An underground legend holds court in the street

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 14, 2011    LAST UPDATED: THURSDAY DECEMBER 15, 2011, 1:59 AM

BY STEVE JANOSKI

When the World Heavyweight Bareknuckle Boxing Championship bout takes place, it does so with none of the fanfare typical of regular boxing matches.

The event is invitation only, and the final location is disclosed just hours before the fight takes place. In the end, it’s in the ghetto of one of America’s meanest cities that the collection of involved characters will be gathered to witness the spectacle… and what a collection it is.



The audience is made up of all males, nearly all of whom belong to or are descended from a nomadic tribe of Irish gypsies known in America as "Irish Travelers."

Some, wearing wool overcoats and scally caps, have thick brogues straight from the shores of the Old Country, while others, clad in hooded sweatshirts and jeans, have the dying blue-collar New York accent that uses the letter "r" merely as a placeholder.

Professional boxers mix with working men and wiseguys from the Irish underworld, and to a man they are cordial and welcoming, all great lovers of conversation, a good laugh, or an off-color joke.

When their champ arrives, they greet him like a long lost brother, and cheers and backslaps erupt through the street-lit city night as they welcome the Canadian-born fighter who has become Rochelle Park’s own: Bobby Gunn.

Standing at just over 5 foot 10 inches and likely hovering around 200 pounds, he is nearly as wide as he is tall, and his dark hair and thoroughly Celtic face belie his Irish and Scottish roots.

Although Gunn, 37, is a seven-time cruiserweight champ with a ring record of 21-4-1, perhaps more impressive is his record when the gloves are off; at 66-0, he is creating his own legend on the underground boxing circuit.

And that circuit (Gunn’s last match, held in public on an Arizona Indian reservation, not withstanding) is still very underground.

After being led through a door that opens only from the inside, the crowd of around 150 is brought to a warehouse with deep blue painted floors and fluorescent lights, where a makeshift ring — a square area between the building’s support poles — lies.

Rumors abound about his opponent, Ernest Jackson — he’s 6 foot 5 inches tall, weighs nearly 300 lbs, was allegedly a bodyguard for Jay-Z — but Gunn, dressed in blue jeans and a black shirt, is calm as the day is long and walks around in his typically affable way text messaging, smiling, and laughing.

As his opponent is introduced, however, and the fight draws near, a different Bobby Gunn emerges. As his trainer, Dominick Scibetta, smears Vaseline on his face, his Irish eyes scorch with their own blue light and he paces to and fro, a caged lion eyeing a child at the zoo.

He has turned into, as he says, "the Bobby Gunn that nobody likes."

Jackson, a lean but muscular black man, turns out to be tall, but not 6 foot 5, and nowhere near 300 pounds. He is not intimidated, though, and it is immediately clear what his game plan is: keep moving, keep pumping the jab into Gunn’s face, and don’t let the shorter, stockier champ catch him.

Unfortunately, it’s nothing that Gunn hasn’t seen, and his professional experience shows through even as a cut opens up under his left eye courtesy of Jackson’s left hand. He stays loose, and gradually begins to close the gap between himself and his rangy opponent.

Three minutes in, he lands a sharp jab to Jackson’s face, then another, and the crowd grows excited.

More shots land, and fists hitting face create the sound of slabs of meat being slapped on concrete.

Jackson slowly tires, and Gunn walks him down, finding his range and landing devastating punches to the challenger’s gut. With no gloves to spread the impact, he may as well be using a baseball bat.

Somewhere in the crowd, Gunn’s 15-year-old son — baby-faced but a boxer himself — watches.

Jackson begins to fall into the champ’s heavier shots, brutal overhand rights and left hooks that stagger him and send him careening backwards before he bravely comes back in for more.

As the fight nears its savage crescendo, Gunn connects with a right hand to the temple that drops Jackson, who quickly pops back up as the now-screaming crowd begins to close in, eager with anticipation, chanting "Bob-by, Bob-by!"

Jackson tries to work Gunn’s body, but he doesn’t hit hard enough and now he’s playing the champ’s game. A minute later, Gunn connects with shattering left hooks that send Jackson to the ground, crawling on all fours in a noble but ultimately futile attempt to rise as the referee waves the bout off.



There were no pacts between lions and men here tonight.

Just minutes later, a rumor will sweep the crowd — cops, cops! — and the warehouse is emptied as quickly as it was filled. Quietly, however, the champ will walk out, his title still intact.

Email: janoski@northjersey.com

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Cardinals' defense makes sure that they can be seen, heard and mostimportantly felt

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 4, 2011
BY STEVE JANOSKI

If you're standing on the field, you can hear it. Sometimes the sound travels to the stands, but you certainly can't catch it from the press box. If you're on that field, though, if you're on those sidelines… you'll hear it.

It can take on a few different incarnations. Now, it sounds like shotgun shell going off; later on, it's a dull thud, as if one were hitting a tree with a Louisville slugger. Other times, it sounds like just what it is: a body being violently cast to the ground, over, and over, and over.

This has become the soundtrack for the brutal unit known as the Pompton Lakes Cardinals defense, which, with its savage hitting and propensity to generate turnover after turnover, has left opposing coaches and quarterbacks shaking their heads as they walk off the field.

Most defenses gel as the season goes on; this one has turned into poured concrete.

Their ultimate test, however, lay on the windblown turf of Metlife Stadium on Friday night where they faced off against the Glen Rock Panthers for the North 1, Group 1 championship.

As might be expected, they didn't disappoint, and as the clock ticked off its final minute and the Cardinals offense went into its victory formation, every defensive player could look on the scoreboard with the satisfaction that they'd earned by pitching a 20-0 shutout under the brightest of North Jersey's lights.

Simply put, the Cardinals were everywhere. When a Glen Rock pass was completed, linebackers and safeties flew to the ball carrier, often dishing punishing hits that made every completion a Pyrrhic victory.

When a handoff was taken, Glen Rock running backs would watch their blocking scheme crumble in front of them, crushed under the relentless assault from a line that would not give an inch.

In the end, Glen Rock would muster just 184 yards of total offense against the quagmire of a defense, which has been undeniably led by the same two players all year: defensive end Jack Baumgaertel and defensive tackle Andrew Grosser.

Together, they've managed to bring a fire into the Pompton Lakes squad that has not been seen in some time, a fire that's been forged, Baumgaertel said, by suffering through last year's losing season.

They had taken another hit earlier this year, when August's Hurricane Irene brought drenching rains that flooded hundreds of homes and sunk the team's home field under seven feet of water.

The team remembered that, he said, every time they stepped onto the field, every time they got tired, and every time they got frustrated.

"We're not just doing it for ourselves, we're doing it for the whole town… and that's what was in our hearts and minds: our town, and Pompton pride," he said.

They displayed that pride in historic fashion.

Early on in the first half, they bent but didn't break as Glen Rock sustained a drive here and there before eventually falling apart, while the Cardinals offense would supply two touchdowns and a 14-0 lead by halftime.

As the second half opened, however, the defense truly came out.

Glen Rock's first drive would be ended by a Nieko Torres interception, and its second would end in the hands of cornerback Larry Gelok.

The third would be put to sleep by Pompton's biggest hitter: Grosser, the 6 foot 2 inch, 275 lb. behemoth, who would sack Miller on a second and 12 from the Glen Rock 35 yard line.

The 11 yard loss effectively killed the drive, and Glen Rock punted soon after.

After another Pompton Lakes touchdown on the following drive, Glen Rock would mount what was possibly their best shot at scoring in the game, taking a 13 play drive from their own 21 to the Cardinal 31 yard line.

This too would end badly, however, when a Mike O'Neill pass sailed into the middle of the endzone and into the waiting hands of free safety Daniel Foote, who quickly downed the ball.

Foote would repeat that trick on the next drive, intercepting another pass and making a return that, if not for a holding call on Pompton, would have resulted in his running the length of the field for a score.

Baumgaertel attributed this lights-out play to a coaching staff that did their due diligence in drilling the players on the various misdirection plays and reverses that they knew they'd see coming at them.

"We knew that they were going to do a lot of trick plays, and we knew they were going to run to the outside, but the coaches taught us well and we prepared for it," he said.

Coach Scott Mahoney echoed this, and said that Glen Rock "tried just about everything we saw on film," but his defense was able to adapt and keep up.

It was something of a chess match for Mahoney. Glen Rock likes to run sweeps and traps, he said, and therefore, those had to be cut off. If they were, he anticipated that they would try to start throwing the ball.

With enough pressure, however, and the addition of another defensive back, Pompton could make them throw on the run, which could force them to commit turnovers.

That turnover margin, which ended up being four to one in Pompton's favor, leads directly to the winner's circle, he said.

"We were plus 22 for the year — we had 34 takeaways and 12 giveaways — and when you do that, you're gonna' win, bottom line," Mahoney said.

The philosophy worked, and the Pompton fans that packed the stands by the hundreds could see that checkmate was called by the end of the third quarter.

As for the hitting? Mahoney said that came from practice.

"The kids wanted to hit, they wanted to be physical, and every practice was physical," he said. "We hit right down to Wednesday, we were tackling and poppin' people."

That environment fosters aggressiveness, and Mahoney said that as one big hit begets another, the attitude became contagious.

"One guy sees a big hit, and everyone gets excited, and then they want to make the big hit…that's how you win here," he said.

Apparently, that's how you win at the Meadowlands as well.

E-mail: janoski@northjersey.com



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Smokin' Joe - the real Rocky, hands down

Wednesday, Nov. 30, 2011
By Steve Janoski

‘Tell them Rocky was not a champion. Joe Frazier was. Tell them Rocky is fictitious, Joe was reality. Rocky’s fists are frozen in stone. Joe’s fists are smoking,’

- Jesse Jackson

It may as well have been Hector and Achilles, with the minor difference that instead of being fought outside the stone walls of Troy, it was inside the ring ropes in Manila.

It was October 1975, and the two legends were locked in their final battle for heavyweight supremacy, going toe-to-toe in an epic brawl that even now, nearly four decades later, is every bit as amazing.

The seventh round had just begun, and, after a slow start, Joe Frazier was coming on strong. He had punished Muhammad Ali in the sixth, bobbing and weaving his way in with crossed forearms before unleashing his devastating left hooks to the body and head to tremendous effect.

The battering stunned even Ali, who, sometime in the middle of the round when the fighters’ heads were close, whispered into Frazier’s ear.

"Joe, they told me you was all washed up," Ali said.

"They told you wrong pretty boy," he growled back.

And if one story could ever epitomize the man we knew as "Smokin’ Joe," it was that one. No, Frazier wasn’t pretty, or eloquent, or privileged, but then to be heavyweight champ, he didn’t have to be.

Norman Mailer once wrote that Frazier was "twice as black and half as handsome" as his arch-nemesis, and he was as gritty as those Philadelphia streets he came from.

His fighting style was an unrelenting, swarming nightmare that saw him take punch after punch just to land his signature left hook. When he did, it would land with every bit of the force that his broad, 5 foot 11 inch, 205 pound frame could muster, and only two fighters — Ali and George Foreman — could ever stand up to it.

The twelfth child of poor black sharecroppers from Beaufort, South Carolina, he made his first heavy bag out of a burlap sack filled with a combination of rags and Spanish moss with a brick in the middle to give it some weight.

He left the South after a run-in with a white farm owner made it clear that he couldn’t play the subservient black man in the Jim Crow South, and ended up working in a Philadelphia slaughterhouse, boxing on the side and using the slabs of animal carcasses as the occasional punching bag – sound familiar?

The trainer Yank Durham noticed the young man, thought he had some talent, and started him down the path that would lead to the gold medal at the 1964 Olympics and the heavyweight championship in 1968.

Some thought that Frazier’s title wasn’t legitimate because he hadn’t taken it from the previous champ; Ali had been stripped of it earlier that year after refusing to be inducted into the military. Frazier, however, quieted the naysayers when he convincingly beat Ali in their first fight in 1971, which was billed the "Fight of the Century."

They would fight twice more, with the third match carved into the history books as the "Thrilla’ in Manila," a brutal affair that beat both men past the limits of human endurance. Later on, Ali said that it was the closest he’d ever felt to dying.

Frazier’s corner would move to stop the fight just before the fourteenth round because their fighter’s one good eye — he was legally blind in his left eye for most of his life but never told anyone except his trainer — was closing, leaving him unable to see the punches coming.

Unknown to Frazier’s trainer, however, Ali’s corner was trying to convince their man to keep going, even as he was asking them to cut off his gloves.

But Frazier’s corner ended it first; as soon as they did, Ali stood up, his hands in the air, and promptly passed out.

"Man, I hit him with punches that’d bring down the walls of a city," Frazier said afterwards. "Lawdy, Lawdy, he’s a great champion."

In the years after the fight, Ali would become "Muhammad Ali," and receive all the plaudits associated with being who he was.

Frazier, however, faded from the minds of the regular American, and became known more as the second man in the Google search term "Ali vs. Frazier" than for what he really was: Ali’s true foil, the Hector to his Achilles, the Napoleon to his Wellington.

And when he died of liver cancer on Nov. 7, for the first time in many years the people outside the boxing community stood up and took notice of him. They called him a great champion, a great man, an ambassador for a sport too often filled with some of the worst people in humanity.

I wonder how many of those people were anywhere to be found in the past decade, which saw one of America’s sporting heroes living in a small room above his Philadelphia boxing gym, grappling with the same financial woes that strike so many ex-champs after their days of glory have faded.

But mostly, I wonder when the City of Philadelphia is going to do its duty, finally, and replace the statue of the fictional character of Rocky with a statue of their real hometown champ, the man who was not only the heavyweight champ back when that title meant something, but symbolized the values that America once prided itself on.

He was a tenacious blue-collar hero who rose up in the face of overwhelming poverty and racism, and outworked his lack of size or talent and turned it into an Olympic gold medal. He took on the mythical Ali and beat him when nobody thought that was possible, all the while staying a true gentleman outside the ring he once owned.

Even if it cannot bear to part with its statue of the movie character, the city owes it to their adopted son to do something to commemorate the man who actually ran the streets of its city, actually fought out of its abrasive atmosphere, with something that will stand proudly, arms raised in triumph, as Frazier did so many times himself.

Philadelphia, you owe him that.

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One veteran’s longest day

BY STEVE JANOSKI

The red cover is faded and tattered, its gold lettering slowly beginning to wear to the point of illegibility.

The pages have taken on a yellow hue, and small, dark smudges of fingerprints — dirt? blood? — festoon the corners.


It sits quietly on the table, with its owner of nearly seven decades having recently departed this world after 88 years, with the story of how it came into his possession known to but a few.

Frank T. Semeraro was born in 1922. Following the death of his mother, he had to quit school early to work on his father's garbage truck, and came up in a hardscrabble Paterson existence in the earliest decades of the American Century.

His father had been wounded while serving in the Italian Army during the Great War, and had left that country just as Mussolini's shadow began to rise over Rome. As the storm of World War II began to gather, he was positive of one thing: he didn't want his son to go to war.

But, as the long fingers of fascism began to wrap around the globe, there would be few families who remained untouched, few children that remained unscathed. The Semeraro home on McBride Avenue was to be no different.

After the Dec. 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, the young Semeraro, like so many others, decided that he was going to go to war.

He planned to join the US Navy so he could fight the Japanese, but an ill-fated fishing trip left him so seasick that he reconsidered that course.

He decided to leave it up to the government, and figured that when they drafted him, they'd send him where they needed him. When the US Army called in 1943, it decided that he was needed in Europe, and so after boot camp, Semeraro was sent to England.

As 1943 wore on into the following year, rumors abounded over whether, where, and when the Allies would make their great landing on the European mainland to begin the final stage of the great battle to save civilization.

The plans for the landing, ominously named Operation Overlord by high command, were unknown to the troops on the ground…until the day that the call came.

And as they herded troops into the transports sitting along the coast of the English Channel on the morning of June 6, 1944, Semeraro wasn't sure where he was headed, but he knew that whatever was happening, it was big.

The seas were rough that day, and men vomited as the boats shook; a result, no doubt, of a brutal combination of seasickness and devastated nerves.

As they closed on the French beach, it's likely that the scene that greeted Semeraro was one straight from the depths of hell — steel abatis, known as "Czech hedgehogs," strewn across the sand as the great cement pillboxes of Hitler's fearsome Atlantic Wall rose into the heavens — but there was little time to take in the sight, for as they neared the shore, his landing craft was struck by a shell.

In an effort to save their lives, troops began streaming over the sides and into the water. Semeraro did the same, but realized quickly that his comrades, weighed down by their heavily-loaded packs, were sinking straight to the bottom and drowning.

Fearing this would be his fate, he pulled his knife and cut off his pack before desperately swimming for shore. Once there, however, there seemed to be no respite from the flurry of German bullets — until he saw one man waiving him over.

The man was another American soldier, and had already dug out a small foxhole to provide cover. When Semeraro reached him, the soldier began giving him his rations, weapon, and the like.

"I've got to get back to the boats, I need medical attention," the man told him. It was then he noticed that the soldier was holding his stomach and intestines together with his hands.

"Just wait for the others," he told Semeraro.

Before he left though, he handed him a small, red prayer book, Army issue, 1943, with its title, "A Spiritual Almanac for Service Men," printed across the front in golden letters.

"You're gonna' need this," he said, before disappearing back to the ships, never to be seen again.

Semeraro stayed in that foxhole as long as he could on D-Day, listening to the gruesome bark of the German MG-42s as they mowed down American troops and turned the Channel's water red with their blood.

He held onto that prayer book later on as he fought his way off the beach and through the pillboxes and trenches of the Atlantic Wall, and then through the hedgerows of Normandy, where the Germans fought tooth and nail to try to keep the Allies from breaking out.

It stayed with him through the rest of his service, and after the war, too, as he established a family construction company, married, had children, then grandchildren, and then great-grandchildren.

The world would eventually come to know the ghastly horror of that day, and that beach — Omaha Beach — would come to join the ranks of places like Verdun, Antietam, and Iwo Jima as being amongst the most infamous killing fields in history.

And when "Grandpa Semeraro" (as he was known to all of us) passed away on Oct. 6, he joined all of the other spirits of the Greatest Generation who are slowly passing on to eternity, forever to be remembered as those valiant few who faced down true evil, and saved the world from unimaginable darkness.

This story was related to me by his grandson, Frank T. Semeraro, who is proud to share his grandfather's name.

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