a peanut butter sandwich with bananas, which was my favorite sandwich. But I always charged something.” Late in life, a kinder, gentler George Foreman recalled positioning himself on a pedestrian bridge that crossed over a freeway in Houston when he was young and charging kids who were on their way to school 10 cents to pass. “I can’t believe that’s the person I used to be,” George said. Some bullies never reform. Mark Kriegel looks back on his younger days and remembers, “The toughest kid I knew when I was in high school was a kid named Piggy. When Piggy was around, it changed the dynamic. He was nasty. People got tense. My sophomore or junior year, we
After 10 years as a club fighter, Jose Luis Guzman is carving out a name as one of New York’s better young trainers. “I grew up in the South Bronx and started boxing when I was 7 years old,” Guzman recalls. “I had my first amateur fight when I was 10 or 11. I was small for my age and tried to mind my own business. There were times when some guy would try to prove a point. But if I let my hands go, he wasn’t so tough. You only have to show a bully once, and after that he leaves you alone. What makes a kid tough is when he stands up for himself, not what he does to other people.” Seanie Monaghan got into a lot of bar fights when he was young. “I was looking for them,” he admits. “That was my problem. But I only fought guys who wanted to fight me.” Was Monaghan the toughest kid in his school? “I don’t know,” he answers. “My uncle used to tell me, ‘Never gamble and never mess with a quiet guy. The quiet guys are the toughest ones.’ But I remember one time, I was in second or third grade. We were in the playground and this kid who we all knew was a bully stuck a pebble in my friend’s ear. He shoved it in real far. They had to take my friend to the hospital to get it out. That afternoon, I went after the bully in the bathroom and beat him up. I got suspended but I’m still glad I did it.” It’s impossible to know at an early age which kids will grow up to be genuinely tough. Jim Bell (a childhood classmate of Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr.) later recalled, “We were in elementary school together, and he was just another one of the kids. You push and you shove each other and get into the normal fights. There were days he lost and there were days he won. So when he beat Sonny Liston to win the championship, some of us were laughing about it, saying, ‘He’s not even undefeated in the neighborhood. How can he be champion of the world?’” Chuck Wepner was perceived as the toughest kid in Bayonne High School. Very few people would have argued with that proposition. “But I was never
a bully,” Wepner maintains. “I stood up to bullies.” One day in school, Wepner intervened when a classmate named Cuno Canella was picking on a student who Chuck describes as “a little sissy kid.” More specifically, Wepner recalls, “Cuno was giving this kid a hard time in the cafeteria for no reason. I told him to lay off. He took exception. And we went at it. It was a great fight. We were knocking over tables and I was beating the crap out of him when they broke it up. I lost sometimes in the pros, but I was undefeated in the cafeteria.” Gerry Cooney was physically abused by his father. That led to emotional issues that he didn’t deal with fully and successfully until much later in life. Who was the toughest kid in Cooney’s school? “I was,” Gerry answers. “If I hit you, I hurt you. But I wasn’t a bully. I was a protector. If a bully was bothering somebody, I’d suggest that he stop. From time to time, some kid might think about testing me. But I’d look him in the eye and he’d back down. If you’ve won the Golden Gloves and you’re on the school wrestling team, people think twice about fighting with you. Nobody messed with me and I didn’t mess with anybody else.” We all have memories … Lou DiBella recalls, “When I was in grammar school, there were three guys who called themselves ‘the gang.’ They didn’t have the guts to fight each other. But they’d take turns beating the shit out of other kids. It got so bad that we used to form defense groups in the schoolyard so, if they attacked one of us, the other 20 kids would jump in. “In eighth grade,” DiBella continues, “I had a huge growth spurt. We were in class. The nun was out of the room. One of the bullies slapped me in the back of my head. And I lost my mind. I went absolutely crazy. I turned around and punched him in the face and kept punching him. That was immensely satisfying.” Promoter Artie Pelullo has a similar memory.
“I was in seventh grade,” Pelullo recounts. “The bully was in ninth grade. He wasn’t the toughest kid in the school. There were two brothers who were tougher, but they were nice guys. This guy was big. And he was always picking on me and hitting me. My father told me, ‘It won’t stop until you hit him back.’ Finally, one day in the cafeteria, he grabbed my lunch and I whacked him in the head with my tray as hard as I could. We fought. He got the better of me but not by much. We both got suspended. And he never bothered me again.” So where does that leave us? Cus D’Amato was fond of saying, “When two fighters meet in the ring, the fighter with the greater will prevails every time unless the other man’s skills are so superior that his will is never tested.” In other words, physical and mental toughness are intertwined. Teddy Atlas (D’Amato’s truest disciple) speaks to that point when he says, “I’m going to tell you something that goes back to when I was in junior high school. One of the toughest people I saw in school was a girl. What happened was, there was this guy who liked pushing people around. He was a bully. He’d threaten other kids, take their lunch money, stuff like that. And this guy called the girl some names. He was belittling her, calling her garbage, acting in a threatening manner. And she went at him. She grabbed him by the hair and banged his head into a wall. She was angry. She attacked him. It was the first time I ever saw a girl stand up to a guy with physical force. And I understood that day that toughness, real toughness, is how much something matters to you.” Thomas Hauser’s email address is thomashauserwriter@gmail.com. His most recent book – The Most Honest Sport: Two More Years Inside Boxing – is available at Amazon.com. In 2019, Hauser was selected for boxing’s highest honor – induction into the International Boxing Hall of Fame.
A SLICE OF BOXING TOUGH KIDS AND BULLIES By Thomas Hauser
were on the street after a party. Piggy got into a fight with another kid and was bashing the kid’s head against a tree. People were begging him to stop. I’d never seen that type of visceral violence before. It was terrifying. Later, he went to prison for manslaughter and became middleweight champion of whatever prison he was in. I wound up writing about him. He got paroled and then went back to prison again.” Sometimes the toughest kid in school doesn’t want to fight. “All through high school, I ran from bullies,” Evander Holyfield later recalled. “But if they caught me, I beat them up.” And trainer Russ Anber notes, “Tough in school is different from being tough in a boxing gym. I’ve seen bullies come into a boxing gym, get humbled real quick and come out better people. I’ve never seen a good person go into a boxing gym and come out a bully.” And sometimes a bully finds out that he’s not so tough. As attorney-author Andrew Vachss noted, “Fighting means you could lose. Bullying means you can’t. A bully wants to beat somebody. He doesn’t want to fight.”
I t’s a universal experience that cuts across all divides. Rich, poor, urban, rural, different religious and ethnic groups. Everyone went to a school where there were bullies. Some kids were picked on. Others did the picking. This column is about physical bullying. Not verbal harassment, although the two are often intertwined. And the inquiry is limited to fists – not guns, knives or other weapons. Physical bullying is far more prevalent among boys than girls. Usually, the bully is bigger than the other kids. Frequently, he struggles in the classroom and has been abused physically at home. Someone, often his father, is beating him.
He’s angry and thinks that’s how a man is supposed to act. Generally, a bully gets his reputation by winning a few playground fights and acting a certain way. Intimidation contributes to his persona; particularly when kids get to an age when punches hurt and can do significant physical damage. Bernard Hopkins was a bully when he was young. “An ignorant thug,” he says of the predator he was then. And Bernard played both sides of the protection racket. “Fifth grade, sixth grade,” he recalls, “if someone was messing with another kid, the kid would come to me for protection. It wasn’t free. Maybe it was just
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