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Waiting to hear the decision in his first pro fight, an exhausted, battered Tommy Huff turned to the crowd at the Niagara Falls Convention and Civic Center and clapped his taped hands together.
Not because the Niagara Falls native thought he had won his professional debut Friday night--the unanimous decision against him came as no surprise--but to thank the crowd for its raucous support.
The one-man ovation was well-earned--not just by the announced crowd of 4,500, but by the card's organizers and the fighters themselves--with one possible exception.
Other than Jorge Luis Gonzalez's conscientious objection to combat in the main event against Joe Mesi, the effort and action displayed throughout the evening gave the crowd plenty to be loud about. Few fight cards run perfectly, and this one had glitches--two fights were scratched for medical reasons.
But there were none of the lengthy between-fight delays that often mark such promotions. No quick-and-easy knockouts. No horribly one-sided matches. Just plenty of competitive boxing, along with a splash of pageantry--Mesi entering the ring amid a light-and-fog show and, of course, the requisite ring-card woman.
"If anybody didn't have a good time, it was their own fault," said Jack Mesi, Joe's father and manager.
While Mesi's fourth-round disposal of Gonzalez was the night's least competitive bout, the Tonawanda native's 19th straight win served as a capper on that rarest of Niagara Falls events--an undertaking that lived up to its hype.
It might be petty or mean-spirited to note that the promotion was a success despite, or perhaps because of, the complete non-participation of City Hall.
But the deal was struck between promoter Allan Trombley and Convention Center officials. Several government and quasi-public officials didn't know about the fight a week beforehand. On fight night, there were no gratuitous introductions of members of the local power structure or inane pronouncements by Herroner.
You do the math.
Toward the end of the opening round of the night's first fight, a straight left hand from Ian Gardner dropped Huff in a heap along the ropes. The rookie middleweight got up, but fell into the turnbuckle in his own corner.
"That's when I got scared, because I've never seen him down or hurt," said Lew Ciavaglia, Huff's trainer throughout a career that included 23 amateur bouts.
The bell ended the round and very possibly prolonged the fight. Ciavaglia's between-rounds approach to restoring his fighter's senses?
"I slapped him as hard as I could in the face," Ciavaglia said. "I give him a whack, and he says, 'I'm OK.' I said, 'The hell you are.' "
Huff regrouped and carried the fight to Gardner the rest of the way. Huff got the better of several rapid-fire exchanges and shook Gardner in the fourth.
But in a four-round fight, an early knockdown is nearly insurmountable without scoring one of your own. And while Huff landed an array of shots and looked stronger at the finish, he never quite overcame his fall in the eyes of the judges. Two officials gave every round to Gardner, while the third gave him three of four.
"I was making a lot of amateur mistakes--dropping my hands when I shouldn't have been, letting him hit me when I shouldn't have," Huff said. "But all in all, it was a good experience."
Trombley said taking on Gardner, who had an 83-7 record as an amateur, was a difficult first test.
"Tommy was in tough," said Trombley, who also served as matchmaker for the event. "We discussed other opponents for him, but he wanted to fight the toughest kid out there."
Despite Huff's defeat, Trombley said he wouldn't hesitate to put the middleweight on future cards.
"What we have to do with Tommy is go out and rebuild him a little bit," Trombley said. "He needs three or four fights where ... the competition maybe isn't as stiff as that to get his confidence back and get into the pro game a little bit, and then we'd be happy to maybe rematch him with Gardner."
After a pair of super-bantamweight bouts, one for each gender, large men took over the ring for the night's final two fights.
He entered the fight with less than two weeks notice and the least-recognizable name of the four heavyweights on the card, but Harold Sconiers provided the performance of the night.
Sconiers replaced Rupert Thomas against Donovan "Razor" Ruddock, who started a comeback after 18 months out of the ring. The Jamaican-born Ruddock, a decade removed from his pair of bouts with Mike Tyson, didn't just get the work he needed--he nearly got beat. Despite scoring the fight's only knockdown and a variety of power punches, Ruddock had to settle for a split decision.
Conceding 52 pounds and immeasurable power to Ruddock, Sconiers plugged forward and outworked Ruddock in each of the 10 rounds. Ruddock floored him with a left hook early in the third, but Sconiers kept coming, working inside Ruddock's superior reach and landing to the body and face.
Ruddock deflated after failing to finish Sconiers in the third, and by the fifth round was breathing heavily through his mouth.
"I figured he'd tire out toward the end and I'd run away with it," said Sconiers, who fell to 14-8. "But I started kind of slowing down and letting him get set for some big shots toward the end. I slowed down and let him get back in the game."
Ruddock (37-5, 28 KOs) started throwing, and landing, left hooks and straight rights again and controlled the second half of the fight. Sconiers earned the crowd's admiration with his hustle and frightening capacity for absorbing thudding shot after thudding shot, then attacking. Even after Ruddock nearly decapitated Sconiers with a right in the ninth round, the smaller man still fired back.
"I don't like this to be my best asset, but I've always had a really, really hard chin," Sconiers said. "Sometimes he would hit me and it would seem like it was really hurting me, but I wasn't. If I see the punch coming most of the time, I can brace myself for it."
"The guy takes a very good shot," said Ruddock, who said the layoff and carrying 254 pounds took a toll on him. "He just decided he wasn't going to go. So I had to be patient--I couldn't launch an attack continuously, so I had to fight in bursts."
The crowd booed the decision, but Ruddock's heavier shots rightfully overcame Sconier's pesky flurries on the scorecards.
"I thought I had the fight," said Ruddock. "I knew I hit him with the harder shots. He was more busy than I was, but he wasn't doing any damage at all."
While disappointed, Sconiers didn't share the outrage of some fans.
"He was landing the harder shots, I was landing more shots. It all depends on what the judges are looking for. But I take the decision like a man."
The biggest question facing Mesi entering the night--can he take a true heavyweight's punch? Well, we still don't know. Because Gonzalez didn't throw any.
The 6-foot-7 Cuban refugee and one-time contender made an impressive ring entrance, stepping over the top rope. But big doesn't necessarily equal good.
It certainly didn't Friday.
Gonzalez needed a win, or at least a reasonably impressive performance, to salvage a career that once included a 23-0 record and a mega-contract with the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. Instead, he threw a couple jabs in the first round. He tossed a couple of soft right chops in the third.
Otherwise, he leaned back into the ropes, occasionally using his 12-inch reach advantage to literally hold his opponent at arm's length and staring wide-eyed at Mesi, as if mesmerized by the sight of a heavyweight actually moving.
Mesi couldn't control Gonzalez's mindset or improve the Cuban's suspect conditioning. All he could do was create a fight by himself and score an impressive knockout. And he did.
Despite the lingering effects of breaking the tip of his right thumb in March, Mesi got inside and stayed there, throwing punches with both hands and driving Gonzalez into the ropes. Other than what passed for a Gonzalez rally at the beginning of the third, Mesi dominated throughout.
Mesi did suffer the first cut of his pro career, a small abrasion under his right eye, in the third round. The cut's placement made it unlikely that blood would get in Mesi's eye or swell in a way that affected his vision, but he said it added to his sense of urgency.
"Without being able to use my right hand like I wanted to, and having the swollen and cut eye, my time might have been limited, because my thumb was aching pretty bad," Mesi said. Using his good hand, as well as his feet, Mesi finished the evening a round later.
"With this guy, you can't come straight in," Mesi said. "He's got a pretty nice uppercut and a long jab. Going straight in is useless. I tried to step to the right and step to the left, especially when he was on the ropes.
"And that's what I did. I got him on the ropes, I stepped to the side and I hit him with a hard hook."
Gonzalez crashed to the canvas. He rose on wobbly legs, but referee Dick Pakozdi waved the fight over. Gonzalez said the stoppage was premature, that he could have continued. But even before going down, it didn't look much like he wanted to.
Trombley and the Mesis said before the fight that if things broke the right way and the house sold well, boxing would return to Niagara Falls, most likely in July.
Well, Mesi and Ruddock won, and 4,500 people showed up, despite just three weeks of advertising and 11 days of ticket sales. Casino Niagara officials planned to sponsor the night, but the deal was nixed from above, Trombley said. The casino did buy 200 tickets to disperse to its high rollers, but the promoter had to come up with another sponsor, U.S. Traffic, and reach into his pocket to fill the void.
"If it had been anybody else but Joe, and his family and the relationship I have with them, I would not have done it," Trombley said of gambling on the city and the event.
It paid off.
"We were treated very well, and I have every intention of coming back, with or without the casino," Trombley said.
At 37, Ruddock doesn't figure to get much quicker by summertime. But Sconiers worked some of the rust off the Razor, who said he expected to come in at least 10 pounds lighter against Mesi. And unlike Gonzalez, Ruddock will throw and land the kind of shots Mesi has yet to take in his pro career.
Jack Mesi said his son may take one fight in the interim, if a deal can be worked out with an Italian promoter. A win over Ruddock figures to propel Mesi as high as the top 15 in the rankings of boxing's myriad sanctioning bodies. And with the heavyweight title split between two far-from-invincible journeymen--Hasim Rahman and John Ruiz--it's a great time to be an up-and-coming contender.
And it's a pretty good situation for Niagara Falls. Mesi wants to keep his home base in Western New York and has resisted entreaties to relocate to Las Vegas. The Convention Center offers the ideal size for fights on his way up the rankings. It's close to Casino Niagara. And Lord knows, there's plenty of parking.
Trombley's challenge now--keeping City Hall out of the way.