By D.R.Feiler
My first memory of boxing is a party at my parents’ house, possibly even before they separated. I would have been about four-years-old. The year, 1974. I’m sure the fight wasn’t the reason for the gathering but my memory is that a handful of people were gathered on the front porch, watching Muhammad Ali on a small black-and-white television. If I’m right that it was 1974, it was almost certainly either Ali’s win over Joe Frazier in New York on January 28th or his rope-a-dope “Rumble in the Jungle” win over Big George Foreman in Zaire on October 30th where nearly sixty thousand Africans chanted “Ali, bomaye!” (“Ali, kill him!”).
I don’t remember much about the fight – I was four – but I’m sure Ali won based on the mood of my parents’ inebriated friends after the fight. These north Florida hippies were Ali partisans with almost as much fervor as their counterparts in Zaire. Ali, bomaye! In fact, what I remember most is the reverence my parents’ friends had for Ali. And these were not boxing fans, not a sports crowd at all. No Seminoles caps or tailgaters in this crowd of homebrewers. But they just had so much respect for Muhammad Ali. It stuck with me. Later, when I could understand it, I learned why they felt that way about him and I came to share their admiration for Ali, as a boxer, and as a person willing to pay a terrible price for his convictions and his humanity.
As a kid, I created a whole imaginary boxing council consisting of my family members and pets as everyone from the profane boxing commissioner (my mom) to the charismatic champion of the world (me, of course). We had records and stats and colorful trunks. Over the years, the pictures turned into articles chronicling contests, some fictional, some born from some seed of truth, or supposed documentation. One day I’ll compile it all.
Left to right: me (the heavyweight champ), my dad, my mom and our dog, Thunder, all heavyweight contenders.
The next boxer I remember being aware of was Sugar Ray Leonard. There was a poster of him from the 1976 Olympics in my elementary school library, but it was Leonard’s fight against Thomas “Hit Man” Hearns when Sugar Ray fought through the pain and that big swollen eye on his boyish, movie star face, that cemented what has become a lifelong love of boxing. That was on September 16, 1981. Two days before my eleventh birthday. I remember watching that fight, as I would many after that, with my dad, in his funky little two-room place on Thomasville Road in Tallahassee’s midtown, though we didn’t call it that back then.
My dad never boxed, but he came from a hard upraising in the Bronx that involved frequent physical confrontations with his father, kids on the street and, later, in reformatory school. He carried himself with a determined resolve that short-circuited the need for most actual confrontations. He enrolled me in Tae Kwon Do classes at six-years-old and stayed on me to be disciplined about it until I got my black belt at age twelve. He used to make me spar with him. I don’t have particularly fond memories of that.
My drawing of the Argüello vs. Mancini fight, at age 11.
I do have fond memories of us watching boxing together. I remember seeing Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini lose for the first time to lightweight champion Alexis Argüello in a 14th round TKO. Like many people, I was a Mancini fan, but I had to admire Argüello. I remember the tragic death of Duk-Koo Kim after his 1982 bout with Mancini really impacting me. And there was this one Roberto Duran fight that he lost by decision. He railed about how unfair he thought it was but his interpreter was clearly sanitizing what Duran really said. It had my dad and I cracking up. But no fight from that eighties era looms larger in my memory than the “great white hope” Gerry Cooney’s valiant effort to take Larry Holmes’ world heavyweight title. My dad and I watched a lot of Larry Holmes fights over the years. As much as I looked up to Ali, Larry Holmes was really my generation’s heavyweight champ. And as much as much of white America may have been rooting for Cooney, my dad and I were cheering for the champ, Larry Holmes, who never really got the respect he deserved having to follow in the great Ali’s footsteps.
I had a few remarkable close encounters with the sweet science in the nineties.
Twenty years after the “Rumble in the Jungle,” the November 5, 1994 contest between George Foreman and Michael Moorer was billed “One for the Ages.” And it was the night Foreman made history, reclaiming the world heavyweight title at age 45. I entered HBO’s In the Hero’s Corner Sweepstakes and, as a first prize winner, got a pair of Everlast boxing gloves signed by Big George that are displayed in my office to this day.
Living in San Francisco, my dad got to know the son of award-winning San Francisco Examiner sports writer, Eddie Muller, who referred to himself as “the other Eddie Muller.” In 1997, it resulted in a really nice letter to me from “the other Eddie Muller” and he sent along a collection of what he called, “the old man’s flavor.”
Letter and collection of Eddie Muller articles in San Francisco Examiner
Signed program from Eurosport boxing card at The Moon.
There are cities with great boxing traditions, places like New York, Las Vegas, Detroit and Philadelphia. The places I’ve mostly lived, college towns like Tallahassee, Florida and Eugene, Oregon, are not among them. The only boxing card I ever saw live was at The Moon nightclub in Tallahassee. I think it was the summer of 2000. I’d never heard of any of the fighters. You wouldn’t have either though one of them was from Roy Jones Jr.’s stable which leads me to not only getting to meet but actually work with Florida’s own Roy Jones Jr., a former undisputed world champion considered by many to be one of the greatest pound for pound boxers of all time, and hailing from just down the road in Pensacola, Florida.
The PR firm I worked for in 2000 had a contract with the Florida Department of Transportation to do a seat belt safety campaign and somehow we got connected with Roy Jones Jr. I got to spend a day at his house/gym/recording studio and even check out his convertible Rolls Royce with the monogrammed leather seats. The script I wrote for the ad campaign “Buckle Up Before Impact” likened getting hit by a Roy Jones punch to a head on car crash.
Left: the limo (top), making the ad (bottom). Middle: with Roy in his studio (top), my script (bottom).
Right: signed promotional picture
When I proposed to my wife in 2017, I wrote her a song called “Anything is Better Than Letting You Down” that listed all the terrible things I would rather do than ever let her down. One of the verses goes like this:
I’d rather be standing in line at the DMV
Or a cat trapped way high up in a tree
I’d rather fight Mike Tyson for all 12 rounds
Anything is better than letting you down
Illustration of me fighting Mike Tyson by award-winning cartoonist, Bill Day
I hadn’t kept up with boxing as much in recent years, until the pandemic, when archived fights on YouTube saved me during quarantine. I rewatched some of the great series like Barrera vs. Morales, Gatti vs. Ward and Bowe vs. Holyfield, especially the HBO broadcasts from the nineties. Best boxing productions and cards ever in my estimation. And that’s what led me to writing this book, as a kind of homage to those great broadcasts.
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