Hard Knocks

It’s the punch people pay to see, a mallet-to-melon thud heard clear across the room. The crowd roars: “Oh!”

Rick “The Sledgehammer” Slavens is still standing, but he’s basically out cold. He stumbles forward and flicks a glove at his punisher, a stripper from Springfield.

The handsomely muscled right hook bears down again, and Slavens is suddenly looking straight up at his coach, who’s asking, “Do you know where you are?”

“I’m in a boxing ring,” he says, annoyed.

Less than a minute earlier, when the opening bell rang, Slavens believed he was stepping toward his life’s dream: to be cruiserweight champion of the world. For months he’d trained harder than any boxer he knew, honing his lifelong mean streak.

Now he needs help to sit upright on a three-legged stool.

Across the ring, a man younger and prettier than Slavens prances in victory with his arms in the air. Rock and roll music rages from the sound system. The men in the $75 seats chew cigars and grin, satisfied by the knockout blast.

And as Slavens’ trainer pats a towel against Slavens’ brow, the boxer’s eyes harden again. He asks, “When they gonna ring the bell for the next round?”

The warehouse basement is done up like a stage for the American dream. Every surface is red, white or blue. The walls are lined with posters shouting, “Winners are simply willing to do what losers won’t,” “If you can accept losing, you can’t win” and “He who fears being conquered is sure of defeat.” All around strut the dreamers: men who must beat other men tonight.

It’s Authentic Boxing Club, and five nights a week it’s the training ground for Slavens and other Kansas City boxers of all weights and abilities — Robert “The Preacher Man” Howard, Billy “White Boy” Gibson and Alvin “Slick Nick the Quickster” Brown, to name just a few.

But on this Saturday night it’s both backstage and locker room for the West Bottoms Rumble — an almost-monthly face-off of pros and amateurs. It’s show time for the Authentic crew.

Boxers mill about the wide room, shaking their limbs, biding time before climbing the stairs to the rock and roll and the bloodthirsty crowd. Some stab at punching bags dangling about the room. Others, like Slavens, sit still, practicing mean stares.

Larry Edgar sits quietly on a folding chair in the midst of it. Authentic is his club, and tonight he’s wearing all the hats: promoter, trainer, manager. In addition to Slavens, four other boxers he coaches are on tonight’s card, all but one of them professionals. Most of the night he marches from locker room to boxing ring and back again with a walkie-talkie in one hand, a water bottle in the other and a towel around his neck.

He rests his eyes on Brown, who’s shadowboxing in a practice ring. Brown is a small man, just 122 pounds. But he’s fast and strong, and he actually does as Edgar says. A soft-spoken man who’s punched his way out of mean Kansas City streets, Brown is the rare kind of fighter Edgar hopes to find among his boxers. Edgar dreams he’ll someday watch as his world-champion prizefighter strides around the ring carrying a bejeweled trophy belt high. Slavens isn’t likely to fulfill Edgar’s dream. But Brown might.

Edgar’s son, Rocky, brought him to boxing, and a snake led Edgar to Authentic. Rocky had a temper. He got kicked out of school a dozen times for fighting. So Edgar hauled him to a boxing gym that now competes with Authentic, hoping the kid could safely burn off a little steam. But then one day he found Rocky at the gym choking the owner’s kid down to the floor. Another boy was kicking Rocky in the head. The coach was off somewhere else, paying no attention.

Edgar went to the owner to complain, only to talk his way into coaching a team at the gym.

A pet python hooked him up with Monty Summers — known by some as “The Man From Hell.” About fifteen years ago, Edgar brought the snake to Summers’ Edge of Hell haunted house in the West Bottoms, looking to make a little dough with the squirming prop. Edgar wound up with a job and eventually became Summers’ top haunted-house manager.

One day Summers stopped by Edgar’s other job and saw that the boxing club was dirty and disorganized. He pulled Edgar aside: “How’d you like to do this right?”

Now their venture, Authentic Boxing, may be the cleanest, best-equipped fight gym in town. Here, everyone gets a shot — from the Slavenses to the Browns. The door is open every night and the cost is always zilch. But Edgar says, “Oh, it’s far from free. You got to supply the blood, sweat and tears it takes to be a champion, or you can hit the door.”

They operate the gym under the umbrella of their boxing promotion company, which they were going to call NBS, for No Bullshit. They settled on WRTW, for We Right the Wrong — because they aim to reform the sport they love.

Summers pines for the days of Patterson, Liston, Frazier and Ali, when boxing was the most popular sport in America, when more than 100,000 people would cram into a stadium for a title match. Those days are gone, buried under decades of crime, scandal and boring mismatches, but Summers wants to offer clean, exciting boxing packaged as a full entertainment event — violence wrapped in rock and roll, smoke machines, spinning lights and chicks in bikinis.

They’ve staged a handful of money-losing West Bottoms Rumbles since March 2000. But as Summers often says, “You never know when the next Sugar Ray Leonard or Muhammad Ali is going to show up.”

If that happens, there’ll be plenty of money.

For now, Edgar watches Brown dance across the mat, silvery robe glistening under fluorescent light. He runs a quick mental inventory of his most promising prospect, ticking off the fighter’s weaknesses and strengths, forever plotting the strategy that will propel them to the top. The route includes these fight nights, as well as occasional rumbles at fancier rings, such as Harrah’s casino.

But Edgar knows his hold on this raw gem is tenuous. At any moment Brown could leave him for another coach or promoter, and Edgar’s work would disappear. Or, like Slavens, Brown could step into just one miscalculated punch and be lying on his back with another “L” in his record. Years of progress would vanish.

A short, muscle-bound outsider carves through the locker-room crowd toward the boom box thumping hip-hop against the far wall. He has a cassette tape, and he tries to work the machine with his gloved hands. His song is “Danger” by Mystikal.

“That’s the [music] video Roy Jones was in,” he says, referring to the man some hail as the best fighter on earth. “You got to keep up with the Joneses. We in a class by ourselves.”

This fighter is Stanley “Soul Train” Jones, a visitor from an across-town gym who’ll take on Brown tonight. “I used to be ‘Fuzzy the Hammer,’ but now they call me ‘Soul Train’ because I can’t stop dancing.” He’s 34 years old, and he looks like a shrunken Mike Tyson.

Jones predicts Brown will finish like Slavens: knocked out in the first round. “It’s nothing personal,” Jones says, “just business. He in the way of me getting the world title.”

If the previous night’s weigh-ins were any indication, this fight is personal. A TV crew was present as Jones and Brown stepped on the scales. They played to the cameras — got face-to-face and shouted each other down.

Edgar has rarely seen Brown that angry. Edgar is a little concerned about the fight. He knows his man is sharper, but “Soul Train” has a lethal right hand. Jones comes from a long line of fighters. Though in trouble with the law lately, he previously amassed a fairly respectable record. He once fought Hector Camacho Jr. And he beat Ray Rivera, widely considered one of Kansas City’s toughest guys.

Now Jones is back from his legal troubles, and Brown is his first obstacle. Edgar is worried. He was out of bed early this morning because Jones had to weigh in again at Authentic. The night before, Jones came in too heavy. He spent a night fasting, sweating, spitting and shunning all liquids — a quick drain of any and all excess ounces. By 7:30 a.m., Edgar was at the club waiting for Jones. The fighter snuck in just a half-pound less than the 130-pound maximum for a junior featherweight.

By fight time, he’s back up to 140 — eighteen pounds heavier than Brown — and more weight means more power. But there’s nothing Edgar can do about it now. Under state regulations, what matters is official weight, and that’s usually logged many hours before the fight.

Besides, there’s a crowd upstairs, and fighters’ paychecks are on the line. The show must go on.

The hardest part is actually getting boxers into the ring. Just today, a boxer backs out at the last minute.

The guy was supposed to fight one of Edgar’s men — Robert Howard, “The Preacher Man.” To save the fight, Edgar works the phone, seeking someone willing to box on just hours’ notice. He winds up with a local sensation, Keith “Pretty Boy” Sims — someone he would rather not have Preach fight at this stage in his career. Tonight, Preach will go home with a loss.

A similar incident happened in January with Jones and Brown. Jones failed to show up for the weigh-in. For a couple hours, Edgar tried to track him down. He called his gym. He called Jones’ mother. He called the halfway house where Jones was serving out a drug sentence. But he wasn’t around, so Edgar made more calls and wound up with Alex Arnal, whom Brown had knocked out once before.

The fight was cake. Afterward, a bloodied Arnal applauded Brown and said it was an honor to be in the same ring.

Arnal was able to fight Brown because boxing isn’t like other sports. There’s no league to determine who can fight whom. It’s up to men like Edgar to make the matches.

Money is often a motivator. Some promoters will throw fights together — no matter how dangerously mismatched — for a quick buck. But to get to the million-dollar purses and the Las Vegas lights, a boxer needs to develop a winning record. So Edgar seeks opponents he believes his fighters have at least a 50/50 chance of beating.

The problem is, most trainers think as he does. They’re all out to protect their men. So they play a cat-and-mouse game. Trainers try to reveal just enough about their fighters to lure opponents into the ring. But some information they keep to themselves.

And a lot of fights come together at the last minute because money also lures men into the ring. If it’s Wednesday and bills are coming due, a $400 payday on Saturday looks tempting.

Thus, many fighters don’t know what they’re up against when they step into the ring. Take Slavens, for example. He’s over by the weight machines in his hooded black robe, pacing around with his tattooed chest puffed out. “I think I’m fighting that guy over there with the blue shirt and ponytail,” he says, his eyes hardened into a killer’s glare. “He keeps staring at me.”

Sure enough, that’s his opponent: a buxom bodybuilder who looks ten years younger than Slavens. Fact is, the guy is a stripper from Springfield who took the fight on just a few days’ notice. As with Slavens, it’s only the second fight of this man’s pro career. The stripper harbors no dreams of being a champion. For him, it’s a way to get to the city and earn a quick $400.

He leers at Slavens and struts his muscular frame. But what little he knows about Slavens worries him. Word is that the man works out like a fiend and has his sights set on a championship belt. Although he keeps his muscles toned for his audiences, the stripper hasn’t been working out with gloves as much as he should. If he’s to have any chance in this fight, he’ll have to win it quick because he won’t last long.

He watches Slavens jab at a heavy bag, noticing that with every punch, the man drops his hands below his head.

Linda Jennings is standing, cursing at the top of her lungs: “Stop the fight! Stop the motherfucking fight!”

Lips glossed, a strand of bangs swooping across her brow, she watches Brown batter his opponent.

In the white light above, her fiancé is starting to bleed. The eyes of her man, Stanley Jones, are swelling shut.

It’s barely a minute and a half into round three. Jones looks bad, but he’s still smiling and shuffling his feet, trying to hold onto the cockiness he showed before the bell rang. When Brown entered to the thump of rapper Nelly, he danced into center ring to steal the show. When the emcee said, “Gentlemen, let’s kick some ass!” Jones came out charging, swinging his mighty right hand.

But that’s when the boxing lesson began. Brown ducked all incoming shots and forced his opponent toward his right hand, just as Edgar taught him.

Now Jones is waving his fist in the air, trying to pretend his swollen cheeks don’t hurt. Brown answers with a straight right hand. Again and again and again.

“Stop the fucking fight!”

Jones hits the mat three times before that happens — just seconds after a silicone queen prances around the ring waving the card for round four.

At Jones’ first drop, his fiancée leaps up and moves forward as if to get in the ring and fight for him. The people in the crowd laugh at her. “Stop the fight!” they cry in a mock, high-pitched wail. At the third drop, Jones’ corner man squeezes through the ropes and waves his hands.

The crowd explodes. It’s no secret who the favorite is. Brown brings out his fans — family, friends, people he grew up with around 27th and Walrond.

Tonight he’s in the spotlight. The people are up and screaming. The ref raises Brown’s right arm in the air, and the fighter bows to all four sides of the ring. By the end of the night he’ll carry a fat roll of cash — commissions from tickets sold to his fans.

“I guess that’s just the U.S.,” he’ll say later, as if he knows his glory won’t last. “When you win, then people come up to you. When you win, they see you from blocks away.”

In his old neighborhood along 27th Street in the shadow of I-70, Brown is a star. Passing cars honk. Folks on foot wave and ask how many rounds it took him to win.

Still, the place offers him little anymore. “We ain’t got no stores,” he says, glancing up the litter-strewn sidewalk. “We ain’t got nothing around here.”

He points at the biggest disgrace: the park where he used to play as a kid. Now it’s a weedy lot coated in glass and paper and rusty bed springs. A curvy cement sculpture rises eerily from its center. Spray paint on a gray slab declares: “No trespassing!”

He slaps hands with some friends guarding the curb near the J and B Super — a drug corner that beckoned Brown with its illegal riches when he was young. “When you see your parents scuffling from paycheck to paycheck,” he recalls, “and you still don’t get new shoes and new clothes, and then you go around the corner and see people with new cars and money, that says something to you.”

Now he lives in Grandview, where he works at a nursing home. He’s not getting rich, but it’s a steady check. Boxing is his ticket out of the 9-to-5 grind. “I want to be world champ,” he says. “I want to get all four major world titles, then move up in weight and do it again there, then move up again and do it there too.”

With the millions that feat would bring, he’d rebuild the park. He’d buy up the blighted houses and give everybody a decent place to live. He’d open a community center where kids could swim or shoot hoops or box instead of wasting days on the street.

A lot of good boxers have come from this neighborhood, but he’s determined to be the first to make it to the top. That’s why he’s thinking about leaving town.

The one thing he has in common with the fighters before him is that he’s still in Kansas City — a place with a national reputation as a chump mill, the town to call when you need an easy win. “They stayed in KC and didn’t get nowhere,” Brown says. “They tell me all the time leaving’s the thing I need to do to avoid the spot they hit — the bottom.”

So in a couple of days he’ll try Miami, one of the centers of the boxing universe; a freewheeling promoter there named Nelson Lopez has been calling. Brown hates to think of leaving Authentic and everything Edgar has done for him. When the two linked up, Brown was 6-and-2. Since then he’s notched more than a dozen wins.

But it hasn’t been a perfect run. Last summer he and Edgar went from the ultimate glory to the lowest low in less than a week. One night Brown gave reigning World Boxing Council champion Raul Ruiz a ten-round boxing lesson in a no-belt match at Harrah’s by the river. A few nights later Brown lost to the straight right hand of Rudy Martinez, a 10-and-1 fighter Brown knows he could have beaten if he’d had more time to rest.

“The only reason I went is for the money,” Brown says. “I only got $2,000. It cost me an ‘L’ on my record for life.”

So standing here in the street in front of the house where he grew up, while the January light dims to the west, he nurses his hope that Miami will be the promised land. He doesn’t yet know that a boxer died sparring in Lopez’s gym. He hasn’t read the Palm Beach sports pages about Lopez, who is taking heat for letting a 27-year-old contender fight his way into a coma that has yet to lift.

This trip to the corner seems like a goodbye. But in two weeks, he’ll be back in Kansas City again (after learning of Lopez’s background) with a person he knows he can trust.

Slavens sees the envelope in his mailbox and knows what the letter will say. Across from the stamp are the words “Missouri Department of Athletics.” It’s a suspension, ninety days. It’s one of the few regulations in this sport: After a fighter is knocked out or cut, he’s forced to take a break.

Slavens isn’t surprised; he took a hard hit from the stripper. But the length of the term knocks him back a step — ninety days is as long a suspension he’s heard of.

He thinks maybe it’s time to retire. He’s older than most boxers just starting out. At 34, a championship run would be quite a feat. By the time he’s over this suspension, he’ll be damn near 35. He folds up the letter and drives to the gym to tell Edgar he’s ready to hang up his gloves, but Edgar talks him out of it. Edgar says, “Even if you’re 40 years old, how old do you have to be to dip your knees and dodge a punch?”

That makes Slavens think. He can’t give up now. He wants a rematch with that stripper. Fighting is what he does, the only thing he has in these United States. He’s been fighting since he was in kindergarten. He became the kind of long-haired teenage punk you wouldn’t look at the wrong way. After a short hitch in the military, Slavens fought on the underground circuit in illegal no-rules/no-ref matches in warehouses, under bridges and in cornfields all around the metro area. He claims to have fought in more than 200 such fights. “I can’t sit there and physically count 200 fights,” he says. “But I know it was about 200 fights.”

He claims to have taken a kick with a velocity of 75 to 80 miles per hour. “I just woke up at the hospital, and my buddy told me I died,” he says.

He knows he has a little less pepper in his brain. “I’m sure I’ve had damage,” he admits. “Well, I know I’ve had damage. I can just tell because I’m not like I used to be as far as — I mean, I’m not slow or nothing, but I used to be a lot faster at, you know, thinking, things like that.”

He’ll be at the gym tomorrow night, working the bags, shrugging off the permanent “L” in the record book, dreaming of the day he finally holds that championship belt above his head.