The potential of Mitch "Blood" Green
The potential of Mitch "Blood" Green
I heard this guy was quite the accomplished am-boxer. What happened to him when he reached the pro ranks?
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The Scranton Assassin
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WhiteShadow
- Heavyweight
- Posts: 14
- Joined: 22 Feb 2002, 20:00
This will give you some insight...
Mitch Green Gets Shot
by Charles Farrell (April 13, 2005)
Almost before the ink had dried on the managerial contract Mitch Green had signed with me, he got shot. On a warm afternoon in late October 1992, he’d gotten into a street argument—another Harlem disagreement about Mike Tyson—and had slapped a man. The guy ran to a nearby apartment and came back out with a .22. He fired twice, hitting Mitch in the back of his Achilles tendon and behind the knee. The first bullet passed through his Nikes, leaving entrance and exit holes—I’ve still got the sneakers as a memento—but no one could find the second bullet. Mitch limped to the emergency ward at Harlem Hospital. There he waited for a couple of hours until his knee could be X-rayed, and until the lab technicians were given the opportunity to somehow miss seeing the alarmingly visible shadow of a bullet lodged behind his femur. He was sent home with the sage advice to “walk on it.”
Mitch took the recommendation. He also ran on it. He jumped rope on it. A two hundred-forty pound man repeatedly jumping up and down with an injury like this will splinter the bone like a tree limb, each jump further exacerbating the damage.
After a week of following the rehab suggestion, Mitch called me in Boston.
“Man, I can’t walk. I try running, but I keep falling down. I can’t stand on my leg. What do I do?”
“Take a cab to Kennedy. Call me from the airport. I’ll have your flight information for you when you get there.”
Three hours later Mitch Green, now in a wheelchair, arrived at Logan Airport. We drove to Beth Israel Hospital where orthopedic specialist Dr. Frank Bunch took more X-rays. What he found astounded him. We all looked at a very clear picture of an object—the bullet—securely lodged behind Mitch’s knee, and an equally clear picture of the femur, split alarmingly down the middle.
“He needs an operation immediately. I’ll schedule it for early tomorrow morning. That bone needs to be reattached with pins. I just hope the leg can be saved. I can’t imagine how he could possibly have walked with this injury.”
When Mitch heard that his leg might have to be amputated, he panicked. No one is more alone than a fighter who can’t earn big paydays. Mitch Green, more than any fighter I’ve ever known, is wrapped up in his own image, in his street credibility. Any perceived weakness, in his world, presents the opportunity for exploitation and, worse, ridicule. He has gone to extraordinary lengths, often desperately self-destructive ones, to avoid being laughed at. He is almost pathologically incapable of seeing the irony of some of his more Byzantine choices*.
In his youth, Mitch “Blood” Green had been gang leader of the Warlords, one of New York City’s most feared tribal gangs. He’d been the most highly acclaimed amateur heavyweight in the city’s history, winning the Golden Gloves title four consecutive years. He was crowned King of Rikers Island during his many sojourns there. He’d fought Mike Tyson twice, once in the ring—he’d lost a ten-round decision—once on the street—outcome subject to interpretation. Mitch Green didn’t scare easily.
The prospect of losing his leg terrified him, though. It’s likely that athletes—and Mitch Green is an incredible natural athlete—are more existentially petrified of affliction than less naturally gifted people. Not only are their bodies their tickets to worldly success, they are also finely calibrated machines that they must trust to never let them down. To have damage, malfunction, or breakdown, is an outrage felt at a particularly primal level. To, of necessity, place the welfare of one’s body in the hands of another is a completely unnerving experience. As Mitch Green has told me many times, “I ain’t never been knocked out by nobody. Not as a amateur, not as a pro. I can’t be knocked out.”
He understood, however, that having surgery was in effect being knocked out. There would be a period of time where everything was beyond his control. We drove from the hospital and sat in a car outside his hotel. He grew very solemn. “Don’t abandon me.”
“Don’t abandon me.”
Mitch Green’s father had been murdered when Mitch was twelve. It had been a bizarre double murder; both Mitch’s father and his killer had simultaneously fired shots at each other from close range. Each had killed the other. Their funerals had been held in the same funeral home at the same time, the families sending off their dead in adjacent rooms.
His mother moved her two sons from Atlanta to New York City. Mitch, enormous, wild, and furious, roamed the streets. His size and obvious talent got him immediate attention in the boxing world. He was courted by Shelly Finkel, Lou Duva, Dennis Rappaport and, soon thereafter, Don King. But Mitch Green was suspicious and paranoid, and so labeled difficult, incorrigible, and a head-case. He ranted and screamed, argued with both his own people and other camps constantly. He robbed a filling station—who knows why—then calmly stayed at the crime site, pumping gas for the bewildered customers, many of whom recognized him. He had his driver’s license revoked more times than anyone else in New York history. But he understood something, although no one ever presented his side of the story: Mitch Green knew that boxing was fornicating him over. He hadn’t trusted the white guys, Finkel and Duva. And they hadn’t done well by him. He was wowed by Don King, and was—and still is—rankling over what he considers King’s betrayal of him.
According to Mitch, he was the victim of one of the most despicable tripartite heists ever perpetrated on a boxer. Here’s Green’s brief distillation—Mitch’s complete version is both more detailed and more entertaining, but quite lengthy—of what isn’t a widely known incident:
He was scheduled to fight Mike Tyson on HBO. Larry Merchant of HBO, New York State boxing commissioner Jose Torres, and Don King got together and bullied him into the ring. First, King sent his son Carl into the dressing room where Mitch’s hands were being wrapped. He’d brought along a big stack of money, ostensibly what they were willing to pay for Green’s services. Jerry Green, Mitch’s brother, counted it. King was paying under forty thousand dollars for a headline fighter to go up against the hottest prospect in boxing history at Madison Square Garden in a main event being broadcast by HBO. When Green refused to fight, Torres came in and demanded that he do so. He told Green that, unless he got into the ring, his license would be lifted indefinitely. Finally, HBO’s flunky Larry Merchant attempted to wheedle a performance out of Green, pitching the importance of pay channel exposure. He warned Mitch that, unless the fight took place, HBO would go on the air and announce that Mitch Green was afraid to fight Mike Tyson**.
So Mitch Green, for good or ill, watched out for himself. He could still be marketed easily, especially in a devalued heavyweight division, but he was too self-destructive to do that without managerial help. And he didn’t trust managers. It had taken both effort and money to get him to sign with me. In acquiring Mitch as a client, I’d become a minor laughing stock to both my friends and to the boxing community at large. Boxing Illustrated gave me their “Sucker of the Year” award in 1993***. And Al Braverman, my closest friend in the business, bet me a considerable sum that I’d never manage to get Green into the ring.
“Charles, use your fuckin’ brain, for Christ’s sake. Don’t you think that if we could get that motherfucker into the ring, Don wouldn’t have him wrapped up already? We cut the bastard loose.”
So we sat in the car. Mitch Green thought about losing his leg. He worried about whether anyone would care about him if he couldn’t fight anymore. I too thought about Mitch Green losing his leg. I also thought about my investment in Mitch Green and my wager with Al Braverman. I can’t pretend that everything on my mind at that moment was altruistic; part of me was wondering what this entire episode was going to wind up costing me.
Boxing is a tough business.
As difficult as he was, I liked Mitch Green and, for whatever reason, he liked me. But since boxing is largely a business of perception rather than action, I knew that my assuming responsibility for his operation, his rehabilitation, his day-to-day expenses, and his housing would be looked at as a foolhardy move. Green was the first fighter I’d managed, and now it appeared that he might no longer be a fighter at all. As amazing as this seems, my looking after Mitch Green might well be taken as weakness. I had to think carefully before making a decision that—in any other walk of life—would have been the only moral choice.
In the end, I did what I thought was right. The next morning, Mitch “Blood” Green had a successful operation on his leg. The split femur was reattached using six largish pins. He moved from his home in Jamaica, Queens, New York, to one of my houses in Newton, Massachusetts. As expected, my decision to help him out before it was certain that he’d ever fight again was treated with almost unanimous derision within the boxing business. Mitch Green, ashamed to be seen using crutches, recovered with remarkable speed.
In late February of 1993, he officially made his comeback, refusing to throw any punches at professional opponent Bruce Johnson. Mitch felt that he was being underpaid for the fight—although I had picked up the tab for the entire card—and voiced his protest by not fighting****. The bout was stopped in the third after Green received repeated warnings by the referee that he needed to punch. My only consolation was winning my bet with Al Braverman; I had gotten Mitch “Blood” Green back into a boxing ring. The cost of doing so far exceeded the amount won in the bet.
* He once passed up a potential million-dollar payday to fight Riddick Bowe when Bowe was the WBA heavyweight champion. When I admitted to Green that Bowe, as champion, would be earning more than a million, Mitch refused to fight. I acknowledge making a strategic error here. But this episode wasn’t the strangest of Green’s business decisions. The single strangest was so peculiar that, were I to write about it, no one would believe me.
** It kills me that I wasn’t managing Mitch when this took place. We would have cleaned up.
*** This is true, by the way.
**** This led to a wildly improbably hotel lobby confrontation between Mitch and me later in the evening. We stood nose to navel and had to be pulled apart—thankfully—by Pat and Tony Petronelli, as well as by a number of other fighters who’d been on the card.
[email protected]
Copyright 2005 ConanSports LLC
Mitch Green Gets Shot
by Charles Farrell (April 13, 2005)
Almost before the ink had dried on the managerial contract Mitch Green had signed with me, he got shot. On a warm afternoon in late October 1992, he’d gotten into a street argument—another Harlem disagreement about Mike Tyson—and had slapped a man. The guy ran to a nearby apartment and came back out with a .22. He fired twice, hitting Mitch in the back of his Achilles tendon and behind the knee. The first bullet passed through his Nikes, leaving entrance and exit holes—I’ve still got the sneakers as a memento—but no one could find the second bullet. Mitch limped to the emergency ward at Harlem Hospital. There he waited for a couple of hours until his knee could be X-rayed, and until the lab technicians were given the opportunity to somehow miss seeing the alarmingly visible shadow of a bullet lodged behind his femur. He was sent home with the sage advice to “walk on it.”
Mitch took the recommendation. He also ran on it. He jumped rope on it. A two hundred-forty pound man repeatedly jumping up and down with an injury like this will splinter the bone like a tree limb, each jump further exacerbating the damage.
After a week of following the rehab suggestion, Mitch called me in Boston.
“Man, I can’t walk. I try running, but I keep falling down. I can’t stand on my leg. What do I do?”
“Take a cab to Kennedy. Call me from the airport. I’ll have your flight information for you when you get there.”
Three hours later Mitch Green, now in a wheelchair, arrived at Logan Airport. We drove to Beth Israel Hospital where orthopedic specialist Dr. Frank Bunch took more X-rays. What he found astounded him. We all looked at a very clear picture of an object—the bullet—securely lodged behind Mitch’s knee, and an equally clear picture of the femur, split alarmingly down the middle.
“He needs an operation immediately. I’ll schedule it for early tomorrow morning. That bone needs to be reattached with pins. I just hope the leg can be saved. I can’t imagine how he could possibly have walked with this injury.”
When Mitch heard that his leg might have to be amputated, he panicked. No one is more alone than a fighter who can’t earn big paydays. Mitch Green, more than any fighter I’ve ever known, is wrapped up in his own image, in his street credibility. Any perceived weakness, in his world, presents the opportunity for exploitation and, worse, ridicule. He has gone to extraordinary lengths, often desperately self-destructive ones, to avoid being laughed at. He is almost pathologically incapable of seeing the irony of some of his more Byzantine choices*.
In his youth, Mitch “Blood” Green had been gang leader of the Warlords, one of New York City’s most feared tribal gangs. He’d been the most highly acclaimed amateur heavyweight in the city’s history, winning the Golden Gloves title four consecutive years. He was crowned King of Rikers Island during his many sojourns there. He’d fought Mike Tyson twice, once in the ring—he’d lost a ten-round decision—once on the street—outcome subject to interpretation. Mitch Green didn’t scare easily.
The prospect of losing his leg terrified him, though. It’s likely that athletes—and Mitch Green is an incredible natural athlete—are more existentially petrified of affliction than less naturally gifted people. Not only are their bodies their tickets to worldly success, they are also finely calibrated machines that they must trust to never let them down. To have damage, malfunction, or breakdown, is an outrage felt at a particularly primal level. To, of necessity, place the welfare of one’s body in the hands of another is a completely unnerving experience. As Mitch Green has told me many times, “I ain’t never been knocked out by nobody. Not as a amateur, not as a pro. I can’t be knocked out.”
He understood, however, that having surgery was in effect being knocked out. There would be a period of time where everything was beyond his control. We drove from the hospital and sat in a car outside his hotel. He grew very solemn. “Don’t abandon me.”
“Don’t abandon me.”
Mitch Green’s father had been murdered when Mitch was twelve. It had been a bizarre double murder; both Mitch’s father and his killer had simultaneously fired shots at each other from close range. Each had killed the other. Their funerals had been held in the same funeral home at the same time, the families sending off their dead in adjacent rooms.
His mother moved her two sons from Atlanta to New York City. Mitch, enormous, wild, and furious, roamed the streets. His size and obvious talent got him immediate attention in the boxing world. He was courted by Shelly Finkel, Lou Duva, Dennis Rappaport and, soon thereafter, Don King. But Mitch Green was suspicious and paranoid, and so labeled difficult, incorrigible, and a head-case. He ranted and screamed, argued with both his own people and other camps constantly. He robbed a filling station—who knows why—then calmly stayed at the crime site, pumping gas for the bewildered customers, many of whom recognized him. He had his driver’s license revoked more times than anyone else in New York history. But he understood something, although no one ever presented his side of the story: Mitch Green knew that boxing was fornicating him over. He hadn’t trusted the white guys, Finkel and Duva. And they hadn’t done well by him. He was wowed by Don King, and was—and still is—rankling over what he considers King’s betrayal of him.
According to Mitch, he was the victim of one of the most despicable tripartite heists ever perpetrated on a boxer. Here’s Green’s brief distillation—Mitch’s complete version is both more detailed and more entertaining, but quite lengthy—of what isn’t a widely known incident:
He was scheduled to fight Mike Tyson on HBO. Larry Merchant of HBO, New York State boxing commissioner Jose Torres, and Don King got together and bullied him into the ring. First, King sent his son Carl into the dressing room where Mitch’s hands were being wrapped. He’d brought along a big stack of money, ostensibly what they were willing to pay for Green’s services. Jerry Green, Mitch’s brother, counted it. King was paying under forty thousand dollars for a headline fighter to go up against the hottest prospect in boxing history at Madison Square Garden in a main event being broadcast by HBO. When Green refused to fight, Torres came in and demanded that he do so. He told Green that, unless he got into the ring, his license would be lifted indefinitely. Finally, HBO’s flunky Larry Merchant attempted to wheedle a performance out of Green, pitching the importance of pay channel exposure. He warned Mitch that, unless the fight took place, HBO would go on the air and announce that Mitch Green was afraid to fight Mike Tyson**.
So Mitch Green, for good or ill, watched out for himself. He could still be marketed easily, especially in a devalued heavyweight division, but he was too self-destructive to do that without managerial help. And he didn’t trust managers. It had taken both effort and money to get him to sign with me. In acquiring Mitch as a client, I’d become a minor laughing stock to both my friends and to the boxing community at large. Boxing Illustrated gave me their “Sucker of the Year” award in 1993***. And Al Braverman, my closest friend in the business, bet me a considerable sum that I’d never manage to get Green into the ring.
“Charles, use your fuckin’ brain, for Christ’s sake. Don’t you think that if we could get that motherfucker into the ring, Don wouldn’t have him wrapped up already? We cut the bastard loose.”
So we sat in the car. Mitch Green thought about losing his leg. He worried about whether anyone would care about him if he couldn’t fight anymore. I too thought about Mitch Green losing his leg. I also thought about my investment in Mitch Green and my wager with Al Braverman. I can’t pretend that everything on my mind at that moment was altruistic; part of me was wondering what this entire episode was going to wind up costing me.
Boxing is a tough business.
As difficult as he was, I liked Mitch Green and, for whatever reason, he liked me. But since boxing is largely a business of perception rather than action, I knew that my assuming responsibility for his operation, his rehabilitation, his day-to-day expenses, and his housing would be looked at as a foolhardy move. Green was the first fighter I’d managed, and now it appeared that he might no longer be a fighter at all. As amazing as this seems, my looking after Mitch Green might well be taken as weakness. I had to think carefully before making a decision that—in any other walk of life—would have been the only moral choice.
In the end, I did what I thought was right. The next morning, Mitch “Blood” Green had a successful operation on his leg. The split femur was reattached using six largish pins. He moved from his home in Jamaica, Queens, New York, to one of my houses in Newton, Massachusetts. As expected, my decision to help him out before it was certain that he’d ever fight again was treated with almost unanimous derision within the boxing business. Mitch Green, ashamed to be seen using crutches, recovered with remarkable speed.
In late February of 1993, he officially made his comeback, refusing to throw any punches at professional opponent Bruce Johnson. Mitch felt that he was being underpaid for the fight—although I had picked up the tab for the entire card—and voiced his protest by not fighting****. The bout was stopped in the third after Green received repeated warnings by the referee that he needed to punch. My only consolation was winning my bet with Al Braverman; I had gotten Mitch “Blood” Green back into a boxing ring. The cost of doing so far exceeded the amount won in the bet.
* He once passed up a potential million-dollar payday to fight Riddick Bowe when Bowe was the WBA heavyweight champion. When I admitted to Green that Bowe, as champion, would be earning more than a million, Mitch refused to fight. I acknowledge making a strategic error here. But this episode wasn’t the strangest of Green’s business decisions. The single strangest was so peculiar that, were I to write about it, no one would believe me.
** It kills me that I wasn’t managing Mitch when this took place. We would have cleaned up.
*** This is true, by the way.
**** This led to a wildly improbably hotel lobby confrontation between Mitch and me later in the evening. We stood nose to navel and had to be pulled apart—thankfully—by Pat and Tony Petronelli, as well as by a number of other fighters who’d been on the card.
[email protected]
Copyright 2005 ConanSports LLC
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WhiteShadow
- Heavyweight
- Posts: 14
- Joined: 22 Feb 2002, 20:00
Mitch Green could have been really good, possibly good enough to join the revolving door of heavyweight champions in the 80's. At one time he was 16-1 and ranked as high as number 13 by the WBC. But like all too many, his career succumbed to choosing crime and dope over training. There's a funny story about him that took place not long after his fight with Tyson. Evidently, he held up a gas station, and just as he was to get away with the money, a number of cars began pulling up to the pumps. Nonchalantly, he began going over to them, filling the tanks, taking the customers' money and making change! He hung around so long doing this that a cruiser eventually came by and nabbed him. The criminal mind. . .
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dempseyfire
- Heavyweight
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- Joined: 29 Oct 2003, 22:56
That not entirly true. Chuck Webner was asked by Stallone to help out and Stallone said he was going to compensate Webner seeing how his charector is based off Webner.Decagon wrote:Of course they wouldn't. Look at how Chuck Webner's suing Stallone for saying that Rocky was based off of him.CzarKyle wrote:The thing about The Warriors I doubt. I was watching new The Warriors Ultimate Edition on DVD and I never heard any mention of Mitch Green.
Stallone never payed Chuck and at first Chuck was to humiliated to seek money he deserved till now. Theres some other details, I remember seeing an interview on espn about this and they interviewed Chuck and he told his side of the story. He said he couldn't understand how Stallone could do that.
I read an interview years ago of Chuck and in the interview he said that the rumor about the "you can either have $75,000 up front or 2% of gross of the movie..." claim from Stallone was actually only a rumor that he helped create. Sorry, I can't cite my sourses here...it was a long time ago.ferocity wrote:That not entirly true. Chuck Webner was asked by Stallone to help out and Stallone said he was going to compensate Webner seeing how his charector is based off Webner.Decagon wrote:Of course they wouldn't. Look at how Chuck Webner's suing Stallone for saying that Rocky was based off of him.CzarKyle wrote:The thing about The Warriors I doubt. I was watching new The Warriors Ultimate Edition on DVD and I never heard any mention of Mitch Green.
Stallone never payed Chuck and at first Chuck was to humiliated to seek money he deserved till now. Theres some other details, I remember seeing an interview on espn about this and they interviewed Chuck and he told his side of the story. He said he couldn't understand how Stallone could do that.
I don't know how much of the whole "Rocky is based upon Chuck Wepner" is actually true. I have never come across an interview with Stallone or any of the producers of the Rocky franchise that have validated the story.
It seems like any journeyman who got a shot at the title can claim that Rocky is based upon him.
Is the movie really close enough to Wepner's life for him to say "Hey, that's me on the screen....I want a piece of the money"?
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The Great John L
- Heavyweight
- Posts: 4351
- Joined: 26 Jul 2005, 19:37
Re: The potential of Mitch "Blood" Green
This thread mentions that Mitch Green was a gang leader of "the Warlords",
so maybe the article that said he was a gang leader of the Spades was
wrong or he belonged to 2 gangs in his youth?
I think he may have been a warlord of the Black Spades.
so maybe the article that said he was a gang leader of the Spades was
wrong or he belonged to 2 gangs in his youth?
I think he may have been a warlord of the Black Spades.
Re:
i always thought he was more the level of a snipes, weaver,bruno and tate, who were below the level of a Page,Tubbs,Bonecrusher,who themselves were another level beneath Tucker,Cooney, Thomas,Spoon,Dokes.Nile4000 wrote:If he had developed, Mitch could've been champ.
It was an era of talented black american HWs despite the writers of the time calling them fat and out of shape. Green had a good chin and speed but not much tactical acumen, no power, and conditioning imo.
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Cutman Scabbers
- Heavyweight
- Posts: 2313
- Joined: 05 Jun 2008, 18:15
Re:
WhiteShadow wrote:
* He once passed up a potential million-dollar payday to fight Riddick Bowe when Bowe was the WBA heavyweight champion. When I admitted to Green that Bowe, as champion, would be earning more than a million, Mitch refused to fight. I acknowledge making a strategic error here. But this episode wasn’t the strangest of Green’s business decisions. The single strangest was so peculiar that, were I to write about it, no one would believe me.
Anyone know what this "single strangest episode" could be?
I would love to know. Please do write about it.
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Cutman Scabbers
- Heavyweight
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- Joined: 05 Jun 2008, 18:15
Re: Re:
You're right on many accounts.But if he had stayed with Lou Duva and Tomorrow's Champions, he definitely would have been at minimum a top-5 contender.Ironically, I could see him beating Bonecrusher(who he was scheduled to fight in 1986-late), Snipes, Tillis, Bruno, Tate on the right day, and possibly a Cobb, though Weaver would outhustle him. On a good day, possibly Tucker and Cooney.mugabi wrote:i always thought he was more the level of a snipes, weaver,bruno and tate, who were below the level of a Page,Tubbs,Bonecrusher,who themselves were another level beneath Tucker,Cooney, Thomas,Spoon,Dokes.Nile4000 wrote:If he had developed, Mitch could've been champ.
It was an era of talented black american HWs despite the writers of the time calling them fat and out of shape. Green had a good chin and speed but not much tactical acumen, no power, and conditioning imo.
Re: The potential of Mitch "Blood" Green
After the Mike Tyson fight May 1986,Don King released Mitch Green from his contract early(it was to have been up to 1988).
later Mitch Green was scheduled to fight Bonecrusher Smith
December-13-1986
at Fayettville NC.However a week before that fight ,Tony Tubbs
who was scheduled to fight Tim Witherspoon in a rematch for
a title December10-1986,dropped out a week before and Don King offered Smith a chance at that title and Smith won it
Smith was supposed to get 35 thousand for the Green fight,and I guess
Green's purse was suppose to be the same,
so Green got didddly for it too,which probably even more embittered him
against King.I think he showed up at the Tyson-Smith press conferance
and chased Don King around.
later Mitch Green was scheduled to fight Bonecrusher Smith
December-13-1986
at Fayettville NC.However a week before that fight ,Tony Tubbs
who was scheduled to fight Tim Witherspoon in a rematch for
a title December10-1986,dropped out a week before and Don King offered Smith a chance at that title and Smith won it
Smith was supposed to get 35 thousand for the Green fight,and I guess
Green's purse was suppose to be the same,
so Green got didddly for it too,which probably even more embittered him
against King.I think he showed up at the Tyson-Smith press conferance
and chased Don King around.