Leavin’ on a Jet Plane

If I had only known then what I know now.

It was 1965, my senior year at De La Salle High in New Orleans, and I considered myself something of a travel virgin. Oh, my parents had taken me on several vacations with an uncle and his wife, but those were when I was a small child and we made the trips in clunky automobiles towing one of those even clunkier silver trailers that looks like an overturned can of Coors Light.

You can’t really appreciate Yellowstone National Park when you’re only six years old and have spent the better part of a week on the road cooped up with four adults in a 1948 DeSoto.

But there I was, 17 and still flightless. So the Christian Brothers grabbed my attention when they announced the prizes for the annual school fund-raising project. The top 10 earners would travel by jet to Houston, where they and a chaperone were to tour the National Space Center and see a major league game in the then-spanking-new Astrodome.

Fearing that I never would again have the opportunity to board an actual airplane, listen to lectures on the importance of space exploration or personally see New Orleans’ own Rusty Staub take his hacks in the bigs, I peddled my product – overpriced candy bars – as if I was Willy Loman on steroids (not that any of us knew what steroids were then). And when the tallying was completed, I stood in eighth place among 1,200 students, ready and eager for takeoff.

All right, so the flights were only 45 minutes each way and the game went into extra innings, which meant we had to leave before it was over. I had soared with the eagles, and I wrote the story of my adventures in the school newspaper to furnish proof that, once upon a time, I had gone Up There.

So what happened later on? I became a sportswriter, forever doomed to a life of 6 a.m. flights and five-hour layovers spent napping on the floor in places like Newark International Airport. I once had to cut short Christmas with my children to leave for a holiday basketball tournament in Seattle, and I’ve missed assorted anniversaries, birthdays and graduations to fulfill the obligations of my career.

Whenever anyone asks me what the best thing is about my job, I always say that it’s freedom from the 9-to-5 monotony that enslaves so many members of the American work force. And when I’m asked to identify the worst thing about my job, I say, “Same thing.”
But you can’t have it both ways, and more often than not I choose to describe the glass as half-full. In my capacity as a paid chronicler of sporting events, I have been to Japan, to Europe, to Canada, to Mexico and to virtually every major city in the United States. Sometimes the trips are exciting and memorable; sometimes I wake up in a dark hotel room and wonder where the hell I am. Where’s my itinerary? Not to mention the bathroom? If this is Tuesday, I must be in Akron, right?

Truth be told, the variety of destinations offered me these days is a lot narrower than it once was. With professional boxing increasingly dominated by a select few casino-hotels, I frequently find myself

going back to the same places.

Where once boxing writers could expect at least the occasional trip to places like Lake Tahoe – one of my favorite venues – or Reno, we now have settled into the comfortable rut of a triangular circuit that includes Las Vegas, Atlantic City and New York. But Atlantic City’s Boardwalk Hall and New York’s Madison Square Garden are within easy driving distance of my home base of Philadelphia, so my frequent forays to the MGM Grand and Mandalay Bay have taken on the feel of a numbed swallow returning to Capistrano.

Only in my other capacity – beat writer for the Philadelphia Daily News’ coverage of Penn State football – am I offered a smorgasbord of travel options. Last season, I was there when the Nittany Lions lost a heartbreaker in the final seconds in the Big House at Michigan; this fall, I’m looking forward to trips to Notre Dame and Ohio State. There’s nothing quite like the electricity of big-time college football games on campus.

Had I the insight to do it, I would have begun keeping track of my flight segments and air miles accrued all the way back to that spring day in 1965 when I first left terra firma.. They say you can’t know where you’re going until you remember where you’ve been, so mark me clueless on both counts. Name a place and I’ve probably been there and done that, but don’t press me for details.

Without further adieu, I now offer a travelogue of some of the more interesting and unusual places I have been sent to so that I might observe the pugilistic arts.

(bullet) 1990, Tokyo: Before Tiger Woods became Tiger Woods, Mike Tyson was boxing’s Tiger-sized attraction, a force of nature who bestrode his sport like the Colossus of Rhodes. Where once boxing writers traipsed to places like Zaire and the Phillipines to report on Muhammad Ali, a new generation of reporters now scurried after the snarling bully from Brooklyn.

The first thing I learned was that Tokyo is a very long way from suburban Philly. My wife drove me to 30th Street Station in Center City, where I caught an Amtrak Metroliner to Newark, N.J., from which I took a short cab ride to Newark International. A long flight to Seattle was followed by an even longer (10 hours) flight to Tokyo Narita Airport, whereupon I had to wait to clear customs and take a seemingly endless bus trip to my hotel. Elapsed time from my leaving home to hotel check-in: 24 hours, with 14 time zones crossed.

Upon arrival, I quickly discovered that my body clock had popped a spring and would take several days to reset. Try attending an afternoon press conference when your fatigued mind is screaming for sleep, or prowling the hotel lobby at 4 o’clock in the morning because you’re wide awake.

Tyson typically conducted two daily press briefings during this visit to the Land of the Rising Sun, one with British writers, with whom he seemed more open and convivial, another with U.S. writers, which was markedly more close-lipped and confrontational. After hearing tales of the fighter’s split personality, this colonial boy temporarily pledged allegiance to Queen Elizabeth and began showing up with my colleagues from the UK.

If Tyson noticed, he never let on. But while I was in the company of my Brit friends, he did relate one of the better stories I’ve ever heard him tell.

“One day I was out running at 3 a.m., near the Imperial Palace, and I saw this big rat run out from under the wall,” Tyson said. “Now, I couldn’t believe there would be rats where the emperor lived.”

Asked about his impression of Japanese rats, Tyson said they were no match for those from his old neighborhood in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn.

“There’s no comparison,” Tyson said. “The rats in Brooklyn would eat these rats. One time I saw a rat and a cat fight, and they were fighting hard. There was a crowd of people standing around, watching. People in Brownsville will watch any kind of fight.”

1992 and 1994, London: My first trip to Merry Olde London Towne was for the matchup of Lennox Lewis and Razor Ruddock, which Lewis won by second-round technical knockout. I arranged for my father, now deceased, to accompany me – his first trip to Europe – and we spent whatever down time I had doing the tourist bit. We visited Westminster Abbey, the Tower of London and other landmarks. Dad, a former welterweight, kept apologizing because he tired easily and wasn’t able to complete all the tours, but he got the chance to talk boxing with Angelo Dundee for a couple of hours, which pleased him more than a photo op on Trafalgar Square ever could.

For my next trip across the pond, the occasion for which was the Oliver McCall’s upset, second-round stoppage of Lewis, I was accompanied by the lovely Lady Anne. It turned out that my wife has a jones for castles. So we toured castles – ancient ones in which I half-expected Errol Flynn and Basil Rathbone to sword-fight across the battlements, and the well-maintained ancestral homes of living dukes and earls who, for a fee, allowed commoners like us to set foot inside the royal digs.

1994, Monterrey, Mexico: The main event pitted Julio Cesar Chavez and Tony Lopez in Estadio de Beisbol, but I was there more for a bout pitting a Philly guy, “Rockin’” Rodney Moore, against WBA super lightweight champ Frankie Randall.

I guess I should have done my homework better. I heard “Mexico” and drew a mental picture of Cancun, Cozumel, Puerto Vallarta and Acapulco, with their blue waters and white-sand beaches. Except that Monterrey is inland, more like a Spanish-language version of Gary, Ind., which is to say gritty and industrial.

Nonetheless, I brought along my oldest son, Randy, to share the experience. One night we set out to sample the local delicacy, roast goat, which is a little like … well, it’s kind of hard to explain.

The other thing I recall is that I was worried about being caught in traffic on fight night, so I made sure I was there for the first bout on the card, which featured former IBF heavyweight champion Tony Tucker. So there I was, alone at ringside in a 30,000-seat outdoor ballpark to watch Tucker stop Dan Murphy in three rounds. By my count, there were eight other people – all vendors setting up shop – in the stadium for the opening bell. Chavez and Lopez didn’t enter the ring until nearly seven hours later.

2000, Manchester, England: The disgraced remnants of Mike Tyson went to this gritty, industrial city in northwest England – think Monterrey without the roast goat – to pound on Julius Francis, who was so much of a chump that he agreed to sell advertising space on the bottom of his boxing shoes. Francis – famously dubbed “Clown Jules” by one clever headline writer — gave a good return for the $50,000 investment The Daily Mirror had made in him by being knocked out in the second round.

It rains a lot in Manchester, and the sky is perpetually overcast, but I learned that it’s not as depressing as it might seem. This is the home to perhaps soccer’s most famous franchise, Manchester United. And when I asked a British colleague for points of interest that I might want to check out, he shrugged and said, “There really aren’t any, but at least this place is better than Birmingham.”

I don’t think he was talking about Alabama.