I'm not talking about his fight with George Feeney, the British lightweight champ, in St. Vincent, Italy, Sunday. He figures to win that one without a whole lot of trouble.
But the press over in Italy has him stopped cold. What's more, the popular 21-year-old WBA lightweight champ from Youngstown, Ohio, keeps losing ground all the time.
Traditionally, Italians are warm sentimentalists. Nothing wrong with that. When word reached Italy that the distraught mother of South Korean boxer Duk Koo Kim had committed suicide over the weekend grieving for her son who had died after being knocked out by Ray Mancini last Nov. 13 in Las Vegas, quite naturally, Italian reporters wanted reaction from Boom Boom staying and training in St. Vincent.
Mancini feels terrible over what happened in Las Vegas. I know that from talking with him. He feels rotten over what happened to Kim's mother as well. I know that without even talking to him because he has a soft heart and that's the kind of young man he is.
Newsmen have their jobs to do. Their jobs aren't always pleasant. Most of the writers who have spoken with Mancini since Kim's death have asked him about it. He has heard all their questions and tried to answer them all.
Now the whole thing was going to start all over again after Kim's mother killed herself in Seoul. Mancini didn't want to go through it again. He didn't wish to say anything. That didn't matter. He was quoted liberally in the Italian press, saying such things as he had relived the pain of Kim's death, he was so grief stricken that he wasn't eating anything and he planned to go to South Korea as soon as possible to pray at Kim's tomb.
Mancini can read some Italian, but not much. When what he was supposed to have said about Kim's mother's suicide was read to him as it appeared in the Italian press, he nearly fell over in utter astonishment.
'I never said anything like that,' he protested to Irv Rudd, in Italy with him working for Top Rank, the promoters of the fight. 'I didn't talk to anyone about it at all.'
Boom Boom threw up his hands and shook his head.
'When it rains, it pours, I swear,' he said.
It was simply the latest in a series of newspaper stories that has the entire Mancini camp apprehensive over what to expect next.
'We got a taste of what we were in store for last Wednesday,' revealed Rudd, who drove to Turin that day to pick up Mancini's manager, David Wolf, at the airport.
'The hotel we're staying in here in St. Vincent is right around the corner from a casino,' he said Tuesday over the trans-Atlantic phone. 'You can't get into the casino unless you have a tie on, so that lets Ted Williams out and David Wolf, too. David Wolf doesn't even own a necktie.
'I brought him back to the hotel from the airport Wednesday. He had not had any sleep for 24 hours and he was bushed. He did not talk to anyone, certainly not to any newsman. He watched Mancini work out in the ring we have set up in the hotel, had something to eat and then went to sleep without ever leaving the hotel.'
The following morning, Rudd went down to the newsstand to get the papers. Since they were all in Italian, and Rudd, a native and life-long resident of Flatbush, knows only a few Italian words like pizza and Lee Mazzilli, he had the manager of the hotel, Mario Valsecchi, translate the stories into English for him.
'I couldn't believe what I was hearing,' Rudd declared in amazement. 'There was this story in the paper telling all about how David Wolf had won 425 million lire -- that's $359,000 -- in the casino the day before. To this day, Wolf hasn't set foot in the casino. He can't because he doesn't have a tie. But you should've seen the big story detailing how he played and won the money. You bet he's mad. How does he explain all this to the IRS?'
Rudd told of another story in the paper about Mancini a few days before Wolf arrived. Boom Boom had been invited to meet the Mayor of Turin in that city. Ray was to be the guest of the Turin Soccer Club.
A special mass was arranged in honor of Mancini at one of the churches in Turin, after which he was taken to the soccer stadium to watch a game between the home team and Catanzaro.
'Now it so happens that in 1949, a plane carrying the Turin soccer team crashed and the whole team was wiped out,' Rudd said, recalling a bit of tragic history. 'That happened 12 years before Ray was even born. But the other day after he went to this church in Turin, here was a story saying how his father had taken him aside one day and told him all about how everyone on the soccer team was killed. I asked Ray if he knew about that. He said he never even heard of it.'
Immediately following the death of Kim's mother, Mancini was reported to be so full of grief that he wasn't able to eat.
'That was what it said in the paper,' Rudd pointed out. 'But would you like to know what Ray had for dinner that evening? I'll tell you. He had spaghetti with butter sauce, which he has once a week; filet of sole; vegetables like broccoli, zucchini, carrots and potatoes, and oranges and apples. He also took an apple and banana back to his room with him for a snack. But the paper said he was starving himself.'
The media has been told there will be no further word from Mancini or anyone associated with him in St. Vincent regarding the death of Kim's mother. All phone calls to Boom Boom's room have been cut off so even his father and mother in Youngstown can't reach him.
After all this, Sunday's 10-round non-title fight with Feeney should be a piece of cake.
