Some thoughts on the light side of boxing.
Fistic Nuggets
Few people in boxing are as knowledgeable about performance enhancing drugs as Victor Conte and Margaret Goodman.
Conte is known to sports fans as the mastermind behind the BALCO scandal. But that was just one of many chapters in his remarkable life to date. In recent years, he has been a positive force for education and reform.
Goodman served for years as chief ringside physician and chair of the medical advisory board for the Nevada State Athletic Commission. In addition to maintaining a private practice as a neurologist, she is the founder and current CEO of the Voluntary Anti-Doping Association.
But before any of that, Conte and Goodman were musicians.
Conte was born in 1950 and began taking guitar lessons at age ten. One year later, while in fifth grade, he played guitar in a talent show at the Wishon Elementary School in Fresno, California.
“I played a surf song called Pipeline,” he remembers. “And it brought the house down. I thought it was the coolest thing.”
At age 13, Conte and three of his cousins formed a band called Immediate Family. Victor played lead guitar while his cousins played bass guitar, saxophone, and drums. At age fifteen, one of his brothers joined the group as lead guitarist and Victor switched to bass. Then, at age nineteen, he founded a group called Common Ground with some family and friends. They played a neighborhood club in Fresno six nights a week for which each band member was paid $145.
In search of bigger and better things, Conte dropped out of Fresno City College and moved to Los Angeles where he joined another group prophetically called Pure Food and Drug Act. One of his mentors in Los Angeles was Ray Brown, the legendary bass player who had once been married to Ella Fitzgerald. Brown taught Victor the ins and outs of playing the upright bass. Then Pure Food and Drug Act signed a lucrative contract with Epic Records and, for the first time in his life, Conte had money. Lots of it. “I was on top of the world,” he recalls.
Meanwhile, one of Conte’s cousins had become part of the funky rhythm-and-blues band Tower of Power. In May 1977, Victor joined the group as its electric bass player. He stayed with Tower of Power until 1979, when he and his cousin started another group called Jump Street. Later, he toured as an electric bass player with Herbie Hancock’s Monster Band, an experience he calls “the height of my musical career.” One night, he experienced the joy of playing onstage with the band and legendary trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie.
“But it was getting harder and harder to keep going,” Conte says. “I loved playing. But by then, I was married with three kids, and being on the road is difficult. You kiss your kids goodbye and say, ‘I’ll see you in six months.’ So I left the band in 1983. And in 1984, I founded BALCO.”
Margaret Goodman was born in Toronto. Her father played saxophone and clarinet, managed several rock groups, and ultimately became a record producer. When she was seven, the family moved to Beverly Hills.
“Broadway Danny Rose was the story of my father’s life,” Goodman said years later. “In the 1950s, he managed a group called The Diamonds that had hits with Little Darlin’, Walking Along, and The Stroll. He worked with Brook Benton and Dinah Washington. He started Sonny & Cher and the Righteous Brothers. But what always happened was, he’d take them to a certain point, and then somebody big with a recording studio and more clout in the industry would come along and take them away from him.”
Goodman’s father taught Margaret to read music and sing and introduced her to nightclubs and concerts. He wanted her to be a doctor, but music was the love of her life. Finally, father and daughter had a heart-to-heart talk.
‘If you want to be a studio singer,” he told Margaret, “you’ll do fine. But if you have your heart set on becoming the next Barbra Streisand, go to medical school.’“
Goodman enrolled at Chicago Medical School. But it was expensive and she had to make ends meet. While some of her contemporaries were partying their way out of medicine, Margaret worked her way through school by singing on weekends at nightclubs in Chicago. Old standards: Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hart, Jerome Kern.
Conte still dabbles in music from time to time. In 2010, he wrote and recorded a song called Balco Behop on which he plays a Take Me Out to the Ballgame motif on bass guitar.
Does Conte miss being a fulltime musician?
“Not at all,” he answers. “I was on the road for thirteen years as a traveling musician. I know what it takes to get to the top and stay at the top. And I reached a point long ago where I just didn’t want to do it anymore.”
As for Goodman, “I used to think I’d keep singing one way or another,” Margaret acknowledges. “And I haven’t. That’s kind of sad. Sometimes I think I’d like to do it again. But it’s been so long, I probably wouldn’t be any good anymore.”
On September 27, 2014, adult glamour model Jordan Carver and adult film star Melanie Muller entered a boxing ring in Dusseldorf, Germany, and did battle over four heated rounds. Their encounter could be dismissed as taking place beyond the outer fringe of boxing but for one notable fact.
The ring announcer was Michael Buffer.
Carver was born in Germany in 1986. According to Wikipedia, she worked as a hotel manager, beautician, and make-up artist before moving to Los Angeles to pursue a modeling career. In January 2010, she launched her own website featuring glamour photos, videos, and other content.
Wikipedia further notes, “Carver became successful due to the large size of her breasts paired with her otherwise slim figure.” But in 2017, she posted a video on YouTube entitled “Why I Decided for a Breast Reduction” and a second video heralding her “new life as Ina Marie.” She now says that she has left the adult industry behind. But memories remain. A recent Google search for “Jordan Carver” engendered more than 400,000 results.
Melanie Muller was born in Germany in 1988. Wikipedia reports that she worked as a “restaurant specialist and bartender” before turning to erotic modeling in 2010. She had a brief career in pornographic films and has been involved in a number of entertainment ventures including singing. In April 2014, Muller recorded and released a song in honor of the 2014 FIFA World Cup, the title of which translates into English as “Let’s Go, Germany. Score!”
Carver vs. Muller (which can be found on YouTube) was honestly, albeit inartfully, fought. There were four two-minute rounds without headgear. The women didn’t play-act or pose provocatively. They fought as best they could with Muller winning the decision.
As for Buffer’s participation . . .
The Great One has longstanding commercial ties to Germany. He has been a spokesperson for Saturn, a large German electronics manufacturing company. And he was the ring announcer of choice for most of Vitali and Wladimir Klitschko’s championship fights in Germany.
Where Carver vs. Muller was concerned, Buffer announced Carver as “The Queen of Fitness” and Muller as “The Queen of the Jungle, but tonight she wants to become Germany’s first lady of fighting.” He also intoned “Let’s get ready to rumble!” at the appropriate time and, when the bout was over, announced the decision as he would after any big fight.
“It was part of a celebrity boxing series,” Buffer recalls, looking back on that night. “And it was done on a pretty high level. They had a good crowd in a respectable venue. [Former heavyweight contender] Axel Schulz was one of the German television commentators, and the telecast got good ratings. I was brought in to give the event credibility. The fight was sloppy but totally for real. Both women tried hard to win. I did my job. They paid me well. And that was it.”
It has long been said that a picture is worth a thousand words. So let’s stop and gaze fondly at a recent Instagram post of a gentleman with outstretched arms standing amidst dozens of marijuana plants that are flourishing beneath indoor LED lights.
Shannon Briggs is 46 years old. He turned pro at age twenty and has compiled a 60–6-1 (53 KOs, 2 KOs by) ring record over the past quarter century. There have been high points: victories in his first 25 fights which made him a highly-touted prospect; a questionable verdict over George Foreman that brought him the “lineal” world heavyweight championship. And lows: a “KO by” against Darroll Wilson that raised questions about Briggs’s fortitude, and a loss to a 9-and-9 club fighter named Sedreck Fields when Shannon came in unprepared and out of shape.
There was also a 1998 defeat at the hands of Lennox Lewis, when Briggs gave Lewis all he could handle for five dramatic rounds. And a night in 2010 when Shannon displayed extraordinary courage as he endured a brutal beating from Vitali Klitschko but lasted a full twelve rounds.
Briggs is still hoping for another big payday in boxing. He’s riding a nine-bout winning streak that includes seven first-round knockouts over opponents he was expected to knock out in the first round. But he last fought on May 21, 2016. And as a practical man, Shannon has been looking for other sources of income.
This brings us to Champ RX LLC—a Shannon Briggs venture that’s producing an “alternative health and wellness” line of cannabidiol (CBD) products that are THC free.
Cannabidiol is a marijuana plant extract that, while not making users “high,” has been prescribed to treat cases of post-traumatic stress disorder and has additional therapeutic properties. Its adherents claim that CBD can ease pain and shorten recovery time after heavy exercise and injury. It’s sold in lotion, gel, cream, and oral spray form, and can also be applied under the tongue with a dropper. Many variants of CBD are legal under the World Anti-Doping Agency code.
Briggs is particularly fond of CBD isolate, which he describes as “cannabidiol in its purest form possible.” He then explains, “CBD isolate crystals are a fine white powder that only contains the cannabidiol chemical compound. CBD isolate powder and CBD isolate crystals are the most powerful punch of CBD you can get your hands on.”
CBD is a booming business. It’s also often a cash business because many banks refuse to handle accounts for businesses that deal in marijuana products. It’s expected to grow exponentially in the years ahead as more and more states relax their laws regarding the sale and use of marijuana.
Meanwhile, it would be interesting to know what Brigg does with the “waste product” (THC) from his horticultural venture.
Cus D’Amato used to tell his fighters to cut their hair short. He didn’t want a spray of water shooting into the air when his fighter got hit because he was afraid it would make the impact of the punch seem greater than it actually was.
“Judges are supposed to score punches that land,” D’Amato would say. “But some judges score blood. And others score water.”
It happens often enough to require correction . . .
Time and again, I hear ring announcers, commentators, and others say Gennady Golovkin is “fighting out of Los Angeles by way of Kazakstan.” Or Sergey Kovalev is “fighting out of Florida by way of Russia.”
No! They have it backwards.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines “by way of” as “to pass through or across.” For example, “He drove from New York to Massachusetts by way of Connecticut. . . . He flew from New York to San Francisco by way of Chicago.”
If Gennady Golovkin fights in Las Vegas, he’s coming “all the way from Kazakstan by way of Los Angeles.” If Sergey Kovalev fights in New York, he’s coming “all the way from Russia by way of Florida.”
“By way of” means “via.”
Get it right.
The recent death of evangelist Billy Graham conjures up memories of another Billy Graham, who epitomized what boxing was about in an earlier era.
Graham fought professionally from 1941 through 1955. He was undefeated in his first 58 pro fights and, during the course of his ring career, posted victories over Kid Gavilan, Carmen Basilio, and Joey Giardello. He was never knocked out and, more remarkably, was never knocked down. His final record stood at 102 wins, 15 losses, and nine draws with 27 knockouts. But boxing was different then. Graham never won a world title.
Graham is said to have been the model for Eddie Brown in The Professional, W.C. Heinz’s novel about boxing. He also had a way with words and once observed, “If you watch The Late Show and it comes up a boxing movie, always bet on the guy who lost the first fourteen rounds. It’s the price Hollywood makes him pay for knocking the other guy out in the fifteenth.”