Steve Springer : Ring Career Forged by Food Fight

Most boxers first enter the ring to escape--escape from poverty, deprivation, the ghetto, gang warfare or from the welfare line.

Wimpy Halstead might be the first to escape from a fast-food line.

The way Wimpy tells it, he was in a hamburger place back home in Oklahoma. “I was about 15 at the time,” he says, “and I got into a fight over something involving a Coke and a girl, and the security guard came over. I fought him and then the guards started coming at me in numbers because that’s the way they’re trained.”

The exact number in the crack unit it took to subdue him is not recorded in any boxing book, but Wimpy remembers standing before a judge, faced with a choice: Get sent to a juvenile detention camp or, if you really want to fight, go to a gym and learn how.

To Wimpy’s way of thinking, anything had to be better than detention camp. So he and his father, LeRoy, opted for the nearby gym of Pat O’Grady, who had been in the fight game for nearly a half-century. Among the fighters O’Grady has managed is his son, Sean, the former World Boxing Assn. lightweight champion.

When Wimpy first came strutting into the gym, Pat O’Grady took it upon himself to teach this impudent youth a lesson. He immediately put him in the ring with Monte Masters, heavyweight champion of Oklahoma. Nobody has ever mistaken Masters for Mike Tyson, but a veteran such as Masters, then 27, looks just as ferocious as Tyson to a 15-year-old putting on the gloves for the first time.

Masters knocked Wimpy down seven times, once sending him flying out of the ring.

“We finally stopped it,” O’Grady recalls. “We weren’t really counting rounds. We just wanted to show this kid he wasn’t so tough. But when he went out of that ring, I thought the kid was killed.”

That performance earned Jerry Halstead the nickname Wimpy.

He not only stuck with the name, but also with the profession. Rather than being discouraged by his devastation at the hands of Masters, Wimpy was inspired.

The 215-pound heavyweight since has amassed a 43-5-1 record and 34 knockouts against opponents, all of whom, it can be said, were at least tougher than anyone to be found among the ranks of fast-food security guards.

His emotional development, however, has not always kept pace. This is a guy who shaves his head, passes out dollar bills with his picture on them and tells people, “I’m white and I fight. I just want to establish some white credibility in a black sport. That’s not racial. Gerry Cooney fights once every four years. I fight once every two weeks. No pain, no money.”

How low can he go? In his last fight, held last month in Santa Monica, Wimpy was the victim of a low blow delivered by Percell Davis. What did Wimpy do? Hey, he’s not really a wimp, so he delivered his own low blow.

The result was two grown men pushing away the referee while they stood in the middle of the ring exchanging punches below the belt. The referee finally got between them to salvage their descendants if not their dignity.

Says O’Grady: “He’s 23 going on 14. I’ve seen him kick guys, spit on guys. It’s not right. I told him I don’t want to mess with guys who can’t go all the way to a title.”

O’Grady meant what he said. Wimpy won his first 21 professional fights under O’Grady, then, at 18, decided to take off on his own. Stumbling to a 2-4-1 record in fights on the East Coast and in Europe, Wimpy came back to Oklahoma three years later. O’Grady wanted no part of Wimpy, but his wife, Jean, finally agreed to manage the fighter.

When the O’Gradys came to Southern California, Wimpy followed, moving to Simi Valley. Since his return to the O’Gradys, he is 22-1 with 19 knockouts, his only loss coming last November, an eighth-round TKO at the hands of former WBA heavyweight champ Greg Page.

All will be forgiven, however, if Wimpy can win his next fight. That is scheduled for May 30 in Las Vegas where he will meet another former WBA heavyweight champ, Tony Tubbs, on the undercard of the Mike Tyson-Pinklon Thomas heavyweight title fight. A victory there, in the national spotlight, could get Wimpy his own title shot.

“He’s got more talent than I’ve seen in a long time,” Pat O’Grady says, “but right now, he’s playing with only about 50 cards in a 52-card deck.”