Saoul Mamby probably shouldn't be fighting, but he's been doing it for so long I'm not going to be the one to tell him to stop. The grandfather of 11 first fought for money in 1969, a year he remembers well even if a lot of others don't. Once a world champion who fought on the same card as Muhammad Ali, he's fought around the world in places you'd be hard pressed to find on a map, but where he could always find a payday. The other night he went 10 rounds with a man half his age down in the Cayman Islands. He took the fight on a few days notice, figuring that even a few months shy of 61 he could beat a guy who had lost 13 of his last 14 fights. He couldn't, but at his age one more loss isn't going to deter him. “I didn't get hurt or beat down. It's just that my tools weren't sharp,” Mamby said. “Now that I've got 10 good rounds under me I'm ready to go again.” Just when that will be depends on the ability of his manager, Steve Tannenbaum, to convince a boxing commission somewhere that 60 is the new 30 and that a fighter shouldn't be discriminated against just because he's only a few months away from collecting retirement pay. That's been difficult in recent years, but Tannenbaum has a plan. He also has an opponent, though he still needs to find him. “Give me a white guy with a decent record from the south,” Tannenbaum says. “That's all I need.” In boxing, that's all anyone needs to sell a few tickets. Add a senior citizen to the mix, and start opening some more windows at the box office. Just how Mamby got to this point should be a cautionary tale for anyone involved in the sport of boxing. The fact that he's now fought in five different decades and might be the oldest fighter ever to step into a ring should be cause for alarm. I said should be, because you talk to Mamby and it all makes sense. Well, almost all. His motivation goes back 40 years, to the jungles of Vietnam where newly drafted out of the Bronx he served in the infantry. He and his friends would sit around, joke and laugh, and talk about what they were going to do after the war. After seeing some of those friends leave the country in body bags, Mamby made a vow to himself to lead the life he wanted if he got out alive. “I don't want to be the shoulda, woulda, coulda,” Mamby said. “Because when it's over, it's over. I made it out of a hellhole, so whatever I want to do I'm going to do as long as it's not hurting me or anybody else.” Sounds corny, sure. There's probably a dozen B movies in Hollywood based on the same principle, though no one got their brains scrambled while making them. Mamby's brain isn't scrambled, either, which may come as a surprise for someone who's been in 85 fights, gone 15 rounds eight different times, and fought dozens of times in places when the only medical clearance needed was your ability to breathe and climb into the ring. Mamby can do both, though his ring skills had deteriorated so much that he was suspended after a 2000 fight in North Carolina and fought only once, in 2004 in Thailand, before getting his comeback fight last Saturday against Anthony Osbourne in the Cayman Islands. He lost a unanimous decision to a guy who can't fight, but he felt like a winner coming out of the ring when the crowd gathered to shake his hand and cheer him on after the announcer filled them in on his age. It was another story to add to a collection that Mamby tells with little prompting and surprising eloquence for a man who has spent most of his life trading punches to the head. He'll tell you of defending his 140-pound (63.5-kilogram) world title in the fight just before Ali took on Larry Holmes in 1980, his fights in Madison Square Garden, and how he used to go into the backyard of opponents around the world to make a living. The conditions weren't always great. But once when he took his title belt to Indonesia to defend against the local hero, the fight organizers put him up in a luxury hotel. That was a quarter century ago, and Mamby wasn't a young man then. The guys he fought are now all old and fat or dead, while Mamby walks around at 155 or so pounds (70 or so kilograms) and doesn't have a gray hair on his head. He eats steamed veggies, recently bought a juicer for his health foods and will talk forever about how important proper nutrition is. “The man hasn't had a Dunkin' Donut in his life,” Tannenbaum said. Mamby is chasing a dream he shouldn't be chasing, but all boxers do the same thing. He wants to be a champion again, and feels that with a few fights he should be able to fight for one of the many titles out there. That's not going to happen, just as he's not going to be fighting in Las Vegas or New York or anywhere else where they regulate the sport. His best hope lies in his well-used passport or Tannenbaum's ability to find that hometown fighter somewhere in the south where they might look the other way when they see his age. __
