Hey, Dad, This Life Is for You

Who or what would you guess a Livingstone Bramble is?

A character out of Dickens? A trust officer at the local bank? A village in New Hampshire? A stretch of gorse and heather on the high road in Scotland? A coxswain for the Harvard eight? A railroad depot in the Cotswolds in England?

There’s no doubt what a Boom Boom Mancini is. It’s a second-generation pug out of Youngstown, Ohio, something the tabloid press would tab a left-hook artist. You roll that name around your tongue and you can almost smell the cauliflower.

Livingstone Bramble is a pug, too, almost as elegant as his name. He fights out of a stand-up style like those old Police Gazette tintypes. He’s almost couth. But his punches come in blizzards. It’s like fighting a sleet storm.

Guys usually become fighters because it beats driving a truck or shining shoes or sorting mail, but Ray Mancini became a fighter for the most medieval of reasons: He wanted to right an old injustice to the family name. For him, it was an affair of honor. The boxing game owed the Mancini family one.

You see, there had already been a Boom Boom Mancini. Ray’s father, Lenny.

Lenny was a good, tough lightweight in the days before World War II. In the immortal words of Marlon Brando, Boom Boom was good enough so he “coulda been a contendah.”

He got his shot at Sammy Angott in the days just before Sammy got to be champion. Lenny beat him seven out of the 10 rounds in the eyes of the referee. But Angott got the decision--and the title shot. Lenny Mancini got to fight the German army.

They met in a 10-rounder at Metz.

As usual, Lenny was taking the fight to his opponent. As usual, he could take it. They had to take 14 pieces of shrapnel out of him when the fight was over. Metz didn’t come cheap.

Ray Mancini grew up on stories of the glory that might have been. The title shot, the fame, the notoriety that “coulda been.”

Boom Boom II loved his father. He yearned for it all to have been different. It became an obsession with him. He watched his father struggle through life in industrial Ohio--the factories, the layoffs, the recessions, the aches from old war injuries when the weather changed.

As kids will do, he dreamed of making it all up, of riding up to the front door in Youngstown in the big limousine some day and stepping out with the jewel-encrusted lightweight championship belt and laying it at his father’s feet and saying, “Here, Dad, it’s finally yours.”

Some kids outgrow these Walter Mitty dreams of glory. Mancini never did. The little kid in Ray Mancini dies hard.

He was a plucky little kid. Like his father, he was no world beater but you had to be ready to fight when you took on a Mancini. It was never pretty, stylish. It was kind of like the battle of Metz. No one ever called him Sugar Ray. The old family name, Boom Boom, served fine. Boom Boom II got his title shot. His boyhood dreams came true. It was a heartwarming story. A Disney film come to life. All it needed was a dog. A real life remake of “The Champ.” A great part for a Jackie Cooper.

It was not that Boom Boom II was such a great fighter. No one ever mixed him up with Ray Robinson. But he was no Jake LaMotta, either. Clean living, polite, he spoke in full sentences. He was not your adenoidal music-hall pug. He had no more time for the bright lights than his father had.

Television loved him. There was never a dull minute in a Mancini fight. All the Boom Booms fought you three minutes of every round. It was wholesome family entertainment, rated PG, the simple story of a boy and his pop. Lenny Mancini knew where his kid was at night. In a ring.

Then, something happened that wasn’t in the script. Boom Boom Mancini, of all people, killed a man in the ring. A plot twist no one foresaw. All of a sudden, the Disney movie was a horror show, something by Kafka.

Ray Mancini was stunned, confused. This was not a part of the boyhood fantasies, not programmed into the fairy tale. This was a part of the game not included in the romance of the prize ring as handed down in the Mancini household.

Some of the verve went out of the sweet science for Ray. He seemed at a loss to understand how it all went from flowers in the ring to a wreath on the door. He appeared tentative in the ring, tortured by questions he squirmed to answer.

He took a bad beating from the Hon. Livingstone Bramble, Esq., and it seemed prudent to retire. The networks were going to do a documentary on the glory years and it seemed not out of the question that Ray Mancini would star in the part of Ray Mancini.

Instead, he’s going to star as Ray Mancini in the part as lightweight contender, against Master Livingstone Bramble in Reno Feb. 16. After all, it’s a title shot, another chance to make it all up to Dad.

Has the dream all turned to ashes? Does he have any second thoughts about his fulfilled dream to make good on the career of his father?

Mancini the younger shakes his head. He is still sure he did the right thing, took the right course. “Sometimes, I can’t believe the things I’ve done, the people I’ve met through boxing,” he said. “Look at the security. The biggest purse my father ever got was $5,000. He worked over 30 years in hard times and good, and I can make myself secure for life in just two or three fights.

“I took up fighting for my father and it’s the proudest thing I’ve ever done. It’s why I’m fighting (Bramble) again. All my life, I’d say, ‘What if?’ if I didn’t.

“It’s something I made a promise to myself when I was a little kid. It’s a part of me, who I am. I have a great sadness in me for (Duk-Koo) Kim but I have no regrets in my choice of career. You got to take your title shot when you get it.”

Especially if it means never having to tell your kid about the one that got away and there’ll be no need for a Boom Boom III.