By Michael Klimes: It is astounding how a celebrity like Paris Hilton can attract the incessant fascination of so many youngsters. What happened to crediting the everyday folk? The cult of personality which surrounds such mediocre entities makes one feel sorry for barmen or I believe, in American lingo, bartenders. Think of what a bartender has done for you personally and human civilisation! In my recent trip to New York, they demonstrated themselves to be erudite conversationalists with many anecdotes. They made delightful Mohitos and Cuba Libres which made reality more tasteful and manageable. They are the distributors of Benjamin Franklin’s noble maxim, “Beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.” Where would James Bond be without his two greatest allies: The Martini and bartender? Where would Raymond Chandler’s prose be without the bartender presence to infuse colour into his imagined Los Angeles? Where would this story have come from if it was not for Larry Trap?
We waited for a table at the River Café at the foot of Brooklyn Bridge, considering Manhattan’s evening skyline from a clichéd angle. I requested a cocktail and the heavyset barman made an exquisite drink. Out of curiosity, I asked this barman if he knew the location of Stillman’s Gym. He did not know it was a long vanished part of the boxing establishment, which had once been for great fighters what Paris had been to writers like Joyce, Hemingway and Fitzgerald between the world wars. He said he was unsure but had a friend called Bob Bozic that had fought the ex-heavyweight champion Larry Holmes more then thirty years ago. My eyebrows raised themselves instantly. The barman asked, “Why do you want to know about Stillman’s? I replied that I was a boxing fan and wanted to see if there was any memorial for the place. Our discussion steered into boxing and he then said, “You’d love Bob. He is prepared to talk to anyone. He works at a bar.”
The man then made a phone call and found out Bob was working the next day. He was kind enough to write down the time of his shift and where he worked. The piece of paper said, Fanelli’s Café, 94 Prince Street, corner Prince & Mercer, bartender Bob Bozic. Bob’s friend said his name was Larry Tramp. I thanked him earnestly and went to dinner.
Fanelli’s Café does not meet the stereotypes of a joint that mixes with boxing. It looks respectable on the outside and is not particularly downtrodden. It is filled with boxing memorabilia. Fighters from the early twentieth century such as Jack Dempsey, Packey McFarland, Owen Moran, Joe Gans and many others are strikingly rendered in pictures. Some are handsomely dressed in dinner jackets while others hold themselves in typical boxing poses, either both fists beneath the chin or pretending to throw a punch. They are all ghosts haunting a little corner of New York, reminding the City That Never Sleeps that it cannot completely exorcise its fistic heritage, although it shut its eyes on boxing long ago. Perhaps the same can be said of Philadelphia, the US boxing scene and the public in general. The heavyweights are definitely not stirring people’s minds and drawing capacity crowds. Nowadays, that feat is left to the smaller boxers like Ricky Hatton, Joe Calzaghe, Oscar de la Hoya and Miguel Cotto. In a way it is a good phenomenon as the small men do not get and have never received their due attention. Nevertheless, the heavyweight division is a barometer about the stature of boxing. If it is in a mess, it is bad news.
We start talking about Larry Holmes and I ask him, “Was he your toughest fight?” He quickly turns philosophical, “Uh yeah…well…not my toughest fight, he was the hardest, the best guy I ever fought. I had one fight in LA and it was bad. I had sixteen stitches in my lip. My eyes were closed. I had all these little slits,” he says allowing me to peer into his mouth and I see an assortment of scars, “I had bruised ribs, cracked ribs and two policemen carried me to the dressing room and I won that fight…I won that fight. You know my ear flop. The ear flop here was so swollen that there was no ear flop. It was all big lumps here and I won that fight. That’s when I decided to get out of fighting. I lay in my friend’s bathtub all night vomiting, I was so ill, it was so difficult! And then I decided. This can’t be really good for my health.”
Bozic is a charismatic entertainer and his warmth is enthralling. I then enquire how old he was when he fought in LA, he recollects, “I was twenty four or twenty five. I fought for another year and a half until about twenty six. Then I took off and lived in Europe. I used to always do that, when I won fights, the next day I would go to Europe. Instead of celebrating, a lot of guys would have parties, but I would go to the airport, here at Kennedy Airport. I would be there before the airport opened up and I would be lining up to get tickets to go somewhere so I could stay real. Right round then, I had one or two more fights, the last one if you look at the record it looks like I lost by TKO but I threw the fight to get rid of my managers.” He looks sheepish in his honesty, “That’s pretty bad but it is thirty years later. I threw the fight so I could get rid of my managers so they wouldn’t bother me anymore otherwise they would be like ‘you have to fight more’. They were not my first managers.” Bozic walks across the bar to serve the customers and remembers in a drifting voice, “I also lived in Lebanon, Iran and Afghanistan.”
According to www.boxrec.com Bozic’s professional record is seventeen bouts with fourteen wins and three loses. However, he says, “My real record is different. It doesn’t say it in the link, they missed a couple, I don’t know why. I was really twenty four and two. I don’t know why the record missed it. I think they have it as seventeen and two or something like that.”
The fighters he sparred with in the seventies are worth noting, “Oh Chuvalo, Ken Norton, Foreman and Frazier a little bit. He was murder,” says Bozic dryly, twisting the memory in his mind. For some reason I laugh a little at “Frazier being murder.” A punter calls out “Ali?” Bozic replies, “never Ali.” There is a distinct sigh of disappointment from the punter.
Bozic then remarks, “I got more scars on my face from Chuvalo then anyone else. George asked a few years ago ‘do you want a Christmas card?’ ‘I say no because I got your signature all over my face’. See these lines there? That’s all scars from Chuvalo.”
Having grasped the outline of Bozic’s career I want to find out what he thinks about the current prospects for the sport. Bozic’s evaluation is gravely delivered, “I think boxing is going to be finished in about ten years. I think it’s more of a show now, it’s more like…some guys will make a ton of money and some make nothing. People will pay for it because it’s something to do. People will go to the opening of a movie, even though it’s a terrible movie because it gets all the publicity and they will only watch certain fights even though they don’t know anything about boxing. It’s become an event rather than a boxing match, you don’t make it on merit you make it on personality. It’s like a lot of things in life. The idea now is to have some type of public performer.” An honest boxing fan cannot discount Bozic’s assessment which seems more grounded in fact then opinion.
I ask him if the fifteen round distance should be reinstated for championship bouts and he is firmly against it, “No, no there’s no need. The extra three rounds, all it can give you is more damage. I think there are enough rounds to find a dominant person in twelve rounds. Over eight rounds, maybe it’s hard to see, it can be close, in eight rounds one person can get off quickly, but over twelve rounds you can know who the better person is. The extra three rounds are unnecessary and guys can get hurt from it. But I think boxing is on its way out, generally. I think society is going to have a change in the next twenty years. I think we are going to start changing our priorities. Between the environment and energy, I think sports and things like that are going to be less predominant in our consciousness. They’re predominant now, they will always be predominant but just less so.”
I then ask what boxers Bozic admires and he declares adamantly, “Frazier. I liked Frazier. I liked his style, I liked where he came from. I liked how he worked. I liked his work ethic, he wasn’t tremendously talented but he worked really hard and he understood that, I forget who said it Carl Samberg, Forster, or Robert Frost the poet? ‘The harder I work the better luck I have’. You learn that if you try hard at something, it will come out better.”
I am in awe he sparred with Foreman. I am also intrigued to find out if he thinks Foreman is the hardest puncher he ever encountered. All knowledgeable fans know how Foreman savagely clubbed Norton and Frazier in blitzkrieg style fights, “He was a very heavy hitter but Frazier was the harder hitter. Frazier was a sharper puncher, more of a whip. Foreman knocked you off balance, like thunder. Foreman was just really heavy. Norton was good as well; he had a really sharp cracking punch.”
There were a number of big contenders Bozic did not meet in his heyday including Ernie Shavers and Ron Lyle. On Norton’s legendary awkwardness he believes, “Well he was an awkward fighter yet he wasn’t that awkward. He made you look bad. If you fought him, you had to dominate him. He was like Gerry Cooney, you had to jump on him. You couldn’t let him dictate the pace or let him set your pace. Boxing can be a metaphor for a lot of things. It’s like Mao Zedong, ‘when the enemy attack you retreat, when they rest you harass, when they retreat you attack’.”
Bozic does not miss the sport. He reflects unsentimentally, “Once I had a daughter I quit all sports. I lost interests in sports. I watch occasionally, I don’t have a television at home. Since my daughter was born, some afternoons, I would watch sports but then I played with my kid.” This is not too surprising from Bozic. During my interview, Bozic reveals himself to be personable but not a man who ever clamoured for much attention. He still maintains contact with Chuvalo, “I keep in contact with George. Other then that the games is over. I’ve moved on in my life. I don’t meet much with people. I read a lot and I stay with my kid in the house. I’m not a hanging out kind of guy.”
Now, he believes his main priority in life is being a good parent, he has witty yet serious attitude towards his duties, “I like being a dad. I always felt being a dad was much more of a male thing than being a fighter. Generally, I talk more about being a father than I do about boxing. I think being a father is more gratifying and much more challenging than being a boxer…far more challenging. It drives me nuts! It’s not easy and my daughter, she’s beautiful, so it’s all worse, everything comes to her. She’s 5ft 10’’. She looks very Serbian, tall, big eyes, very slim and very good skin. It’s been so easy. In fact, she wanted a dress for the prom. We argued two weeks ago about the price. She wanted a $1000 for one night for one prom. I said $400 tops! And then she said blah, blah, blah. I said you know what, ‘you are not going to get anything until you write me an essay on the perils of being beautiful’.” I laugh at Bozic’s clever essay title.
I cannot help but slide the conversation back to boxing. He also met Alexis Arguëllo and Jack Dempsey a long time ago. He observes, “Dempsey was a quiet guy. You know he was talking to so many people all his life that he just sort of became quiet. He was a polite man but he was not a tremendous conversationalist. You know some of these guys get stopped in the street. Chuvalo gets stopped because he looks like what he is. You know he gets tired. Dempsey did not run his restaurant. He sat at the front of the place and just greeted people and talked about boxing but how many times can you talk about fighting Gene Tunney?” There seems to be a large part of Bozic that dislikes celebrity.
He is also voracious reader. We then discuss Liebling, Heinz and Oates. Bozic complements the columnist Murray Kempton and remarks, “I had dinner with him once. He was a wonderful man.”
Our conversation heads onto politics as all conversations inevitably do and I ask Bozic about the themes of Kempton’s writing and he replies, “He wrote about the fall of the American left and the hypocrisies of American society. There’s a lot of hypocrisy in our culture. I read a lot also about the First Amendment about freedom of speech. People proclaim they have patriotism but the Bush administration says you should not criticise the government but the idea is you should be able to criticise your government… I can go on and on about that stuff. Murray would have a good time with Bush, Murray would love Bush! Bush, his father, his influence, his relationship with Cheney. He would have loved, he was meant for these guys!” Bozic exclaims, shaking his head.
Since he is passionate about literature, I want to know who his most favourite writers are, “My most favourite writers are Ferdinand Céline, Camus, Ivo Andriæ, Robert Penn Warren but only about one book. I love Melville’s short stories. Some Kafka and I like Tolstoy.”
As our time together comes to an end I thank Mr Bozic for his generosity and have my picture taken with him. The final question I have for him is about the name of the place. He says, “It used to be owned by an old prize-fighter, Mike Finelli. He was a fighter.”
Then, I walk out of the door and into the street. I think about the past couple of hours which contained boxing, politics, history and literature. A conversation cannot get much better. It is so refreshing to see man who can talk about boxing so informatively yet with a healthy detachment. Bozic never was consumed by fighting in the self-destructive fashion so many boxers are and has many other interests apart from boxing. Fighting was a chapter in the book of life and he closed it with no regrets.
I begin to feel happy and conclude that as long as there are barman like Mr Bozic and places such as Finelli;s Café, boxing can be preserved, at least in corners, in its former capital. I turn over the phrase from Bozic, “Mike Finelli. He was a fighter.” Of Bob Bozic it might be written, He was a fighter too.
Note
Another article about Bob Bozic can be viewed at http://www.thesweetscience.com/boxing-article/5450/boxrec-idea-how-busy-bozic-was/ by Robert Mladinich.
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