OMIGOD! Even to the marginal boxing fan, it was apparent that the bout going on in the ring was a gross mismatch.  The local DC fighter was beating his Philadelphia opponent from pillar to post, as they say in the fight game.  It seemed to me that the majority of the crowd was bloodthirsty and anticipating a vicious knockout, which only made matters worst. Whereas most may have thought they were seeing a show of entertainment, I saw a tragedy in the making and was determined to do something about it.

Not that I had any licensed authority to do so, mind you.  I guess I had rationalized it was my civic duty.  After all, I had a Masters degree in Social Work, so it was, you know, the only ethical thing to do.

Yeah, right!

The real truth of the matter was that it gave me an excuse to grandstand a little bit!  You see, showbiz had been in my blood for as long as I could remember.  I felt the world was my stage, and right now I was on a role, you understand.  I was trying to become a color commentator in professional boxing, the guys behind the microphones who analyzed the fight as it was going on.  I had tried other things and had some moderate success, like acting in bit Plays here and there.  My theatrical highlight was being in a stage production of the award winning play, PORGY and BESS.  It was on tour across the nation, starting out in Baltimore, but I was only on stage as an extra, which didn’t pay well enough for me to go city to city with them.  I did meet the original Porgy, however, the late Mr. Todd Duncan, who was a remarkably fit eighty-four years old at the time.  I became even more inspired to do my own thing in life.

I had also tried my hand at stand-up comedy but that turned out disastrous.  My material was okay but my timing was way off.  When I got hit with eggs on stage one night, that’s when I realized how the...  yolk...  was on me.  Yeah well, as they say, I guess you had to be there. But talking into a microphone, for money, about something I knew a lot about, like boxing? With my gift for gab it seemed to be a natural.  Right now I was doing some self-promotion, creating a little bit of free publicity for my desired future vocation.

Tonight’s fight card was the first ever held at the newly built Washington, DC Convention Center.  Two young local promoters, brothers Dahru and Amin, were showcasing the two best professional boxers DC had to offer, welterweights Simon “Montequilla” Brown, and Maurice “The Thin Man” Blocker.  Both would go on to win World Championships. I had gone to the downtown DC headquarters of the Monumental Productions promoters and purchased tickets from them for some of my Baltimore buddies to come to the fight with me. It crossed my mind how the two young brothers could have come up with so much money to put on a show of this magnitude.  The youngest one reminded me of my own brother Wilfred.  The fund raising methods of the promoters became clear a couple of years later when both received long sentences for being heroin kingpins.

I had purposely dressed to impress, arriving fashionably late -for effect- wearing a body-fitting black leather suit Eddie Murphy would have been proud to sport.  I was an even six feet tall, and a barbell sculpted one hundred-eighty pounds.  I knew the ladies would be looking. Hard!  Just the way I liked it, too.

I guess the security guard at ringside must have thought I was part of the fight card entourage or something because he didn’t even try to stop me from approaching the ring.  Maybe he felt compassionate as well, and even welcomed that a supposedly saner mind was trying to prevail and put a halt to the massacre going on inside the ring.  By time I reached the red corner where the overmatched fighter’s trainer was standing, I was in full voice.  I saw him glance at me then back to his guy, who was just fighting on instincts alone.  For all intent and purposes it was over with before it began.  The trainer was hoping against hope his nephew could land one of those whistling left hooks he himself had made famous coming out of Philadelphia. When his man got caught with a vicious shot to the temple, which made him jump up in the ring and do an equilibrium-losing, jitterbug kind of dance, he had seen enough.  Or maybe he remembered how he had reacted that very same way when clubbed with pulverizing blows to the head by George Foreman a decade earlier.  He went down six times before the fight was stopped.  In the event he somehow missed that sense of deja vu, I was certainly the voice of harsh reality for him.

 “Smokin’ Joe,  Smokin’ Joe!  Stop the fight man... it’s over!”

Former Heavyweight Champion of the world, Smokin’ Joe Frazier, gave me a glare which had intimidated much tougher men than me but he knew I was telling him to do the right thing.  In the next instant he tossed a white towel into the ring and the referee called a halt to the bout.  His fighter seemed to have a look of gratitude on his battered and bloodied face. As the former champ consoled his defeated fighter, it struck me that he may really have been tending to his own hurt in not being able to fight again.  It’s a common thing, especially among athletes, to try and recapture glory again through someone else.  Vicarious living is the term for it, and I had gotten caught up into it myself.  BIG TIME!