Dateline: RENO – When art imitates life, especially if it is made-for-television art, happy endings can be scripted, which for Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini is that proud moment three years ago when he won the lightweight boxing championship of the known world.
That is when a just-completed TV movie ends Mancini’s life, when he is on top, not when he is fighting back or just fighting on.
What we have here is a clear case of premature biography.
Real life has a way of continuing after the last commercial, often not for the better, and a champion at 21 can be a relic at 23 if he is not careful whose fists he meets face first.
Such as those of Livingstone Bramble, who relieved Mancini of his championship eight months ago and kept Mancini from reclaiming it Saturday night.
The decision was unanimous but astonishingly close, with each judge giving Bramble the margin by only one point. Had the vote gone to Mancini, it would have been like the steer getting the decision over the butcher.
“Ray fought a great fight,” said Bramble. “I didn’t think anybody could give me a fight like that.”
Great, maybe. Courageous, certainly. Mancini fought with one eye closed and blood streaming down his face for the last eight rounds.
Mancini swung and missed. Bramble swung and hit. The actual count, which tells more about the fight than the judges’ numbers, were 1,349 punches thrown by Mancini, only 381 landing for a hitting average of .280. Bramble threw 1,220 punches and connected with 674, for .550, a mean batting average, as Mancini’s face could testify.
Mancini was cut over the left eye in the first round and on the right eye in the third. The chief question for the last half of the fight was not if Mancini would finish but if he would bleed to death first.
Mancini’s corner worked on both eyes with sponges big enough to wash a truck and still couldn’t soak up all the blood.
“No way did I want the fight stopped,” Mancini said. “The cuts did hinder my fighting. I couldn’t see all the punches coming, and I had to keep wiping the blood out of my eyes.
“It seems like the last half of my career, cuts have been a problem. After a while, you can’t kid yourself.”
Does that mean, as he had hinted before the fight, that Mancini will now retire?
“I know I look like I just went through a meatgrinder,” Mancini said, “and if I made the decison right this moment, I would probably call it a career.
“What I want to do is take a nice long rest, pray a lot, get some tender loving from my family and then decide.”
Mancini’s manager, David Wolf, had no hesitation in casting his vote for retirement.
“My own feelings are that this should be the end,” said Wolf. “There was just so much dignity in the way he fought this fight, it seems like the right way to call a halt.”
Mancini’s father, Lenny, concurred. “If it was up to me,” the elder Mancini said, “I would tell him to forget about it.”
“You’ve got to remember I’m his baby,” Mancini said.
Bramble doesn’t think Mancini should quit. “I don’t see another lightweight out there who can beat him,” Bramble said.
This was the same Bramble who had said before the fight:
“I want to cut him up, flatten him and forget him,” said Bramble before the fight. “If he gets too close, I will bite his ears off.”
Now, that is a serious threat considering Bramble is a vegetarian. Of course, he did not say anything about swallowing.
Mancini made no threats, only a promise.
“The difference between this fight and the first is that I will be victorious,” Mancini said.
In their first fight, eight months ago in Buffalo, Mancini was leading on two of the three judges’ cards when the referee stopped the fight in the 14th round with Mancini bleeding like dressed pork, though not even Mancini disputed Bramble’s victory.
“I love being the underdog,” Mancini said. “It’s the American way.”
Mancini did not join in the prefight hype with the same energy as did Bramble. Mancini also reacted to Bramble’s antics much more passively than before the first fight, when Bramble employed a bogus witch doctor to put a curse on Mancini.
Not even a voodoo doll, into whose eyes Bramble stuck pins, or a human skull Bramble gave Mancini as a gift appeared to bother Mancini. Mancini merely turned the skull over to find it was made in China.
“All I can think about is getting my title back,” Mancini said.
Before he lost that title, Mancini was in a position to be the next superstar of boxing, the natural heir to Muhammad Ali and Sugar Ray Leonard.
He had a natural appeal. He had guts and grit and enough talent to get by. He was unpretentious and hard working, and he was white. That didn’t hurt at the gate.
“Mr. All-American boy,” Bramble said with scorn.
Mancini was a growth industry. There were Boom Boom dolls and Boom Boom athletic gear and Boom Boom posters.
Mancini had everything, including the right motives for being in the seamiest sport of them all.
And that brings us back to the movie, which is titled “Walk in Your Shadow,” the name coming from a poem that young Mancini wrote in devotion to his father.
In its eagerness to give us Mancini’s brief life, TV may have forgotten that Mancini himself is not quite through with it yet, but for the purposes of prime-time melodrama, all the good stuff is already over.
Nothing that Mancini can possibly do from here will improve upon what so far has had the scent of bad fiction.
“It’s a real-life ‘Rocky’ story,” said Dan Duva, promoter of the rematch with Bramble.
As a child, Mancini heard the stories of how his blue-collar father, Lenny, the original “Boom Boom,” could have been the champ if he hadn’t had to go to war for his country.
His little fingers could touch the scars left by enemy shrapnel and his heart could feel the wounds that ended his old man’s dreams.
He swore that when he grew up, he would be the champ his dad never was but could have been, would have been, if only . . .
Check your TV listings later this fall and stock up on Kleenex.
Mancini wanted to play himself in the film and was briefly considered before the part was given to Doug McKeon, whom you may remember as the kid who liked to “suck face” in “On Golden Pond.”
In any case, the thing was being shot at the same time Mancini was otherwise preoccupied with trying to win back the title that climaxes the movie.
That is where the TV movie of Mancini’s life wraps things up, with tidy sentiment, the night little Ray wins the title, the night a loving son gives to his father the gift of immortality.
All in all, not a bad present.
Most of us only get neckties. PHOTO: AP Laserphoto. Livingstone Bramble measures Ray Mancini. Keywords: BOXING