Tris Dixon - The Road to Nowhere: A Journey Through Boxings Wastelands

First published by Pitch Publishing, 2014

Pitch Publishing

A2 Yeoman Gate

Yeoman Way

Durrington

BN13 3QZ

www.pitchpublishing.co.uk

TRIS DIXON, 2014

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A CIP catalogue record is available for this book from the British Library

Print ISBN 978 1-90962-652-2

eBook ISBN: 978-1-909626-95-9

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ITS been a gruelling journey through boxings wastelands. Although a lot of work went into finding the fighters and putting their stories together, without them, of course, this book could never have happened.

Several took me out to dinner. Micky Ward, Gene Fullmer, Chico Vejar, Chuck Wepner and Joey Giardello all treated their poor British friend to good food; valuable fuel for the long bus rides that lay ahead.

Other boxers welcomed me as a guest in their homes, allowing me to see behind the scenes and really find out where they are now.

My old friend, the late Phil Rooney, made the call to then Boxing News assistant editor Tony Connolly to let him know what I was doing in the US. Without that, the ball would never have started to roll.

Special thanks, also, goes to my great friend George Zeleny, a true boxing historian, for his constant encouragement. Two of my favourite writers today, Donald McRae and Elliot Worsell, have been patient and generous with ideas when providing their eloquent counsel on this book.

My Boxing News team, too, of Danny Flexen, Matt Christie, Nick Bond, John Dennen and Paul Wheeler have all lent appreciated support.

Thanks also to Claude Abrams, Daniel Herbert, Tony and Steve Connolly and to Mary Payne, Kevin Mitchell (Observer/Guardian), Jeff Powell, Dominic Calder-Smith, Nigel Collins, Bill Browne, Chris Mardell, Kit Neilson, the late Mike Biggs and Greg Juckett.

Of course, there was a mini-network of contacts helping throughout, made up of my friends Tom Jess, Jim Carlin and Jeff Brophy and the late International Boxing Hall of Fame historian Hank Kaplan and Brad Berkwitt.

Without their help I would still be in the USA trying to find a starting point.

Many thanks to the team at Pitch Publishing, led by Paul Camillin, for taking a chance on me, and following The Road to Nowhere.

Duncan Olner, who has produced a fabulous cover, was a pleasure to work with.

The president of the Boxing Writers Association of America, Jack Hirsch, deserves credit for planting an early seed about turning my travels into a book and my old journalism lecturer at Falmouth, the late Jim Hall, made it seem no one was out of reach.

Its fair to say my father was always sceptical about my American jaunts and I wish he was alive to read this.

Thanks also to my brother, Justin, who sacrificed his J-reg Ford Escort to fund one of my early trips.

My beautiful girlfriend Amy has given me the time and space to finish this large project but there is, however, one person who actually inspired me to put a metaphorical pen to a metaphorical piece of paper to write these memoirs.

When I moved house in July 2006, I was floating down memory lane with dozens of pictures of the fighters on these pages when I wondered whether my newborn son would ever want to know how I found these old warriors and why I looked for them.

It was only then that, rather than years from now through faded memories, I decided to bring my thoughts and feelings to book. I hope he will enjoy them when he is older.

It was my boy, Benjamin, who made me write this and I owe him and my precious daughter Lois everything.

IT wasnt the road to nowhere and I knew where we were going. I just had no idea where we were or whether we would reach our intended destination. It was getting dark and the rickety old two-tone Cadillac with scraped blue doors and a battered grey hood boasted tyres that looked flat to the untrained eye but somehow kept us chugging from Atlantic City in the general direction of New York City.

The driver and car owner, former world light-heavyweight champion Matthew Saad Muhammad, reassured me he knew where we were going and offered kind words of support when he erratically swerved away from cars, the central reservation and anything else we nearly collided with. However, not even my favourite fighter could make the trip any easier.

I did not have a great deal of faith in his driving.

Hed had a long, hard career and the physical signs would tell you as much.

His words were slurred. He walked with a lurching stagger. This was one of my more dangerous assignments. The first of many, yes, and one that would give me a taste of the future, but one that would, as is often the case in boxing, leave me shocked, amazed and devastated, yet somehow wanting more.

Over the last few months Matthew and I had often talked at length but I said very little on this road trip. My tensed knuckles glowed white as I clawed to my seat, my eyes were like saucers and said more than I could. If that wasnt a giveaway about anxiety levels, perhaps the sweaty brow was.

It seemed like a lifetime but it was not too long before the hazy neons of New York could be seen from the Garden State.

A little further and we could make out the Empire State Building and the Chrysler, but the gap where the World Trade Center had stood proudly little more than a fortnight earlier left a raw scar.

There had been doubts about whether the fight we were going to see, the middleweight title clash between hot favourite Felix Trinidad and Philadelphia veteran Bernard Hopkins, would go ahead. It had been originally scheduled for 15 September, but the horrific events of 9/11 had forced it back to the 29th.

Miraculously we made it to the Garden and found a place at street level to park.

There was not much chance of anyone taking the car. It looked like an abandoned vehicle, it was so decrepit.

I was a 20-something wannabe boxing guy, Saad was an ex-champion whod stumbled upon hard times.

He had been living a nondescript existence in a rundown part of Atlantic City. He didnt have his own place. He slept in a friends living room and either took the small single bed at the foot of the apartments one window or he slept on the couch.

Wed known one another for little more than a year. Id stayed with a mutual friend on the outskirts of Atlantic City but eventually Matthew invited me to move in with his buddy in that downtrodden section. It was an offer I couldnt refuse.