-
Mark KriegelESPN
In the summer of 2011, a 16-year-old from Oklahoma City showed up at the Maple Avenue Boxing Club in Dallas. There, Alex Saucedo found the work he sought in the form of Errol Spence, already a winner of several national titles at 152 pounds and headed to the U.S. Olympic team.
Spence, who’d surprise no one by eventually winning a welterweight title, was bigger and four years older than Saucedo, who competed at 141 pounds. But the Oklahoman more than held his own that day.
Among those who couldn’t help but notice was a former two division champion, Jesus Chavez. Chavez, then training a young pro named Maurice Hooker, quickly excused himself to call his former manager.
“Lou,” he said. “I got a kid for you.”
Lou Mesorana had been there for Chavez when no one else was. Still, he didn’t consider it payback. “I was paying it forward,” Chavez said.
They’re the oldest archetypes in boxing, source material for everything from “Rocky” to “Million Dollar Baby”: the old man and the kid. They nourish and annoy each other, all the while bound by a quest known as the shot. The shot is sacrosanct. Jesus Chavez got his. Now comes Saucedo’s turn Friday night, when he goes against Hooker, the WBO’s 140-pound champion.
The fight is in Oklahoma City. But Mesorana will be watching from his home in Texas. In preparation, his wife, Rachel, will adjust his hospital bed to 45 degrees before setting a ginger ale on his tray. Then she’ll turn the volume all the way up, as Mesorana’s hearing has gone from bad to worse since the stroke. Mesorana, 72, will wear his Saucedo T-shirt, admonishing Saucedo about the perils of pulling straight back against Hooker. His screaming will give way to a stutter. It concerns Rachel, how excited he gets. Then again, what would you expect from a man forced to appraise the last act of his life’s work through a little Sony flat screen?
“This is the most he could ever hope for,” Rachel said. “Rocky had kind of a rough life.”
Lou Mesorana — “Rocky” to friends and family — was born in 1946 and endured an unhappy childhood in the Bronx. As he told Rachel and his protégés, his father was a junkie who beat him and hocked the family television. After his father’s permanent departure, Lou’s mother entertained a series of boyfriends, one of whom was a brutal sort, quite handy with a knife. Lou has the scars on the left side of his face to prove it.
The last time the boyfriend came home with that knife, though, Mesorana was ready for him — with a .22 Remington rifle. “It’s not like you see in the movies,” he once told Saucedo. “I shot him, and he fell.”
Dead.
With Rocky awaiting trial in the Bronx House of Detention, it was determined that (a) he’d acted in self-defense and (b) it would be best if he left town.
“In order for Rocky not to go to jail, he went to the Air Force,” Rachel said.
They met in San Antonio, where he was stationed, in 1972. She was studying to be a nurse. He was studying boxing.
“It was his life,” Rachel said. “He’d be on the phone all night.”
Matchmakers. Small-time promoters. Sportswriters. Through the 1970s, he insinuated himself into the firmament of the game. Talking boxing wasn’t merely Rocky Mesorana’s compulsion; it gave him purpose, even virtue.
“Lou was in boxing like the rest of us,” Chavez said. “As snaky and ugly and nasty as the business side of it is, the sport itself is pure. We’re a fraternity. Whatever our reasons — the fight you had when you were a kid, whatever — we’ve all fallen in love. And we make this game what it is.”
By the late ’70s, Mesorana’s fraternity brothers included matchmakers Johnny Bos and Bruce Trampler, then apprenticing with Madison Square Garden’s Teddy Brenner, booking agent Don Majeski and Malcolm “Flash” Gordon, a hermit from Sunnyside, Queens, whose mimeographed newsletter, “Tonight’s Boxing Program,” was required reading among pugilism’s cognoscenti. No one got rich. Rather, their currency was information.
“It was before the internet,” said Randy Gordon, former editor of “The Ring” record book. “Lou became my Texas correspondent. He’d call with results after every show in Texas, and later, Mexico, too.”
The entries were recorded on index cards and published annually in “The Ring.” Mesorana went about his work with such gusto, however, one would think it was his own name being entered for posterity. As for the nature of his obsession, Gordon didn’t ask. He was another boxing guy, paying it forward.
“I do know he had some rough beginnings, though,” Gordon said. “I remember him telling me, ‘I’m not a bad guy. Whatever I did as a kid, I’m always repenting for that.'”
Two decades passed before Rocky placed a call to Chavez in Chihuahua, Mexico. At 25, as a highly ranked super featherweight, Chavez had been deported for robbing a grocery store in Chicago nine years earlier. “I can help you,” Mesorana told him. “I can get you fights.”
And he did, most of them in Mexico City, where Mesorana moved briefly to look after his new charge.
“I knew he’d gotten into some trouble and needed to get out of New York,” Chavez said. “Just like I had to get out of Chicago.”
Chavez did the fighting; Mesorana took care of everything else, from the money to the opponents.
“I’m the warrior,” Chavez told him. “You’re the worrier.”
Mesorana even insisted on accompanying the fighter during roadwork. Why? Chavez asked. “If you become a world champion, I’ll feel like I made it in boxing.”
By 2011, when Saucedo walked into the Maple Avenue gym, Chavez had settled back in Texas and retired. He’d also won titles in two divisions.
“Lou moved all the pieces,” he said. “Lou gave me my shot.”
Now it was Saucedo’s turn. Past informs present. “He’s from Chihuahua like me,” Chavez told Mesorana.
Mesorana initiated his relentless campaign on Saucedo’s behalf with a call to Bruce Trampler, who’d long since left the Garden for Top Rank. After Mesorana explained that Saucedo was about to sign with a local promoter in Oklahoma, Trampler arranged for an audition at the Wild Card gym in Hollywood.
Saucedo’s second day there was marked by a rare occurrence. As he sparred with undefeated welterweight Wale Omotoso, Manny Pacquiao and Freddie Roach — then preparing for Juan Manuel Marquez — stopped their own training to watch the teenager. As endorsements go, it was a resounding one.
Trampler promptly sent a contract, and Saucedo debuted that November. Although Mesorana was entitled to 10 percent of the purse, he never took a dime. Saucedo understood the terms. Rocky Mesorana didn’t want a piece of the fighter. He wanted a piece of posterity, an eternal entry in the book of boxing.
“What he saw in Jesus Chavez, he saw in me,” said Saucedo, now 24. “He wanted his last shot.”
Over the next six years, Mesorana did what he does best: push. First, it was Top Rank. Then it was Churchill Management, founded by Pete Berg and Mark Wahlberg. Finally, it was the trainer Abel Sanchez. If that seems like a high-end team for a prospect, it did nothing to diminish Mesorana’s obsession.
“Any little problem I had, I would call him,” Saucedo said. “He would always fight for me.”
Gear. Sparring. The cellphone bill. Even the washing machines at Sanchez’s camp in Big Bear. Saucedo could do no wrong, and Lou couldn’t do enough. It was nothing for him to launch into a diatribe pertaining to the inherent unfairness of Alex’s situation, with other fighters undoubtedly being given more time to do their laundry.
Finally, Mesorana went to camp himself to keep a closer eye on the kid. He had an endless selection of videos for Alex to watch, from Willie Pep to Joe Louis. He also had a BB gun. The old man and the kid spent hours shooting cans, just as he had with Chavez. Saucedo wasn’t much for watching black and white videos, but shooting cans, he would learn, was the most fun one could have while sequestered in Big Bear.
Still, the kid became concerned, what with the way Mesorana would gorge on bagels and cream cheese. He didn’t take care of himself. Looking back, Saucedo said, “That’s why he wanted to get me with the right people. I think he knew something was coming.”
On June 1, 2017, just weeks after Rachel retired from her nursing job, Rocky Mesorana was found mumbling on the floor of his Corpus Christi home. The stroke limited the use of his right leg and left arm, leaving him confined to a wheelchair, with short-term memory loss and impaired speech.
Rachel had to take the phone the first time Saucedo called. Rocky had begun to stutter, stressing so hard to get the words out.
“I could hear him crying,” said Saucedo, who told the old man that he’d make a comeback, that everything would be as it was.
That’s not true. Then again, at this point, Rocky Mesorana seems less concerned with his physical state than with a state of grace. The quest is finite now. He’s in it for one last gift, on Saturday morning — a call apprising him of his final inscription in the book of boxing.
The kid will tell him: “Everything you saw, everything you thought I could do, it happened.”