By Ben Joravsky
“I’m working to set up a pension fund for retired fighters with Senator John McCain of Arizona,” he says. “I want to clean up the sport around here. They’re killing it. We got incompetents in charge of other incompetents. What they did to the Park District boxing is a disgrace. It’s the rape of boxing, I call it.”
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“I was just a kid on the street until I found boxing,” he says. “I grew up around Grand and Ogden. I went to Santa Maria, Holy Innocents, Holy Name Cathedral, Talcott, Montefiore–and that’s just grammar school. For high school, let’s see–oh hell, I can’t remember them all. I was thrown out of every school I went to. I wound up sneaking into Holy Trinity, Wells, and Lane just to be with my buddies. They didn’t throw me out of there because they didn’t know I was there.
“Now, this Boys Club had a boxing ring up on the third floor. And here’s the funny thing–the coach associated boxing with chess. You had the nurse teaching us chess and talking about boxing and the coach teaching us boxing and talking about chess. He said boxing’s the science of deception, just like chess–you want to trick your opponent, getting him to make a move he doesn’t want to make. That’s what fascinates me about boxing. The deviousness of the moves. It’s a modern derivation from the fencing masters in France. They used to teach their students to stab without being stabbed. That’s boxing–hit without being hit. It’s not a rage. A fighter uses rage–a boxer uses science. The greatest boxers weren’t bullies. Muhammad Ali wasn’t a bully. Oscar De La Hoya’s not a bully.”
Lira fought Ernesto Espana in Chicago for the world championship. Rimland remembers watching on TV. “Johnny was not one of those tremendously stylistic fighters, like Sugar Ray Leonard,” says Rimland. “But he was diligent. He had what they call in the fight game ‘heart.’ In the fifth or sixth round he knocked Espana down. I thought, ‘This is it–he’s gonna do it.’ But Espana got up and in either the eighth or the ninth he opened a cut over Johnny’s eye and they called the fight. That was as close as Johnny got to being champ–but give him this, he fought for the title.”
To prove his point, he heads over to the field house at Clarendon Park near Montrose and the lake. The entrance to the boxing gym’s locked, but the field house manager opens it for Lira. The gym’s dark and cool. “Look at this, no one’s here,” he says. “It don’t even smell of sweat, like it hasn’t been used in weeks.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Jon Randolph.
