Vinny Pazienza has had a good life.
He has been a champion. He has had a movie made about his story. There’s a high-profile documentary in the works, and it was recently announced that he has finally made it into the International Boxing Hall of Fame.
There is an air of fatalistic satisfaction in Paz’s tones as we enjoy a long, rambling discussion, about his parents, the mob, damage, being left seriously injured from a car wreck and his headline fights.
Paz has a devil-may-care attitude toward his future. It is not that he does not want to live, he has just enjoyed the time he has had.
How things shake out from here, he doesn’t mind. He’s been here for a good time, not a long one. But, at 62, he has been around longer than at times he felt he might have. Certainly, as his limp body was stretchered away from the car crash from which his unlikely comeback was born, it seemed unlikely that Paz would live a full and happy life, let alone win more championship silverware.
His is not a normal story.
Even after a week in hospital, and with his upper body imprisoned by human scaffolding – a thick metal “halo” drilled into his skull to keep his neck still – with two fractures in his spine, he spat defiance.
“I’m the champion of the world right now,” he told reporters. “And I’m going to remain that way for a very long time. I’m going to show you people what true champs are made of.”
Paz was 28 and he had just won the title, stopping Frenchman Gilbert Dele in the 12th round for the WBA junior middleweight crown.
“Son, I’m sorry to say, you’re not going to box again,” the doctor told him.
“No. You’re wrong,” Paz replied. “You don’t understand what kind of man I am.”
A day after the accident, Paz’s promoter, Dan Duva, said: “It’s such a tragedy. Boxing is such a rough business, but he’s one of the nicest guys I know. Everyone who knows him knows he’s one of the real good guys in boxing. We hope there’s no permanent damage and that he has a normal life. As for boxing, we can only hope for his sake he can come back. If anyone deserves one more miracle, it’s Vinny Paz.”
After training at Champion’s Gym in Providence, Rhode Island, one Wednesday in November, around 4pm, Paz was the passenger in a car, not wearing a seatbelt, when another vehicle swerved in front of the one he was in. The driver shifted over the median to avoid a collision but smashed head-on into a car travelling the other way. Both drivers were taken to hospital and released the same day, but it was more complicated for Pazienza. They were all fortunate that an 18-wheeler drove onto the sidewalk to avoid hitting either vehicle.
Rehab was long, hard, and arduous and it became a key component in the Vinny Paz story. Fourteen months went by between official bouts, but Vinny was in the biggest fight of his life.
“Wonderful, super. It can’t be better. It’s good. It can’t get much better, bro,” Paz smiles 24 years on when asked how life is.
Now, however, in his sixth decade, he admits life is not all it’s cracked up to be. When he raises his right fist, I can see his hand is covered by a bold “5X,” in reference to the titles he won (IBF lightweight, WBA junior middleweight, IBO, IBC and WBU super middleweight belts).
He’s wearing a red cardigan over an open neck white shirt, A large silver cross dangles from his neck and hangs by the middle part of his chest.
“Yes and no,” he confesses at first, asked whether life is that good. But he is soon off on a familiar refrain of hyper-masculinity that life is great regardless of any challenges he might be facing. “But I’m always in my own world at times,” he adds. “At times it’s okay. At other times it’s really grandiose. I still do a lot of things because of boxing. It’s good. I’m not complaining at all. I’m a former five-time world champion fighter, and I take that to heart and I let it guide me through the world today. So, everything’s cool. I’m lucky.”
Paz has always been a fighter. His dad, Angelo, and mom, Louise, taught him to be tough from the start. He credits them with the heart for which he became famous.
“My mother was a hairdresser. She owned her own shop and my dad was a money-maker. He just made money, literally, and I know that sounds crazy, but our life was a little crazy. But it was good. It was super. It made the training for me much easier. Everything was pretty good. I had a great life. I’m blessed. I say it all the time. Somebody’s watching me.”
Then, discussing his mom’s toughness, Paz tells a story from his childhood about how, laden with groceries after a day cutting hair, she tripped. His mother scooped up the shopping, while fighting the agony she could feel, walked two blocks, struggled up the stairs to their apartment, cooked dinner for Vinny and his pops but ultimately admitted: “My knee is killing me.”
The doctor at the hospital, who told her she’d broken her leg, said footballers have been stretchered from the field for far less.
“She was a tough sucker, too,” Paz smiles. “I had two great tough parents, which made me a world champion.”
The idea of his father as a “money-maker” arouses suspicion, but Paz maintains Angelo stayed on the right side of the law, despite the efforts of others trying to turn his head.
“Well sorta, yeah, they came around,” Paz said of the nefarious types from the wrong side of the tracks. “They couldn’t get through my father. My father kept me away from them.”
Did they try to get at Angelo? “Yes and no. They couldn’t get into him. They tried but they couldn’t break him down. He was a strong man. That’s where I got my toughness from.”
It was also where Paz learned that a life of crime was not for him, either.
“No. I wouldn’t have gone down that route. I don’t know what I would have done [had he not been a boxer], but it wasn’t being one of those guys, because I wasn’t into that. I didn’t like them much, and my father made me not like them. He was always on me. ‘Don’t do this, Champ. You don’t need this, Champ.’ My father was on me like a glove. That’s why I stayed away. I didn’t like those guys, to be honest with you.”
He did, however, see them around. He knew them, too, even if he kept them at a distance.
“My God, yeah. They were there smokin’ cigarettes, good lookin’ rough ass guys, tight suits on. There was some bad dudes back then.”
It was a combined love of Muhammad Ali and the fictional character Rocky Balboa that drew Paz to the sport. Ali imprinted on him at the age of five and, the morning after watching Rocky, Paz and three of his 15-year-old pals jogged for two-and-half miles the next morning, got home, and downed some raw eggs.
His parents didn’t want him to box, but after seeing him stick with it, they got behind him.
He had around 100 amateur fights but, unable to defeat Pernell Whitaker, he never made it to the 1984 Olympics but, by then, his parents were all in.
“They were with me 210 per cent. I got lucky. You’ve got to be lucky to have good parents. I had the greatest parents in the world. My parents were the best. And that made me win five world titles. I had 100 amateur wins. I had 50 professional wins. That’s a lot. I fought my whole life. And it turned out pretty good. I’m happy with it.”
For someone who is alive and seemingly well, Vinny puts a period on his sentences to say how satisfied he is with life and how it’s gone. It doesn’t instil one with confidence that we will have him into old age, but Paz has me thinking that if he goes tomorrow, he will be just fine. “I had a blessed life. It was good,” he often says. Then there’s: “All in all, I’m tickled pink with my career. I think I did it all.”
There are just two times when the mask slips and the jovial facade dissipates, but even then, his tongue is firmly in cheek.
In his 60 pro bouts, against the likes of Roberto Duran, Roy Jones Jnr, Hector Camacho, Herol Graham, Lloyd Honeyghan and a lengthy-list of the major names of his time, there were two opponents in which the hate – and that’s not too strong a word – ran so deep that it still courses through him. His storied rivalries with both Greg Haugen and Dana Rosenblatt irk him 30 years on. Of Haugen, Paz promptly snarls: “Oh man, I hate him. I still hate ‘im. Ahhh. I hate the little bitch.”
Why did they not get along?
“Because he’s a punk and I’m not. That’s why. He’s a maggot and I’m not. That’s why. You have no idea. He was just such a little punk bastard, rotten little prick. I can’t stand him. I hate him. I still hate him.”
Many fierce boxing rivals eventually put their feuds behind them. Asked if he could ever see himself sitting down for dinner with Haugen, Paz is astonished by the question.
“Out for dinner?!” he exclaims. “I’ll shove a steak down his throat. Are you kiddin’ me? Oh my God. Woah. I hate that kid.”
With that, Paz runs his hand across his throat and we move onto Rosenblatt.
“You’re good,” he laughs, as I clearly touch another tender spot.
“Are you kiddin’ me? If that kid walks in this ring right now, I’m choking him out. I hate him, too. He’s a twat.”
Is Paz not the common denominator here, is he the troublemaker?
“What? No? They started it, and I finished it. I beat Greg Haugen two out of three and I really beat Rosenblatt – Rosensplat – I really beat him two fights. I beat him twice. Once I knocked him out and the other one, I beat his ass and they gave it to him, so I beat him twice.”
Anyone else that he clearly is not too fond of?
“Those are the only two. So I can’t be that bad.”
Soon after our conversation, it emerges that Haugen is struggling with poor health and is not in a good way. I also think how Paz’s era will be the next line of fallen soldiers to struggle with CTE into old age, and understand more about why, when Vinny’s time is up, he will be ready.
As Vinny takes me on a meandering journey of his career, the names of a generation of superb fighters flash by. We talk about them, about his weight cuts, sparring sessions, big nights, and flashpoints.
There are memories of pounding the wooden slats of the Atlantic City Boardwalk to shed weight before crucial fights, of losing 13lbs on the day of a main event while adorned in sweatsuits, gloves, hats and sweaters – in the summer.
“It was ugly,” he recalls, going on to talk about how he’d dehydrate himself and crash diet, but it always winds up with a typical Paz round-up of gratitude for his time.
“I got lucky,” he says, of avoiding serious injury while fighting as a shell of what he should have been in order to satisfy the scales. “I was blessed. I was happy with the way my career went. I’m elated with the way my life went. I’m very happy with it.”
Paz discusses how, if he didn’t almost die making the weight for Roger Mayweather, then Mayweather nearly finished the job. In the hospital afterwards, Paz recalled: “I was going to another universe. I started seeing clouds and then I felt so good, but I knew I was dying, and it felt great. I can remember this like yesterday. I’m going up and up and up through the brightest white you can see. I was just lettin’ it happen because it felt so good and I was like, ‘Fuck it, I’m gonna die.’”
It was Angelo’s arrival by his side in the emergency room, screaming, ‘Champ, don’t die’ when the clouds evaporated, and Vinny came back around.
Paz classes Mayweather, Duran, and Roy Jones as the biggest punchers he faced. He said Camacho was “an unbelievable fighter, unbelievably elusive” and spoke of his frustration at not being able to land even one bomb.
The mention of Duran, who he twice beat, makes Vinny warm into a conversation he’s clearly already invested in.
“That fucker hit me harder than… I just remember getting hit by the guy. The first time he hit me was with a body shot. Oh my god. What the hell? Every time he hit me it was like a big concrete thud. I still remembered he was old, but he got on me. He talked a lot of shit about me before we fought. Now we’re buddies, he’s cool as hell. He talked mad shit about me, I hated him. But I got his respect. That’s why we’re friends today.”
Paz seems to thrive from the nostalgia of old foes. There are colorful stories, like how he visited the Petronelli Gym in Brockton to watch Marvin Hagler and his half-brother, Robbie Sims, spar, and Sims actually bested Hagler that day. Paz went there thinking Hagler was the baddest man on the planet and left wondering what that made Sims. That memory stayed with him as he prepared for his own fight with Sims.
Of the eccentric Brit Honeyghan, who had by that point scored his defining win by whipping Donald Curry, Paz said Honeyghan – “the coolest cat in the box” – had already had his day in the sun.
“If Lloyd was going to beat me, he was going to have to pull a Donald Curry out of his ass,” Paz jokes. Lloyd didn’t.
Of Roy Jones, Paz is concise with his superlatives. “He was like lightning. He was faster than lightning. He was remarkable.”
It is perhaps with the mention of the comparatively lesser-known Glenwood Brown, however, when Paz is most moved. With very little prompting, he explains: “I love that dude. I would give him a hug right now if I see him. Glenwood Brown was a bad motherfucker. He was a bad dude. We went at it toe to toe. It was one of the greatest fights in super middleweight history. If anybody can go back and pull up that fight, oh my God. What a fight that was. We were going back and forth. I was a little too much for him but he was a bad dude and a great fighter. It was kinda fucking awesome.”
His best night was soon consigned to a memory that he knows will increasingly play tricks on him. It was the night he won the title against Gilbert Dele.
“By far. That was the greatest fight I ever had,” he says. “For sure. I broke my neck days later. I win the world title and then I break my neck days later. That wasn’t cool.”
Paz smiles, and then switches back to looking on the infinitely brighter side.
“But I’m glad how the whole thing worked out.”
The crash is – for some – the moment Paz is best known for. It is retold in graphic detail in the movie Bleed for This, which stars Miles Teller as Paz.
From not being able to fight again, from major surgery to having the halo removed and the screws taken out of his skull without painkillers, even Teller’s acting of the gruesome scene does not do the pain justice.
“Yeah, a little bit but not really,” Paz replies, when it’s put to him that moment made for painstaking viewing. “It was so much more horrific. It was so much more horrific than what was shown on TV. It was a good movie. I love Miles Teller. He did a great job, but there’s no way in hell he could have known the pain that I was going through, the pain when they took the screws out of my head. They’d been wrapping around my skull for three months, in four spots in my head. It was so painful. I literally said after that happened it was like a 747 flying through my head. And that’s about as bad as it gets.”
Coming through it was a result, he insists, of luck and hard work.
“It was slightly horrendous. I almost died because of it,” he remembers. Blank space occupies the actual incident.
One moment, the silver Camaro is moving briskly, then comes the collision.
“The next is the broken neck. That was a life-changing incident. It was ugly. Not good. We got hit by a big town car, and after that, things went a little bit blank, and the next thing you know I’m getting pulled out the car by a couple of firemen and policemen in Rhode Island, Warwick. That was it.
A continued journey of defiance and courage saw Paz return to the ring, win more titles and take part in another 24 fights. Even now he finds it hard to believe that he did that.
“Most definitely. Mentally it was draining. Physically it was slightly impossible and I’m lucky. I’m blessed. Good luck and hard work can do some major damage. You all remember that. When you’re doing something someday and you’re saying, ‘Oh man, this is so hard,’ say that Vinny Paz said, ‘This is going to be hard, but it’s going to be because you get good stuff out of it.’ Remember I told you that.”
The accident changed his fighting style. He had come through that nightmare and now boxing was no longer the hardest thing he’d ever done. In fact, boxing was the easy part.
“I was more of an animal. Yeah,” he says. “I said, ‘If I’ve got screws in my skull, I’ve had them taken out and I’m still walking, I’m giving it all I’ve got no matter what.’”
Something incredible came out of something tragic.
“I’m full of good and bad stuff,” he smiles.
“I wasn’t good at taking losses,” Paz says.
He retired following a victory, outpointing Tocker Pudwill. He knew it could be the end and was satisfied.
“I wanted to get to my 50th win. I just wanted to get to 50 because nobody does that. That’s awesome. It really is. I’m very proud of that.
“Fifty wins, five world titles, I stopped 30 guys. I’m proud of my record.”
Again, it feels like Paz is trying to leave me a sentiment of gratitude, reaffirming that there is no bitterness – unless your surname is Haugen or Rosenblatt – and that he is where he needs to be, no matter how long he might be here for.
It is why his Hall of Fame induction mattered so greatly to him, because – when he goes – ‘The Pazmanian Devil’ will be a long time gone. It is why his quest to find himself on the walls of the hallowed Canastota museum has been so personal. He realizes that he might have been inducted at a point when he would not be physically able to attend, or when he won’t be able to understand what is going on around him. He knows about CTE and what it could mean for him. He knows the fights, the wars, the trauma, the crash, could all count against him as the years roll uncontrollably by.
“One thousand per cent,” he admits. “My girlfriend says to me all the time, ‘Vinny you forgot this, you forgot that.’ I say, ‘Honey, I got hit in the head a million fucking times. You don’t gotta tell me. I get it.’ I feel blessed that I’m as good as I am now. I can hold a conversation with anybody at any time, and it’s a good thing.
“But a lot of loss of memory, this and that, a little bit of this and a little bit of that, I’m lucky. I’m a little off course once in a while, but I’m alright.”
Vinny Paz raises his fist with “5X” staring me square in the face. I get the impression that, along with 5X, Vinny would be just fine if that and his record is on his headstone.
Does he sometimes think about the worst and what life might be like years from now? He shakes his head and sighs, “Nah. I just deal with it as it comes. I’m going out just like this. Just like I am now. I don’t want to live too long. I want to live a good life. I don’t want it to be long. It’s been a good life.”
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