After The Gloves Came Off

After the split with Ruiz, Stone was sure he could never work with another fighter. “I was depressed, missing the gym. It was my life. I was in a bad state. But I didn’t realize alls I had to do was get off my ass and go to an AA meeting. It was ‘Poor me.’ Luckily, a friend of mine got out of jail and said, ‘C’mon, let’s go to a meeting,’ and bingo, I’m back in the life, at the gym. Guy called me, told me to take a look at Joe McCreedy. He needs a lot of work on his defense, but he’s a good kid, hard-workin’ kid. Doesn’t drink, no drugs.” Still, it was only after a great deal of hesitation that he agreed to manage the young boxer. “I wasn’t sold on it,” he said. “It’s here,” he said, pointing at his chest. “Gettin’ over Johnny.” Eventually, he talked himself into one more fling. “I’ll give it all I have, but I don’t know how much I do have. It’s been a long road.”

McCreedy’s mid-July bout at the Castle was supposed to help Stone figure out what his fighter had. In McCreedy’s last fight, in October 2006, his jaw had been broken on both sides. They had to find out if the repaired bones would hold up in the ring, and also whether disaster could inspire McCreedy to discover a deeper toughness and desire in himself, as Ruiz did after being knocked out by Tua. That was the plan, anyway, until the state boxing commission informed Stone shortly before the evening’s first bouts that McCreedy’s had been canceled. The opponent, a bearded guy from Maine with the bright-eyed, questioning look of a psycho, hadn’t gotten the required signatures on his medical paperwork.

Suddenly Stone and a tall black man from the commission were exchanging looks, stiffening, going into head-tilted pre-beef attitudes. “He threw me out of two fights,” Stone muttered to me, still holding the prospective opponent’s gaze with a hard little come-and-get-it smile. “I don’t know what his fuckin’ problem is.” Suits and uniforms intervened, and Stone let himself be steered away from trouble, but he and his nemesis continued to exchange yearning gazes.

The moment passed, though, and Stone just as swiftly regained his good humor when a two-year-old boy with a gorgeous head of tumbling dark golden ringlets ran up to him. Stone scooped him up in his arms, where he settled with regal familiarity. This was one of those grandchildren he had supposedly retired to spend time with. After a while Stone put the boy down, took him by the hand, and said, “Let’s go tell Joey he can’t fight.” To me, he said, “Joey’s gonna be bullshit.”

Fighters and their cornermen were getting ready in the basement, a dingy, cluttered space broken up by crumbling once-white brick columns. The crews were scattered around folding tables strewn with jars of Vaseline and rolls of white athletic tape. Satiny robes on hangers dangled from exposed pipes.

Stone found McCreedy, took him aside, and broke the bad news. The young man stared at the floor, miserable. “Things happen for a reason,” Stone said. “We don’t always know what the reason is. You got all your people here, you go up and see them. And you get your money. You get paid.” Stone put his arm around McCreedy’s sweatsuited shoulder and gave him a bucking-up squeeze. “Thank God nothin’ happened,” he went on, gently insistent. “We didn’t lose the fight. I’ll make some calls, see if we can get you a fight quick. Okay? That’s why I hate this sport, but I love it, too. It’s bullshit, but it’s the greatest sport there is. So be a man. Go on up.” The grandson took it all in, wide-eyed.

This could be a bitterly wasted night for McCreedy, or it could turn out to be a small but telling moment for him—and for Stone, who forged his bond with Ruiz out of shared disappointment as well as hard work. The bond, more than anything else, is what brought him back. “What I’m lookin’ for now,” Stone told me, “is someone that’s gonna work hard, be at their own level, and not change.”