That got a laugh. A dozen timeless standards followed.
Middleton’s voice is still strong. He has style. His timing is impeccable. And he puts his emotions into the lyrics, telling a story with each song.
When Middleton sings “Almost Like Being in Love,” one gets the feeling that he’s remembering a special person and there have probably been more than a few special ladies in his life. When he sings “All of Me,” the audience knows that he has been hurt after falling in love.
Jazz, blues, ballads. Middleton does it all.
“He has a sexy voice,” the attractive blonde sitting next to me said.
“There’s probably two thousand songs I can sing,” Middleton noted afterward. “But I can’t do them all in one show.”
One advantage to singing over fighting is that practitioners can do it longer. Tony Middleton has been singing professionally for sixty-five years. He has lived a long, full life. And he’s still living it.
“Making people smile is happiness to me,” Middleton says. “I love singing. When I’m on stage, the audience belongs to me and I can make them happy. What I always wanted out of life was to have a place to live, pay the rent, be happy, and leave something for my children. I live in a house now [in suburban New York]. It has a yard. I own it. It’s nice to own something. I plan on being around for a long time. My mother is 106 years old and still here, God bless her. So get used to me. I am the way I am. Always have been, always will be.”
I Fell on My Face
When I spoke with Seanie Monaghan for this article, Seanie told me, “I was at a bar that James Moore owns the other night. There was James, John Duddy, Matthew Macklin, Michael Conlan, Seamus McDonough, and myself. All of us fighters. I was looking at the faces, thinking, ‘We all have scars.’”
Earlier this year, I fell on my face. I was running to catch a bus with a shopping bag in each hand. There was a raised section of sidewalk that I didn’t see. The tip of my shoe caught the edge of the sidewalk and I went down.
I knew I was falling. I tried to put my arms in front of me to break the fall but couldn’t let go of the bags fast enough.
BOOM! ! !
My head was spinning.
I could have beaten the count if I was a fighter. But the referee would have stopped the fight.
I knew I was hurt. The question was, how badly.
I ran my hand across my face. No blood.
I did a quick cognitive test, asking myself questions that I’d heard ring doctors ask fighters after they’d been knocked out. Not the simple, “Do you know where you are?” But the more sophisticated, “Recite the months of the year backward. What’s your telephone number?” I asked myself the results of a basketball game I’d watched the night before.
The right side of my face was throbbing.
So that’s what it feels like to get knocked out by the punch you don’t see.
Soon, there was a discolored lump high on my cheekbone. The odds were good that I’d have a black eye. There was an abrasion above the edge of my right eyebrow that wasn’t bleeding but would turn into a scab. The right side of my upper lip was discolored and swollen, and there was another abrasion above my lip.
I was “lucky.” There were no broken bones or other structural damage. I didn’t have headaches (symptomatic of a brain bleed) afterward. It took a while to fully heal.
In the days that followed, the people who saw me were kind. To the best of my knowledge, no one tweeted, “It’s about time someone punched Hauser in the face.” But the experience was a reminder that, every time a fighter enters the ring, he’s facing a skilled adversary who’s trying to disfigure his face.
Most of us seek immediate medical aid if we’re damaged. Certainly, we don’t keep doing what we were doing. After I fell, I didn’t get up and run as fast as I could to catch the next bus. But fighters keep fighting. They ask for more.
Light-heavyweight contender Seanie Monaghan takes it for granted that, each time he fights, there will be damage to his face.
“It’s the price we pay,” Monaghan says. “You just don’t want to pay a price where something like your eye is functioning differently for the rest of your life. But if you’re thinking about things like that too much, you shouldn’t be a fighter.”
“The worst damage I had,” Monaghan continues, “was when I fought Elvir Muriqi at Barclays Center [on June 14, 2014]. He head-butted me, and it felt like someone slammed a bowling ball into my face. My orbital bone was broken in two places. It broke my nose and severed a tendon. I needed internal and external stitches, and they had to reattach the tendon I use to lift my eyelid. When I woke up the morning after the fight, the pillow was stuck to my face because of all the blood.”
Last year, Monaghan was putting his son to bed. Sammy was four years old at the time.
“You never lost a fight, right?” Sammy said.
“Nope.”
“Except that one fight,” Sammy corrected.
“Which fight?”
Sammy pointed to the scar from the Muriqi fight
“No. I won that one, too.”
“Sammy got a big smile on his face,” Seanie remembers. “He stared straight up at the ceiling, and I could see the wheels in his head turning. He was thinking, ‘Wow. You can get hurt that bad and still win.’ That was a good message for him. No matter how tough life is, you can still win.”
Former world champion Paulie Malignaggi had his share of bruises and worse. Now retired, Malignaggi says, “One of the things I hated most was losing a fight and having to get on a plane the next day and everyone is staring at you. If you win, you can say. ‘Yeah, I won.’ The bruising and swelling is like a badge of honor. If you lost, you’re self-conscious about it; especially if people don’t know you’re a fighter and look at you like, ‘That punk got beaten up.’”
In 2006, Malignaggi fought a heroic battle against Miguel Cotto. His right eye socket was broken in the second round. His jaw was horribly swollen. But he persevered, winning four rounds on two of the judges’ scorecards and five on the third.
“I had to wait a week for the swelling to go down before they performed the surgery,” Malignaggi recalls. “For a long time, I couldn’t do things I wanted to do. Not just in boxing, but in the rest of my life, too. Italy won the World Cup that year. I spent a lot of time that summer watching soccer on television.”
“When you’re young,” Paulie says, “it’s win at all costs. During a fight, you don’t care about the damage. In the Cotto fight, I kept trying to win for every second of every round regardless of the consequences. I don’t think I could have done that when I was older. You think about getting hurt more when you’re older. The damage adds up. It takes longer to heal. Your face changes. You start to look like a fighter. You want to finish your career healthy, which you’re not thinking about when you’re young.”
Former heavyweight Vinny Maddalone wasn’t known for his defense.
“I got cut in most of my fights,” Maddalone says. “I needed hundreds of stitches. During a fight, it feels like you’re getting hit with a baseball bat. You don’t think about the damage while the fight is going on. But afterward, a lot of times, I felt the hurt in my head for a couple of days. The first few days after a fight, the way your face looks gets worse. Then the bruises go from purple to green to yellow to the way you looked before. The bruises never bothered me. I never cared about what other people thought. That was where I earned my stripes. I knew where the bruises came from. If you play football and your uniform isn’t dirty, you didn’t play.”
Micky Ward, whose career highlights include a bloody ring trilogy against Arturo Gatti, has similar thoughts.
“It’s weird,” Ward says. “You know there’s blood during the fight. You know you’re getting hit. But you don’t think about it. After I fought Arturo the first time, I went back to my room and went to bed. Around three o’clock, I woke up to take a pee. I went into the bathroom, saw my face in the mirror, and said, ‘Oh, Jesus. I sh
ould have moved my head more.’”
Chuck Wepner is boxing’s patron saint of damaged faces. He fought professionally for fourteen years against the likes of Sonny Liston, George Foreman, and Ernie Terrell. On March 24, 1975, “the Bayonne Bleeder” (as Wepner was known) lasted nineteen seconds short of fifteen rounds against Muhammad Ali. Wepner’s courage that night inspired an out-of-work actor named Sylvester Stallone to write a screenplay entitled Rocky.
“A lot of the damage to my face came from the way I fought,” Wepner says, stating the obvious. “I’d take two or three punches to land one. Al Braverman [who trained and managed Wepner] used to say. ‘Three steps forward and two back.’ But I liked to take five steps forward.”
“I got 328 stitches over my eyes,” Wepner continues. “I think that’s an alltime world record. One time, I needed fifty-one stitches inside my mouth. I got seventy-something stitches after I fought Sonny Liston. Barney Felix refereed that fight. They stopped it on cuts and because I couldn’t see. Barney asked me, ‘How many fingers do I have up?’ And I answered, ‘How many guesses do I get?’ The morning after is when the pain catches up to you. You feel like hell. But if you won, the way you look doesn’t bother you that much.”
Meanwhile, it’s worth noting that, when I fell on the sidewalk, I’d been on the way to have lunch with my thirty-year-old niece.
“It doesn’t look so bad,” Jessica assured me when she surveyed the damage. “It makes you look kind of rugged.”
Or like a guy who fell on his face.
Fistic Nuggets
Some thoughts on the light side of boxing.
What was it like to be Muhammad Ali?
For starters, “this-couldn’t-possibly-be-happening” moments were common. Like the time Ali walked out of his home in Berrien Springs, Michigan, and found a real, live, enormous, honest-to-goodness elephant in the back yard.
That doesn’t happen to most people. But it happened to Ali. Let me explain.
When I was researching and writing Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times almost thirty years ago, Muhammad and Lonnie Ali lived on an eighty-eight-acre farm in Berrien Springs, Michigan. Half of their property was leased to a flower nursery. The other half, which the nursery operators maintained for the Alis, included a comfortable house and nicely kept grounds.
I traveled to Berrien Springs on numerous occasions while I was working on the book. One of these trips coincided with Bill Burke having some fun.
Burke was a longtime player in Los Angeles politics and, in the late 1980s, president of the Los Angeles Marathon. He was also friends with Ali’s closest friend, Howard Bingham.
Lonnie Ali was outside when the elephant arrived.
“I remember that a moving truck brought the elephant,” Lonnie reminisced when we compared memories recently. “And I kept saying, I didn’t order any furniture, so why was a big moving truck coming through the gate?”
Then an elephant emerged from the truck with its keeper. Lonnie went into the house and told Muhammad, “I think you better come outside.”
Actually, the elephant wasn’t Muhammad’s to keep. After an hour, the keeper loaded it back onto the truck and off they went. Meanwhile, Ali was surprised that an elephant was in his back yard, although not as surprised as the average person might be. He asked if he could pat the elephant, and the keeper said yes. Then the keeper offered Ali the opportunity to climb on top of the elephant and go for a ride, but Muhammad declined. As did I.
It’s also worth noting that, at dinner that night, Ali observed, “It’s a good thing they didn’t send a lion. It might have eaten the dog.”
The recent heavyweight championship fight between Anthony Joshua and Wladimir Klitschko brought back memories of my first in-depth conversation with the Klitschko brothers.
I don’t recall precisely when it was. I do know that, by then, the Klitschkos had begun to have an impact on boxing, although not to the extent that they would in later years. There was still some confusion among boxing fans as to which one was Vitali and which was Wladimir.
Bernd Boente, the Klitschkos’ manager, set up the meeting. We had breakfast at a hotel in midtown Manhattan. The conversation began with boxing but shifted soon to other subjects.
The Klitschkos have lived for much of their lives in Ukraine. Their father, a Soviet Air Force colonel, was actively involved in the clean-up after the 1986 nuclear power plant disaster at Chernobyl. Years later, cancer believed to have been caused by exposure to radiation claimed his life.
I had co-authored a book about Chernobyl that was translated into Ukrainian and Russian. That was my first bond with the Klitschkos. Then our conversation turned to Pythagoras.
Pythagoras was born in Greece around 570 BC and is best known as the mathematician whose teachings led to formulation of the Pythagorean theorem used to calculate the length of the hypotenuse in a right triangle (A2 + B2 = C2). But he was also a philosopher and founder of the Pythagorean brotherhood, which espoused self-discipline, self-analysis, and belief in an eternal soul. His teachings later influenced Plato and Aristotle.
Vitali and Wladimir have incorporated certain principles of Pythagorean philosophy into their daily lives.
The conversation lasted for two hours. At the end, Vitali told me, “There are not many boxing writers that we can discuss Pythagorean philosophy with.”
“And there are not many boxers that I can discuss Pythagorean philosophy with,” I countered.
One of the nicest things about being on site in Las Vegas for Canelo Alvarez vs. Gennady Golovkin was the opportunity to spend time with Hall of Fame promoter Don Chargin.
Russell Peltz, another member of that exclusive club, says fondly, “Don is the only guy I look up to as a promoter. His word is good. He’s as astute an analyst of boxing as any promoter I’ve ever known. He’s made great fights his entire career. I’ve never heard anyone say anything bad about Don. In boxing, that makes him unique.”
Three days before Canelo–Golovkin, Chargin was reminiscing about an incident at the Arco Arena in Sacramento that occurred twenty-two years ago.
Don and his wife Lorraine were promoting a fight card headlined by Lennox Lewis vs. Lionel Butler and Michael Moorer vs. Melvin Foster. Lorraine, as was her custom, was overseeing the fighter-media entrance. Don was on the arena floor when the head usher approached him.
“There’s a problem downstairs,” the usher reported.
The “problem” was Don King, who had arrived with an entourage of ten and was demanding that he and his party be admitted free of charge. Lorraine was willing to let King in for free as a courtesy to another promoter. But there was no way the rest of his group was getting past her unless they bought tickets.
“It’s pretty heated,” the usher said. “Lorraine and King are going at it jaw to jaw.”
“She can handle it,” Chargin said.
Then Don thought better of it and headed downstairs.
“Are you worried about Lorraine?” the usher inquired.
“No,” Chargin answered. “I’m worried about what she might do to King.”
While in Las Vegas, Chargin spoke of that long-ago night.
“By the time I got there,” he recalled, “King had given up and bought tickets for his entire entourage. The next time I saw him was when I was inducted into the Hall of Fame in Canastota. He came over to me with a kind of relieved look on his face and said, ‘I want you to know. I just saw Lorraine. We’re okay now.’”
Another familiar face in the media center at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas in the days leading up to Canelo–Golovkin belonged to Kelly Pavlik.
Pavlik was in town to promote The Punchline, a podcast he hosts with James Dominguez. He’s thirty-five years old now, the same age as Golovkin. But Kelly’s fighting days are long behind him.
“This reminds me of when I fought Jermain Taylor here nine years ago,” Pavlik told me one day before the fight. “I’m like, oh man, this was my title. They say the middleweights are boxing’s glamour d
ivision. And I’m part of that lineage. I was that person. That’s kind of cool.”
Pavlik went through some hard times after peaking in the ring. “When you’re a champion,” he noted in Las Vegas, “everyone wants to be your friend. I don’t have as many friends as I had before. But I have the same number of real friends.”
Does he miss fighting?
“I miss it and I don’t miss it,” Kelly answered. “I’d go back and do it over if I could be young again. But what I like now is, I don’t have to worry about making weight. I can walk around during fight week, eat cookies, and drink water.”
Go to YouTube. Type in “Al Bernstein–Kenny Davidsen.”
Does that guy with the beard singing “You Make Me Feel So Young” look familiar?
Boxing fans are used to seeing Al Bernstein behind a microphone. Usually, he’s commentating on a fight. This time, he’s singing.
When Bernstein was young, he took voice lessons. In his late teens and twenties, he sang old standards in Chicago nightclubs. Then he set music aside to concentrate on boxing.
In 1987, the powers that be at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas let Bernstein sing in one of their lounges for three nights in conjunction with Marvin Hagler vs. Sugar Ray Leonard. Several years later, Al put together a show called “The Boxing Party” where he sang a half-dozen songs interspersed with boxing patter and video clips of fights.
“Then I stopped singing,” Bernstein says. “But I missed it. So not long ago, I decided to sing again.”
Kenny Davidsen is a singer and pianist who performs at the Tuscany Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas every Friday night with a different co-host each week. On March 31, 2017, Bernstein joined him.
“There’s nothing about doing boxing on television that makes me nervous,” Bernstein acknowledges. “Getting up and singing in front of a bunch of people makes me nervous. But I love singing old standards and the stories they tell. There’s no larger plan, no agenda. I did it for fun, and I had fun. I don’t have grand illusions about what the future might bring. But I’d love to do it again.”
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