Sunday, February 06, 2000
Williams climbing hills to Mt. Olympus
Fueled by a pro he idolizes and a father he respects, Ricardo Williams Jr. pushes himself toward the gold
BY JOHN ERARDI
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Ricardo Williams with his father - his role model, mentor, coach and one-time sparring partner.
(Ernest Coleman photos)
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They have been running these hills for years. Going back to at least Ezzard Charles in the 1940s — and probably well before that — Cincinnati boxers have been running the hills of Eden Park and Mount Adams in search of the stamina to go the distance and win.
Charles found that stamina in Eden's hills, becoming world heavyweight champion in 1950, and four years later becoming the first (and only) man to go 15 rounds with the great Rocky Marciano, in what is regarded as one of the most action-packed fights in boxing history.
And now, Cincinnati's latest boxing champion — Ricardo Williams Jr., the No. 1-ranked amateur in the 139-pound weight class — continues his quest for similar respect, fortune and fame.
Six days a week, Monday through Saturday, the 18-year-old Williams traces Ezzard Charles' grueling 4.2-mile route through Eden Park and Mount Adams, that includes two foreboding climbs up Hill Street (“The Monster”) and Parkside Place (“The Alamo”).
What's remarkable is not that he does it.
What's remarkable is that he has been doing it since he was 12 years old.
From the Twin Lakes overlook in Eden Park, the eastern entry to the city of Cincinnati is shrouded in fog.
Williams (right) runs the snowy hills of Eden Park with Ravea Springs.
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One can barely make out the edges of the arch of the Big Mac Bridge over the Ohio River. Directly beneath the overlook is the outline of an eight-barge tow. One can hear the sounds of traffic on Columbia Parkway as motorists make their way to work. On the other side of the river, the hills of Kentucky are a memory, although a train whistle blows in one of the hollows. A gray cat with flashing reen eyes looks back toward a visitor, then steps onto a snow-covered wall that leads down a steep descent full of leafless brown trees.
It is Thursday morning, February 3, less than a week before the U.S. Olympic boxing trials in Tampa, Fla., the second step on the three-step route to making the North American team that will box in the Summer Olympics in Sydney, Australia, in September.
The first step toward the Olympics was winning one of the national championships or qualifiers to participate in Tampa. The third step is the North American Box-offs at Foxwoods Casino in Connecticut later this month.
From the rear, the sound of a car motor heralds the arrival of one of Williams' trainers, Ronnie Kelsey, Ricardo's cousin. Soon, Williams and his running partner, Ravea Springs, the former National Golden Gloves champion, will be arriving, too.
Like Ricardo, Ravea is a southpaw, fast, slick, stylish. Years ago, when Ricardo was 11 and idolizing the older Ravea, he watched as Ravea put his hands behind his back one day in the ring. Nobody could hit Ravea in the head. He was too quick.
“I bet $25 you can't hit him,” Bobby Lewis told Ricardo.
“Ravea, let me hit you,” Ricardo whispered to Ravea.
But Ravea wouldn't let him do it.
Now, it's Ricardo that none of the kids in the gym can hit.
Some of the eight- and ten- and 15-year-old kids wear braided hair and do-rags like Ricardo. Anton Palmer, 15, emulates Ricardo's style, fast feet, fast hands, slipping punches. Palmer is one of seven regional champions out of Cincinnati gyms boxing for national championships this weekend in Kansas.
The sky is a solid sheet of gray. No sign of the sun. A light, soft snow is beginning to fall.
Proving he's different
Someday, maybe, Cincinnati will be Ricardo's town.
But the fog will have to lift.
And only Ricardo can lift it.
Nowadays, like never before, there's a stigma to boxing.
The supporters of amateur boxing say the stigma should apply only to professional boxing — but that is not the way most people look at it. They don't distinguish between the seamy pro game with its shady promoters, leeching posses, and boxers with their scrambled brains from one too many blows to the head.
Amateur boxing has protective equipment and strict rules and three-round bouts. But try explaining that to somebody.
Ricardo has heard the criticism, right to his face.
“Ricardo Williams the boxer?” they begin.
Then, they follow it with a dismissive wave of the hand.
“You're going to end up like all the rest of 'em, broke and not even knowing your name.”
Ricardo says he is going to be different.
He's been boxing for 10 years, has had over 200 bouts.
In 10 more years, he wants to be coming into some big-time purses and be retired from the ring by the time he's 30. He wants to have a good chunk of change stashed away, open up a restaurant in Cincinnati with his sister, Marlene, and have provided amply for his dad, so he doesn't have to work anymore, and for his mom, so she doesn't have to keep house anymore.
Yes, Ricardo has had a good upbringing.
He quotes his mother (“Good habits are destroyed by bad associations”) and wears the red-stockinged camp emblazoned by the initials W.W.J.D. (What Would Jesus Do?) and he says he will stick by his sponsor, Buddy LaRosa, and not be lured away by the promise of easy, early, cash elsewhere.
“All that glitters is not gold,” says Ricardo, again quoting his mother.
You had to like the photo of Ricardo in Houston last year, when he wore his graduation cap from Taft High School, right into the ring.
It is great stuff, and you want to root for the kid. You hope he is able to live up to the promise.
You hope this, even though you know that Ezzard Charles, as gentle and humble a man as ever graced the profession, went through his entire pile of money. Wallace (Bud) Smith, a graceful champion, too, was shot and killed when he tried to break up a fight near his home in Cincinnati. In The Enquirer morgue, there's a photo of Smith lying in a pool of blood, not even covered over by a towel. Aaron Pryor lost everything in a haze of cocaine and now, clean, seeks to redeem itself as a boxing trainer and church deacon.
Champions all ...
Anyway, that is the bigger battle.
That is the war.
First, there is this battle.
The battle to make the Olympic team and bring home the gold.
Emergency situation
Ricardo and Ravea jog out of Twin Lakes Overlook. As they go to turn the corner onto Eden Park Drive, they get a glimpse of the Vietnam Memorial. They are now at full stride.
Ricardo's father, Ricardo Sr., served in Vietnam. He assisted the seriously wounded on transport planes between South Vietnam and the hospitals in Okinawa.
Ricardo Sr. was also a boxer, a middleweight, who had over 80 amateur bouts and lost only three, and finished one victory short of the inter-
service championship that would have meant a spot in the 1968 U.S. Olympic Trials.
But nothing could have prepared Ricardo Sr. for what he saw that Saturday afternoon, in mid-June, 1988, as he sat on the porch at 1494 Dudley Walk in the West End and saw his son come sprinting up the street, grasping his left hand to his shirt, covered in blood.
Ricardo Jr., two weeks shy of his seventh birthday, had been riding — standing up — in a grocery cart on the playground. Some older boys were pushing him at a high speed and then released it. It was fun until the cart struck a sewer grate.
In the spill, the middle finger of Ricardo's left hand was nearly severed.
Ricardo Jr. recalls the pre-surgery particulars with vivid detail.
He remembers the name of the older boys he was playing with, Bucky and Bud, who the younger boys in the neighborhood idolized.
“Anything Bucky and Bud told you to do, you did, as long as it wasn't bad,” Ricardo said. “So, when they put me and Lamont Dixon in the cart and started pushing it, we went along with it. And then, when they gave it a hard push and let it go — wheeeee! — so much the better.”
Even when the wheels of the cart hit the sewer grate and tipped over, Ricardo laughed. He even laughed when he was the green-and-purple knots on Lamont's head. But as he mocked Lamont, he shook his left hand to try to rid himself of a strange feeling.
It was then he felt the blood splashing him in the face. He looked down at his hand.
That's when he felt the terrible pain and went into shock.
“I took off like a crazy man in a dead sprint,” he said. “I think I could have gone to the Olympics right there. I'd have given Carl Lewis a run for his money that day.”
He remembers nothing of the four-hour surgery, just having to sleep in the hospital bed with his left hand up in the air, and his father bringing him remote control cars to brighten up his days.
It is highly unlikely that the emergency room surgeon and hand surgeon who re-attached his nearly severed hand that day know what became of their patient.
The Enquirer initiated a search last week for those doctors' names and their whereabouts after hearing a recounting of the accident by Ricardo Sr. But the search hadn't yielded any fruit as of press time Saturday. “I'd like to thank those doctors again,” Ricardo Sr. said. “They saved his finger, and they saved his career. Ricardo couldn't be where he is today if they hadn't brought that finger back to life. You can't be a boxer with a dead middle finger. You wouldn't even be able to make a fist.”
If the doctors can't be located in time to watch the semifinals and finals of the U.S. Olympic Trials on ESPN Friday and Saturday, Ricardo Jr. and Sr. hope they can be located in time to see the North American Box-offs at the end of the month that yield the Olympic team.
“I'd like to thank them, too,” Ricardo Jr. said. “At the time, I pretty much just took it for granted the feeling in my finger was going to come back. I've since learned it was anything but automatic.”
He has regained full use of his finger — although it did grow back crooked. It is turned inward at about a 20-degree angle toward his index finger. The crooked finger made for a startling natural screwball when he was an eight-year-old Knothole pitcher and later, for some startled looks from classmates to whom Ricardo Jr. liked to make up stories. Such as saying the finger turned crooked every time he landed a left-handed punch in the ring.
Ricardo notes that because is the youngest of four children — he has three sisters (Marlene, Vicki, Annette) — his mother and father mom wanted to make sure he didn't have too soft a side.
So his dad took him to the boxing gym when he turned eight.
Soon, Ricardo, who like playing baseball and football, too, gave them up for boxing. He preferred boxing because nobody could help you in boxing; success or failure was your own.
For his ring workouts, he wraps an extra layer of tape around the middle finger on his left hand for protection of it, and does the same around the lower knuckle that has since recessed all the way into his hand. In tournaments, because boxers are not allowed to wrap tape on their knuckles, he goes without. Once, he hurt his untaped knuckle in a bout, and fought the next day's tournament bout with only his right hand. He won.
It was the best his father had ever seen him move.
Tribute to Dad
Tulip Time in Holland, reads the sign in front of Krohn Conservatory.
The snow is falling hard, blown crosswise by the wind. Ricardo and Ravea can feel the flakes melting on their faces.
They turn left just past the conservatory, and begin the journey down Cliff Street toward the old reservoir.
Meadowland Natural Area ... Now Leaving Eden Park ... Save the Green Space.
Ravea, who is a few inches taller than Ricardo, has longer legs but the two are moving stride-for-stride. As they approach the bottom of Martin Street, they see the white-caps in the river current and the Big Mac and Suspension Bridges looming. They hang a right up Hill Street, appropriately named, a two-tenths of a mile tug that would gas most people. But Ravea and Ricardo power their way up it.
Ricardo glances at the Spanish-style house to his left just about at the summit. It is the home of David Justice, the Cincinnati native who plays outfield for the Cleveland Indians.
Ricardo's dream is to buy a home for his father and mother someday ... and to open a restaurant with his sister, Marlene, who is a terrific cook. Ricardo names it and Marlene can cook it — soul food, Chinese, anything really.
Ricardo Sr. is a house and sign painter. He also is an artistic painter, self-trained. In the ring one day last week, Te'tro Amaru, a Xavier University graduate who now is an advertising executive, was wearing a T-shirt Ricardo Sr. had painted. A portrait of Ricardo Jr. was on the front. It was a perfect likeness.
“The apple doesn't fall far from the tree,” trainer Ronnie Kelsey said. “Rick Jr.'s the same as his dad. Quiet, even-tempered. In the ring, Rick Jr. picks his spots. If you hurt him, he'll wait for an opening then make you pay. Same as his dad.”
Rick Jr. calls boxing a “chess match.”
Rick Sr. first noticed that Rick Jr. had something special when he was 12 years old. Rick Sr. led Rick Jr. — and about eight carloads of friends and family — to Akron for a club tournament. The star of that show was to be a young Akron lad nicknamed “Showtime” who had beaten Rick Jr. in the previous year's junior Olympics. “Showtime” had about 20 more bouts under his belt than Rick Jr.
Facing the hometown hero, and scrutinized by the hometown judges, Rick Jr. scored point after point, and won convincingly.
“We thought we might have to fight our way out,” said Ricardo Sr., smiling at the memory. “We had about 40 people with us, but Showtime had more than a hundred. But we didn't have any trouble. People just kept coming up to Rick and saying, "Heck of a bout ... you're a heck of boxer.'”
Although Ricardo Sr. knew his son was a handful in the ring, there came a time when he decided to teach him a lesson. Not to hurt him, but to box him. Ricardo Jr. was 14, and had gotten kind of sassy with Ricardo Sr. one day. Junior had just had an altercation with his sister, Vicki.
Senior felt Junior needed to be taught a lesson, and would learn something more about boxing as well. So Ricardo Sr. stepped into the ring with him and told little Rick not to hold back.
Junior danced around the ring, and was impossible for his dad to catch. Then, pop, pop, pop, Junior connected on his jab. Senior was surprised by the sting in those blows.
All right, that's enough, Sr. said.
Darn cigarettes, he muttered to himself.
But he knew there was more to it than than that.
He knew he'd never get into the ring with Junior again.
Feet keep moving
Ricardo and Ravea turn right on Celestial. Rookwood Pottery comes into view. They blow past a historic marker that tells the story of the German and Irish immigrants that settled Mount Adams, and built the churches and traveled the incline to and from work.
Ricardo and Ravea cross over the Ida Street Bridge, and nod simultaneously to a lady walking two huge, heavy, black-furred dogs.
The two boxers pass the Cincinnati Art Academy on the left and head down Eden Park Drive past Seasongood Pavilion. Through the barren trees, a white gazebo and the frozen, snow-covered surface of Mirror Lake come into view. It is a beautiful wintry scene. Two hockey-rink sized rectangles on the ice have been cleared of snow, but there are no skaters.
Ricardo and Ravea pass Mirror Lake on the right and head up the slight hill of Eden Park Drive. They steam toward the Krone Conservatory, turning right this time onto Cliff Drive. They turn right onto Parkside, past the Cincinnati Art Club on their left, and began climbing another garish hill. It is another two-tenths of a mile pull; they call it “The Alamo.”
The snow is coming hard now, and it stings their faces.
A city truck has just finished salting the hill, and the boxers are grateful. They are wearing conventional gym shoes — not the combat boots their ring ancestors preferred — and they welcome the extra bit of traction.
Ricardo's feet are the key to his boxing style.
They are fast feet. They move him off the ropes, out of the corners, and in the ring he slips punch after punch without effort. It is pure instinct, and it cannot be taught. He has it in abundance, and it startles you when you see it, because it comes out of nowhere.
If an opponent can find a way to slow down his feet, then that opponent will have taken away Ricardo's greatest weapon.
And it could happen — not likely in Tampa, perhaps not even at the North American Boxoffs later this month.
But it could happen at the Olympics.
Ricardo Jr. got a taste of that in Houston last year at the World Amateur Championships. He doesn't say as much. Not even his trainers say it. Nor does his father say it. They aren't into his excuses.
But others who were there, saw it.
And what they saw is always a threat in international competition.
Mahammat Abdullaev, a 28-year-old boxer from Uzbekistan, had done a good job of scouting Ricardo Jr. and stepped on his feet at every opportunity in the first round.
Want to know how hard it is to defend yourself against that tactic? Try this exercise: put your hands up by your chest, then have somebody step on your feet and see what happens when you try to back up. Your drop your hands.
Pow!
Ricardo Jr. was down 7-0 after the first round, and Ricardo Jr. has never been down 7-0 in the first round. He fought back, kept his feet away from Abdullaev, and knocked him all over the ring. But the damage had been done. Ricardo Jr. lost the bout. The man from Uzbekistan went on to win the world amateur title.
But Ricardo Jr. learned. He learned to never leave anything up to anybody else, especially the judges and referee. If the decision isn't close, it's harder for them to take it away from you.
He applies the same thought process to his opponent.
“He is somebody trying to take something away from me,” Ricardo Jr. said. “I can't let that happen. I think of all the hard work, all the hills every morning, the hours in the gym.
“I'm not going to let them take it away from me.”
Climbing the hill
Ricardo and Ravea reach the summit of “The Alamo” and roar past the perfect little lacy-yellow house on the corner, the one with the perfect white trim.
They pass Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, and they trace the short, juking, twists of their route onto Louden, then Paradrome, then Wareham, then back onto Art Academy Drive.
They cruise down the winding road past the trees along Eden Park Drive, and then they head for home.
Trainer Ronnie Kelsey clicks his stopwatch: thirty-seven minutes and change. “Good work,” he says.
It's an impressive clocking for a hill-filled, 4.2 mile route, full of slippery footing and wind-blown snow stinging your face.
The day before, Ricardo and Ravea had run this same route in just over 33 minutes. It was colder that day, but it was sunny, too, and their breath hung in the air before them. The sky was an azure blue.
But that was yesterday, and Ricardo Williams Jr. is not thinking about yesterday. He is thinking about Tampa and Connecticut and climbing to the top of the winner's stand in Sydney.
He is thinking about turning pro, and being world champion and buying a house for his mother and father on a hill.
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