FROM PUGILIST TO PIZZA KING : For Two Eventful Years, Vince Colandrea Made a Little Dough in Boxing

They called him “The Rock,” as in Rocky Rossiano. He didn’t like it.

To Vince Colandrea, a.k.a. Vinnie Rossiano, there was only one Rocky. And he didn’t do sequels.

But in 1961, Colandrea came out of Fresno billed as another Rocky Marciano, with a little Tony Galento thrown in.

Fighting under the name Vinnie Rossiano, Colandrea had a brief, somewhat bizarre fling with boxing. In all, he had five fights before a head injury--away from the ring--ended his career in 1962.

Yet in those two years, Colandrea collected plenty of memories--and a few bruises. He fought against some bums and trained with some of the best boxers in California. He met young Cassius Clay, now known as Muhammad Ali. But in a hotel room, not in a ring.

Colandrea even won three fights, two by knockout.

It was two years of sweat, two years of pain, two years of fun.

“I still miss fighting,” Colandrea said. “Sometimes, when I’m at a fight, I want to get in there. When I was a kid in shape, where I was at and the way I was going, I could handle anyone of those guys up there in the top 10 today.”

Today, the next Rocky Marciano runs two Italian restaurants in Orange County. He also has one in Japan, which has been so successful that he is planning to expand his foreign market.

At 49, Colandrea is well above his fighting weight of 205 pounds, but his instincts are still good.

In a flash, he assumed the pose. His hands were up, massive forearms tense, eyes fixed on an imaginary opponent. He shadow-boxed, punching, counter-punching, bobbing, weaving, stalking the opponent.

At that moment, one of Colandrea’s employees walked in, apologizing. It seems the employee forgot to call in an order over the weekend. He had gone to Mexico instead.

Colandrea, still poised to punch, handled his employee with kid gloves.

“That’s OK. If you’d let me know, I would have called it in for you,” he said.

Colandrea drops his hands and shrugs.

“You know, running a restaurant takes almost the same discipline as boxing,” he said. “With boxing, I had to get up every morning and run. Here, I have to get up every morning and make the (pizza) dough.”

According to Pat DiFuria, Fresno had the best boxing stable west of the Mississippi River in the early 1960s.

DiFuria was the top manager in Fresno in those days. He had opened his own gym in the late 1950s, which he called the Fresno Boxing Club, and began training fighters.

Actually, it was a vacant Laundromat that DiFuria rented, but it served its purpose.

“There was a concrete floor with a ditch where the water used to drain from the Laundromat,” former light heavyweight Wayne Thornton said. “There wasn’t even a shower at first. But we kicked butt and took names.”

Thornton was one of several quality boxers that DiFuria trained. He fought Willie Pastrano, the future world light heavyweight champion, three times in 1963. It was a push, with Thornton winning one and losing one, with one draw.

Also included in DiFuria’s stable was Gabe Terronez, Dean Bogany and Mac Foster. Terronez was the state welterweight champion, Bogany the state light heavyweight champion, both in the early 1960s, and Foster lost a 15-round decision to Muhammad Ali in 1972.

“It was amazing that a little town like Fresno, with about 125,000 people, could have so many good fighters,” DiFuria said. “About 1965, Los Angeles took over with guys like Jerry Quarry. But from 1960 until 1965, the talent was in Fresno.”

Vince Colandrea was also in Fresno at that time.

Colandrea had come to Fresno in 1960, but not to fight. He had been a star football player at Barringer High School in Newark, N.J., as a senior in 1958 and had received a scholarship to play at Southern Mississippi University.

He left Southern Mississippi after a year and came to Fresno City College.

Colandrea, a 5-foot-11, 255-pound lineman, had been contacted by Indiana University, but as a transfer he would have had to sit out. He decided to play for Fresno.

Terronez was also going to school at that time. The two became friends and then roommates.

“Gabe said one day, ‘Come on down to the gym,’ so I went down there and started fooling around,” Colandrea said. “At the time, I was still waiting to hear from Indiana and I was getting frustrated. I was looking for a way to stay in shape and lose a few pounds, so I just started working out at the gym.”

A few days later, Colandrea was approached by another person in the gym who wanted to spar.

“I didn’t know this guy, except that he was a cop,” Colandrea said. “He had a nice jab and I didn’t know a damn thing about this. We get in the ring and he’s just peppering me and peppering me and peppering me and making my nose red.

“I said, ‘I’ve had enough of this,’ so I winged him from the floor and hit him on top of the head. He went to the post and I just jumped on him. I started biting him and hitting him and clubbing him, because that’s all I knew at the time. He never showed up to the gym anymore.”

DiFuria was impressed when he saw Colandrea working out. He asked Terronez about the new guy and then approached Colandrea.

“Pat starts chit-chatting with me and said, ‘Did you ever think about fighting professionally?’ ” Colandrea said. “I wasn’t doing anything, anyhow, so I said, ‘What the hell.’ It just evolved from there.”

Colandrea began training on a regular basis. He would run in the morning, sometimes as many as seven miles. He began losing weight, which he felt would help him on the football field.

His training in the ring consisted mostly of sparring, sometimes with the gym’s top fighters.

“Vinnie had some natural instincts,” DiFuria said. “We liked to use him to spar with better fighters because he was aggressive and didn’t seem fearful. He wouldn’t mind getting in and mixing it up.”

Said Thornton: “He was a nice guy out of the ring, but an animal in it. He looked so big and mean and tough, he scared some people. He looked like the Mafia.”

In the spring of 1961, Colandrea still hadn’t heard from Indiana, so he decided to give up football and concentrate on boxing.

Colandrea intensified his workouts and began losing more weight. After six weeks, he was down to 210 pounds.

“I was fit, trim and ready,” he said. “And I was learning how to do things right in the ring. It was great. I just dreaded the days when Pat said, ‘All right, Vinnie, you and Willie in the ring.’ ”

Willie was Willie McDonald, another heavyweight at the Fresno Boxing Club. McDonald was considered a promising newcomer, who had been given the name, “Prince Bongoa.”

“Willie looked like Joe Frazier a little bit, only not that ugly,” Colandrea said. “They started this thing where they got him all dressed up in African garb and called him Prince Bongoa. He had this big African shield and leopard-skin trunks. I’ll never forget it.”

With good reason. Although they liked each other out of the ring, when they sparred, look out.

“They would get into the ring and everyone in the gym would stop what they were doing and watch,” DiFuria said. “They had a donnybrook every time.”

On one occasion, the two were working on punches and counter-punches. Nothing too stressful, as they were working in slow motion.

Colandrea was the dummy during the workout. He would slowly throw a left hook, while DiFuria instructed McDonald how to counter it. Things were going along nicely, until . . .

“All of a sudden, Willie tagged me and I wasn’t ready for it,” Colandrea said. “I don’t care who you are, if you’re not ready for it you’re going to go down. I went down and was looking at him and he was looking at me. I said, ‘I own you.’ For the next three or four days, I beat the . . . out of him.”

After 2 1/2 months of training, Colandrea was ready for his first bout.

He was fighting under the name Vince Rossiano, which was his own creation.

“In case I did bad, I didn’t want anyone to know my real name,” Colandrea said.

DiFuria wanted to take it a step further. He thought it would be better to call Colandrea, Rocky Rossiano, to cash in on the Marciano legend.

“He had the same physical structure as Marciano,” DiFuria said. “We thought it was the best thing to take advantage of an existing legend.”

But Colandrea didn’t like it. He felt it was almost a sacrilege.

“I told them not to put me in that category, there was only one Rocky,” he said. “The rest of my career, they kept trying to stick ‘Rocky’ in there. But I didn’t want to have nothing to do with it.”

Colandrea, or rather Rossiano, was scheduled to fight Kid Arena in a four-rounder. The Fresno papers were predicting great things from the newcomer, one called him a cross between Rocky Marciano and Tony Galento.

Colandrea won, but not against Kid Arena, who backed out at the last minute. Perry Hicks, who normally fought as a light heavyweight, was brought in as a replacement.

“We were in the dressing room and they told me they had changed my opponent,” Colandrea said. “I didn’t know one from the other anyhow, so it didn’t make any difference to me. Pat said, ‘When the bell rings, just go out there and hit him.’ I really didn’t have any style yet.”

Colandrea went out and hit Hicks. In fact, he hit Hicks often and knocked him out in the first round.

“I got $75 and got to keep it all,” Colandrea said. “That was a lot of money to me.”

After another impressive first-round knockout, Colandrea was scheduled to face Sammy Wyatt. It was a step up in class.

Wyatt had fought Joe Clagg, who also belonged to DiFuria. In that fight, Wyatt had broken Clagg’s nose.

“I told Pat, ‘You guys feel that confident about me? I’m not as good as Clagg,’ ” Colandrea said. “I think this guy was a Golden Gloves champ from Los Angeles.”

Colandrea began hearing stories about Wyatt’s vicious right hand, the same one that had broken Clagg’s nose. He decided that if nothing else, he was not going to get hit by the right.

“The fight starts and I got my chin tucked under my left shoulder and my left hand up protecting it,” Colandrea said. “There is no way he’s going to hit me with the right, not in 1,000 years.

“After one round, I got tired of that, you know. So I said, ‘Forget it.’ I wanted to see how good his right hand was. I dropped my left and boom, he hits me. I said, ‘That’s it?’ I started chasing him around the ring. I owned him.”

However, the fight was called a draw.

“The people went bananas,” Colandrea said. “They started throwing chairs into the ring. In fact, the announcer announced me as the winner before the scorecard even came in. He was that sure.”

Colandrea was 2-0-1 when he was asked to fight in Los Angeles on July 20, 1962. He was on the same card as Cassius Clay, who was fighting Alejandro Lavorante.

Clay dropped Lavorante in the fifth round and Colandrea decisioned Bob Brown in a four-round bout.

He was asked again to appear on a card with Clay, who was fighting Archie Moore on Nov. 15, 1962. Colandrea was scheduled to face Irish John Davey.

“He was All-Pacific Fleet champion or All-Marine champion, something like that,” Colandrea said. “But Pat thought I could take him.”

DiFuria and Colandrea drove down from Fresno on the morning of the fight. After the weigh-in, they had a lot of time to kill.

Clay’s manager, Angelo Dundee, invited them to stay at a hotel with them for the day.

“I’d known Angelo from a previous fight and he said to send the kid up to the suite and we’ll all go to the fight together,” DiFuria said.

Colandrea walked into the hotel room and was stunned to see Clay resting on the couch in his shorts.

“I didn’t know what was going on, I had just met Angelo Dundee, which was pretty big,” Colandrea said. “Then there was Clay, just sitting there watching television. He and Dundee were going back and forth, calling each other names, just having some fun.

“Then the television shows the weigh-in and Clay jumps up and shouts, ‘Look at me, I’m on TV. Look at me, I’m so pretty.’ He starts running up and down the hall, knocking on doors, all the time yelling, ‘Turn on your TV and look at me, I’m so pretty.’ ”

The rest of the day was more of the same, according to Colandrea.

“The guy was a character, but he was sharp,” he said. “He said, ‘Half the people coming to the fight wanted him to lose and the other half wanted him to win. The more noise I make, the more people that come to the fight.’

“Then he would come up and jab at me and say, ‘Some day, you old spaghetti bender, we’ll make a lot of money together. The Italian Stallion and The Greatest.’ ”

Colandrea would never make it to that day.

In the first round, Colandrea had Davey on the ropes. He wound up for a left hook for the finisher and ended up taking it on the chin.

“Vinnie had the fight in the palm of his hand,” DiFuria said. “Then he made one minor mistake that he always made. He always dropped his right hand when throwing a left hook. The guy dropped his right hand in and hit Vinnie before Vinnie could hit him. The guy later said he didn’t even remember throwing the punch. It was reflex only.”

Stunned, Colandrea fell back to the ropes and Davey kept punching. The referee stopped the fight.

“The guy never hit me when I was on the ropes, he kept hitting my gloves,” Colandrea said. “But the ref stopped it. I looked at the ref and said, ‘You’re stopping what.’ I was OK.”

Still, it was Colandrea’s first loss and last fight.

A few days later, he passed out and hit his head on a marble floor in Lake Tahoe.

“I had been drinking and just blacked out,” Colandrea said. “After that, I had a problem with my equilibrium. It was like the floor slanted all the time, like in a fun house. That lasted for about five or six years. I couldn’t fight anymore.”

These days, Colandrea has settled into life as a restaurant owner.

He opened his Placentia restaurant in 1979, after eight years as an interior decorator. The Costa Mesa place was opened in 1986. Last year, he expanded to Japan.

“It’s at a resort, where all the important people in Japan go,” Colandrea said. “The prince and princess of Japan, the president of Sony. It’s been a big hit. We’re talking about opening a few more there.”

The restaurants have been good to Colandrea, but he still misses boxing. He is a regular at the Marriott fights, where he even saw Ali one night.

“He was ushered in by his bodyguards and sat in this special VIP section,” Colandrea said. “I didn’t want to bother him. Why make a guy try to remember you. He might have, but why put him on the spot.”

Colandrea also carries, with pride, his boxing license. That, and a few tattered press clippings, are all he has left from his boxing days.

“It’s really a shame, because he had promise,” DiFuria said. “If his career had blossomed, he would have been a big ticket seller. He had a great personality and was really funny. He was a promoter’s dream.”

Colandrea merely shrugs at the suggestion. He doesn’t dwell on what he might have been, although he is proud of what he was.

“It takes a lot of ifs and some breaks,” he said. “But it’s nice that some people still remember me. I get a lot of people who tell me I could have been someone.”