My Third Fight

Mike Ricassa is a 28-year-old, 5'10", 138-pound muscle. I knew this about him the day that I first met him. What I didn't know about him until after our bout, was that he had 14 fights under his belt. He won the first 13 and lost the 14th in the national championship bout earlier this year. They say what you don't know won't hurt you. They're wrong.

Mike has a fight on November 30. And so this night he needed someone to work out with. Since there were only four others of us at the club, (John Young, the Williams brothers Billy and Eddie, and me) Danny asked us each to go two rounds with Mike. I volunteered to go first. It later occurred to me that this was one of my more egregious errors. Why didn't I opt to go last after Mike had already fought six rounds? Pretty dumb. Anyway, ...

During the first round we took about ten seconds to get to know each other. What I learned about Mike was that he was the quickest person I had ever seen box and that he had a relentless left jab. It was non-stop and seemed to come at the rate of 2 per second. And each one of them found its way through my defenses and landed on my right cheek. Occasionally I got a left-right combination in but the price I paid was to endure his quick and hard counter punches.

I was pretty tired after the first round but nevertheless used the 30-second break to ask Danny what to do about all those left jabs. He illustrated how I should knock them away with my right hand before they connected. Armed with this new knowledge I returned for round two anxious to try out this new technique. But two things went wrong. First of all, Mike was so fast that I was able to deflect only about 3 out of every four of the jabs. Even so, that was a big improvement over the first round. But the big problem came when Mike realized that I had stopped watching his right hand and kept focusing on this machine that was attached to his left shoulder. About 45 seconds into the round I felt this blow to the left side of my face that I never even saw coming. He caught me with a right cross that landed on my left eye and made me wish I had removed my contact lenses before the fight.

It was stunning. To me, anyway. To my satisfaction, even though the blow sent me reeling across the ring, I did not fall down. I think Mike was surprised that I was able to get back into the fight and finish off the last minute or so. I know I was.

After the second round my eye was swollen shut and as Danny helped me take off my gloves, he commented on my apparent fearlessness.