Replica Trunks from the 5x World Champion
Vinny Pazienza. Nice long multi inscribed autograph. This
wonderful item comes complete with our Certificate of Authenticity
and a photograph of Vinny Pazienza at the signing, plus
all the attached security holograms, so you can be rest
assured you are buying a genuine autograph.
Vinny Pazienza £75.00
Vinny Pazienza's boxing life ended three weeks
after his greatest
triumph. At least that's what the doctors and the boxing
world thought.
They might have been right if he thought like they did.
But he doesn't.
He thinks like a latter-day Gladiator, which is why the
five-time
world champion went on to win three more world titles, survive
two near
bankruptcies, one gambling addiction and a decade of wild
nights with the porn stars and Hollywood celebrities who
followed him during his time as boxing's latest Great White
Hope.
See Paz video of him in action wearing the
shorts!
Pazienza was never supposed to fight again
after breaking his neck
three weeks after the crowning achievement of his young
life, a victory
over a French boxer named Gilbert Dele that made him the
World Boxing Association junior middleweight champion. That
night he became the first man ever to win world boxing titles
at both 135 pounds and 154 pounds, a nearly 20 pound jump
in weight that no fighter had ever successfully negotiated
before.
The world seemed at his feet at that moment
and it stayed that way
until the car his friend was driving near his home outside
Providence, R.I. spun out of control and land upside down
with Paz pinned inside, his neck broken and his right side
paralyzed. By the time the jaws of life had pried him free
of the wreckage and the first x-rays had been studied one
thing was certain - America needed a new Great White Hope.
Vinny Paz had fought his last.
Thus began an odyssey through pain, disloyalty,
false promises, blind
faith and broken dreams culminating in the continuation
of a boxing career that wouldn't end for another decade
and a half only because Paz refused to accept reality. This,
in many ways, would become his trademark, the commodity
he sold to an adoring public. He was then, and remains today,
the guy who will not quit.
"I never complained about the hurt,
no matter what kind it was,'' Paz
says today and he is speaking not only of the pain a boxer
knows or the
pain a man trying to come back from a broken neck against
doctor's orders knows. He knows about a lot more pain than
that.
His is a story of triumph over the pain of always being
told he was
too small but never believing it. It's the story of the
pain of seeing
yourself go bankrupt twice because of other people's mistakes,
missteps and misappropriations and literally fighting to
get the money back after a savings and loan scam and bad
investments took him to the brink of bankruptcy.
But as with anyone's life, Vinny Paz inflicted
much of his own pain.
Anyone who chooses to make a living by prize fighting is
a gambler by
nature but Paz took that, like everything else in his life,
to the edge. He
became a gambler in casinos that finally did what boxing
could not. The
same casinos that paid him millions also broke him, finally
leaving him
alone in a Las Vegas hotel room one night with only one
thing on his mind. Suicide. "I played blackjack like
a billionaire on crack and I was neither,'' Paz recalls.
"It was the rush not the money. I needed the charge
I used to get in the ring. It cost me a lot to get it. My
Dad was a gambler and it was monkey see, monkey do. He used
to tell me, 'Kid, you bleed for our money. Don't blow it.'
I didn't listen.'' As with most gambler's, it started with
a big night and ended with a bad week. Playing with $25
chips early in his boxing career, Paz had a run
of luck in Atlantic City like you read about, leaving the
tables with
$65,000 and two security guards taking him back to his room.
"I thought I had the answer to it all,'' he recalls.
"I had chips
stuffed everywhere. I'm a world champion. I'm sleeping with
the Penthouse Pet of the Year. I thought I had it figured
out but my thought process was a little sick. I kept thinking
if I'd played $1,000 chips it would have been a million.
That was the beginning but it was never enough.''
Gambling, like fighting, came easily to Paz.
He grew up hanging
around his father Angelo's barbershop in East Providence,
R.I., an Italian kid who dreamed of being "Rocky''
ever since he saw the movie and went to a boxing gym the
next day. He didn't leave those gyms for nearly 30 years.
His father would put him on display in the early days, having
him throw punches into the hands of the men in the shop
when he was just six and seven. Paz liked that but he wondered
how his father made a living since he didn't see him cut
much hair. Later he figured that out too. "My Dad cut
a lopsided head about once a month but the place was always
full of wiseguys wearing pinkie rings,'' he recalls. "Took
a while for me to get it.'' Eventually he would figure out
his father's shop was a front for bookmaking and the movement
of stolen goods like watches and such, the kind of place
where the real life members of Raymond Patriaca's crime
family, the New England chapter of the Mafia, loved to hang
out. It was a place for gamblers and fight fans and wiseguys
and Paz would end up being a guy who gambled with his money
and his body to become what they all admired most - a prize
fighter who lived the wild life and the sometimes nightmare
of being the Great White Hope.
"I was a lot of people's Great White
Hope,'' Paz says. "I can't lie
about that. If I was just another black fighter maybe nobody
ever hears of me but I wasn't. I was white and I could fight.
That sells. But it costs
you, too.''
The story of how he rose from a 15-year-old
amateur in
Providence to a member of the United States Olympic development
team rooming at the Olympic training center in Colorado
Springs with a kid from Brooklyn named Mike Tyson and then
went on to fight other men, seamy promoters, slimy managers
like Tyson's old agent Bill Cayton and his own gambling
addiction to become a world champion, all of which taught
him not only how to win but also how to get up off the floor.
"Now Tyson, there was a twisted guy,''
Paz says. Once he's told the
stories of their nights together fighting to make the Olympic
team that
both failed to reach for political more than pugilistic
reasons you'll
understand why he feels that way.
When Paz finally turned pro he signed with
one of the biggest boxing
promotional companies in the country, Main Events, run by
Lou and Dan Duva, who frankly liked not just his talent
but an Italian heritage they believed they could exploit.
Pazienza had, as Muhammad Ali once said, "the complexion
to buy the protection.'' At the time Duva and his son were
promoting Sugar Ray Leonard, Thomas Hearns, Evander Holyfield,
Pernell Whitaker, Meldrick Taylor and a wide stable of other
world-class boxers. They cornered the market on the 1984
Olympic team through various nefarious means and with that
group - which included gold medal winners Whitaker, Taylor,
Mark Breland and Tyrell Biggs
as well as silver medalists Holyfield and Virgil Hill -
came the white kid
from Providence who began to sell tickets and beat people
up with
surprising regularity until the afternoon he first did it
on national TV to
Joe Frazier's son, Joe, Jr. Paz knocked the young Frazier
cold, dumping him into his legendary father's lap before
a packed house of over 10,000.
Everything changed for Vinny Paz after that
night. Before long he was a world champion for the first
time, defeating both Greg Haugen and a weight problem that
would haunt him for most of his professional career. That
weight problem would eventually lead to his near death after
a loss to world champion Roger Mayweather in another title
fight but long before that, on the very night he won the
lightweight title,
he learned for the first time that boxing is a treacherous
sport.
As he sat exhausted and amazed after his
crowning victory over Haugen, he heard Duva tell the media
Paz was good but he had a better
lightweight, a black kid from Virginia named Pernell Whitaker.
The Great
White Hope was stunned. It was the first time, but not the
last time, he
understood what it meant to be a pawn in someone else's
game. It wasn't the first time he was to be betrayed in
boxing or in life either. Nor would it be the worst time.
As he struggled to make weight over the years he learned
that America's obsession with being thin didn't just belong
to women who want to look like runway models. His was a
life littered with soaked rubber suits and suppositories,
odd diets and for a brief time the presence of an Oriental
Zen master and martial arts king who convinced Paz's father
he'd have his son throwing 300 punches a round if he trained
him in a room heated to over 100 degrees while he worked
in a plastic suit. Anyone who ever struggled to lose 10
pounds will be stunned to learn what a fighter does to lose
10 pounds - including once have sex all night with a girl
friend until he'd lost six pounds of water weight, something
Paz could only check by repeatedly getting off her and weighing
himself by the bed.
All this struggle with the battle of the bulge was about
one thing -
his promoters' refusal to allow him to move into higher
weight classes
because they had other fighters already in play there, a
concept he didn't understand until it had nearly killed
him. So he fought against nature to keep himself at 135
pounds and then at 140 despite the fact he was growing older
and heavier. Paz kept insisting it was time to fight at
a higher weight but his management team kept telling him
the money was still at 140.
Finally, in a super lightweight world title
fight against Mayweather,
Paz became so dehydrated in the effort to reach down to
140 that he was a spent cartridge on Fight Night. He had
nothing left to burn up once the fight began but himself.
"They took me to the hospital after it was over and
told my father they were losing me,'' Paz says of that night
and the hard and near fatal days that led up to it. "I
was so dehydrated they kept putting IVs in me but I was
barely breathing. I could feel myself slipping away and
I didn't care. I didn't want to fight any more.
"It had been a big fight and I lost because I pushed
myself too hard.
I had to lose too much weight too fast at the end to make
it. My body
didn't want to be 140 any more. I walked around at 165,
170. It was
ridiculous but it was business.
"I was the semi-main event that night
underneath Leonard. He was
fighting a guy named Donny LaLonde for the light heavyweight
title, which was a huge fight at the time. LaLonde got about
$8 million and who knows what Leonard got? Me? I got $150,000,
a beating and an idea what it's like to die.
"Sylvster Stallone had become a friend
of mine. He was in the front
row. There was a load of celebrities there. Me and Leonard
always brought them in. They were all hollering for me but
nobody was in the locker room after I got beat but my Dad.
That's when I collapsed and he took me to the hospital.
I felt so bad I just wanted to die.
"I could feel myself drifting away. Like I was on morphine.
I was
okay with drifting away. I was tired of fighting and taking
chances. I was just going to let it go until I heard my
father hollering, "Champ! Champ!'' He was the only
person there I knew. "He kept shaking me until I started
to come back. After that's when I started drinking. I just
didn't give a shit any more for quite a while. The people
around me were killing me.''
Five months later Pazienza would get on the
scales and watch in
stunned silence as the needle rose to 158, 162, 164, 168,
172, 174, 176. It finally stopped steady at 176 1/2 pounds.
For the first time but not the last, Vinny Paz figured he'd
never fight again if he didn't do something immediately
so he put on what had become his trademark plastic workout
suit and went for a run. Somehow he would fight at 140 for
three more years before finally being disqualified in another
title fight after losing six pounds the day before the match.
He refused to ever make the weight that had once nearly
killed him again and ten months later he would win the World
Boxing Association junior middleweight title at 154 pounds,
stopping Dele in the final round before a packed house in
Providence's Civic Center.
Barely two weeks later he lay in a hospital
bed, paralyzed, with screws
bolted to his head and a sad-faced doctor telling him, 'Son,
you'll never
fight again.'' Typically, Vinny Paz refused to accept that.
Then, also typically, he went berserk. "I went crazy,''
Paz recalled. "Dr. (Walter) Cotter told me I cracked
the third vertebra and dislocated the second. Then he took
his glasses off. I said, 'Doc, cut the bullshit. Will I
ever fight again?' "When he said, 'I'm sorry son. No,'
I bugged out. I kept screaming, 'What are you talking about?'
I was banging my left arm and leg on the table because they
were the only things I could move. I grabbed my neck with
my left hand and started hollering, 'I'll twist my neck
right now you motherfucker!' My mother was crying. Someone's
hollering, 'Stop it! Stop it!' My brother-in-law is crying,
the little whimp. What was I thinking? I remember all I
could think was, "I'll never defend the title again?''
How sick is that? I was acting like I lost my mind as well
as my neck. "Next thing I knew I woke up with a 10
pound weight pulling my head back. They'd given me the benefit
of the doubt because of the kind of guy I was. If they'd
put rods in like they wanted to do I could have never fought
again but Dr. Cotter decided to give me one chance. The
same kind I always had in boxing. Slim but a chance.''
HBO wanted to make a movie of the story, tell how he came
back from
that injury to fight again 14 months later on their network,
lifting
weights against doctors' orders late at night in the basement
of his
parents' home with the screws bolting a huge metal halo
to his head while he "waited'' three months to see
if the vertebra would slip back where it belonged. Defying
his doctor's opinion as well as his own manager and promoter,
Paz just wanted to fight. He wanted to even more after he
learned that Duva had his own reasons for not wanting him
to come back and they had little to do with concern for
his safety. After months of rehab and those secret midnight
weight lifting
sessions, Paz was cleared by Dr. Cotter in Providence although
he advised him to forget fighting.
Surprisingly, his promoters seemed less than
happy at the news, an
odd emotion he could not understand considering he was still
a world
champion and one of the sport's biggest ticket sellers.
He didn't understand until later when, to appease them,
he agreed to go to Houston to have their doctor review his
records and examine him. When
they made him pay for his own plane ticket he should have
known something was up.
Initially the doctor said he was finished
but Paz produced his own
x-rays and MRIs as well as his doctor's report that had
cleared him to
fight and he demanded the doctor review them. After he did,
he admitted there was no medical reason to stop him. "Duva
looked like someone punched him in the stomach,'' Paz said.
"It took a while to figure out why.'' Only much later
did Paz learn Duva's promotional company had made a deal
with the 154-pound division's No. 1 challenger, Julio Cesar
Green, that they'd only have to pay off on if Paz was cleared
to fight. Hence they ordered their doctor not to clear him
because if he defended the title Green had to be the first
opponent at an exorbitant price he'd agreed to accept when
Paz was first injured in exchange for not pressing his case
for an interim title fight while Paz was out of commission.
When Pazienza finally made his comeback on
Dec. 12, 1992 on HBO,
entering the ring to the "Rocky'' theme, he defeated
a man named Luis
Santana. He weighed 158 that night and would never again
fight at 154 or defend the title he'd won from Dele 14 months
earlier, having been
convinced by his "promoters'' that he'd make more if
he moved up to the middleweight division despite being barely
5-foot-9. How he beat that shady deal as well as that broken
neck is the story of a man obsessed and a fighter learning
to cope with the dirty side of his
sport while becoming an odd kind of celebrity, a white guy
in a dark man's sport who bleeds for the applause he receives.
"Pains part of living, from the first
day to the last,'' Paz insists. "You come in crying
and you go out with other people crying if you're
lucky. If you're not, at the end you cry alone. It's what
you do with the
rest of the time that's living. "Everybody gets hurt.
Everybody gets their heart broken. Everybody goes broke.
At least everybody who tries to do something big in this
world does. Trump went broke. Why shouldn't I? The champion
is the person who gets up and keeps going.''
But how do you go on when you're trying to come back from
a broken
neck and you figure out that the guys who are supposed to
be in your corner not only don't believe in you but are
conspiring against you because they promised another fighter
$300,000 for a match if you ever fight again and they don't
want to have to pay it because they might not make a profit
on the bout? What do you do then? You leave them and sign
on with Tyson's manager, a slick New York ad man named Bill
Cayton who once cornered the market on fight films and ended
up making millions off them in the TV business. But you
get conned in the
learning process more than once there too.
"That's how you learn,'' Paz said. "I
never knew the Duvas had me
give up my title not because I could make more money without
it but because they didn't want to pay Julio Cesar Green
the $300,000 they promised him if he agreed to let me sit
out with the title for a year with my neck,'' he says now.
"They didn't think I'd ever fight again but if I did
they knew Green wasn't worth $300,000. So they screwed me.
It happens. That's the boxing business.''
