Salvatore & Carmella Ingrassia Family 1914

In preparation for my wife’s family reunion, I spent four days fishing with my father-in-law in Canada where I sat in a boat all day listening to stories that went something like this: Your Uncle Paul’s cousin Annazette married a fella who works over at Newell Rubbermaid. Nice guy. His father and I were in Troop 38 together at Marmion and he’s in an investment club with your brother Eddie. Well, they don’t really invest in anything. They just get together once a week to drink and shoot the shit. But anyway, they came up here fishing and he caught a bass in that bay over there. A very nice fish. A real beauty.

Over the years, I’ve grown used to hearing these stories told in the same shaggy dog manner by cousins, brothers and other relatives because my wife comes from what you might call a large family in Rockford, Illinois, and they like nothing more than getting together with each other.

The immediate family comes from eight brothers and sisters born to Tony and Jean Domino in the 10 1/2 years from 1959 to 1970. (“What happened in the off-year?” I once asked him. “Color TV,” he said.) But Tony’s issue was nothing compared to his father’s father (11) or his mother’s father (13), so when the table was set last weekend for the descendants of Salvatore Ingrassia to celebrate his emigration from Sicily to the United States in 1884, it surprised no one that there were 267 placecards.

The Verdi Club

The reunion was held at Rockford’s Verdi Club, a red brick edifice along the Rock River, not to be confused with the other Italian ethnic clubs in Rockford – the Lombardi Club, the Venetian Club or the St. Ambrosia Society – because, as any Italian will tell you, the cultures of Sicily, Lombard, Venice and Rome are vastly different. The single factor that unites them was America’s disdain for all of them when they first arrived here.

As we entered, over the door of the Verdi Club. was a Budweiser sign advertising Bingo on Thursday and Sunday nights. Italian operas played inside over the public address system as the organizing committee handed out credentials. The tables were strewn with Italian flags and plastic artichokes stuffed with questions meant to get families talking about their heritage. (Sample: What is the most Italian thing about you?) And the agenda promised lessons in Bocce ball and Italian bingo after dinner, brief remarks and the requisite picture. But clearly, the main event was what in our family would be called schmoozing and consists in theirs of kissing elderly women on the cheek and enduring bear hug handshakes from the men.

The ten branches of the family (Two children died in infancy. A third became a nun.) were given color coded name tags, each delineated with the generation, lineage and status of the bearer. I was, for instance, the 3G spouse of Lucy Domino Jacobs. The oldest attendees were Aunt Vita and Aunt Frances, 96; and the youngest, a sixth-generation cherub appropriately named Isaiah. There was an award for the relative who came the farthest (from Holland) and the “most Italian,” the prize being a set of furry car dice.

I am not by nature a social person so I was drawn to the other spouses standing on the periphery. When pulled into conversation, I invariably found myself talking to someone named Tony, Paul, Lucy or Maryjo – family names that hang on the family tree like barnacles on a ship bottom – and explaining myself as co-ordinates on the Ingrassia map.

The Greatness of Italy

Reunions are a time to celebrate family, which often involves embellishing the past achievements of ancestors. The Ingrassias have not fed the American celebrity machine like, for instance, the Bushes, the Hiltons or the Lohans. The most famous ancestor turns out to be Anne Sterling, a B-movie actress in the 40’s best known for appearing on the cover of racy tabloids. But other Ingrassias have made their mark on the local stage, as one newspaper account put it, personifying, nurturing and defending “the spiritual and moral greatness of Italy.”

Thus, my father-in-law proudly boasts that his Uncle Tony was not just a lawyer, he was the first Italian-American lawyer in Rockford; his Uncle Nunzio was the first Italian-American alderman; his mother Lucy headed up the Catholic Foresters and was the first Italian-American woman from Rockford ever invited to the White House – “and come to think of it, probably the only one.”

But Salvatore himself was a piece of work, as he recalls.  “The truth is Grandpa Ingrassia was something of a tyrant,” he confides. One of his sons jumped from a second-story window to avoid a beating; another ran away for three months; another daughter, after getting tied to a post in the basement for coming home 10 minutes late from a dance, up and joined the convent.

The Family History

After dinner, they played home movies of a family gathering in the 1940’s almost as large as this one, and Tony Domino, a great grandson who has traveled back to Sicily many times to research records and talk with distant relatives, gave the family history. The original homestead was a grain mill in Camporeale, a bone dry, dirt poor small town in the mountains about 35 miles south of Palermo.

Salvatore Ingrassia was 26 when he followed his older brother Pasqualle to the United States, arriving at the customs house in New Orleans.  At the time, Louisiana was still trying to recover from the Civil War loss of slave labor so they offered discount fares in the poorer regions of Italy to anyone who would book passage through New Orleans.  Recruiters from local plantations would meet the arriving boats and put the workers up in quarter houses, former slave quarters the Italians shared with the remaining African-Americans and anyone else at the bottom of the economic ladder.

Grandpa Ingrassia brought with him his first wife, Francesca Sacco, and a one-year-old son Joseph. But the southern climate gave her consumption and she returned to Sicily after a year or two and died shortly after.  In 1889, he met and married his second wife, Carmela Musso, herself newly arrived from Sicily, and together they ran a small concession selling fruit and sandwiches, with Sal supplementing their income by going off for long periods to work on the railroads in Missouri.

Take Two

Ten years later, as the century came to an end, Sal decided to take his family back to Italy. He was going nowhere fast in America. Now burdened with five children, however, he discovered Sicily was no bargain either so he decided to try his luck again. This time, he booked passage through Ellis Island, but quickly moved back to New Orleans to open his first grocery store on Magazine Street in 1901.

The problem with the American Dream is that it rarely follows the path we pretend it does. Honesty, hard work, and perseverance are no guarantee of success. Although Sal was doing all right in New Orleans, his wife’s relatives had emigrated  to Rockford, and she wanted the comfort of family.

“We’ve tried it your way, “ Tony imagines Carmela saying, “Now I want to try it mine.” Tony’s presentation to the assembled Ingrassia relatives is crisp, authoritative and, for many, a revelation. Still, it sparks memories of tales other family members have heard about the move.

“Is that when he put the kids in an orphanage while he got established?” someone in the crowd asks.

“No, that was his brother Pasqualle, but that’s another story,” Tony replies.

The Melting Pot

Salvatore opened his first store in Rockford at 1211 Rock Street in 1905 selling “staples and fancy groceries”. By 1918, he was opening his third store on Loomis Avenue in partnership with his sons Nunzio (Del) and Ted.

But he will be remembered more for the accomplishments of his progeny than his own. One started a furniture store, another became a lawyer, a daughter mastered the insurance business, two others entered the liquor business (whether before or after the end of prohibition remains a topic of some dispute.) What is not in dispute is that the Ingrassias, in all their many third generation names and permutations, have become pillars of the Rockford community.

The most poignant stories about America often come from immigrants because they are simple stories of struggle: to get out of the old country, to rise up the economic ladder, to overcome language and cultural barriers, usually just to gain a foothold in America so the next generation can reap the full rewards. As Nathan Glazier and Daniel Moynihan would demonstrate in their 1960 collaboration “Beyond The Melting Pot,” very few immigrant cultures assimilated easily. The Italians, Irish, Jews, Poles and, more recently, Puerto Ricans and Mexicans have all faced discrimination; and one of the ways they overcame it was by self-segregating into their own communities and clinging to family vines, using them to pull each other up. The Ingrassia Family Reunion was a demonstration that it doesn’t happen overnight. Sometimes, it takes 116 years.

The Picture

To get a picture of the whole Ingrassia clan, the photographer brought a ladder and divided the families into three groups he would later seam into a panoramic shot. The first groups were the red, white and blue families. They took their places on four picnic tables and – wouldn’t you know ­– two of the tables collapsed. Nothing comes easy. Elderly aunts tumbled into little children, and three women were left with bruised ankles, one seriously enough to go to the hospital.

But nothing was going to hold back the family portrait. They climbed back into the frame for another go. The other color coded families took their turn in the spotlight, and the photos were completed just as thunder rolled in off the river.

As the family dispersed, my wife’s cousin Mike Cavataio suggested we make up a T-shirt saying “I survived the Ingrassia Reunion.”

“I’m down with that,” I said because it was a very nice reunion. A real beauty.

In 1971, before any of today’s 2010 Hawks were even born, I was twelve years old. As a kid, I watched or listened to every Hawks game. I even wrote a summary of every period–––pre-season through post-season––in a journal that soon became a two-inch thick binder revealing my own opinion of which Blackhawk was hot or not, who hit the net and who missed the net. I was tracking plus-minus before the league ever did.

Thanks to my dad, my brothers and I were raised on a steady diet of hopes and dreams of Chicago hockey glory. It showed up in our street hockey playing all the time. Every game… a game seven. The dinner bell … the start of overtime. Next goal wins!

There were the occasional special nights when my dad would take us to the Hawks game. I remember catching a quick bite to eat at Freddie Caserio’s or the Como Inn, then riding their game bus from the restaurant to the Stadium, the eighth wonder of the world in my eyes.
It came to pass in 1971 that the ultimate moment in hockey’s Holy Grail – a Stanley Cup Finals Game Seven – was blacked out in Chicago (although nationally televised). Tickets were not easily obtained, and even if they were, certainly a Game Seven was for the adults.

Remember 1971?

Every 12-year-old boy in Chicago in 1971 has a story to tell about trying to cope with the blackout that night. Many of us scrambled to the attic with our dads to try to reposition the antenna in the hope of grabbing a signal from a far away beacon. Others settled in with their transistor radios under their pillows, hungry for the visual cues that AM radio offered.

But I have a great story to tell that is one of my fondest memories, even through the pain of the Hawks loss that night. I was able to watch the game because my dad and his buddies concocted a scheme to outrun the blackout and rent a hotel room in Indiana that had a TV! In my mind, it seemed somehow illegal. I imagined there were some Wirtz police that would step in and stop this flash of brilliance. “Can you do that?” I asked my dad.

Enter Mr. Z

Mr. Z's hearse. That's me in the lawn chair.

Mr. Z, as we affectionately knew him, was a good friend of my Dad. He had recently purchased an old hearse from an auto graveyard. For its former occupants, it was the last ride, a journey to eternal rest. For me, it was to become a most unlikely ray of hope.

I heard banter back and forth between my mom and dad about the idea of grown men driving to a hotel room in Indiana in Mr. Z’s hearse. “If we decide to take the boys, we can all fit in one vehicle,” my Dad said, an outlandish suggestion that somehow won approval.

Rows of lawn chairs, coolers, booze, soda and cans of oil were loaded into the back of the hearse. My dad and his buddies – Mr. Z, Uncle Ray, and Little Eddie – then did the coolest thing adults could ever do: they rounded up my brothers and packed us in as well. The men sat in lawn chairs in the old hearse while we sat quietly on the floor watching them. Seat belts? Who ever heard of them?

None of us boys said a peep. When a dad does something like this for his sons, good behavior abounds.

Game Seven, 1971

We arrived at the hotel room to see the old Chicago Stadium on TV, full of life and rabid fans, more clearly than I’d ever seen it in the snowy picture we got at home. The Hawks enjoyed a 2-0 lead midway through the 2nd period. Then Bobby Hull hit the crossbar over what looked like a beaten Ken Dryden. And then, in what seemed like a fleeting second, we collectively lost our innocence. A Jacques Lemaire slapshot skittered past Tony Esposito for the first Canadiens goal. Then Henri Richard scored another. Just like that, it was 2-2 at the end of the 2nd period.

Ken Dryden, 1971

I don’t remember the second intermission or ever breathing at all when watching the 3rd period. Richard scored again in a power move past Magnuson; Jimmy Pappin missed an open net, even raising his stick in false hope. The Hawks pulled Tony-O, sent in six attackers, but both hands on the old stadium clock suddenly went dark.

The Stadium Thud

There are those among us who remember the sound when an opposing team scores a goal. In our personal family folklore, it is referred to as “The Stadium Thud.” It is the collective sigh of despair that fans express when they see their hopes go up in smoke.

It happened that night not once, but twice: when Richard scored his goal and again at game’s end when the Montreal Canadians won the Stanley Cup.

I don’t remember leaving the hotel room. I know we didn’t stay. I remember, sitting on the floor of the hearse in the silence, crying, knowing the parade the next day would take place in Montreal rather than Chicago.

The Blackhawks Resurgence

The 1971 seventh game loss left a personal wound that has stayed with me for nearly 30 years. True blue to the core, even though the last time the Chicago Blackhawks won the Stanley Cup was 1961, I attended as many games as I could over the past few decades, taking my own boys to instill a love for the game through their eyes.

Fast forward to 2010 – this year we watched as soon as all of Chicago climbed aboard the Blackhawks quest. Going into Game Six of the finals vs. The Flyers, there was plenty of nervousness to go around. Tied at the end of regulation, the prospect of another Game Seven loomed large. That is when Patrick Kane found the shortest distance between two points: first the head fake, then the straight line of his unexpected, low angle shot… and The Cup was ours!

And it all brought me back to that moment in 1971 when my dad drove us in a hearse to watch the playoffs in an Indiana hotel room. There have been many ups and downs in my life since then – admittedly more downs than ups in Blackhawks’ history – but this victory has left me with my own Cup filled with gratitude.

Thank you, Chicago Blackhawks. You’ve made the 12-year-old in me very happy. And thank you, Dad, for instilling in me a love for the best sport in the world, one I now share in common with my boys.

(c) Joel Heller, Green Bay Press-Gazette

After Congress passed the 2009 credit card reform bill, I started receiving a wave of junk mail from my bank, JP Morgan Chase, informing me of my right/duty to re-authorize the overdraft protection on my checking account.

Over the years, at the urging of friendly tellers, I have signed up for a variety of Chase credit cards with names like the Freedom Card, Business Rewards and Cash Plus, but I never use them. Paying off one credit card is hard enough. Three is a bankruptcy waiting to happen.

But I don’t want my friendly bankers to think I’m not a team player so when the cards arrive, I usually just cut them up quietly and that’s the end of it. When I went to get my new overdraft protection approved, however, my personal banker suggested I switch it to the one with the lowest rate (11 %) to save on overdraft charges. Being of sound mind, I agreed.

Before I knew it, I had $1600 in overdrafts on a credit card I haven’t used in over a year –– and no statement reflecting it. Okay, I admit, I was a little cash short that month so I don’t dispute the charges. What bugs me is that when Chase finally displayed the charges in my online account (and I paid them off), they were carrying a 24% interest charge.

The Run Around

This didn’t seem right so, when I got the next IMPORTANT NOTICE from Chase Bank about “a feature called Chase Debit Card Overdraft Coverage”, I decided to dispute the interest rate. I called the customer service number provided at the bottom of the letter. 1-866-532-4272.

As you might guess, all the telephone bankers were busy assisting other customers. The first responder, however, was quick to identify my problem as a credit card issue and sent me to another number. 1-800-945-2006. The second responder said this was an issue for the checking account credit services department; and he connected me to a third responder in The Phillippines who referred me back to 1-800-945-2006. When I told him I had just spoken to 1-800-945-2006, he connected me to his manager,  my fourth responder, Chris Delgado, who was randomly assigned among Chase’s 50 international call centers to take my case from his outpost in Arlington, Texas. He suggested I call back and not use the words “overdraft protecton” so my call would be routed to another call center that just handles credit cards.

Back to Square One

As much as I enjoy touring the world through call-holding muzak, I went in to my local Chase branch the next day to take up the matter in person. The good thing about meeting in person with your banker is they can instantly pop up your personal information on a computer screen. The bad thing, from their perspective, is you can ask questions all day until the sun goes down, and the only way he can get rid of you is to call security – and that’s bad for business.

It turns out there is an answer for everything in the banking world, and very few of those answers benefit the client. For all the talk about credit card reform, the only significant change in the law is that banks now are required to have consumers “opt-in” to overdraft fees – or face even larger fees for insufficient sums and/or bounced checks. The fees themselves are largely untouched by the new law.  (Except no more than one fee can be assessed per day, and banks cannot charge overdraft fees on fees that create more overdrafts. This is the banking industry equivalent of nit-picking.)

Every time I write a check that exceeds my bank balance, Chase charges me $10 per incident and 24% interest for every day that I do not repay the overdraft. As it turns out, it doesn’t matter that the card I am using has an 11% rate, my banker now informed me.  This money is considered a “cash advance” subject to an industry standard 24% interest rate. No ifs, ands or buts.

The Overdraft Racket

I am not alone in my despair over these charges. Fifty million Americans dip into their overdraft account at least once a year; and 27 million use it five or more times. Between 2006 and 2008, overdraft charges rose 35% – and that was before the economy tanked. A 2008 study of overdrafts showed that a majority are due to small debit card transactions under $100. But they generate an outrageous $23.7 billion in revenues a year –– more than the total annual revenues of Google the same year.

What banks once offered free as an enticement for new customers in a competitive bank environment  is now a secure (and growing) profit center in banks too large to fail. And Chase’s response to Congressional efforts for more disclosure is a blizzard of junk mail, a web of telephone support lines that stretches from the Phillipines to Texas, and misinformed personal bankers who don’t understand the products they are selling.

Washington’s Problem or Yours?

The new 2010 financial reform bill that has now made its ways through both houses into a conference committee has a lot to say about a new consumer protection agency that will monitor credit card rates. Maybe too much, it turns out. With all the banking lobbyists at work there, the exact language of the final bill is being tortuously twisted around how banks describe their rates. But nobody is seriously thinking – or saying – that 24% is a usurious rate for a $100 overdraft (or that the $10-35 one-time fee banks can charge for each occurrence borders on payday loan rates) because that would be an unwarranted intrusion of government controls on the free enterprise system.

The difficulty Congress encounters even getting banks to describe what they do, however,  makes it clear they are incapable of setting caps on rates that are fair to both borrowers and lenders. And the more Congress struggles, the more I think that’s not really their job. Why should we expect Congress to set fair rates for overdrafts? Why do we think the banking lobby will just lie down and die? Why do we keep expecting Congress to do anything right?

The right thing to do, in this case, is don’t rely on bank overdrafts. They are a rip-off. A $100 overdraft at Chase that goes unpaid for a year will cost you $134. That’s just stupid. And Congress has no obligation to keep people from being stupid.

Our obligation as citizens is to be smarter.

Ben Royko

I first heard the word autism in high school, probably around 1975 or so. When I became a psychologist (no, not specializing in autism) I came to understand it as a severe disorder that resulted in lives deeply and negatively impacted.

In 1995, my son Ben was diagnosed with autism so severe that when he turned 12, we placed him in a residential school because life at home was no longer viable. Whatever we imagined it would be like someday when our first son moved out, this wasn’t it. For us, finding the positive in autism is like looking for the bright side of cancer. There’s no way to sugar coat it. Autism has destroyed Ben’s life.

My wife and I are not “glass is half empty” parents who refuse to see Ben’s  “differences” as something to be embraced. Of course we love Ben, enjoy Ben, do all we can for Ben. But his differences are huge deficits that make it impossible for him to live, unaided, in our world. We worry about every stage of his life, because Ben will need care, parental-level care, until it’s his turn to pass on. Few like to say it, but many parents harbor the desire–as anti-instinctual as it gets–to outlive our eternally childlike children. “Who will love them when we’re gone?” is the thought that keeps parents of autistics awake, at all ages. And there is nothing positive about it.

Asperger’s Syndrome

Around the time Ben was born, a new form of autism was identified on the spectrum of mental health called “Asperger’s syndrome,” more commonly termed Asperger’s Disorder these days. It’s used to describe certain high-functioning autistics. Aspies–a term used by many to describe those with Asperger’s Disorder–often think about the world and act in ways that most of us would not consider “normal.” Their different-ness may require special understanding and attention from us neuro-typicals, but many adult Aspies can live independent and fulfilling lives.

Something that distinguishes an Aspie from a more classically autistic person is they are aware of their own different-ness. They can express their thoughts and feelings about it – as opposed to someone like Ben, who has never created a sentence of his own. So while I have no proprietary interest in the term “autism,” I am growing weary of explaining the difference between “severe autism,” as I have come to describe Ben, and someone’s “autistic” nephew who will be graduating from Princeton next month.

A Modern Disorder

Since that first time I heard “autistic” 35 years ago, it has shifted from an obscure term (and a severe disorder) to a word with celebrity cachet, in large part because the numbers have exploded — from 1 in 10,000 diagnoses of autism, the statistic quoted to me in 1995 when we first entered the arena, to one in 110 currently. The wider breadth of behaviors now included in the diagnostic category accounts for some of that growth; as does the need for that diagnosis to qualify for various federally funded special education and therapy programs. But how much of the statistical mushroom cloud reflects those factors versus a true increase in autism is a major question, and federal funds for research and treatment have not kept up. What is available is spread among a wide variety of programs, so basic research into the causes and possible cures for severe autism suffers as a consequence.

Ben’s Way

I understand the extraordinary challenges Aspies face. But the lights that await them at the end of their tunnels can be blindingly bright compared to the bleakness facing the “classic” autism sufferer. And yes, they are sufferers, not because others won’t accept their different-ness, but because they are constricted by their own internal chains and plagued by obsessive anxieties and a minimal ability to express their pain, or pleasures.

Ben cannot articulate his opinions about autistics versus Aspies versus neuro-typicals, if he has them. Ben, now 16, has a hard time articulating a toothache, though his behavioral seizure (i.e. a tantrum) can indicate that something is causing agony. A productive and independent life is not in Ben’s future, nor most of the earlier generations diagnosed with classic autism.

As it is now defined, autism afflicts a range of people with IQs that stretch from mentally retarded to genius. Many need huge help simply ordering in a fast food restaurant; forget about getting a job in one. Others are graduating at the top of their college class. How does that make sense?

Aspies ARE Different

Aspies sometimes seem to me to take offense at being lumped in with the whole range of people with autism, and I can’t blame them. Lumping everyone with autism together makes it harder to discuss, harder to research, and certainly harder to cure –– especially when a sizable chunk of Aspies take offense at the idea that they even need or want a “cure.”

But if he could tell you, Ben would say he does want to be cured. And separating Aspies from Autistics might help that happen. Or at least, it would make it easier to talk about.

Si Stern, the indefatigable promoter, is making the rounds of local radio stations with one last appeal for fans. “. . . and this year we’ve got T-shirts, really great T-shirts with the poster on the front for only $10. So come on down.” Carl Moretti, the Top Rank executive in charge, chats casually with the fighters as they file in. All he needs now, he says, is a good fight.

Top Rank exec Carl Moretti with Pound for Pound fighters Glenn Tapia and Jorge Diaz

Moretti is hoping an exciting title match between his heavyweight, Odlanier Solis, the former Cuban Olympic gold medalist, and his Costa Rican opponent Carl Drumond will force Vladimir Klitschko, the reigning heavyweight champion, to give Solis a shot at the world championship. “If he can score an impressive knockout, and he looks good on television, and the fans like him, this will build that momentum. It’s all about whether TV wants you and the fans like you,” he says.

Si Stern surrounded by the ring girls

The Ring Girls

Before the match starts, Si brings in the ring girls, recruited from his strip club “Teasers” for their athletic prowess and scholarship. Between rounds, they will parade around the ring holding up placards announcing the next round.

Si’s son Gary, 50, is in charge of getting them in and out of the ring. “You can strut and show as much as you want,” he counsels them, “but don’t ham it up too much during the broadcast.” He might as well be  preaching abstinence in a whorehouse. The longer the night goes on, the more the girls try to out-do each other with their bumps and grinds.

Florida State Champions

The first three bouts are all for Florida state titles. The first pits Si’s fighter Marcus Upshaw against the skinny kid from Minnesota, Scotty Ball. They trade punches for three rounds, but Upshaw’s arms are longer and his punches land while Ball’s whistle through the air. After three rounds, Ball’s manager throws in the towel. “My boy didn’t get hurt, he just got tired,” he says as he follows his fighter out of the ring.

Damian "Devo" Frias

Damian Frias is next up, fighting for the Florida state welterweight title. His opponent is Mr. Fast Hands himself, Brad Solomon. In the ring, I soon discover Damian is not Damian anymore but “Devo” Frias, the name stitched on the side of his trunks, and “Devo” is clearly a crowd favorite. It’s a good match, eight rounds. The two fighters begin circling the ring, sizing each other up, and the first time they pass, I notice that Fast Hands has his own moniker “Busy Bee” stitched on the butt of his trunks.

Frias stalks his prey determined to pin him into a corner, but Solomon is too quick for him. He circles back, then attacks with a dozen quick jabs to the stomach and head. None is hard enough to take Frias down, but they leave him no room to counter-punch. Si sits quietly in a chair just below the ring. He follows every flurry of punches intently, not cheering, not scowling, but studying his man. Looking to see what’s in him. Not much, it turns out. The longer the match goes on, the more bewildered Frias appears and the more daring Solomon is with his quick combinations.

Brad "Busy Bee" Solomon

The judges score every round for Solomon, 72-18, and he wins a unanimous decision. Frias retreats silently back to the locker room, where he sits with his head between his legs. Meanwhile, Fast Hands wraps the belt around his waist and trots around the ring showing it off. It looks like a manhole cover with the Florida state seal stitched to an inner tube.

I ask him what he’s going to do with it. “I have three national Golden Gloves and a world title,” he says. “I keep those hanging on the wall in the shop. I guess I’ll put it there.”

Diaz vs. Lopez

For the Diaz-Lopez fight, I slip into the front row aisle reserved for Top Rank VIP’s next to my friends, the Moretti security detail. The match between the two undefeated fighters lives up to all expectations: eight rounds of hand-to-hand, toe-to-toe, glove-to-face combat––and neither fighter gives an inch.

In one flurry of punches, it looks like Diaz has the advantage. “He’s got him, he’s got him, he’s got to finish him,” the guy next to me shouts. Then Lopez comes back with ten unanswered punches to the face. “He really tattooed him that time,” he admits.

By the sixth round, Lopez is bleeding from cuts to his eye, ear and right cheek. Diaz’s nose and mouth are both open sores and a welt is rising under his right eye. Their white trunks are smeared pink and there are trails of blood across their gloves. By the eighth and final round, both are exhausted. But that doesn’t keep them from searching for one last piece of untouched skin to bruise.

My three friends from New Jersey all think Diaz won . . . narrowly. Indeed, by a 74-72 count, the judges unanimously give Diaz his 13^th straight win, a first rate TV performance that somehow, in the alchemy of the sport, will bring him that much closer to fighting for the world Super Bantamweight Championship.

Trouble in Paradise

While the Diaz-Lopez fight is going on, however, there is trouble in the locker room. Big trouble. A state boxing examiner is insisting Carl Drumond rewrap his wrists before putting on the gloves. Just as loudly, Drumond’s manager is insisting he won’t fight. The problem, as the Florida boxing commissioner see it, is that the tape Drumond’s manager is using is a nylon synthetic instead of the cloth-based adhesive Florida mandates. The first examiner approved the wrap, but a second has asked for a change.

Tampering with the fist wraps is a storied way fighters can gain an edge in a boxing match. In South America, some trainers weave little shards of metal — called “a margarita” — into the tape just above the glove so if a punch to the head misses, the blow nonetheless opens a gash when it brushes against an opponent’s face. Synthetic nylon wraps offer the same opportunity for glancing blows. But forced to unwrap, Drumond has changed back into his street clothes and sulks in the corner while his manager screams in protest. The examiner sends out a frantic call to his boss Tom Molloy, the executive director of the Florida Boxing Commission.

Sudden Fame

Meanwhile, in the Fox Sports control room, the director needs to fill time. And that time now belongs not to Jorge Diaz but to Glenn Tapia. Tapia’s little four round warmer-upper is suddenly live on national TV. And Tapia not only looks good on television –– he punches his opponent so hard in the second round the referee has to stop the fight so the fighter can put on another jock –– his opponent throws in the towel after three rounds.

So Fox Sports has plenty of time to talk with the winner, and Tapia turns out to be as comfortable in front of a camera as Sarah Palin at a turkey farm. He shucks and jives and smiles a lot. He yammers on about how grateful he is to God, and his managers, and his parents, his friends, his pet lizard, whatever. He can say anything he wants to say, for as long as he wants to say it, because, as the interviewer can plainly see, no heavyweights are walking out the locker room door.

To Fight or Not to Fight

Tom Molloy told me later he definitely did not tell Carl Drumond “You’ll never fight again.” He just reminded him that he had the power to indefinitely suspend his license, and that suspension would become widely known throughout the boxing world.  He also informed him he had the power to withhold his $100,000 purse and call any number of friends to describe the circumstances. But at no point, Molloy contends, did he ever threaten the fighter. Carl Drumond decided on his own to rewrap his wrists and step into the ring.

A Bust Out

Odlanier Solis vs. Carl Drumond

Odlanier Solix, the Cuban who calls himself La Sombra, or “The Shade”, listened to Drumond’s excuses through the thin walls of the locker room (a converted theater dressing room) and entered the ring ready to kill him.

Like an angry bull, he advances straight out of his corner at the first bell, tucking his head low behind his gloves, but using his shoulders ripped by years of conditioning to pop his fists into Drumond’s face. Drumond manages to dance from them for three rounds. As the third round ends, however, Solis unfurls a punishing combination of blows that sends Drumond to his corner reeling just as the bell sounds.  And he never comes out.  As quickly as it started, the match is over. And the TV boxing gods are not sated.

Glenn Tapia and fan

In the crowd afterward, the Pound for Pound boys are celebrating their dual victories. Tapia poses with a girl who came down from New Jersey to watch the fight. Diaz stands quietly in the background, his eyes covered by wrap around shades. When I ask him to lower the shades for a picture, it reveals a black and blue mark under his eye the size of a baseball.

I saw Si only briefly after the fight. He was back at Teasers, in his usual post by the door, greeting friends as they came in after midnight. He was in one of those hard to read moods, still running on the fumes of a successful night, all promoted out, but already thinking about how next year can be better.

The Aftermath

The next morning at the Hotel Key West, Ron Peterson and his boy Scotty Ball are lying out poolside when I check out. They have decided to stay down in Key West for a few more days before heading back to Minnesota. Ball says he’s not sorry he came. He got an all expenses paid week in Florida and $4,000 out of the deal. But this is probably his last fight. He only went back to boxing because he was laid off last year at the auto parts plant outside Rochester where he worked as a machinist. “They let go 230 people, but they’re starting to hire back,” he says. “I’m tenth in line on the rehire list, so I should be back there by June.”

The Gold Ring

Since the fight, I’ve been paying a lot of attention to the HBO documentary series “24/7 Mayweather-Mosley” leading up to their title fight last Saturday night. [Ed note: Mayweather won a unanimous decision, earning a $22.7 million purse.] This is the Gold Ring of Boxing –– two world class fighters, one living in a mansion in Las Vegas, the other training with his entourage in the California foothills outside Los Angeles. The cameras capture every waking second, all the details of father-son relationships, the opinions of the fight managers, the training, the meals, the partying down. One contender says he is only in it for the money, the other professes pride is on the line.

No matter. It’s a made up story. A television story shaped and shifted into a “reality” TV documentary that celebrates the glamor of boxing, the same way television shapes so much of what we think is reality in America.

The reality for these lower card fighters in Key West is that no one is watching until the end of the journey. For the Scotty Balls, Damian Friases, Glenn Tapias, Jorge Diazes, and yes, even, Mr. Fast Hands, the “Busy Bee” Brad Solomon, it’s a life of discipline and perseverance, little money and no guarantees. Every fight could be their last. And I can’t get out of my head what Sal Alessi told me that first day: “When you love the game, the money is the back end. It’s getting there. It’s the ride. Trust me. Even for a hard core businessman, it’s the ride.”

Click Here to read Part I: The Sweet Life of Si Stern
Click Here to read Part II: The Pound For Pound Boys
Click Here to read Part III: The Weigh-In

We return you now to your regularly scheduled programming.

It was just a hunch, but Sal lived on hunches. So first thing Friday morning, he piled his boys into Juan Arias’ courtesy van to put them on the official scale downtown. What Alessi did not know is that the official, official scale would not arrive in Key West until boxing commissioner Tom Molloy brought it that afternoon. The one everyone else was using, the one borrowed from the high school wrestling team, meanwhile, was riding around in the trunk of Si Stern’s’s car. But Juan wants to be accommodating, so he has arranged with a friend who works on the loading dock at the Publix supermarket to use theirs.

“You’re going to weigh me on a meat scale?” Diaz asks incredulously as they pull up in front. “No way. What if it says I’m over? Which one do we go by, mine or the Publix?” Juan drives the Pound for Pound boys back to the hotel, who are still chortling about the screw-up.  The Top Rank executives are waiting out front to meet them, but the boys have their eyes fixed out the other window at two blondes who are climbing into a red Mustang convertible.

“Boy, I’d take one of those,” Diaz says.

“The Mustang or the girls?” I ask.

“Neither. The car next to the Mustang,” he says, pointing at a black BMW sedan. Brad Goodman, the matchmaker for Top Rank, overhears him and dangles the keys in front of Diaz’s eyes. “Here. Take her for a spin. She’s mine.”

Goodman is one of those guys in the boxing world who knows everybody, and nobody knows. To put a fight card together, he calls on friends in every major market. In New Jersey, it’s the Lynch brothers. In Chicago, it’s Dominic Pesoli. In the upstream battle to become a championship contender, he’s the keeper of the locks and channels, giving one fighter a break and flushing away the dreams of another.

On the day before the big match, his job is simple: to make sure everybody shows up, at the weight they have contracted to fight. He notices that Diaz is walking around with an Arizona Tea can and pulls him aside. “Loose the liquids for 24 hours,” he says. “Chew this and spit. I know a guy who lost two pounds just in spit.”

A Sissy Who Can Punch

Scotty Ball and his manager Ron Peterson

I ride down to the weigh-in later that day with Ron Peterson, a manager from Minneapolis whose fighter Scotty Ball will be going up against Si’s man Marcus Upshaw. Ball, 24, is a boxer only when he has to be. Until last year, he was a machinist in an auto parts factory outside Rochester, but he was laid off when the auto industry tanked.

With a baby due in August, he signed with Peterson to earn some extra money fighting in the Indian casinos around Minnesota and has put together a respectable 11-6 record, with six knockouts. “He looks like a sissy, but he can really punch,” Peterson says. When Peterson was offered a $4,000 purse to bring Ball down to Fight Night in The Keys, he jumped at the chance.

“I’m like that old prospector looking for gold,” he says. “You go through a lot of fighters, but you’re looking for that one nugget who is going to set you up for life. I had a guy a couple years ago who I thought was it. He was like 16 and 0, then he got in with someone who could punch and it was all over. Poof! All your dreams are gone.”

Big Uns

The weigh-in is being held in the same courtyard behind Big Uns where Ricky Jackson used to stage his bubba matches. Big Uns is the sports bar Si owns under his strip club, and the boxing commissioners have set up shop at the back bar to check paperwork while the official doctor conducts physical exams on a nearby pool table.

Besides the fighters and managers, the weigh-in attracts a number of local luminaries Si has lured in with VIP tickets and a free buffet, reporters and photographers from the boxing press, there are a growing number of attendees who-–how do I say this delicately––look like they just flew in on the Buda Bing charter.

Soon enough, the courtyard starts filling up faster than detention hall at St. Anthony’s on Halloween. In short order, I meet two Hall of Fame matchmakers on vacation from Philadelphia and Baltimore, a retired promoter from Las Vegas, and three shadowy figures from New Jersey who won’t give me their names but joke they have flown in to be Carl Moretti’s bodyguards. “We keep him out of trouble in the bars,” one says.

One of the men looks like someone I know in Wisconsin, so I ask if he has relatives there. “The only guy I knew in Wisconsin was Vince Lombardi, and he’s buried in Secaucus,” he says. Do you have a monument to him there like they do in Green Bay, I wonder. “Yeah, it’s a rest stop on the New Jersey turnpike,” his buddy says.

Odlanier Solis

The paperwork is going slowly. The two heavyweights who will anchor the show kill the waiting time without acknowledging the other’s presence. Odlanier Solis, 29, the Cuban gold mendalist, is a bundle of energy, playing foosball with the other fighters, signing posters and mugging for the cameras with his one-year-old son.

Carl Drumond

His opponent Carl Drumond, 35, the Costa Rican champion, sits in a chair on the deck, quietly hiding behind his sunglasses.

The weigh-in will soon confirm a new trend in boxing. Heavyweights are getting heavier. Solis will come in at a hefty 268.5 pounds. Drumond will weigh 228.5. Both are heavier than Mohammed Ali or George Foreman were in their prime, and they are vying for the chance to take on the current champion, Wlvadimir Klitschko, who is 6’ 7” and weighs 269 pounds.

Mr. Fast Hands

Before things start, Juan wants me to meet Brad Solomon, who will be Damian Frias’s opponent. Juan saw him fight in Atlanta and swears “he has the fastest hands since Sugar Ray Leonard.”

“So you’re Mr. Fast Hands,” I say, thinking a little levity might break the ice. He breaks into a broad smile. That’s when I see his top five front teeth are all gold-plated. “How’s that working for you?”

His manager Charles Ferguson quickly jumps in. He thinks maybe I’ve gotten the wrong impression. “The teel are real,” he reassures me. “It’s just one of those things kids are doing these days. He wanted gold teeth, so he’s got gold teeth.”

Good to Go

Alejandro Lopez vs. Jorge Diaz

Carl Moretti, the senior vice president of Top Rank, kicks off the weigh-in with appropriate thanks to the local promoters, sponsors and friends (no mention of the bodyguards.) Key West is a terrific venue, he says, with a family atmosphere that “will expose boxing to a whole different set of fans.” The weigh-in itself is anti-climatic. No in-your-face challenges, insults or boasting. The boxers step to the stage, strip down to their underwear (mid-calf briefs not boxers, in case you were wondering), step on the scale, then pose for photographers facing their opponent in that cheesy fists up shot you see in program books. (Diaz weighs in at 124 pounds exactly.)

When it is over, Solis gathers his entourage and drives off. The Pound for Pound Boys climb back in Juan’s van to get to sleep early at the hotel. The only fighter in no particular hurry to leave is Drumond.  I follow him out to Duvall Street where he stops in a T-shirt shop to pick up a few souvenirs. Most of the officials at the weigh-in assumed that as a Costa Rican, Drumond knows only a smattering of English. In the souvenir shop, it’s clear he speaks English fluently, especially in the company of women.

He picks out a Key West hoodie, then another shirt, all the while flirting with the woman behind the counter. When she finds out he is one of the fighters, she presses a beaded necklace in his hand and prays. She is praying that he has a great victory tomorrow night, that God will protect him, and that he will return home safe.  In Drumond’s eyes, however, you can see his mind is focused on only one thing: where is she going to be after the fight?

A dozen or so Harley hogs sit outside in the parking lot with license plates from Michigan, South Carolina, New Hampshire and other points north. Inside the Denny’s, their owners are holding what looks to be a cast party for Cocoon, giving rise to the notion Key West is blessed with two tourist seasons: daylight for retirement age hippies, after midnight for the party hearty.

Odlanier Solis, the 29-year-old Cuban defector who headlines Saturday’s “Fight Night in The Keys” is supposed to be staying here, but he won’t be arriving until the end of the week. So it’s a relief when Juan Arias, the affable driver assigned to cart the boxers around in his courtesy van, shows up carrying the Pound for Pound Boys. Manager Sal Alessi and trainer Mike Skowronski climb out followed by three young boxers from their stable in Jersey City, New Jersey. Before they are even checked in, the boys are bobbing and weaving in the lobby.

Jorge Diaz

The headliner among them is Jorge Diaz, an intense 22-year-old whose featherweight fight has been tapped by Top Rank to lead off its Saturday night broadcast. This will be Diaz’s first national television exposure so he doesn’t want to do anything to spoil it. He declines my offer to shake hands for fear I might wrench his sore thumb.

Glen Tapia

His buddy Glen Tapia, 20, has no such qualms. He is slated for a lower card middleweight bout, only four rounds, and he is so happy to be out of New Jersey in March he would have flown down in his swimsuit if the airlines allowed it. This is only his fifth fight since he turned professional, and his first in an outdoor arena. The third boxer, Jeremy Bryant, 21, has no fight on the card, but his managers think he’ll benefit from coming along for the ride.

Pound for Pound Promotions is the brainchild of the Lynch brothers, John and Pat, two savvy fight promoters with close ties to the Top Rank people. John books events in New York and Atlantic City (Diaz is on a June 5 Yankee Stadium card) and his brother Pat develops young fighters to fill the bill. They are a paradigm for a new generation of boxing promoters that are resuscitating the sport across America with HBO’s 24/7 documentary series leading the way and its pay-per-view title matches as the gold pot at the end of the rainbow.

The Lynch brothers, Alessi and Skowronski started Pound for Pound in 2008 by cherry picking the best amateurs from the New Jersey Golden Gloves. “At first it was like picking a fantasy football team,” Skowronski recalls. “We each had to pick one guy, then say what we liked about him.” They mapped out a plan to develop each fighter, use local matches to give him experience and confidence, and look for matches that will push him into the national spotlight, and maybe a shot at a title.

How far a fighter goes up the ladder . . . that is a key phrase in boxing . . . up the ladder . . . depends on the fighter. “We can only lead the horse to water. We can’t make him drink,” Skowronski says.  “When he’s in that ring, it’s just him and the other guy. That’s what I love boxers. The great ones know it’s him against everyone else.”

The Boxing Business

I’m sitting in the Key West Hotel lobby waiting for Si Stern, the impresario of “Fight Night in The Keys”, to take me to his gym when Alessi starts talking about the business. It takes only a few minutes for him to discover “you don’t know much about boxing, do you?” I have to admit I don’t.  So Alessi is gracious enough to give me a short course in how the ladder works.

He has been in the fight game for 31 years (He turned his first amateur pro in 1983.) and he will be the first to tell you the path to becoming a champion boxer is anything but straightforward. Most young boxers in America start out in the Golden Gloves. The best, if they are lucky, or persistent (and usually both), find a manager who signs them to a contract. For a fee that usually amounts to 30 percent of their earnings, he provides a training facility, sets up matches and manages their career. At first, the purses are so small the managers usually waive their fee.

Mike Skowronski, trainer, and Sal Alessi, manager

The purses grow incrementally as fighters move up the ladder, but only become significant when a fighter joins the ranks of a contender. Who fights whom falls to a network of matchmakers––some local, some regional, a few nationally known––who share notes and observations. Their judgment is pivotal, but also intuitive. On the one hand, their job is to create matches fight fans will pay to watch. On the other, it is to make matches that are worth watching. The subtle distinction is the difference between an over-hyped fight that ends in an early round and a match that goes the distance leaving fans wanting to see more from both.

On the championship title level, the water gets very murky, very fast. A dizzying array of sanctioning bodies – the WBA, WBO, WBC, IBO, IBF and IBC, to name a few – have been created to hand out titles; and there is seemingly no end of territories or weight classes in which a fighter can be crowned a champ. Rankings don’t help much. They are guesses built on rumors made out of lies, one manager says.

At the top of the sport, the real determinant of who gets a shot at a title are the TV networks like HBO, Showtime, ESPN, and Fox Sports who fill their airtime with matches they can promote. They put up the big money for title fights. But the only fighters who get a shot at it somehow “look good” on television, which makes a good manager more adept at managing the spin than managing his fighter in the ring.

Alessi admits he isn’t much of a spinmeister. He works in the trenches, building up young boxers one fight at a time. It all sounds so noble I have to ask him: can he make a living doing that?

“When you love the game, the money is the back end,” he says. “The thrill is getting there. It’s the ride. Trust me. Even for a hard core businessman, it’s the ride.”

Much of what Alessi says is echoed by Si when he picks me up. “In the old days, you had your clubs, your CYO (Catholic Youth Organization) and Golden Gloves. They were the breeding ground where kids who wanted to fight could bring themselves up. But a lot of those places have disappeared,” Si says. “The Elks Club matches, what they used to call smokers, are dying out. All the money is in television, but TV only wants guys who are undefeated. So most of these promoters will fight a guy against a bunch of bums to get his record to 18 and 0. And when he gets on television, it’s his first good fight and he gets knocked out, and he’s done.”

The Florida Championship Belt

Tom Molloy, executive director of the Florida Boxing Commission

Fight Night in The Keys is an attempt to reverse the trend, Si says. Top Rank’s participation guarantees national exposure for the top two fights, but Si has arranged with Tom Molloy, the executive director of the Florida boxing commission, to bestow Florida state titles at the bottom of the card for three other fights.

Molloy, 54, is a former New York boxer and trainer recruited in 2006 to clean up the sport after a series of local scandals. In recent years, Florida has taken its place alongside New York, Los Angeles and Las Vegas as a fertile training ground in the sport. Year round good weather and a ready audience of Hispanic fight fans have made its gyms home to many Cuban and South American boxers.

As a result, Molloy and Si believe Florida can provide a framework of state titles young professional fighters can aspire to compete for that will allow them to fight, and lose, and fight again all the wiser for the experience. If, as Si envisions it, Georgia, Texas, California, and other states do the same, state champions could fight each other, regional champions could be crowned, and boxing would have its first playoff system.

“It would bring back rivalries like the old Chicago-New York Golden Glove matches,” he says. “But you have to have good looking title belts. These fighters are very belt conscious. So you need a belt that says, ‘This is big time.’”

The Key West Police Athletic League

Si’s boxers are working out at the the Key West Police Athletic League, where his friend Ricky “Action” Jackson runs the youth boxing program. Ricky is working with Damian Frias, Si’s welterweight. Working in the sense that Jackson is sitting in a chair watching Frias thrash away at a speed bag. His fists pop rhythmically against the leather. You’re not gonna beat me. You’re not gonna beat me. I’ve been through things you’ll never go through. You’re not gonna beat me. You’re not gonna beat me. I beat ‘em in juvie whatever they tried. You’re not gonna beat me! You’re not gonna beat me. I can only beat myself.

Frias gives the bag one last roundhouse, climbs into the center of the ring and lies down staring at the ceiling. At the age of 33, he is the kind of fighter Si is drawn to––a kid most people would have given up on long ago.

Damian Frias

In many ways, he is the very definition of a hard case. He came to America as a four-year-old in the Mariel Boat Lift. He remembers cowering between his mother’s legs and throwing up, with sharks, meanwhile, circling the flimsy craft all the way to America. His family was sent to a refuge camp in New Jersey, but Damian’s asthma got them sent back to Florida, and that’s when things went from bad to worse.

As a 12-year-old in Miami, Damian never saw much of his father or mother. He lived his life on the streets. “I learned how to steal cars, break into houses. I stole a gun once and pretty soon I was carrying every day,” he recalls. When he was 15, he used it to shoot an 18-year-old, earning himself eight years in prison for attempted murder.

In prison, he was quiet, rebellious and explosive. He was moved around to three different prisons for bad behavior. At the last, he spent two-and-a-half years in solitary confinement. It was the first time he ever contemplated––for days at a time––what he wanted to do when he got out. He was 25 before he stepped into a boxing ring, but soon put together a 16 and 2 professional record with 11 knockouts. Married with two children, Frias was well on his way to a professional career when his mother, sister and older brother were swept up in a 2006 federal drug raid and sent to prison. Even as his life unraveled around him, though, Damian stuck to his boxing. He wakes up every day at 4:30 AM, runs five miles, swims 40 minutes, eats breakfast, goes to the gym and leaves in time to pick up his kids after school. That’s the part Si admires, and why he picked up his contract when nobody else would.

Damian is lying in the middle of the ring staring at the ceiling. Si is talking on his cell phone. But Ricky “Action” Jackson has all the time in the world to talk to me about bubba boxing in Key West.

The Hemingway Connection

You might think from the tourist materials available Ernest Hemingway was a lifelong resident of Key West who wrote on the side. In fact, Hemingway only finished one novel there, A Farewell to Arms, the first year he visited in 1929. He lived then above a Ford dealership at 314 Simonton Street that now advertises itself as “The Pelican Poop Shoppe.” The Spanish style mansion at 907 Whitehead Street that tourists line up to tour was a gift to Hemingway from his second wife Pauline’s father in 1931.

Hemingway House, 907 Whitehead

The house was only a few blocks away from the colored section of town known as Bahama Village. Hemingway would walk over to watch “Iron Baby” Roberts, Alfred “Black Pie” Colebrooks and Kermit “Shine” Forbes duke it out in “bubba matches” that he would sometimes volunteer to referee.

He set up a boxing ring in his backyard and invited the local boxers to spar with his houseguests, including everyone from novelist John Dos Passos to heavyweight champion Gene Tunney. But his interest in Key West was short-lived. He left in 1937 for the Spanish Civil War. When he returned in 1939, he divorced his wife and moved to Cuba.

Bubba Boxing

Si Stern, manager

In the late 1990’s, Si and his partner Dave Johnson were casing an old jazz club in Bahama Village as a possible investment when an old black guy started talking to them about the good old days. “Shine” Forbes told them about fighting with Hemingway, sparring with Kid Gavalan and the various matches he had arranged. He invited them over to his little house. “Sure enough, the walls were lined with pictures,” Si recalls. “He was the real deal. He had pictures of all these fighters and could talk for hours about them.”

Bubba boxing isn’t just a memory on Shine’s wall, it’s a Key West tradition, Jackson says. “Whenever a fireman had a beef with a policeman, or a policeman and lawyer wanted to settle something out of court, we’d put up a ring, hire a ref and call it bubba boxing.” The wildest matches were in the courtyard behind Big Uns. “We turned this little stage into a ring. The only problem was it had a coconut tree in the corner. We put pillows around it, but you really had to watch out. Some of the fights were grudge matches. Most were just to see who was best. There was no scale to see who was fighting in what weight class. It was crazy.”

After a Tough Man contest in Tampa turned into a melee in 2004, the Florida state legislature decided it was time to close down unsanctioned fighting in Florida. But where some saw a crisis, Si saw opportunity. “I knew the bubba fights were getting out of hand, and I remembered Shine, and I told Dave we ought to do something.”

The Ghost of Arturo Gatti

By the time Si drops me back at the Hotel Key West, Sal Alessi has commandeered the workout room off the pool deck as a makeshift gym. Glen Tapia sits on an exer-cycle, his legs dangling over the pedals. All of Skowronski’s attention is focused on Diaz, who dances around covered neck to toe in a black rubber suit, a last ditch effort to shed another pound or two before the official weigh in. (He is teetering on the edge.)

Skowronski and Diaz

Skowronski puts Diaz through his paces, calling out sequences of punches both know by heart. In one exchange, Diaz pummels the practice mitts with a flurry of blows so fast he looks like a Roadrunner cartoon. In another, he finishes it off with a right cross that thwops into the mitt so hard it echoes.

“He’s ready,” Skowronski whispers in Alessi’s ear.

Skowronski, 39, has been around boxing for 19 years. His pedigree is a list of fighters and trainers he has worked with. It starts with Buddy McGirt, Hector Roca and Lou Duva, famous trainers who broke him in, and ends with Arturo Gatti, the legendary featherweight that Skownronski trained for 16 years.

“I compare every fighter I train today to Gatti, every guy,” he says. “With a guy like Arturo, it was all about giving the fans their money worth. He would fight for the fans. He’d go out and stand there throwing fifty punches, you know, just trade with the guy, and he would come back and say, ‘Did you hear the fans? They’re going crazy?’”

Gatti earned his featherweight champion title five times in matches renown for their ferocity. Ring magazine named four of his bouts “Fight of the Year” before he retired in 2007. In one, he fought three rounds with a broken wrist. In another, he kept throwing punches even though he had both knees on the floor.

Diaz idolizes Gatti. He wears his colors, wears his picture on a T-shirt and emulates his style. “We fought him in Madison Square Garden last year against an African kid named Lante Addy. Before the sixth round, Jorge comes back to the corner and says, ‘Coach, can I do it?’ I knew exactly what he meant. The next round, the two of them went at it. They stood toe to toe for a minute and 15 seconds of non-stop punching. And he came back and said, ‘Did you hear the crowd?’ It was pure Gatti!”

Skowronski believes boxing is making a comeback in America. The popularity of Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) – those Ultimate Fighting Championships staged in an octagonal cage – stole some of the sport’s thunder, but the excitement is spilling back into the traditional ring. Young boxers all have Facebook fan pages and use other social media to keep friends in touch with where they are fighting. “You go to some of these fights, and there are fans who follow these guys from one venue to the next,” he says.

If boxing fell into disfavor, Skowronski believes it wasn’t MMA that did it in. It was the TV networks trying to boost ratings with bad matchmaking. “If you were going to present a kid for television, certain networks would look at someone who’s 21-3 and say, ‘oh, he has three losses.’ Never mind they were all good fights. The TV network would rather go with some guy who is 20-0 and hasn’t fought anybody good than somebody who fought his way to the top. So everyone became so afraid to take a loss that it killed the sport,“ he says. “It totally killed it.”

“If you got a kid that you really believe in, you should be willing to fight anybody. I know the fight here is a 50-50 proposition. The Lopez kid is a good fighter. But that’s the kind of fight we’re looking for.”

Coming Next Week: PART III: The Weigh In.

CLICK HERE for Part I: The Sweet Life of Si Stern

One of his girls – there are 118 in all, a dozen or so always on call to dance – comes up and gives him a big kiss. “This is the most beautiful girl in the world,” he says. There are some who think Si is a bit daft. If he is, there is method in his madness, because his method tonight is to hug her back.

Over the din of the music, Si launches in on his favorite topic, which is not girls, Key West, or the college students on Spring break that now fill his club, but boxing. He is just back from the Pacquaio – Clottey fight in Houston. (“A total waste of time. Clottey lost every round. He never even fought.”) But he can hardly wait until Saturday when Top Rank Boxing brings the whole show to town for “Fight Night in The Keys.”

In the great tradition of Ernest Hemingway––a tradition, by the way, that is not as great as you might imagine––Key West will take its place in boxing’s center ring. Top Rank will stage a heavyweight title match between Cuba’s Olympic gold medalist Odlanier Solis and Costa Rican champion Carl Davis Drumond outdoors before 5,000 fans in Key West’s famous Mallory Square. The Fox Sports Network will broadcast it to 93 million homes, and ground zero for all the action will be Teasers, Si’s strip club on Duval Street and Big Uns, the sports bar he owns below it.

For the last five years, Si Stern and his partner Dave Johnson have been building “Fight Night in the Keys” into a Key West institution. The literary crowd has its “Hemingway Days.” The gay community celebrates “Fantasy Fest.” Now fight fans will have their day as well and, although Johnson is the promoter of record, everyone knows this is Si’s baby.

In the weeks leading up to the event, Si lives and breathes boxing. He pumps it on the radio, promotes it at the club, sells the tickets (or gives them away to car valets), picks the ring girls, even manages some of the fighters. For some reason this year, Si has decided that is not enough. This year, Si wants something special at Fight Night in the Keys. This year, Si has decided he needs a writer.

Flying In

The American Eagle turbo-prop lifts off from Miami International Airport and banks sharply south over suburbs, then farmlands, then a murky kind of greenish-brown swamp called The Everglades. Only from the air do you fully realize that southern Florida has no border just this soft green goo that oozes like lava into the sea. Slippery fingers of swampland break into small isles and islets, hundreds of them (800), mostly uninhabited, some little more than reefs with water skimming over the top, and pretty soon there is more water than land, and no more Florida.

I’m headed to Key West, one of only 30 of these islands large enough to sustain any kind of human community. Only 90 miles from Havana (and 168 from Miami Beach), it is the southernmost point in the United States. From the time Ponce de Leon first charted its existence in 1513, Key West has been a haven for characters who didn’t quite fit in anywhere else. The Spaniards called it Cayo Hueso, or bone key after finding the bones of massacred Indians scattered on its beaches, and for the next 300 years that’s about all you could find there.

Once control transferred to the United States in 1822, however, the scoundrels started moving in. Key West’s history thereafter can be divided into four eras: The Shipwreck Years (1830 – 1890) when small fortunes were made salvaging cargo from sunken schooners in the Florida Straits; The Heyday (1890 – 1930) when Key West flourished as Florida’s largest city (pop. 18,800) and Henry Flagler built his railroad through Florida in a vain attempt to make it a vacation destination; The Romantic Years (1930 – 1960) when Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams and Robert Frost were frequent guests there; and The Margaritaville Years (1977 – present), when Jimmy Buffett’s song “Wasting Away in Margaritaville” turned Key West into a refuge for anyone wishing to partake of the drugs, sex, liquor and lifestyle it celebrates.

When Si called to ask if I would come down for Fight Night, it took me all of a New York second to say yes. He knew all the words that inspire a Chicago boy ­–– seventy degrees, all expenses paid, front row seats, “and did I mention, I run the largest strip club in the Florida Keys”–– because Si once was a Chicago boy himself, if you can call a 73-year-old a boy.

The Sweet Life of Si Stern

Si was born Silas Stern in 1937 in Garfield Park Hospital to a family of strictly observing Hassidic Jews from Humboldt Park. His family moved to Albany Park where he attended Roosevelt High School, then on to Los Angeles, where he followed in the footsteps of Sandy Koufax at Fairfax High School. (“I never attended a school more than two blocks from a deli,” he jokes.)  He tried his hand at a variety of sports, but excelled at tennis. “He plays a lot like Bobby Riggs,” his son Gary, 49, says. “He lures you in by claiming he’s not very good, then drives you crazy with lobs to the corner.”

When he was 19, Si found himself in the finals of a tennis tournament that took place on a Friday night. If he played, it would mean breaking the Sabbath. His father warned him never to return home if he did. Si went to the match, and kept going, eventually landing in Miami Beach where he got a job working as a bellman at the Fontainebleau Hotel.

This was in the 1950’s when Cuba was still considered a Florida colony. Fidel Castro had yet to come to power and Havana’s Riviera was a wild strip of beaches, casinos, nightclubs and showgirls. Si would go frequently on weekends to sample the nightlife and carouse with his buddies. One of them sold television sets for Admiral. Another, a Memphis businessman named Kemmons Wilson, was about to start a chain of motels called Holiday Inns.

In his first job in the television business, Si put the two of them together in a deal to furnish Admiral TV’s to all the Holiday Inn rooms in America.  The deal was so lucrative that when Motorola acquired the Admiral brand, the company made Si vice president of its television division. He rose in the ranks to become president of Quasar and GTE, ran a cable company in Ohio for a few years, and was living on Astor Street in Chicago, developing a hotel venture in Hoffman Estates, when a huge blizzard struck Chicago in 1988. The wind chill was below zero. Traffic on the Kennedy was at a standstill, and his car was dead. “If I get out of this car, I’m never coming back,” he told himself. Then he climbed out.

It took three years, but Si moved to Key West in 1991. He was 54 and single. He’d accumulated enough pension rights to retire three times over. His two children were grown. He had every intention of never working again — until another “opportunity” presented itself.

Never Miss an Opportunity

Opportunity has been the watchword of Si’s life. In Key West, it was an opportunity to buy a small bed and breakfast, and double its size; then an opportunity to buy a little strip club called Teasers, and move it downtown onto Duval Street. Enough other opportunities have arisen that Si has a dozen business interests on the island. Key West natives tend to be naturally suspicious of anyone not born and bred on the island, but Si has a foot in the door of every civic endeavor. He’s contributed money to help furnish the police department gym, construct the high school scoreboard, support local tourism and dabble in politics. But what Si contributes most is his enthusiasm.

“It’s fun watching Si work. He’s like a 5-year-old,” says his friend Reggie Long, a trainer in Chicago. “He gets so excited. You don’t always know where he’s going with an idea. The only thing you know for sure is that anything he touches turns to gold.”

Still Promoting

It’s going on midnight and Si is still pumping Fight Night in The Keys, although he has moved on to plug the individual boxers he will have fighting that night. There’s Marcus Upshaw, the nephew of NFL players union head Gene Upshaw, fighting for the Florida state middleweight belt; and Damian Frias, a Cuban out of Miami’s ghetto, “who is a great story”; and Danny “The White Lion” Van Staden, who also happens to manage the girls at Teasers.

Si rattles off the names of other VIP guests he wants me to interview. We make arrangements to meet tomorrow because suddenly his eye catches something amiss at the other end of the bar. “Have a drink. Enjoy the show,” he says, “We’ll talk more in the morning.”

Teasers

As soon as Si steps away, a dancer by the name of Mary Jane takes a seat beside me. In the ten minutes before she goes up on stage, she coaxes a cream soda and Tequila shot out of me for ten bucks. (I, in turn, coax from her the fact she pays $40 a night to dance, keeps what she earns from lap dances, less tips for the bouncers and DJ, and makes $20 to $2,000 a night, depending on the clientele.)

The nice thing about working for Si, she says, is she can do what she wants as long as she stays clear of anything that might be construed as prostitution. There’s nothing sleazy about Teasers. It’s a job, and a legal one in Key West, not worth jeopardizing for a few extra bucks. What she offers customers is the illusion of sex. Most of the dance takes place in her customers’ heads. Her body is just the canvas on which they paint their dreams. To get those dreams going, she dresses like a schoolteacher with flowing black hair and heavy-rimmed black glasses – in a neon green latex mini-skirt.

When her turn comes to dance, Mary Jane slips off her stool. (“Watch this. I’m going gansta!” she says.) She mounts a stage with two poles in the middle of the room, starting at the back pole half-clothed and ending ten minutes later totally naked at the front one. Other girls are more athletic, shimmying up the pole and doing various acrobatic tricks as they undress on the way down, but Mary Jane has mastered the art of watching the boys watch her in the mirrors on the wall.

She catches the eye of a guy who is pretending to watch TV and comes over to engulf his head in her breasts. He slips a dollar in her garter for the favor. Another boy grins ear to ear and leans forward on both elbows with a twenty dangling from his teeth. She snatches it from him with her tits. He pulls out another. She does it again. He looks like he died and went to heaven.

Midnight on Duval Street

Outside on the sidewalk, a street hawker sounds the clarion call for Teasers – “Hot naked ladies and alcohol.” At Hemingway’s favorite bar Smokey Joe’s down the street, a half dozen college girls take the stage to sing “My Sharona” with the band. A fat man in a bra dances in the window of the Bull & Whiskey. A man with “$2 a beer” painted on his belly sells liquor from a T-shirt shop.

In the cab back to the hotel, the driver says this is all par for the course during spring break in Key West. During spring break, he can make $600 a night driving students around. The rest of the year he stays closer to his charter fishing boat. I ask him if he happens to know Si Stern. He smiles.

“Everybody knows Si,” he says. “He’s a great guy. He does things the Key West way. He does good by people, and people do good by him.”

Coming Next Week: FIGHT NIGHT IN THE KEYS Part II: The Pound for Pound Boys.

“Sometime’s you just have to piss in the sink.”
–Charles Bukowski

Before I was employed by Playboy magazine I was hired as a designer (in 1970) by Playboy’s Book Division where I laid out books, mainly paper-back collections of cartoons from the magazine.

During that time Robert Crumb made one of his regular trips to Chicago to help Jay Lynch and me put together an issue of Bijou Funnies.

Jay and Jane Lynch, Robert Crumb and I were invited to a reception for the psychedelic poster entrepreneur, Peter Max and his guru, Swami Satchidanada. This transcendental soiree was held in the lakeshore high-rise apartment of Paul Magit, a prosperous clothing retailer/meditator. The attendees were a variegated flock of well-heeled liberal functionaries, wealthy polo hippies, a retinue of hardboiled, whiskey-drinking Chicago newspaper reporters and a gaggle of scraggly young cartoonists.

In the bedroom the beatific Swami levitated in a lotus position inches off the bed and randomly deciphered the Meaning of Life for the assembled gentry.

In the living room macrobiotic snacks and a bar stocked with organic fruit juices fed our secular needs. The reporters became dark and surly due to lack of liquor. Meanwhile, the affluent white people continued to ferret out Godliness while Peter Max’s faint handshake and dazzling garage-door grin serviced the entourage.

Around this time Playboy was about to publish an article about the underground comix phenomenon and the magazine was attempting to woo Robert Crumb into becoming a Playboy cartoonist and Robert was finding delight in rejecting their advances. The corporate pressure was being applied through Harvey Kurtzman, mentor, friend and symbol to Robert. Consequently, we were all invited to meet Hugh Hefner at the Chicago Playboy Mansion.

So, one afternoon, after working as a wage slave/junior designer at Playboy’s
book division I get picked up by a sleek limousine, where I join, Jay, Jane, Robert, Harvey.

As we were chauffeured up Michigan Avenue, Harvey spied a breast-pendulous and braless love child strutting down the avenue at a bouncy gait.

“I’ll never get used to the braless look”, commented Harvey. It struck me as peculiar, this coming from the guy who created the breast-pendulous and often naked nymphet, Little Annie Fanny.

The limo rolled through the radio activated gates of the Playboy Mansion. We were ushered out of the car and through the commanding iron-relief doors, past a burnished suit of armor and a hologram of an enormous killer white shark, razor-toothed and hostile. We were escorted around a colonnade and into the 66′x33′ Living Room of the Great House.

The Living Room was palatial, a masculine expanse awash in dark virile leather and intrepid mahogany. On the west wall a Franz Kline hung in resolute misogyny next to a mean-spirited portrait of a woman by De Kooning. The acrid stench of testosterone stained the air.

We were told it would be awhile before Hef would be awake. There would be a few hours to kill and we could order any food or drink we desired from the Mansion’s company of snappy servants. I had a steak and began an aggressive assault on the host’s intoxicants. We were free to investigate all the facilities, except the Great Man’s personal quarters and rotating love nest.

I began to wander and ended up in the Red Room, where playmate Donna Michelle capriciously romped in the Playboy of my youth. The room, sadly, seemed much smaller and had less audacity than in the photos of my adolescence. More like a motel room really. A bed, a TV and on the beside table was a lamp, a remote control, but instead of a Gideon Bible the current issue of Playboy held sway. Reality versus fantasy is always a losing battle. Before long we were invited to slide down a phallic brass firepole through a vulvic hole cut through lush carpeting and dark hardwood that accessed us into the gameroom below. There, the manly arts of pinball, bowling and billiards could be practiced and honed by those with balls enough.

We were solicited to sip the driest of martinis in the undulating and hypnotic confines of the Grotto Bar where a glass wall looked into the famous kidney-shaped Playboy pool.

“How often”, I brooded “had nude exhibitionist sprites romped in rude water-ballet, while in the shadows of the Woo Grotto voyeuristic hep cats sipped Rob Roys and reposed enrapt?”

I sucked my cocktail onion dry and ordered another drink, my focus in disarray.

I was poolside where, only months earlier, the entire cast of “Hair” frolicked in naked hippie abandon much to the delight of sophisticated couples, ice cubes atinkle and libidos aflutter.

But this night there were no bare-bottomed free spirits or hard nippled water sprites playfully splashing. There was only an empty pool and a bar full of mudlark cartoonists. The booze had washed me clean of propriety. I told Jane Lynch that it had been my fantasy to skinny dip in Hef’s pool, so with her encouragement I stripped down to my love beads and belly flopped into the perfumed swimming hole.

Before my aquatic antic I whispered to Jay – I thought facetiously – “I’m going to take a shit in the Playboy pool.”

Jay knew I was a mischievous sort and correctly observed that Demon Rum had me in its diabolic grip. The line between truth and caprice was sufficiently blurred that he took me at my word and warned Harvey Kurtzman that I intended to loose a floater in Hefner’s swim tank.

Kurtzman, who was seeking a raise in pay for his “Little Annie Fanny” strip, figured that his chances for more money would be diminished if a companion of his pooped in the pool. So he informed security of my scatological intent.

Scowling security personnel hustled me out of the area and padlocked the Grotto Bar and pool.

I was outraged, as I saw it, at being kicked out of the pool for swimming naked – by this time having totally forgotten my offhand fecal threat.  I stormed out of the Mansion before Hef arrived on scene, kicking the suit of armor in the shins as I left.

Later that week Jay, Robert and I produced a collaborative strip for Bijou titled “Hef’s Pad” in which Snappy Sammy Smoot, having been invited to Hef’s home, aggravates his companions by pissing in the sink.

Skip Williamson is a former Chicago cartoonist. “Hef’s Pad” is an excerpt from his upcoming autobiography “My Bitter Agenda.” All images are copyright (c) Bijou Publishing Empire, Inc.