Kiss the ring

Boxing’s back in Portland, and it sure beats the movies

You can go see the fights at the Portland Boxing Club, 33 Allen Avenue in Portland, June 15, at 8 p.m. Call (207) 761-0975.

By Tanya Whiton

DOWN AND OUT: though Anthony Reed will rise to fight another day.

It’s training time at the Portland Boxing Club. Amateur hopefuls — from a scrawny 12-year old kid to New England Super Welterweight Champion Jason Lehoullier — work out; jumping rope, lifting weights, hitting the bags. Coach, promoter, and matchmaker Bobby Russo grills Light Heavyweight Champion Lee Lamour about what he’s been eating. Is he drinking juice, is he taking a lot of water?

Lamour, who will be the featured athlete at the season’s final bouts this Friday, June 15, has been sick and out of the gym for a week. “You gotta put it back in,” Russo tells him. “You gonna work out today?”

Lamour shakes his head. “This is the first day I’m feeling good,” he says, lounging in his chair. Russo looks at him closely, nods, and says, “Tomorrow.”

“Yeah, I’ll be in tomorrow.”

Russo started the Club in the abandoned industrial lot behind Bingo Time out Forest Avenue, in a cinderblock building with busted windows and trees growing up through a broken concrete floor. The site looks like the place you’d go to bury a body. But for three Friday nights in spring, and again in fall, the large, potholed parking lot is filled to capacity. Clusters of boxing fans stand outside in the overgrown grass, smoking, posturing, and discussing the odds for bouts to come. The rest of the time, it’s fight school for anyone who wants to attend. Monthly dues for the club? Twenty-five dollars — with arrangements made for those who can’t afford to pay.

“The nature of boxing is a lot of the kids come from a low-income, troubled background,” Russo says, turning on the stereo. Lauren Hill booms over the loudspeakers, interspersed with the jarring electric bell that marks rounds during a match. He mentions a fighter named Ivan, who came to the club from the Maine Youth Center. When Russo and some of his boxers traveled to Reno in April, Ivan broke probation.

“He’s probably gonna go back,” Russo says ruefully. “I just hope they consider the fact that he’s found something that works for him.”

The more people I talk to, the more it seems like boxing is less a sport than an obsession, a physical outlet for aggression that rapidly becomes a channel for all the pent up energies and emotions of its practitioners.

Take Anthony Reed, a much profiled and virulent fighter who is looking to turn pro in the next couple of years. As a kid growing up in Southern Maine, Reed was the terror of his hometown. Now he works out five days a week and gives prisoners at the Cumberland County Jail talks about Jesus.

Or Liz Leddy, a young woman who only last year was homeless, drunk, and without prospects. She’s pure muscle now, working the uppercut bag with the white gleam of her mouthguard showing.

Mack McDonough got me hooked on the fights.

It all started with a cab ride. In the dead of winter, no car, and little cash, I hiked to the supermarket, rounded up my week’s worth of beans, rice, and pasta, and stepped outside into the bitter cold, intending to walk home. Mack’s Timely Taxi stood idling next to some stray shopping carts. I lost my frugal initiative.

Mack, a middle-aged man with an affable face, a mashed nose, and knuckly hands, helped me load my groceries into the trunk. When I got into the pale velour back seat, I noticed a miniature boxing glove dangling from the rearview mirror.

“You a boxing fan?” I asked.

An hour later, Mack and I sat parked in front of my apartment building, still talking about the fights. He showed me newspaper clippings on the Portland Club, photographs of Reed and Lamour, and finally, a picture of himself, arm in arm with Rocky Marciano, back in the day.

Mack is passionate about all things boxing related. I become a regular patron, and actually look forward to my weekly shopping trip. Mack tells me about the difference between fighters with style and fighters with heart, between your Dapper Dans and your Killers.

At the end of one of our conversations he asks me for the second time if I’ll be at the coming weekend’s bouts, registers my expression, shakes his head and says, “I asked you that already, huh? See what the ring does to ya?”

FRIDAY, MAY 18: PORTLAND, MAINE VS. MONTREAL

The show begins, like most sporting events, with a rousing version of the national anthem. Everyone in the club stands to honor the large American flag hung on the back wall, some with their hands over their hearts, lips mouthing the words. A less rousing version of “O Canada” follows.

The judges are already at their ringside seats, and the coaches confer with first bout fighters in their respective corners. The song “Survivor” booms over the PA system, followed by the theme song from Rocky. Most of the audience fidget impatiently in their folding metal chairs, except for latecomers, who stand on the fringes; and drinkers, who are corralled in the back corner of the room.

Portland’s Scott Perry dons protective headgear, mouthguard and gloves in the Blue Corner.

As soon as he and his Canadian opponent start swinging, the fans start hollering advice: “LEFT!” “LEFT!” “RIGHT!” “GO FOR THE BODY SCOTTY, GET IN THERE!” In a few minutes, round one is over, and the loudspeakers come back on, pumping adrenalized disco into the room, while a round card girl (supplied by Mark’s Showplace) in white halter top and short, short, short shorts climbs through the ropes. A few lazy wolf whistles ring out.

Canada wins the first bout, and the crowd cheers good-naturedly. The stakes are still low.

Next up is Joey Gamache’s son, Brian, an apeshit junior rabblerouser who starts throwing punches before his opponent is within range, then proceeds to shove, bluster, and aim below the belt for the duration of the match. The crowd mutters with irritation. Their response to a decision in Gamache’s favor is met with a spatter of dutiful applause, but Gamache is too busy strutting around to notice.

I wonder briefly about all the backseat drivers in the audience, all the guys yelling out combinations. What the heck do they know?

But in the third match, when Liz Leddy starts throwing powerful jabs and cross punches, my inner sports commentator kicks in. LOUDLY. It’s all I can do to keep from screaming and hopping up and down: “GET HER GET HER GET HER! KILL KILL KILL!” Something about seeing another woman in the ring makes the whole thing more real to me, makes it a physical possibility. My adrenalin surges. Leddy’s opponent’s head wobbles in an alarming fashion in the second round, and one of the doctors on hand stops the fight.

The smell of popcorn and beer splashed on concrete mingles with sweat, cologne, and the curious metallic, male scent of a gymnasium. I look around at the spectators, and though the atmosphere is charged, no one seems hostile or too stoked up on testosterone to behave themselves — unlike some other sporting events I’ve attended. Old guys in square glasses, hands folded over their bellies, hats on their knees, occupy most of the front rows. Younger, beefed up fans in tight T-shirts mingle on the periphery, and a few families are interspersed throughout. The music is the most aggressive thing about the atmosphere:

LIt takes two to make thing go ri-ight/It takes two to make it outta sight”

Phil Chason, a fast stepping young Mainer with a long reach and the freckled, boyish face of a Beverly Cleary character gives one of the most elegant performances of the evening in the next round, against a Latino kid from Massachusetts. Shouted counsel in Spanish blends with the endless volley of “LEFT! RIGHT! TAKE HIM DOWN!”

Finally, we’re getting to the BIG FIGHTS: Medium big — 2000 New England Super Welterweight Champion Jason Lehoullier, and really big — 2001 New England Heavyweight Champion Anthony Reed. Regional Golden Gloves Light Heavyweight Champion Lee Lamour stands in the crowd in his street clothes, with nobody to box. His opponent no-showed.

“Guess he was afraid to fight me,” Lamour says, leaning up against the soda machine. A disappointment — from what I’ve heard about Lamour, he’s a stylish and graceful fighter, a very different breed from the super-aggressive, hard-hitting pugilist Reed is known to be. I’d wanted to see the difference.

Lehoullier gets into the ring looking like a bad-ass from the 1950s, tattoos decorating his well-defined arms and torso, nose broken beyond repair. He whales on his competitor with outside shots that make a tremendous amount of noise but don’t seem to have much effect, falling on the Canadian’s arms and outer ribs. Lehoullier’s inside punches don’t land, for the most part, effectively blocked or just misplaced each time. The two go up against the ropes, over and over, pounding on each other without mercy, but nobody goes down.

“REED, REED, REED, REED!” the crowd starts shouting after Lehoullier and his opponent touch gloves. Disco throbs, the corralled drinkers become louder and more boisterous, and out comes Anthony Reed, hometown villain turned hero. The fight will be a four-rounder, between the compact, brutally built Reed and his equally dense and far more hairy Canadian counterpart, Erik Barrak. In last year’s bouts, Reed trounced this same guy, one in a series of wins that led to talk about the 29-year-old fighter having a distinct chance at turning pro.

Apparently, though, the 208-pound Barrak (now the Quebec Provincial Heavyweight Champion) has been saving it up for Reed over the last year, because in the first round Reed is backed into a corner, and takes some serious wallops. Reed seems far less aggressive than in recent matches, at least according to what I’ve heard about his approach, and though his power and determination are visible, he seems off-balance. The match is a close, inside slug-fest, and Reed loses a little bit of ground with each round.

The crowd is with him, still, and the shouted comments become less about Reed’s form and punch combos than derision directed at Barrak. “COME ON ANTHONY! HE’S A PUSSY!” one of the drinkers shouts. “YEAH! TAKE HIM OUT ANTHONY!”

My heart starts sinking in the fourth round, watching Reed lose steam and precision. Barrak backs him into a corner again, and finding an undefended opening, slugs Anthony with a overhand right that drops the 205-pound boxer to the mat. It’s as though the wind has been knocked out of everybody in the room except Barrak and his coach, and the doctors jump through the ropes. Reed is out cold.

After a few seconds, spectators begin to rise and put on their coats. Without so much as a word of encouragement, or a momentary wait to see if the fallen fighter will get back to his feet, people start filing out the door.

I run into Mack outside, who is addled and heartbroken for his young friend. “He’s gonna have to get a CATSCAN,” Mack says. “They didn’t have that back in my day. He won’t be allowed to fight in the next match, either.”

A week later, I see Reed in a coffee shop, a perfect shiner around one eye, ordering a coffee to go. Other than the bruise, he looks handsome and fit, undefeated. We chat for a minute, and he tells me that Mack was up all night with him after the knockout.

“He was more upset than I was,” Reed says. Reed is stoic about the brawl. “It happens,” he says. He’ll be back in training soon enough, and when he gets to the next match, he’ll be a shade tougher, a degree or two meaner, than he is already.

“He’s the real fighter, there,” Mack tells me from his taxi cell phone. “Don’t listen to what anybody says. Are you coming this weekend?”

You bet.

Tanya Whiton can be reached at twhiton@ime.net.