Nunn’s Life Was Not Fit for King

In the movie “On The Waterfront,” there is this moving scene in which Marlon Brando, playing a broken-down, betrayed old pug, turns to his brother piteously and delivers this heartbreaking line: “I coulda been a contendah!”

He spoke for every loser the world over who got to his big chance and blew it.

For some reason, I had these lines in mind when I went out to the San Fernando Valley the other day to interview Michael Nunn, the light-heavyweight fighter.

Not that Michael Nunn had any trouble being a contender. In fact, he was a champion twice, middleweight and super-middleweight.

It’s just that he disappeared off the monitor of big-time boxing some time ago.

There were some brushes with the law, but nothing serious enough to keep him out of boxing.

So what happened? Don King happened, if you want to know. Nunn doesn’t want to blame him, though. Nunn thinks the culprit is Michael Nunn.

The thing was, the guys who hung around the gyms figured, early in the game, Michael Nunn was the nearest thing they had seen to Sugar Ray Robinson.

He was good-looking, he had these great moves. A southpaw, he could punch with either hand. He had lightning reflexes, quick feet, fast hands and his fights could be set to music. They were ballets, not brawls. He had a high instinct for self-preservation, he seldom got his hair mussed. Most of the guys he fought needed a road map to find him and were aiming punches at places he had left some time ago.

He wasn’t an angel. He had been a street kid in Davenport, Iowa. He won most of his early fights in alleys. He tried out for the ’84 Olympic boxing team but ran afoul of Virgil Hill and came up a round short at the trials.

He went home to Davenport and resumed his career in the back alleys until a cousin, Marshall Jackson, wised him up.

“You know,” Jackson told him, “when you fight guys in the ring they can’t take out a gun at the end and shoot you. It’s against the rules. And you never get matched against a guy carrying a knife. You want a career or a funeral?”

Nunn got the point. He came west and put his career in the care of the “Ten Goose” enterprise, named for a family of 10 brothers and sisters in the Goossen family of Sherman Oaks and devoted to the promoting, managing, matchmaking and handling of prizefighters.

Dan Goossen and his brother Joe handled their charge with great care. They never overmatched him, and soon he was running up a 30-plus winning streak. He wasn’t “One-Round” Hogan or “One-Punch” McDonough or even “the Davenport Destroyer,” but he had his hand in the air after every fight.

Then he got impatient, greedy. He wanted instant fame and money to go with it. He split with the Goossens and signed with King.

All of a sudden, he was fighting only twice a year. All of a sudden, he was getting his head handed to him by James Toney. All of a sudden he was losing to somebody named Steve Little in England and Frank Liles in Ecuador.

All of a sudden, he was climbing into the ring out of shape.

He found out that he was not in that 1% of the world’s people who can handle their own affairs. He needed direction, he needed authority.

“I lost my motivation. I was my own manager,” Nunn recalls. “I found I needed supervision. I had a supervisor who didn’t have my best interests at heart. Me.

“I had nobody to blame but myself. You get so, if you don’t wanna run, you don’t run. You don’t feel like training, you don’t train. You listen to nobody but yourself. That’s what I did. Boy, was I getting some bum advice! From me.”

So, he wouldn’t say to Don King, “I coulda been a Hall of Famer!” He says instead with a shrug, “To Don King, I was just another fighter. Don’s got a lot of other fighters.”

So, what he did was return to the golden Goossens.

“I got back to the dance with the guys what brung me,” he says. “I won six straight fights. I’m unbeaten under the Goossens. I’m 36 and 0 with them.”

So now, Joe Goossen won’t let him skip roadwork or sessions on the heavy bag the way Michael Nunn would.

Nunn is 34 now, a good age if your sport is golf, but it’s a little harder for him to disappear on his opponent in mid-ring. He goes to Germany next to fight for the World Boxing Council’s vacant light-heavyweight championship against Germany’s Graciano “Rocky” Rocchigiani in Berlin next Saturday.

He plans to make it a lousy part for Sylvester Stallone. He plans to listen to the Goossens that lay the golden eggs and stop taking advice from that lowlife loafer Michael Nunn.