Irish Thunder

by Bob Halloran

  “Crack!” Lutkus blurts out, pausing long enough to make sure his audience is properly startled.

  “Crack!” he says again, louder.

  “They banged Micky a couple of times with one of those long flashlights they carry around.”

  Those blows opened a cut on Micky’s head. Blood oozed down into his eyes, blinding him while a policeman’s knee was in his back and the cuffs were being slapped on his wrists.

  “Then somebody yells, ‘Hey, don’t do that! That’s Micky Ward.’ And one of the cops yells back, ‘Fuck Micky Ward,’ and another one says, ‘Yeah, break his hands so he can’t fight again,’ and then they cracked him again.”

  This time they delivered a crushing blow to his hands.

  “My hands were behind my back, and they were hitting them, a bunch of times,” Micky says. “I just feel as though I was gonna do something with my life, and they said, ‘Fuck this little punk.’ You know? I had just come back from fighting in Vegas. They probably didn’t like me, because I was having some success.”

  Or maybe it was because of who his brother was.

  Micky’s success would have to wait. His night at the Cosmo occurred ten days before he was scheduled to fight in Corpus Christi, Texas, on national television against a contender named Joey Belinc. Micky would have made twenty-five thousand dollars for that fight—by far his biggest payday to date. Instead, he had to cancel the fight because of a broken left hand and a swollen right hand. Micky’s replacement won a unanimous decision over Belinc.

  Micky never got as far as the hospital the night of the Cosmo melee. He sat in the patrol wagon while his brother and sister were arraigned for assault and battery, disorderly conduct, and marijuana possession. Dickie was also charged with assaulting Rosario, although Rosario never claimed that Dickie had struck him.

  “It wasn’t Dickie’s fault,” Lutkus tells the bar. “He really was just helping the guy up, but when the police arrived, Dickie was holding the guy, and I’m sure it looked to the cops like Dickie was involved. It’s not like Dickie had made himself any friends on the police force.”

  For his part, Dickie treated the incident as if it were just one of those things that happen in Lowell. He was not his brother’s keeper, and he took no responsibility for what happened to Micky that night or the impact it would have on his boxing career.

  “I was there and Micky just came on his own,” Dickie told the Boston Globe at the time. “Everybody blames me, but I didn’t take Micky down to the Cosmo. . . . He’s twenty-one years old. I can’t follow him around with a chain. He hits too hard.”

  With that, Dickie laughed.

  Though this was Micky’s first arrest, Dickie had already been hauled down to the police station on twelve different occasions. On a hot August afternoon the previous summer, a police officer was questioning Dickie on a street corner when another officer drove up in a cruiser. When Dickie spotted the cruiser, he sucker punched the first cop and took off. From petty larceny to public drunkenness and now his fourth assault charge, Dickie had established a reputation.

  So it wouldn’t come as any big surprise that the police would presume Dickie was the instigator of the brawl, or that they would use aggressive force to deal with him. And Micky? Guilty by association.

  “Oh yeah, it was a confrontation,” said Superintendent John Sheehan, though he denied his officers were unnecessarily violent. “I’ve seen it many, many times. Guys get together after the fact and tell you what you want to hear. Their recollection of the event breaks down. I’m here to tell you there was a confrontation. It was like most confrontations. It starts off probably verbal, and it tends to get physical.”

  “I don’t know what he was doing there that night,” Cleo says. “It’s one of the toughest bars in New England. It’s just a shame. Micky had a chance to go all the way.”

  By the time he got to the hospital that morning, the blood had already begun to calcify in the joints of his left hand, causing tendonitis that would bother him for the rest of his life.

  The next morning, Top Rank boxing promoter Teddy Brenner called Micky’s mother, Alice Ward, just to see how Micky’s training was going. Alice, who had taken over managing Micky’s career, had to explain that Micky would be unable to take that fight.

  “They were helping a fellow up from the ground,” she said, “and the guy was telling the police that Dickie and Micky were helping him. The fellow who beat him up went back in the bar and wasn’t there when the police showed up. They arrested Dickie, and Micky tried to calm things down and was arrested, and they beat him up, too.”

  Micky’s fight was canceled while the Wards considered a civil suit against the Lowell Police Department.

  “The family never did sue, did they?” Lutkus asks. Cleo shakes his head. But he wonders if they should have.

  “One thing’s for sure,” Cleo says emphatically. “That Micky Ward always put on a great show.”

  “Tough kid,” they all agree.

  But that was to be expected. After all, he grew up in Lowell. This is the kind of town where boxers breed. Boxers go to the West End Gym, and any number of similar cold, dark places with a scant number of speed bags, heavy bags, jump ropes, and mats for sit-ups. Just the basics. Boxers come without moms, or with working moms, and they walk or run to the gyms several miles away. More often than not, boxers grow up in poverty, and in ethnic communities such as Lowell’s Acre section, with its numerous Irish and Greek immigrants.

  Certainly, if a person had a choice, he wouldn’t choose boxing. But Micky really didn’t have a choice, not if he wanted more for himself than to be working on a crew paving the streets of Lowell. And he did. He wanted more than that.

  Cleo looks up at the photograph of Micky on the wall. He was a teenager when that picture was taken. He was simultaneously frail and sinewy. “Maybe someday,” Cleo thinks, “I’ll be hanging a picture of Micky wearing a championship belt.” And that makes Cleo smile.

  Mike Lutkus looks down at his watch and realizes that it’s approaching 9:30 a.m.

  “Shoot, I’ve got to get to work,” he says, as if that realization surprises him. He looks at his newly drawn beer and says, “It’s yours, buddy,” and then he bolts out of the Highland Tap. Some of the other men take notice of the time and quicken the pace of their conversations. They throw back their shots and drink their beers and also race off for work.

  Manny Freitas doesn’t watch them leave, but he hears the door slam behind him. He has time to sit a while longer. So, he simply stares at what’s left of his beer, and thinks about his days in the ring, the ones he can remember. Those were good days.

  “Good luck to Micky Ward,” he thinks. “Here’s hoping that boxing treats him better than it treated the rest of us.”

  He raises his glass to the skinny teenager on the wall, and throws back his beer. “Hit me again, Cleo. Hit me again.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  As Micky was planning a comeback, his brother, Dickie, was losing his battle with drugs. He had become a crack addict with an eighth-grade education and nothing to show for all the time he had spent in the gym.

  Dickie knew exactly when it all went wrong. It started several years and several armed robberies ago when his friend Chico offered him part of his kilo of cocaine. As a popular fighter known for his thunderous left hand to the body, Dick Eklund commanded respect when he walked through the streets of Lowell. This was his town, and everybody was either his friend or wanted to be. So this was not the first time he’d received such an offer, but it was the first time that he accepted. He grabbed the stash from Chico, chalked off a little bit, and was instantly hooked. The fighter stopped fighting and surrendered to the coke habit.

  The boy who had grown to be a man much faster than most became a boy again. Forgot his mom and dad. Forgot his little brother and his seven sisters. Sure, he loved them all. But drugs were his new master. Boxing would have to wait. All the hours of intense training, all the years of sweating, all the times he hemorr
haged from his nose or his eyes were swollen shut by the vicious attack of another muscular warrior—it all meant nothing. “He should have been a champ,” his mother laments.

  “He was a natural,” says Johnny Dunn. “He couldn’t miss. We should all be swimming in money right now. Believe me when I tell you, he should have been champ.”

  Dickie concurs, “If I did everything the right way, I would have been champ.”

  But Dickie did very little the right way. When he was just twelve years old, he was already lying about his age and his name, just for the opportunity to fight jockeys. That’s right—jockeys.

  Still not weighing as much as a slender jockey himself, Dickie would tell his mother he was going over to a friend’s house, and instead he would sneak down to Rockingham Park for amateur boxing night. Rockingham was a popular racetrack in Salem, New Hampshire, and boxing night at “The Rock” was heavily populated by jockeys. Dickie remembers vividly going up against one particularly strong twenty-six-year-old on two separate occasions, losing both times. But even if records of such events were kept, they would never show that Dickie Eklund ever fought there. When duking it out with the jockeys, Dickie went by the name of “Dick Huntley.” A trainer at the gym, who was looking at a poster of an old fighter named Def Huntley from the Bahamas, gave him the name.

  “He says to me, ‘You’re Dick Huntley tonight,’” Dickie remembers. And the name stuck well into his professional career.

  Dickie had been a frail-looking little boy, with a whiffle haircut, who occasionally had to ward off the bigger kids who wanted his milk money, but he learned early that he had a talent inside the ring. For example, when he was only nine years old, he began winning organized brawls. Ouchie McManus, a popular trainer at one of the Lowell gyms, would give about a dozen kids one glove each and throw them into the ring just to see who would be the last man standing.

  “They’d have a big battle royal,” McManus says. “They’d all whack it out. One kid would get slugged, and he’d come out holding his face. Pretty soon there’d only be two left, and it would really be a battle. He was the king, Dickie was.”

  But to Dickie, the king was Larry Carney. He stared with his mouth wide open whenever he got a chance to see his idol and brother-in-law fight. He also took some tips from his other brother-in-law, Beau Jaynes. He was always throwing punches, looking to spar, shadowboxing, and squaring off with his cousins, the Lutkus boys. And Dickie trained hard down at Ramalho’s gym.

  When Dickie was thirteen, he won the New England Silver Mittens, the precursor to the Golden Gloves. At age fifteen, he was still eligible for the Mittens, but he was too good and therefore potentially dangerous, so the tournament officials bumped him up to the Golden Gloves. His opponent in the finals was a defending champion at 126 pounds, but Dickie beat him pretty easily.

  “I didn’t get hit that much when I was a kid,” Dickie says. “I was fast.”

  He was also a natural southpaw in the ring, the nontraditional style in which a boxer leads with a right jab. Dickie was encouraged to switch to the orthodox stance, however, because it was sometimes difficult for lefties to get fights. There weren’t enough of them, so nobody wanted to fight them.

  Without school to take up six to ten hours a day, Dickie took various jobs in construction, trained as he saw fit, and daydreamed about one day being a world champion. There was, however, time left in the day for other activities. So, when he was sixteen, he came home and told his mom that his girlfriend, Debbie, was pregnant.

  “I couldn’t believe it,” his mother would say. “When could she ever have gotten pregnant? He was always home by nine.”

  Dickie and Debbie got married in a hurry, and their daughter, Kerry, arrived soon after Dickie’s seventeenth birthday. By then, he had turned pro, determined to follow his dream and provide for his new family. Instead, divorce was around the corner, and the Cosmo incident was just a little further up the road.

  “Fighters have been going [to the Cosmo] from day one,” the police chief at the time, John Sheehan, says. “I remember kicking Dickie out of there when he was sixteen. He’d just won the Best Fighter Award at the Golden Gloves. He was given a bowl, and he was drinking beer out of it. I sent him home, and I told Alice to keep him out of there.”

  Alice, who didn’t know that Dickie was slugging it out with jockeys at twelve and taking his five-year-old brother Micky by train into Boston and then by bus to Randolph to see his friend Bubbles Morcioni at thirteen, had no control over Dickie. Nobody did, not even Dickie.

  In his youth, he seemed to have a single-minded devotion: he wanted to be a world champion. That dream was able to lift him out of the streets of Lowell and across the Atlantic Ocean before his twentieth birthday. After building up a 10-1 record as a professional fighting exclusively in New England, Dickie took a fight in Copenhagen, Denmark, against a Helsinki fighter of little or no reputation named Erkki Meronen. He went six rounds with Meronen, losing on points because of a disputed head-butt.

  “He head butted me, so I butted him back,” Dickie claims. “There’s no way I was going to win a decision in his backyard.”

  Two years later, Dickie was back across the ocean in Wembley, England, taking on a former European welterweight champion, Davey Boy Green. Dickie lost that fight, too, but he was going places. Unfortunately, he always ended up back in Lowell, back in trouble, and oftentimes back in jail.

  Folks who thought he might be the next champion from Lowell had to reconsider their optimism. Nothing underscored that point more than his fight with Sugar Ray Leonard in 1978. Sandwiched between the Davey Boy Green and Erkki Meronen fights, Dickie’s loss to the future champion and Hall of Fame boxer signaled the beginning of the end for Dickie.

  “I said if I can’t beat Leonard, I might as well quit,” Dickie tries to explain to no avail. It’s nonsense. Losing a ten-round decision to an Olympic Gold medalist who was undefeated in his first twelve professional fights isn’t an indicator that you’re worthless as a boxer.

  “I should have just kept going,” he continues. “I didn’t know I was as good as I was.”

  Maybe he just fought Leonard too soon. He was only twenty years old, and he didn’t have the benefit of the Olympic experience. He’d only had fourteen pro fights at the time and was coming off a loss, the third of his career. But Dickie’s mother was managing his career, and how could she pass up a chance to fight Sugar Ray Leonard? Everybody knew who he was, and soon everybody would know who her son was as well. Dickie wanted it, too.

  “I wasn’t scared of him,” he says.

  A month before the fight, scheduled for July 18 at the Hynes Auditorium in Boston, Dickie and a bunch of his friends took the short ride up to Hampton Beach in New Hampshire. Not surprisingly, he went to a bar and started drinking. It was the serious kind of drinking, the kind a man does when he wants to have so much fun that his troubles will disappear. It was also the kind of drinking a person doesn’t do just prior to climbing onto a motorcycle. But Dickie did it.

  “I was the lead motorcycle,” he recalls. “Everyone was following me, and I saw this girl in a bikini. I just turned for a moment, and then Boom! I hit a curb. The motorcycle stops dead, and I went flying over, landed flat on my back!”

  While lying in the back of the ambulance, Dickie began thinking about the fight, the fight that could make or break his career, the one he was supposed to be training for. He now had a built-in excuse if he didn’t fare too well inside the ropes against Leonard. Dickie showed up for the pre-fight press conference a few days later on crutches.

  “I’m fighting him?” Leonard asked.

  But Dickie was very fit when he stepped into the ring wearing shiny blue trunks and blue sneakers. He bounced around with a lot of life, but five thousand people watched Leonard win all ten rounds, nine of them unanimously. Still, Dickie has always been able to brag that he went the distance against one of the greatest. After all, Davey Boy Green didn’t make it the distance. Some eighteen months after
his dance with Dickie, Leonard knocked Green out in four rounds.

  It took many years, but Dickie finally stopped bragging that he had knocked Leonard down during the fight. He never did. He was throwing his jab, but not with the intention of making effective contact. He was just trying to keep Leonard at arm’s length. As Sugar Ray started to land a few shots, Dickie appeared to lose his balance, and while accidentally stepping on Sugar Ray’s foot, Dickie shoved him to the ground. Dickie stood over this great, undefeated fighter, apparently unsure of what had just happened. Dickie bounced nervously into a neutral corner, while the referee notified the judges that it was not a knockdown. It was ruled a slip, but Dickie’s original version of the event was always aided by the memory of Leonard with his ass on the canvas. That allowed for a re-creation of the truth for several years, until the entire town, in an unspoken show of unanimity decided to forego the fabrication. Everyone always knew the truth anyway, so what was the point of retelling each other the same old lie?

  “No, I didn’t knock him down,” Dickie now says. “That was bullshit. He slipped.”

  Leonard told the Boston Globe six years later that his fight with Dickie was “One of my most disappointing fights. I had a problem with my weight, and it was my first experience with racism—the crowd. Dick and I were friends, but it was the crowd.”

  Dickie took the next year off from fighting, finally making his return at the Lowell Auditorium thirteen months to the day after the Leonard fight. He went up against Fernando Fernandez, a tough kid from Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Fernandez had beaten none other than Beau Jaynes, Dickie’s mentor and brother-in-law, on the undercard of Dickie’s fight against Leonard. And Fernandez would go on to beat Jackie Morrell for the New England welterweight title. But that night he lost to Dickie.

  That tells you where Dickie could have been headed. He had risen past the aging Beau Jaynes who was now fighting on Dickie’s undercard. He outboxed a talented kid who would go on to win a regional title. He had been to Europe twice. And still, he couldn’t keep his eyes on the prize. He lost a rematch to Fernandez in Boston a year later, and his career was completely rudderless.