Tom Is Ready To Rummmmble! By Tom Danehy I'VE NEVER REALLY liked boxing. At best I have mixed feelings about it, marvelling at the conditioning of the athletes and the punishment they endure, but at the same time being absolutely repulsed by the blood thirst of the fans, the savagery of the sport and mostly by the high percentage of lowlifes who inhabit the fringes and big-money parts of the sport. Perhaps that makes me less of a man than other sports fans, but the simple truth is that I just don't get that primal rush that a lot of other guys have told me about. Oddly enough, I sorta get it from watching a good hit in football, but then the object of football isn't to beat somebody senseless. Boxing has never held an appeal for me. Even as a kid, growing up in a tough neighborhood in L.A., I didn't understand the need to fight. Probably the weirdest fact of my weird life is that I managed to grow up as a skinny white kid in a black/Hispanic part of town and never once got in a fight. Had to talk my way out of a couple, but never really came close to having to throw a punch. And thank God for that. There was this one guy in high school named Eric Thomas who just didn't like me on general principle. He had boxed in some Golden Gloves tournaments and was supposed to be pretty good. He was even trying to piece together a professional schtick about being "Baby Cassius" (based on Muhammad Ali), where he would recite some bad poetry and then dance around the ring. He was on the undercard at the old Olympic Auditorium in L.A. matched against a Mexican buzzsaw whose name escapes me. The fight was close until it started and then old Eric took the beating of his life. In fact, he came close to getting killed that night. The Mexican boxer just punished him, round after round, shouting in Spanish, "Tell me some more poetry!" The referee, who was almost as hapless as Eric, let the thing go on much too long, and by the time he stopped it, Eric had to be carried from the ring straight to the hospital. He never stepped in the ring again, and frankly, I didn't shed a whole lot of tears for him. Actually, none. A guy who lived next door to me for a few years when I was growing up in the Projects also became a boxer. His name was Bobby Chacon, the toughest guy I've ever known. You always wanted Bobby on your team, no matter what the sport. (Not in case a fight broke out; those things rarely happened back then. Just because he played so hard and was so intense.) He could have had a shot at a Baseball career, but felt that his size (he was about 5-foot-7 and 135 pounds) would hold him back. Instead, he went into boxing and his raw force took him a long way. His promoter enrolled him in some college classes (which he never attended, of course) and billed him as "School Boy Bobby Chacon." The School Boy nonsense was dropped after a few fights when it became obvious that he was the real deal and didn't need a gimmick. He became a hero to the rabid Latino fight crowd in L.A. and quickly moved up in the rankings. Along the way, he married his high school sweetheart, Valerie, and they had a son. Bobby won the world junior-lightweight championship and held it for a couple defenses. Then, he suffered the inevitable trouble with making weight, tried to move up in class and lost a couple fights. He got arrested for Domestic Violence, then tried to straighten up. Velerie asked him to retire, and when he wouldn't, she killed herself. Amazingly, Bobby's career took off again and he won another title (one of those alphabet-soup WBA-WBC-IBF junior-super-light-bantamweight things). He then fought one of the great fights of all time against African Cornelius Boza-Edwards. But he slipped again and his career finally ended. A couple years ago, there was a stir here in Arizona when he was reported missing. His friends say that he had developed a form of boxer's dementia (what used to be known as punch-drunkenness) and sometimes didn't know who or where he was. He turned up, but not long after that, his son, who was living with Bobby's mom back in Pacoima, was killed in a drive-by shooting. I'll always wonder what would have happened if Bobby has chosen baseball. This disdain for boxing is somewhat strange considering that my favorite athlete of my lifetime is Muhammad Ali, but that's another story. I've been thinking about boxing lately because of a couple things that've been in the papers recently. The first is the Tommy Morrison AIDS story, which when you boil it down, isn't so much a boxing story as it is just another tragic tale of a dumb jock thinking with his dumb jock. I wish him well, but he had to be incredibly reckless to get to where he is now. The story that really got to me was the announcement that two "respected" boxing magazines, KO and Boxing Illustrated, both picked as their best fight of 1995 the fight between Nigel Benn and Gerald McClellan, a fight that put McClellan in a coma and left him handicapped for life. It's hard to imagine anything more tasteless. KO Magazine, for its part, admitted to having "ambivalence drifting toward guilt" for its pick. But Boxing Illustrated chose the fight for its "continually explosive action." The magazine's associate editor Gregory Juckett said that there was widespread support for picking that fight, claiming that editors and correspondents chose it "overwhelmingly." Says Juckett: "I'm just looking at the fight itself, and it was a war." High praise indeed for a sports event that left a man crippled and brain-damaged for life.

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