Boxing - NYC
If someone were to ask me back in 1984 what it was that I wanted to do with my life, I would answer that I wished to make my living as a boxing photographer. To travel the country, and world, and be ringside for all the great fights would have provided me, at age 23, with all that I needed for a happy and fulfilling life. Or so I thought. At the time, it perfectly melded my nascent interest in photography with my already long lived fascination with boxing.
Putting my studies in Art and Design behind me, sans degree, I plunged into the work world. From the newspaper's hefty Help Wanted pages, an anachronism given the electronic age in which we now live, I quickly found work as an assistant in a photo studio in Manhattan. My annual starting compensation was $8,000, a dreadfully low salary even by the standards of the day. With few credentials beyond the ability to fetch lunch, a long and difficult career in photography was launched.
About that same time, I began taking photographs at the various boxing gyms in New York City, especially the Times Square Gym on 42nd street. Soon after that, I made contacts at Madison Square Garden's boxing office, and began to finagle press passes to photograph at their monthly cards, held usually on Thursday nights. For a stretch of several years, I became somewhat of a regular there, and had the privilege of photographing many of the top fighters of the day.
Although there were a few exceptions, my photographs had near zero marketability. As I slowly realized, my dream proved itself to be heavy with desire but light in practicality. Regrettably, there would be no vagabond life for this son of a mailman. I moved onward, and slowly but steadily upward. I directed my energy toward the pursuit of other, more fruitful, and more secure means of building my future.
Back then, just as I dared not think I had earned the right to call myself a photographer, likewise, I did not think my photographs deserved anyone's admiration. Looking now, what I can dare say with absolute certainty is that I had an abundance of energy and passion in a time in my life when it was safe, and right, and wonderful to follow one's dreams, however fleeting, and be free to disregard thoughts of all else.
