Great Article - 'Fighters of Melbourne's West'

Fight Knights of the West

from the Maribyrnong Weekly - 1st April 2011

Like the gladiators of ancient Rome, old-school boxers from Melbourne’s west fought each other. Mostly, they were socially-marginalised working-class battlers and migrants... until victory brought them freedom from poverty and obscurity.

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take us inside their world.

GANGITANO caught him off guard. Barry Michael had reached the pinnacle, beating

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for the IBF super featherweight world title in 1985.

Michael was with his first wife at Lazar’s when Ellis’s promoter, Alfonse Gangitano, nearly bit his face off.

Sitting in his Williamstown home, the boxing legend says the full story has never been told.

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...the late Gus Mercurio referees 1985 world title fight between Barry Michael and Lester Ellis.


‘‘Lester had underworld management and I had waterfront management, let’s say,’’ Michael begins. ‘‘Colourful identities, we’ll call ’em.

‘‘After I beat Lester there was bitterness in his camp. They were filthy on me because I’d signed a return-fight contract with them ... the IBF had forced me to sign a contract that said if I won, under no circumstances could I fight Lester again. I had to fight the Korean Jin Sik Choi, who was No.1.’’

Michael stops mid-sentence, yelling out: ‘‘Fammo!’’

No, he hasn’t got brain damage. Michael is trying to stop his pug, named after his hero Johnny Famechon, from indulging his foot fetish and nipping my feet.

Michael didn’t stand a chance against Gangitano and his cohorts.

‘‘My first wife started screaming. I realised I was surrounded. I realised I was in serious trouble. And they were all tooled-up as well.

‘‘He grabbed me by the lapels of my jacket and dragged me with him and we went down on the couch and he latched onto this cheek.

‘‘I was sticking my fingers into his eyes to get him off, and they were on me, pounding me. I never got off the couch, I never threw a punch, I never had a chance.

‘‘Then I just remember being dragged through the crowd and blood spraying everywhere and people screaming. I remember getting to the front door and my first wife Sandy was outside screaming. I said: ‘Listen, take me to hospital, let them think they’ve had a victory — I’ve still got the world title’.’’


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Fight Knights of the West (continued)


Arriving from the UK at age five, Michael was raised in Glenbervie and then Williamstown.

‘‘I was in the commission flats at 12, 13, when Lionel Rose won the world bantamweight title; 1968 it was. That inspired me.’’

Michael, Famechon, Rose and Jeff Fenech were the first four inducted into Australia’s boxing hall of fame.

In the garage-gym of his Avondale Heights home, Paul Ferreri hopes he will find Australia’s next gladiator.

At 63, the former Commonwealth bantamweight champion and trainer of Ellis is in great shape and spirits.

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Yet people still ask if Ferreri is bitter.

Hestops before a poster for the 1976 world title fight against Mexican Carlos Zarate in Los Angeles.

Zarate was the undefeated WBC bantamweight champion and Ferreri was his challenger. ‘‘Zarate was the best of all time at the time,’’ says Ferreri.

‘‘He had 41 fights, 40 KOs and no defeats.”

Ferreri lost his tilt by TKO: he never agreed with the verdict.

‘‘They pulled a bit of a dirty on me because they knew Carlos wasn’t gonna make the distance; he was getting tired.

‘‘They stopped it in the 12th round.

‘‘When Carlos went down to the dressing rooms, he collapsed.

‘‘So I got ripped off. If the fight had been allowed to continue for 15 rounds I would have been world champion.’’

But Ferreri says boxing saved him from a life of drudgery.

‘‘When I started boxing I was a fitter and turner. I had really nothing going for me ... and I found another way to get out of that rut of just being behind a machine. If I’d stayed being a fitter and turner nobody would know me.’’

After arriving from Italy at age 5, life was tough for Ferreri.

But harsh times seem to produce great boxers.

‘‘I suppose we were equivalent to the Roman gladiators back then,’’ Ferreri says.

‘‘There’s not so many boxers that are really talented and tough today.

‘‘I’m hoping I can get someone who can go all the way.’’

MISCHA Merz can’t claim the harrowing upbringing of Lester Ellis.

The former women’s welterweight amateur champion never picked maggots off carcasses at a Sunshine abattoir like the three-time world champion.


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Fight Knights of the West (continued)


But something about boxing’s grungy reputation attracted the boxer and author, who calls Seddon home.

Merz, 46, says Sunshine is a suburb with such an ironic name that George Orwell could not have bettered it.

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It is ‘‘poor, bleak, tough and in perpetual, almost terminal recession,’’ she writes in her book titled Bruising.

She tells me: ‘‘Boxing is my man — even my husband will tell you that. It’s like having a relationship with another human being because it can be very frustrating, it can irritate you, it can disgust you, it can appal you. It brings out absolutely the best and the worst in people.’’

Boxing has opened up a new world for Merz, who is training for a masters bout in Atlanta next month.

She has hit and been hit by the most dangerous women on the planet and sparred with celebrities like Lucia Rijker, who played the villain in Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby.

She’s carved a career out of defence, but recalls the first time her nose broke.

‘‘When I saw in the mirror that my nose had shifted halfway across my face I thought, f--k, I look like one of those cliches of a boxer with a bent nose.

‘‘Then the trainer, who was Keith Ellis, Lester’s brother, came over and went, ‘Oh, give us a look,’ and just pushed it back into place. I could hear the gristle and the bone creaking ...’’

When a TV crew came knocking at his back-street St Albans gym, John Scida wasn’t talking.

He has trained world champions, but people seem to dwell on former clients like Andrew ‘Benji’ Veniamin.

Scida says if Veniamin’s parents didn’t want to talk to the Families of Crime producer, then what right did he have.

Whatever the suspected hitman did outside, Scida says it has nothing to do with Veniamin’s training.

‘‘He didn’t use what he learned in the ring outside.

‘‘If you ever see a street fight, it’s completely different. They pick up a stick, pick up a knife, they’re wild things.

‘‘If it was a tennis club in Brighton, it would have lawyers and doctors, true? Well, in the western suburbs we have boxing.’’


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Scida recalls the first time Merz visited his gym.

‘‘She said when she was driving over the West Gate she was thinking, ‘Oh geez, where am I going? Over to the Bronx?’

‘‘I had a girl from Bendigo that sparred with her and knocked her out, just about.

‘‘And she said she was driving back home and going, ‘Oh my God, that was a bad experience. I went over to the west; I got punched up. Jesus, they fight over there.’

‘‘She’s always got fond memories of me.’’

Barry Michael’s run-in with Gangitano ruined his nose and fighting career.

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But long after the gloves come off, the bond between boxing’s gladiators endures.

‘‘Undoubtedly, that cost me the world title because I had to have my nose rebroken and reconstructed, and it broke in the first round when I had my last defence, which was a matter of three months later,’’ Michael says.

‘‘So they basically exacted revenge on me to a certain extent.’’

But he says the Gangitano camp probably got the wrong side of the story.

‘‘I’d trained with Lester since he was 12 and I was 22. I picked him as a world champion when he was 12.

‘‘Then eight years later I’m fighting him for his world title. I was always up for the rematch with Lester Ellis.

‘‘For years they gave me bad publicity, saying I didn’t want it and wouldn’t do it and sidestepped it, which is not true. I always wanted it.

“Even when Lester Ellis fought Mundine, I tried to convince Lester to come back and fight me, not Mundine.

‘‘Lester and I are mates now and I’m sure he regrets it ... and I’m indebted to him for the rest of my life.’’

 

Ambush marketing at it's worst Leon!

 

Merz's returns for "Sweetest" Day at Gleason's Gym

by Lyle Fitzsimmons - The Sports Network - 12th April 2011


It's official... Mischa Merz has come full (squared) circle.

Four years after an initial stair climb to the Brooklyn capital of the boxing world, the globetrotting Australian author returns again to the place that re- ignited her zest for the sport and became the backbone of the 282-page project she'll unveil Tuesday night.

"These are characters in the true literary sense, as big and brave and as vivid as any of the greats of men's boxing have been. If they were all gathered together in the one room, the walls wouldn't be able to contain their energy and their unstoppable life force."

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Soon after she returned to Australia in 2009, the International Olympic Committee announced women's boxing would be included as an event at the 2012 Summer Olympics in London.

And needless to say, Merz expects that exposure to provide yet another launching pad.

"Women have already fought in main events on shows in Europe, and especially Germany," she said. "So it's the U.S. that's really been a little slow. But the Olympics will go a long way to legitimizing the sport and showing people the amazing standards of quality the women involved have reached.

"It adds legitimacy and more people are going to want to see it and take it seriously. If the people out there that are in charge have any real business sense, they're going to want to take advantage of that and it'll be a tipping point.

"When money is deposited, the bank doesn't care if it came from men or women. And the same holds true for boxing. Women are half the population and the fighters out there are going to have just as strong fan followings as the men. At some point, that's got to matter."

"The Sweetest Thing: A Boxer's Memoir" is billed by its publisher as a "wonderful mix of champ-in-the-making story and a tour through the world of a women's sport rising in a male domain."

Gleason's Gym will host the book's launch and kick off a tour that'll send Merz -- the masters division athlete around whom its characters revolve -- out west to California and back east to Georgia, where she'll appear on former world champion Terri Moss's "Atlanta Corporate Fight Night" show on April 23.

According to Merz, Gleason's was the logical place to commence the book's promotional journey, given its role as U.S. staging area for her unlikely climb to the top of the women's amateur boxing ladder -- including wins at the Golden Gloves, Georgia Games and Ringside World Championships.

"I think it's a cross-section of the city. It is New York," Merz said.

"You have people from every corner of New York and they're on every possible level, from top-line boxers preparing for a big fight -- who are jaw- droppingly good in their sessions -- to the beginners who are just learning the basics and who you know will never get anywhere.

"It's like the United Nations. All gyms are similar in that they have the rings and the bells and the rhythms, but there's nowhere I've been that's anywhere on the scale of Gleason's."

The book recounts the six trips Merz took from her home in Melbourne to the United States over 27 months from 2007 through 2009. In her words, "It was in those two years and three months that everything changed for me. What I knew about boxing, what I could do as a boxer and who I was in the world of women's boxing were all transformed."

The initial September 2007 visit was followed by two more a year later in September and October 2008, respectively, and ultimately by a prolonged May- December 2009 run during which she competed in New York, Fort Lauderdale, Atlanta, Kansas City, Los Angeles and Albuquerque.

She gives first-person access to training regimens and ultimately fight-night results, while bobbing and weaving through introductions to the many personalities she encountered along the way.

Among them are several women -- Lucia Rijker, Alicia Ashley, Melissa Hernandez, Bonnie Canino, Ann Wolfe and others -- who, in Merz's estimation, comprise the foundation upon which the future of the female side of the sport will continue to depend.

"I was consciously writing about the sport from a different perspective, within the culture, and relaying it to the outside not as an observer, but as a participant," she said. "I've written about other subjects, but I felt like this was my thing, like I could relate these stories with more fluidity."

Merz's 2000 book, "Bruising," also chronicled her experiences as a boxer and was published to critical acclaim by Picador Australia. Her journalism has appeared in several publications, including The Age, the Sunday Age and the Herald Sun.

"I think the sport has the same potential as women's tennis," she said. "There is no shortage of marketable individuals out there and there's a lot of mileage to be gained from that.

 

"The Sweetest Thing" by Mischa Merz:

Review by Bernie McCoy - WBAN (Womens Boxing Archive Network) - April 14th 2011


In the preface to "The Sweetest Thing," her second book on the sport of Women's boxing, Mischa Merz leaves no doubt about her choice of subject:

"My relationship with boxing has been like one you would have with another human being. I have loathed it and adored it. It has both invaded my dreams and turned my stomach. I have resolved to reduce it's significance in my life only to see my passions for it intensify. Boxing is my man. Even my husband will tell you so."

An understandable reaction to such words might posit that all writers need be passionate about a subject to which they are going to devote the time and effort required to turn out tens of thousands of words. This is true, but then you learn that Merz has traveled half way around the world, from her native Australia, multiple times in the two years, 2007-09, covered in this book.

She has come to the United States, the putative center of the sport, to camp follow the sport's actions and athletes from the big city gyms to lesser known enclaves of female boxing. And what has resulted is a remarkable up close and personal insight that endows this one-of-a-kind look at an often misunderstood sport and a realization that her passion has been well spent.

And the jet lag inducing travel is just a small part of what has gone into this effort. There is the less than one-star food and lodging accommodations that Merz endures as she seeks out and, invariably, gets next to the famous, the wannabes and the never-was personalities of the sport. The reader gets the good, the bad and the indifferent of both athletes, managers, promoters and fans.

Merz's prose is populated with personalities, ranging from world class athletes to boxing lifers, on both side of the ropes, who put their whole being into an often derided sport and sometimes receive, in return, a modicum of fame, although more often, thru no lack of effort, come away devoid of even a sliver of achievement. And Merz doesn't limit herself to the role of "interested observer."

She goes well beyond "hangin' around" the sport, recording what she sees and hears, although she does this in a very readable manner. Her chronicling of women who devote much of their lives to punching each other in the face in the name of sport, is an unparalleled education not only for those who are familiar with Women's boxing, but, probably, a more useful primer for those unfamiliar or misinformed about the sport.

But Merz is not content on the literal ring apron of Women's boxing. She seeks, and achieves, a full scale embedding and again it is to the reader's benefit. Merz, a longtime amateur boxer in Australia, fully details her quest for "Master" class bouts in the US; the frustration of near miss match-ups and the fruition of finally hearing the bell ring and moving to the center of the ring in "a real" bout.

And between these poles of frustration and achievement, Merz details what she and every other woman boxer goes thru: the training regimen, the self doubts, the slow, arduous progression towards the grail of actual competition, the quick silver flash of the bout and inevitable let down aftermath of the high of six minutes of competition. Along the way, Merz catalogues the various participants in the amateur boxing world as it exists, today, in this country, for female boxers.

Even with the 2012 Olympics on the horizon, a reader can hardly be faulted for questioning why young boxers put themselves through the tribulations and disappointments that the sport holds for young female athletes, particularly in this world of Title IX opportunity. And a few pages later, like any good tour guide, Merz provides one answer. She leads the way to "Cobra Country" and unveils Bonnie Canino, who runs one of the programs that sets a high bar for amateur female boxing in this country.

Canino's gym situated, seemingly almost on purpose, in the "cut with a knife" humidity and heat of Dania Beach, FL, is run (in the most expansive sense of the verb) with Parris Island discipline, by Canino, who is described as having "striking, androgynous, white Annie Lennox hair and the kind of cool equilibrium of an old cowboy who has broken every bone in his body and is afraid of nothing."

And after ten pages of "Cobra Country" and Bonnie Canino you are, at least, half way to an answer about amateur female boxers and the "why" of their quest. Another part of the answer, as it is for every sport, is that many of the amateur female boxers hope to graduate to the next level, which, in boxing, means "turning pro." Merz covers the professional ranks of the sport with the same detail, the same sharp, insider's eye that she cast on the amateurs.

She again concentrates on the ground zeros of the sport, the gyms. Gleasons, in downtown Brooklyn, provides the launching pad and it is familiar territory for Merz. She was there in her first book, "Bruising," and many of the same players are still on this famously, dingy stage: Alicia Ashley, who provides Merz counseling about moves in and out of the ring; the bombastic Melissa Hernandez, whose comic relief persona often masks world class skill; Belinda Laracuente, Ronica Jeffrey and Keisher McLeod and others who have made the successful transition to the professional ranks.

There are other stops in "big time" gyms across the country culminating at Freddie Roach's Wild Card Gym in Los Angeles, where Merz spends time under the aegis and ring tutelage of the still mythic Lucia Rijker. But it is in Gleasons where the sport of female boxing marches to the beat of an intriguing cast of women who also happen to be devoted athletes. The book concludes with Merz's description of the Holly Holm/Melissa Hernandez bout, scheduled for December 2009 in Albuquerque, NM. The highly anticipated bout did not happen due to a seemingly surmountable dispute over the wrapping of Holm's hands and the complete absence of anything approaching leadership among the boxing "overseers" present in New Mexico. Merz, not surprisingly, given the Gleasons connection, is, figuratively, in Hernandez's corner, but still provides an even handed description of the events surrounding the debacle to which this anticipated big night for Women's boxing descended.

In the end, Merz's conclusion, which was, essentially, that when no fight happens, nobody wins, is, like the entirety of the rest of the book, exactly on target. The fact that Mischa Merz is from "down under" provides an "outsider's" objectivity to her view of the American version of female boxing.

But, at the same time, her boxing experience and her continuing participation in the sport dovetails well when an inside (the ropes) explanation of the sport is required. It's a combination that few authors are capable of providing and less than those few are capable of articulating so well. It adds up to a book worth reading about a sport worth knowing more about.