kind of waved me off. He was too cool to be taking photos of some guy, you know? By the time the announcer got done reading all Mark's amateur stuff, though, this same guy sheepishly comes back over to me and, without actually speaking the words, asked me for a photo.
He laughed, too... as I laughed at him.
Standing next to Mark during all this is another former world welterweight champion, his former rival Marlon Starling, and the two stood there all night long talking and catching up on old times and posing for photos with all the fans who are amazed that these two former champions -and opponents of each other- are in the same place at the same time for the whole night. Both of them hand out trophies to some of the winners of the night. When it comes time for him to leave I start to bring him to the door so I can point out the way back to the highway but Marlon steps in and tells me he's got it and that he will show Mark the way. Mark leaves without ever once asking for as much as ten cents for gas.
About five months later a friend of mine, Paul Cichon at the Manchester Gym, is running his annual fund raising amateur boxing show about twenty minutes from Hartford and he tells me he would love to have a boxing celebrity come to his show to add something special to the night. Starling will be there but it is a thing where Marlon is always at the amateur shows and people are used to seeing him. So I call Mark again and he agrees once more to come add to the show. He does a great job handing out trophies and mingling with the crowd. It turns out the wife of the Police Chief is a big fan of Mark and she is absolutely delighted when Mark shows up and takes pictures with her.
Once again, true to form, Mark Breland never once asks for so much as a dime for gas. However, Paul is making money on the show and plans ahead to give the former champ a nice plaque (as we did at the show in November) and a great introduction in the ring. His appearance helps the show a great deal and to this day they still talk about how humble and cool he was. Two hours each way for a former Olympic and world boxing champion just to attend an amateur boxing show without asking for some form of compensation is not the norm, believe that. .Comment
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The Breland story is then followed by this....
Several years later I had the honor of once again having a part in allowing a champion to show his qualities to the public. My good friend, Massachusetts welterweight Jose Antonio Rivera, was the WBA (regular) 147 pound champion at the time having won that vacant title with a stirring and gutsy twelve round decision in Germany over local hometown hero Michael Trabant. Jose is a blue collar fighter, a no-nonsense type of guy who relies on supreme conditioning to grind out victory after victory. That summer I was holding a summer rec position at a youth facility in Connecticut and the guy that ran the department, former national college boxing champion Johnny Callas, asked if I could recommend a speaker to come in and talk to the kids. Since each and every kid there was there as a teenager incarcerated by the state of Connecticut it stood to reason that they could use some talking to and who better than a successful athlete who himself had been through many situations similar to what these kids had already faced at some point in their young lives? I immediately thought of Jose and his story. What a story it is.
Mother passes away, takes her own life, when he is just ten years old. He runs the streets, hangs with the toughest crowd. Friends got murdered, drugged out, beat up and/or sent to prison. By age thirteen he has quit school and moved to Puerto Rico where he worked in a field all day for just five dollars a week.
He talks now of the feelings he had back then about life and the world. He hated both of them.
At age fifteen an aunt steps back into his life and steers him back to the right road. By age sixteen he is living on his own with a fellow amateur boxer named Bobby Harris. A trainer from Worcester by the name of Carlos Garcia, a man who had been through his own ordeals as a younger man, takes him in and helps to mold him into not just a world class boxer but a productive member of this society.
Fast forward more than fifteen years into the future and the full time court officer in Worcester, Massachusetts is not only a devoted father to his son Anthonee and a WBA welterweight champion but he is also a man who has been inducted into the Worcester Boys and Girls Club Hall of Fame and, maybe most importantly, has twice been named "Speaker of the Year" by the Massachusetts branch of the United Way.
And now (in the summer of 2004) more than fifteen years after he just as easily could have taken steps that would have surely seen him visiting a facility like this for twenty years instead of two hours, armed with the knowledge and experience that he gained from growing up under such conditions to make his way to the top of the boxing world, Jose drove the two hours from his home in Massachusetts -no questions asked- to the facility in Connecticut to speak to a couple hundred kids that probably reminded him a lot of himself.
He spoke. The kids listened intently as he gave a great speech that really hit home with a great majority of them, too, because many of them had faced (or are facing) similar situations as he did in his life. He told them, showed them, it is possible to change what you view as your future and that YOU do have some control over where it takes you. It's possible to make it.
And at the end of the speech he uttered the three lines that brought the house down:
"There are three kinds of people in this world. There are those who see things happen, there are those who wish things would happen and then there are those who make things happen. Which one are you going to be?"
Kids were talking about that one for days and the staff was, too. They also talked about how he stayed late afterwards and patiently signed an autographed photo for each and every kid in the whole facility. (The one kid that missed the signing because he was off the grounds that day got a signed picture mailed to him, through me, less than a week later.) John Callas told me how he was so very surprised to see that Jose came all that way alone. No entourage. No press agent. No friends. No demands for a bottle of Perrier water on hand to drink during the speech and no requests for a private dressing room, either. No expectation of any "star treatment" whatsoever. He also told me how Jose refused to accept the money that was set aside by the state to give such speakers, telling Callas if the kids would just listen to him then it was worth it to him to take the day and drive over.
Trust me, champ, they listened. Everybody listened.Comment
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