Caan Hopes Latest Gamble Will Pay Off

They are both returning from exile, one self-imposed, the other state imposed.

One man gave up a world-famous career to devote the past 4 1/2 years to raising his son. The other was forced to give up six years of freedom after being sentenced to prison for burglary.

They have decided to return together, this unlikely team of actor James Caan and heavyweight boxer Mike Hunter, ex-con.

They will take their first step in that direction Tuesday when Hunter (6-0-2, one knockout) meets Mike Gans (10-3, seven knockouts) in the eight-round main event at the Country Club in Reseda. Caan will be seated in a chair at ringside, or at least on the edge of that chair, during Hunter’s fight in his new capacity as the boxer’s manager.

Thirteen years later, the scene remains vivid.

It is from the movie “The Gambler.” James Caan, playing a character who is impulsive, obsessive and self-destructive, has just lost more than $44,000 gambling.

With nothing left but $20 in his pocket, he is driving home through an urban area when he sees a young kid shooting baskets on a playground.

The Caan character can’t resist.

He parks his car, saunters onto the playground and challenges the kid to a game--for $20.

Caan loses.

There was a lot of James Caan in that character.

Not the obsessive gambler. But certainly the impulsiveness, the disillusionment, the playing out of sports fantasies.

And, some have said, the self-destructiveness.

It was impulsiveness that led Caan, disgusted with a lack of quality scripts and a string of commercially unsuccessful pictures, to walk away from his profession at the age of 42, despite an Academy Award nomination for his role in “The Godfather” and an Emmy nomination for his portrayal of Chicago Bears running back Brian Piccolo in the television classic, “Brian’s Song.”

The disillusionment also was caused by an inability to work with a string of directors.

In early 1983, “Kiss Me Goodbye,” starring Caan, Sally Field and Jeff Bridges, was released.

Caan took the title literally. He hasn’t been back on film since.

In addition to his dissatisfaction with the products he was turning out, there have been other downers in Caan’s life during this period. His sister, Barbara, with whom he was very close, died of leukemia five years ago. His father, Arthur, died a year ago of Alzheimer’s disease.

For Caan, that left one love in his life--his son Scott, who has just turned 10. Having been divorced from Scott’s mother, Sheila, when the child was still an infant, Caan always has stayed extremely close to Scott. Sports was their common denominator.

“I was a full-time coach for Scott’s teams,” Caan said. “Everything from AYSO to basketball to Little League. I wanted to grow up with the kid. I have to have passion in my life. There’s passion in growing up with a kid. It’s not like a film. The creativity is there immediately. You don’t have to wait six months for them to put music to it.”

Sports was a natural path to lead his son down. It always has played a big part in his own life.

That is where the fantasies came in.

Example: Caan’s football career consisted of a year on the freshman team at Michigan State. Yet when he accepted the role of Piccolo in 1971, he largely was motivated by a fantasy.

“I thought I’d get a two-year contract out of the Bears,” he said. “I really did. I thought once they saw me as a running back, I’d make the team. I’m always having fantasies like that.”

Example: With no prior experience, one day Caan decided to join the rodeo circuit more than a decade ago. He became a weekend calf roper and a pretty good one, sometimes beating people who had been riding horses almost before they could walk. At one point, Caan actually fantasized about doing it full time.

Caan also has plunged into swimming, diving, baseball, softball, handball, tennis and even bullfighting and off-shore power boat racing.

And when he’s not doing something athletic, he’s watching somebody else do it.

“This guy could spend his whole life watching ESPN,” said Paul Bloch, his publicist.

Caan has had a lot of time to do that over the past 4 1/2 years. But now, with his money running a little thin, Caan is coming back, re-emerging on two fronts, in a soon-to-be-released movie, director Francis Ford Coppola’s “Garden of Stone,” and as Hunter’s manager.

“I still have to feel passion before I do something,” Caan said. “Unfortunately, there was not a lot of great material out there over the past few years.

“But I also turned down some great material. I won’t tell you what, but let’s just say it was Oscar level material. I’m a genius, aren’t I? I turned down pictures like that and I’m making a $1.48 at the time. But I just wasn’t loving it then.”

He’s loving it now. Some critics who have seen sneak previews of “Garden of Stone” already are whispering that Caan’s performance could put him back on the list of Oscar contenders.

Caan’s primary goal now is to make Hunter a contender.

This is a kid who had never had a professional fight before going into prison in Greenville, S.C.

Not that he didn’t know something about fighting. Asked if he had been in a gang as a youth, Hunter replied, “I was a gang. If I hadn’t gone to prison, I’d be dead by now.”

Instead, he found a new life.

“I wanted to do something positive in prison,” he said. “I didn’t believe in institutional rehabilitation. I began to rehabilitate myself.”

At the expense of others. Hunter had 44 fights in prison. He won them all, 25 by knockout.

When he got out two years ago at the age of 24, he decided to stick with boxing, but said nobody would stick with him.

“Everybody dismissed me,” he explained, “probably because I was an ex-con.”

So he worked in a car wash and a textile mill and various other places while boxing on the side.

He would fight anywhere, anytime, and it nearly cost him the chance to come under Caan’s management.

That was several months ago. Hunter had accompanied his friend, Reggie Currington, to a weigh-in for Currington’s fight against James Pritchard at the Sands Hotel in Atlantic City. But during the weigh-in proceedings, it was Pritchard and Hunter who got into a stare-down. Hunter was mad about two proposed fights between himself and Pritchard that had fallen through, and the two wound up face to face at the weigh-in.

“I don’t know why he was so interested in me,” Hunter said. “I told him, ‘Don’t worry about me. It’s not me you’re fighting.’ ”

But it was.

Hunter discovered about 15 minutes before the scheduled bout that Currington was running a fever and would be unable to fight.

Impulsively, Hunter agreed to substitute for his friend.

Hunter was fighting regularly, was in shape and wasn’t afraid of anybody, but 15 minutes was slightly short notice, even for him. Besides, he had run five miles earlier that day.

But he decided to grab this opportunity to finally get Pritchard in the ring. Someone was dispatched up to Hunter’s room at the Sands, site of the fight, to get his mouthpiece and boots. Hunter borrowed Currington’s cup, robe and trunks and off he went.

It wasn’t as if he was fighting a nobody, either; Pritchard was 10-0 with nine knockouts.

At this point, Caan was in the midst of buying Hunter’s contract. John Ciarcia, an old friend of Caan’s, was going to get involved as a promoter.

So you can imagine the reaction when the ESPN fights came on that night and suddenly, there is their fighter in the ring .

Ciarcia called Robert Middleman, who still owned Hunter’s contract, in London and asked what was going on.

Middleman, of course, was as amazed as anyone.

What do you mean he’s fighting right now? Middleman asked.

I’m telling you, I’m watching him on ESPN, Ciarcia insisted. If he loses, the deal is off.

There was a pause.

Wait a minute, Ciarcia told Middleman, hold on. This is not going to be so bad. He looks good! He’s winning!

Hunter didn’t win that night, but he did get a draw. Under the circumstances, that would have to be considered a major upset.

Still, insists Caan, “If I’d have been there, I’d have hit him in the head if he wanted to take that fight. I wouldn’t have let him up.”

But once Hunter got the draw, Caan went ahead and obtained the 6-3, 208-pound fighter. Another longtime Caan friend, Joe Mangiapane, and veteran Archie Grant have joined the team as trainers.

There is, said Caan, plenty of work to be done.

“He had no experience when we got him,” Caan said of Hunter, “and no left hand. He was terribly raw. He looked awful, but he moved so well laterally. You just don’t see that in a heavyweight. He moves like a middleweight. He understands boxing is like geometry--all angles. And he has plenty of heart. It was like we found a piece of wood with a heart on it.”

The first thing Caan did was to move Hunter out to Los Angeles two months ago. He is also changing Hunter’s act. The fighter had billed himself as The Bounty Hunter and had worn a long coat and a mask into the ring in order to gain attention.

“I told him,” Caan said, “that I would wear the outfits. He should just go out and punish people.

“I’m getting older now and I can’t do a lot of the things I did before, so I have to have somebody to watch. It’s nice to be a part of something you believe in.”

Caan doesn’t see this as a long-term project.

“If he isn’t ready in six months to fight for the title,” Caan said flatly, “I’ll quit. If he hasn’t learned by then, he’ll never learn.”

The gambler is back. But this time, he believes he’s putting his money on a sure bet.