Nicole Bass & Macho Camacho, Atlantic City, New Jersey, 14, January 1995
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Macho Camacho and Vinny Pazienza beat each other up on a regular basis beginning about 1990. They fought a bunch of times and Vinny was usually on the receiving end. People have loved to look at other people beating one another for as long as there have been people to beat and since these guys put on a good show, they usually filled the arena. Generally, the people who like hang out at fights don’t want to get too close, they don’t want to get their own teeth knocked out or their own noses bloodied or bone broken. They want to just look from safe distance and not get dirty or worse still beaten.
There was a gym around the corner in the early 1990s called Natural Physique. It was a real gym, where boxers trained, people really worked out and weren’t just looking to pick up the girl on the next bench and body builders built themselves into one thing or another, often with the aid of assorted steroid supplied by various friends and associates. Vinny was one of the people who worked out at the gym. That’s the kind of place it was.
Shelley worked out at Natural Physique and knew the owners. She also liked boxing and when the owners, Nicole Bass, then the world’s largest female body builder her husband, Bob Fuchs, suggested that we head down to Atlantic City to watch a championship bout that was to pit their Vinny against his long time rival, the undefeated reigning WBO Middleweight Champion, Hector “Macho” Camacho, she jumped at the chance.
It was a Saturday night, January 14, 1995 and it was quite a circus. Prior to the fight 240 pound Nicole posed with 140 pound Camacho and an hour or so later he pounded their Vinny for twelve bruising rounds and won a unanimous decision. It was a tough fight and a bunch of people in the crowd thought Pazienzo had been robbed, but the guys who control things like that didn’t pay any attention to the crowd.
The next morning we were scheduled to drive back to New York and I spotted an notice in the paper about an sports memorabilia show being held at a local hotel that featured a number of famous boxers from the past. I recognized the names of many boxers who were prominent before Shelley was even born and asked is he’d like to go see some other boxers, great fighters, real champions, men who might have a fight or two a month, when there was only one guy who was world champion in his weight division, not like the half a dozen bouncing around in those and these days. She was game so we headed off to another hotel on the beach. |
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Shelley M. Shier and Floyd Patterson Atlantic City, New Jersey, 14, January 1995|
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We reached the autograph show an hour or so after it opened and surveyed a sorry sight. The promoter had built a large boxing ring in the middle of a ballroom and the famous boxers of the past were positioned around the ring. Fans could buy a ticket and get an autograph. Except only a handful of fans had showed and the event was being shut down as we entered. The ring was empty and there were just a few people milling about.
I was eager to see Carmen Basilio. He was the local guy who made good when I was a kid in Syracuse in the 1950s. He’d won the welterweight championship in 1953 and moved up a class in 1957, taking the middleweight away from Sugar Ray Robinson. He was as famous as Jimmy Brown, the big football star at the university or any of the Syracuse National basketball players.
I went over to speak with him and get an autograph for Shelley, but he wasn’t interested. He was unhappy that he’d missed a payday and his ego was probably on the floor as well because no one had turned up. I said something like, “Well, it still nice to see you after all these years.” He looked at me and said, “What do you mean?” I told him about the Syracuse connection, how all the kids looked at his fights on TV and in the newsreels. Then he brightened up. “Where’d you go to school?” he asked. “Nottingham,” I told him, “and then I went to Syracuse.” “Did you ever know anybody at LeMoyne (a local Jesuit college)” he asked and I replied, “Sure, I dated a girl from LeMoyne when I was at Syracuse.”
That was all it took. His eyes brightened. He yelled at Floyd Patterson and Willie Pep and asked them to come over. Poise for pictures, no problem. Sign a boxing glove, no problem. Talk about whatever came up, no problem. This lasted for fifteen minutes or so and then Patterson and Pep got called away, but they’d done their duty and Shelley was thrilled.
I’ll never forget one thing Basilio told me. He said he been an assistant athletic director at LeMoyne College for a lot of years after he retired from boxing. He added that if he didn’t have the pension from LeMoyne he wouldn’t have anything except boxing shows like the one nobody just attended.
Macho Camacho fought as recently as 2008 and won something called the World Boxing Empire championship, but he may have quit by now since he’s nearing fifty. Vinny Pazienza became Vinny Paz and had a distinguished career, winning assorted WBC championships and ended his fighting days before someone made mush of his head.
Willie Pep, who had a spectacular career, was featherweight champ forever in the 1940s and at one point had a record of 117-1, lived to the ripe old age of 84, and hopefully was happy doing it. Floyd Patterson, one of the most decent (and smallest) heavyweight champions retired and became Chairman of the New York State Athletic Commission. But he’d been whacked in the head one time too often and was an Alzheimer’s victim at 71. Carmen Basilio is 84, using up his pension and enduring one nasty upstate winter after another.
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Shelley M. Shier and Carmen Basilio, Atlantic City, New Jersey, 14, January 1995