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Rusty's rocky road
And for every Oscar De la Hoya or Shane Mosley that graces a magazine cover with a million dollar smile, there is a man like Rusty Rosenberger, an ex-fighter, long forgotten, light years away from fleeting glory, struggling to put a sentence together, unable to play catch with his children because he sees two of everything. You don't hear about the Rusty Rosenberger's, but they exist. They are what is harsh and what is real about the gloriously violent, magnificiently brutal world of pugilism.
I received an email from Rusty Rosenberger quite some time ago. I skimmmed through it, not quite sure what to make of it. The gist of what I got out of it was that he was a promising contender who had been wronged, been exploited and battered, left with a permanantly damaged brain, double vision and a bad taste in his mouth. But mostly, he was left with the frustrating thoughts of what could have been--had things been different. But they weren't different and life is cruel. I thought about deleting that email and in doing so adding a little muscle to a collective sweep under the carpet, but something prevented me from doing so.
I emailed Rusty back and we agreed to a phone interview. He seemed excited that I had responded. He closed out his email with a p.s. : "I do talk like a punch drunk fighter."
I called Rusty the next day. A woman answered. A child was burning energy in the background. I taped our conversation. I tried my hardest to listen to his story but after a minute or two I realized it was futile. I felt truly sorry for Rusty Rosenberger and I hope he understands that I am in no way mocking him when I say I had a difficult time understanding him that day. When I got off the phone with him I felt a blast of coldness. The world seemed cruel and unforgiving. I couldn't understand what Rusty was telling me but I could hear the hurt in his voice and the embarassment. I could sense the fighers pride and I knew he was living with a cruel fate.
I didn't think I had much of a story. Rusty emailed and apologized for his slurred speech. Like his previous email, the little tiny tape of our phone conversation layed dormant for quite a few days. Everynight when I wrote at my desk in my basement apartment, I looked at it and wondered: Just a tiny little tape, I thought, but someone's story. Someone's life. I was tempted to sweep it all away again, do the easy thing and let it rot under a cowardly carpet. Chalk it up to hard luck and frigid reality. But instead I listened to it. For hours. Rewound it and listened to it again until I understood every word that he was saying. And when I did I sat with eyes wide and my mouth gaping as a fantastic story unfolded, word by labourious word. I could hardly believe what I was hearing.
It was a story about boxing, and bad luck. About being ripped off by the vultures he trusted. It was about organized crime and gambling. About being drugged before fights. About missed opportunities and beatings. About being set up and pummelled. About being forced to lose ridiculous amounts of weight on short notice. About regrets. And anger. About a well-known figure in the boxing world who was in debt with the wrong people and used Rusty like a piece of bloody meat to dig himself out of a hole. It was about greed and evil. Violence and betrayal.
But more than anything it was about not giving up. It was about a man named Rusty Rosenberger, 1979 NJ State Middleweight Champion who took the hardest knocks the world could throw and stayed on his feet. A man who told me, "Mike, I live everyday walking around this world with my head cocked to the right. The reason I do this is so I see one object in front of me instead two". But Rusty didn't lay down and die. He claims to have invented boxercise but didn't have the money or the backing to patent it. Unphased, he invented body boxing, a safe alternative to boxing in which opponents target only the area between the shoulders and the waist. Three two minute rounds in a regulation size ring with 18 oz gloves. No brain damage. No double vision.
And in the end I was inspired and extremely interested in his tragic story. When I listened to that tape, I realized that Rusty was a brave warrior, and I realized that the fight was not knocked out of him when he was allegedly drugged and took a savage beating at the hands of Nino Gonzalez. His language may be slurred but his mind works just fine. He is a man with ideas and ambitions and I'm glad I got to know him. It makes me wonder how many times we've taken the easy road and swept a guy like Rusty under the carpet because we couldn't be bothered or didn't have the time. No matter, a true fighter like Rusty Rosenberger can't be held down. Not when the heart of a champion pounds inside his chest. Not when you were born to fight.
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