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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.
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