5/23/21: The Champ Was Here

Let’s jump into the car, honey,
And head straight for the Cape

from “Route Six” by Stanley Kunitz

Growing up on Cape Cod, I often wondered what motivated people to sit in traffic to get “here.” To slide into mile-long lines at ice cream stands. Or cram, blanket to blanket, into sandy spots on the shore among scores of sun seekers.

Perhaps it’s the allure of the beach. Of boats, bike rides and the briny breeze. Antique shops. Or the feeling of being away from somewhere else. Once the spigot is twisted counterclockwise Memorial Day weekend, the traffic flows nonstop until the first August cool nudges a ripple of visitors back to the mainland.

By Columbus Day, most everybody has gone home.

It’s been that way since the dawn of time.

Forty years ago, my dad worked at Puritan Clothing in Chatham, where Paul Newman and Robert Redford shopped for threads. In the summer, Puritan opened up a satellite location further down the Cape in Wellfleet, which closed for the season after Labor Day.

But if you took Route 6 past my hometown of Dennis, past Chatham, through Wellfleet, all the way out to the tip of the Cape in Provincetown, you’d find Marvelous Marvin Hagler, middleweight boxing champion of the world, preparing for his pugilistic pursuits no matter the time of year.

The Brockton fighter dominated his division — seven years as champion — en route to becoming one of the iconic athletes of the 80’s.

As longtime Cape Cod Times sports editor Bill Higgins wrote, Hagler in his prime was “Boston’s fifth sports team.”

In the papers, on the evening news, mused Steve Buckley of The Athletic, “you were just as likely to see a piece on Marvelous Marvin Hagler as one on Larry Bird…”

So how did one of boxing’s all-time greats— a tenacious competitor who sliced through opponents with tactical precision and power that rumbled up from his guts — wind up in the artist colony, fishing village, vibrant gay community of P-town?

“It was pretty random,” recalls Evan Evans, current owner of the Provincetown Inn. “My father was the GM at — back then it was called Dunfey’s Hyannis Resort — across from the Melody Tent. He had an employee working at the hotel by the name of Joe Silva, a retired boxer who still had deep roots in the boxing community. Jo Jo asked my dad if he’d be interested in holding an exhibition at the hotel.”

“Brooke (Evan’s dad) got to meet Goody and Pat Petronelli, who were Marvin’s trainers. Shortly thereafter, my father bought the Provincetown Inn and Jo Jo came along with him. The Petronellis talked to my father and said Marvin would like to come to a place where he can train, be focused, and get away from all the distractions.”

“There was a lot of weight on him and responsibility coming from Brockton — being a home of champions,” remembers Evan’s brother Jeff Evans, who cooked breakfast — among other roles — for the champ at the Inn.

“It was off the beaten track. He was really intensely motivated to be the middleweight champion of the world,” says Mary-Jo Avellar, chairman of the Provincetown Board of Selectmen during Hagler’s time in town.

“We gave him a suite in the corner of the motel; we gave him a chef,” Evan tells me. “Camp was six weeks long and he won his next fight. Like any athlete does, you stick with what works, so he just kept coming back.”

For Hagler and his team, the empty sands of P-Town in the offseason were fertile ground for success.

“The idea of a training camp is to build up a fighter’s discipline, control, determination and concentration,” Goody Petronelli told Steve Marantz of The Boston Globe in 1981. “The body is important and so is the mind. A fighter builds up his confidence, and, to do that, he’s constantly psyching himself up.”

“Back then they didn’t have all the tourists on Cape Cod,” Hagler told Jason Keidel of CBS Sports in 2015. “Very isolated. Very good spot. I called it the jail. All you could do was train, run, walk, talk boxing.”

“You would always see him out jogging through the streets of town,” Avellar recalls.

His early morning runs were legendary. The champ would log six to eight miles a day, in sunshine or snow drifts. Sometimes, he trudged through the dunes. Other times, he ran in Timberland boots — perhaps the same pair he used to run the 1980 Falmouth Road Race.

Hagler’s regimen stirred a curiosity among locals, a small number of whom would drop by the Inn, where the champ returned to work on some of the more technical aspects of his brutal vocation.

“It was Rocky Marciano’s boxing ring,” says Jeff. “We had it in the pool area. Anyone who wanted to stop by could just walk in and watch him go through his training.”

“When he would shadow box, he had a long, tall mirror,” Even reflects. “And on that mirror he wrote the quote that you’d see all the time: “destruction and destroy.”

“State police would always come by,” Jeff notes. “Some of the locals would come by, of course…he’d have his warm up: speed bags, jump rope. And then he’d go in (the ring) and pound the crap out of his (sparring partners).”

"Marvin don't ease up on you," former sparring partner and future light middleweight champ Buster Drayton told The Ring magazine in 1985, "he comes to work."

A host of partners would accompany the fighter and his team to the Inn. Many would exit before camp was up. Drayton noted they’d leave the sessions with the insides of their mouths so chewed up from Hagler's punches that they couldn't eat.

“One of them - I was cooking dinner for him - he came in and his jaw was broken. Marvin didn’t try to hurt the guy,” Jeff says, “he just got caught.”

As Hagler’s victory total swelled into the 40's, he finally received a title shot: a disputed 1979 draw against Italian champion Vito Antuofermo. By the following autumn, Antuofermo had dropped the belt to Englishman Alan Minter, so Hagler traveled to London, pulverized Minter, and returned with the prize he had chased for more than seven years.

Stateside, the media latched onto Hagler’s tales of time spent in his own personal Provincetown penitentiary.

“I want to stay bitter,” he told Sports Illustrated. “I use it; I feed on it. That’s why I put myself in jail like this to train for a fight. I want to be mean…then nobody can take from me what’s mine. The only way they’ll get the title from me is to kill me.”

The New York Times’ Michael Katz proffered images akin to Rocky training for the Drago fight in Siberia: a sleeping town, the population thinned by evacuated snowbirds and departed city folk, with Hagler the lonely denizen of a “deserted summer resort” where “the only other guests are assorted sparring partners and gulls.”

“The only noise is the incessant wind and rattle of the windows,” wrote Marantz.

Hagler’s suite was “right on the corner of the motel, way out on the water, surrounded by glass,” says Jeff. “The winds out there get crazy in the dead of February. It would sound like a Harrier jet landed on the roof. Winds would get up to 100 miles an hour for brief periods and it sounded like — right above your ceiling — there was a jet coming down.”

Evans remembers one morning when the groggy champ emerged from his quarters and said, “Jeff — I want to tell you, a freakin’ spaceship landed on the roof last night.”

“If you’ve been to Provincetown in January and walked the streets, you have an understanding of what it’s like,” Evan muses. “Especially back then. A lot of the windows had boards on them. There’s no movie theater. None of it. There is a community here, but it’s very small. It’s definitely an extreme change from Brockton.”

“When he first started, he was not a champion. There weren’t a lot of people here. Once he became champion, we had people like Willie Pep here. Bert Sugar. Bennie Briscoe. All of a sudden, reporters started showing up. Boxers started showing up. People would come down from Dennis or Hyannis to catch Marvin training.”

Michael Levine remembers a trip down from his childhood home in Maine:

“I will always cherish the day I spent with the champ while he was training for the Duran fight. My father was promoting a fight card in Portland. Hagler’s brother Robbie Sims was a feature on the card. He woke me up in the morning and said, “let’s take a ride today.”

“An hour into the ride he told where we were headed. Walking into the room and seeing the champ floored me. I had so many questions and he answered all of them. His answers were quick yet complete. He then said, ‘you done asking about me? Because now I want to know you.’ School, sports, life, goals, dreams. The man was as thoughtful as he was powerful.”

His growing celebrity brought a few changes. An August 1980 advertisement in The Provincetown Advocate invited folks to come watch Hagler train at the Inn: $1 admission, $2 to use the pool.

Gregory Katz of The Cape Cod Times noted upgrades to the facility: a cardboard sign replaced by a banner, the ring ropes re-done in velour.

“His afternoons — previously filled with naps and soap operas — are now taken up by magazine photographers from New York City.”

“I talk to the seagulls, still,” the champ noted, giving a nod to his original Outer Cape fan club.

Hagler was nothing if not authentic in the moment. In the ring, he was sprung from his P-town prison, hell-bent on extinguishing his foes to protect the gold belt he’d successfully defend 12 times — beating some of the biggest names in boxing history along the way.

But outside of the squared circle, he was thoughtful, with the occasional touch of whimsy.

“He had certain phrases for each fighter,” says Evan. “Antuofermo — I think he was known as ‘Vito the Mosquito.’ During that particular training camp, Marvin was handing out flyswatters. ‘I’m going to swat that mosquito.’ That’s how he was.”

“My brother was in the Coast Guard. There was a boxing club in Bay City, Michigan. They asked Jim — when he was home from the Coast Guard for a weekend — if he could have Marvin sign some pictures. Jimmy went to see Marvin; he signed them all and he went back, basically a hero.”

“He came to our house a couple times for a spaghetti dinner. When Marvin wasn’t training and he was out in the public, he was very approachable. He was always able to sign an autograph — not that a lot of people asked back then.”

Hagler’s regimen did limit his options for leisure.

“He loved to swim,” Jeff remembers, “but Pat told him he couldn’t because it would tighten up his muscles…we had a moped rental place. There were sandy roads down there. He cut his knee, got some stitches and boom: can’t use the pool, can’t ride mopeds.”

Hagler dropped the belt in 1987 to Sugar Ray Leonard in a slugfest that remains one of the most controversial decisions in boxing history. Unable to goad Leonard into a rematch, he retired the following year, moved to Italy and found a second act in the film industry.

He passed in March of this year at just 66 years of age. As one of the longest-reigning champions in boxing history, his legacy is undeniable.

“When I heard he passed,” says Levine, “I wept. The Marvelous One was gone. The child still in me lost a hero. That night, my daughters met the champ through YouTube. Like me listening to my dad talk about Ray Robinson, they saw and understood what Marvelous Marvin Hagler meant to the boy that is now their father.”

Hagler’s drive set him apart. A childhood move to Brockton stoked a passion for boxing. That passion smoldered in Provincetown and burned a brilliant orange — like a bonfire on a beach — when he hit the ring.

“There were no handouts — none,” Evan reflects. “He wasn’t going to be denied. And he wasn’t; he was one of the greatest fighters of all time.”

And a unique Cape Cod story.

“There’s been a lot of cool people in Provincetown,” Avellar says. “One of the coolest people, I always felt, that lived here was Norman Mailer…he was just like a regular guy. There are a lot of famous, rich people in this town now. They aren’t regular guys.”

“Regular” may seem like an odd description of an individual with an elite talent — like Mailer’s writing or Hagler’s pugilism. But they existed in a different time of American Celebrity. If you can’t imagine this story happening today, there’s a reason for that.

Sports were different. Access was different. Boxing mattered. And Hagler was a star in a golden age of the pursuit, before the promise of brighter lights and juicier paydays brought it crashing down under its own heft.

The Cape is different. That’s inevitable after forty years. The Inn remains; I attended a cousin’s wedding reception there a few years back. I asked Dad about the Puritan store in Wellfleet, to which he replied, “I’m not even sure the building is there anymore.” The people change. And though the tides have shifted countless times over the decades, there’s still a handful of folks who remember the middleweight champion of the world, working on something Marvelous in the most unusual of places.

“It was quite a thing,” says Avellar. People really flocked to the town to see him. He was like an icon in a way.”

It is certainly one of the beautiful spots on earth. I do not know of a place that is comparable to it.

from The Wild Braid, by Stanley Kunitz

Provincetown. Cape Cod. The perfect setting for “destruction and destroy.”