Road to Nowhere , livre ebook

Pitch Publishing Ltd - Tris Dixon

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307 pages

English

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In the era of boxing's pay-per-view superstars, Tris Dixon invested in a Greyhound bus pass and spent several months traversing America on a shoestring budget, tracking down fighters from yesteryear who had vanished from the limelight. Venturing from New York to Las Vegas and from Toronto to Miami, the young writer - himself a former amateur boxer - sought out coulda-beencontenders and cult heroes from the 1950s to the 2000s, all now faded from popular memory. He visited old people's homes, gyms and too many prisons, discovering that life after boxing can be a cruel place when the ropes are no longer in place to keep fighters safe from the outside world. Dixon meets men who shaped boxing history, fighting the likes of Sugar Ray Robinson, Muhammad Ali and Mike Tyson. He shares their memories and weaves together their forgotten tales over the course of a remarkable American journey.

Sujets

USA

United States of America

Boxing

Xian de Boxing

États-Unis

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Publié par	Pitch Publishing Ltd
Date de parution	09 octobre 2014
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781909626959
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0500€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

First published by Pitch Publishing, 2014 Pitch Publishing A2 Yeoman Gate Yeoman Way Durrington BN13 3QZ
www.pitchpublishing.co.uk
TRIS DIXON, 2014
All rights reserved under Internationaland Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been grantedthe non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No partof this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or storedin or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express writtenpermission of the Publisher.
A CIP catalogue record is available for this book from the British Library
Print ISBN 978 1-90962-652-2 eBook ISBN: 978-1-909626-95-9
---
Ebook Conversion by www.eBookPartnership.com
Contents
Acknowledgements
Preface
Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Epilogue
Photographs
Acknowledgements
I T S been a gruelling journey through boxing s wastelands. Although a lot of work went into finding the fighters and putting their stories together, without them, of course, this book could never have happened.
Several took me out to dinner. Micky Ward, Gene Fullmer, Chico Vejar, Chuck Wepner and Joey Giardello all treated their poor British friend to good food; valuable fuel for the long bus rides that lay ahead.
Other boxers welcomed me as a guest in their homes, allowing me to see behind the scenes and really find out where they are now.
My old friend, the late Phil Rooney, made the call to then Boxing News assistant editor Tony Connolly to let him know what I was doing in the US. Without that, the ball would never have started to roll.
Special thanks, also, goes to my great friend George Zeleny, a true boxing historian, for his constant encouragement. Two of my favourite writers today, Donald McRae and Elliot Worsell, have been patient and generous with ideas when providing their eloquent counsel on this book.
My Boxing News team, too, of Danny Flexen, Matt Christie, Nick Bond, John Dennen and Paul Wheeler have all lent appreciated support.
Thanks also to Claude Abrams, Daniel Herbert, Tony and Steve Connolly and to Mary Payne, Kevin Mitchell ( Observer/Guardian ), Jeff Powell, Dominic Calder-Smith, Nigel Collins, Bill Browne, Chris Mardell, Kit Neilson, the late Mike Biggs and Greg Juckett.
Of course, there was a mini-network of contacts helping throughout, made up of my friends Tom Jess, Jim Carlin and Jeff Brophy and the late International Boxing Hall of Fame historian Hank Kaplan and Brad Berkwitt.
Without their help I would still be in the USA trying to find a starting point.
Many thanks to the team at Pitch Publishing, led by Paul Camillin, for taking a chance on me, and following The Road to Nowhere.
Duncan Olner, who has produced a fabulous cover, was a pleasure to work with.
The president of the Boxing Writers Association of America, Jack Hirsch, deserves credit for planting an early seed about turning my travels into a book and my old journalism lecturer at Falmouth, the late Jim Hall, made it seem no one was out of reach.
It s fair to say my father was always sceptical about my American jaunts and I wish he was alive to read this.
Thanks also to my brother, Justin, who sacrificed his J-reg Ford Escort to fund one of my early trips.
My beautiful girlfriend Amy has given me the time and space to finish this large project but there is, however, one person who actually inspired me to put a metaphorical pen to a metaphorical piece of paper to write these memoirs.
When I moved house in July 2006, I was floating down memory lane with dozens of pictures of the fighters on these pages when I wondered whether my newborn son would ever want to know how I found these old warriors and why I looked for them.
It was only then that, rather than years from now through faded memories, I decided to bring my thoughts and feelings to book. I hope he will enjoy them when he is older.
It was my boy, Benjamin, who made me write this and I owe him - and my precious daughter Lois - everything.
Preface
I T wasn t the road to nowhere and I knew where we were going. I just had no idea where we were or whether we would reach our intended destination. It was getting dark and the rickety old two-tone Cadillac with scraped blue doors and a battered grey hood boasted tyres that looked flat to the untrained eye but somehow kept us chugging from Atlantic City in the general direction of New York City.
The driver and car owner, former world light-heavyweight champion Matthew Saad Muhammad, reassured me he knew where we were going and offered kind words of support when he erratically swerved away from cars, the central reservation and anything else we nearly collided with. However, not even my favourite fighter could make the trip any easier.
I did not have a great deal of faith in his driving.
He d had a long, hard career and the physical signs would tell you as much.
His words were slurred. He walked with a lurching stagger. This was one of my more dangerous assignments. The first of many, yes, and one that would give me a taste of the future, but one that would, as is often the case in boxing, leave me shocked, amazed and devastated, yet somehow wanting more.
Over the last few months Matthew and I had often talked at length but I said very little on this road trip. My tensed knuckles glowed white as I clawed to my seat, my eyes were like saucers and said more than I could. If that wasn t a giveaway about anxiety levels, perhaps the sweaty brow was.
It seemed like a lifetime but it was not too long before the hazy neons of New York could be seen from the Garden State.
A little further and we could make out the Empire State Building and the Chrysler, but the gap where the World Trade Center had stood proudly little more than a fortnight earlier left a raw scar.
There had been doubts about whether the fight we were going to see, the middleweight title clash between hot favourite Felix Trinidad and Philadelphia veteran Bernard Hopkins, would go ahead. It had been originally scheduled for 15 September, but the horrific events of 9/11 had forced it back to the 29th.
Miraculously we made it to the Garden and found a place at street level to park.
There was not much chance of anyone taking the car. It looked like an abandoned vehicle, it was so decrepit.
I was a 20-something wannabe boxing guy, Saad was an ex-champion who d stumbled upon hard times.
He had been living a nondescript existence in a rundown part of Atlantic City. He didn t have his own place. He slept in a friend s living room and either took the small single bed at the foot of the apartment s one window or he slept on the couch.
We d known one another for little more than a year. I d stayed with a mutual friend on the outskirts of Atlantic City but eventually Matthew invited me to move in with his buddy in that downtrodden section. It was an offer I couldn t refuse.
He and I would alternate sleeping on the spare bed or the couch in a bland, unattractive two-room apartment.
I will never forget Matthew s beaming smile at the Hall of Fame when we first met, nor will I forget the shock I felt at finding him in his all-too-real surroundings when I visited him in Atlantic City later that summer.
The memorabilia from his career had gone and friends of his had told me he had pawned his world title belt and International Boxing Hall of Fame ring.
Daily, he was faced with the stark reality of his life as it was now.
As I followed my dreams of becoming a fighter, he trained me in the Atlantic City Police Athletic League gym, working on the pads, moving with me in the ring, supervising my skipping and other exercises. To thank him for taking me, I bought him and I matching navy training T-shirts.
He had always said how much he missed not having his own equipment anymore, although he maintained it was safely in storage with friends in New Orleans.
I doubted it.
The T-shirts sported Team Saad across the back in gold and MSM with some boxing gloves, also in gold, on the chest.
His face lit up when I presented him with it just before we left for the fights.
Are these for me, man? he smiled, with his full set of teeth on display.
One each, I said.
He hugged me tightly, almost lifting me off the floor.
He even welled up a bit but was too happy to let the water settle in his eyes.
He proudly wore the $20 T-shirt to the Garden and despite his smart new appearance he couldn t bluff his way beyond all of Don King s men.
Instead, I had to let my MasterCard flex its flimsy muscles and purchased the two cheapest seats left.
They were $75 apiece.
Saad was deflated as we scaled the zig-zagging escalators to take our seats in the nosebleeds. He was even more dejected when we sat down and could see the preliminary fighters the size of pinpricks in the distance.
Are you OK? I asked, knowing he was disappointed.
Yes, thanks Tris. I m fine. Thank you very much, he lied.
Usually, despite everything, you couldn t shift that grin.
I was content to be a part of the big fight atmosphere from the peripheries but Saad wasn t accustomed to being so far from the action.
As the bouts progressed we tended to watch them on the huge screens above the ring rather than observe the dot-like participants far beneath us. I went to use the toilet.
When I came back, Saad was wearing a checked shirt with long sleeves.
There was no sign of the top I had bought.
He wouldn t look at me.
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