Bap. Bap. Bap-bap-bap.
Super middleweight contender Jeff Lacy fires punches at padded mitts worn by his trainer Dan Birmingham. The two feint, duck and bob in a mock boxing dance, part of Lacy's training regimen at St. Pete Boxing Club, a cramped bunker on 49th Street in Gulfport. Routine stuff, until Lacy lets loose with a couple of ferocious rights.
BAM BAM.
I snap my head toward the ring. Noticing me, Birmingham smiles and says. "No one's gonna get up from that!"
Punching power. It may be the most prized commodity in boxing. Fans like knockouts, it's just that simple; give 'em knockouts and your price tag goes up. Lacy has punching power to spare. In his three-and-a-half-year professional career, the former Olympian is 16-0 with 13 KOs. "I think of myself as a seek-and-destroy type fighter," he says, and somehow it doesn't sound threatening. Ranked a Top 5 super middleweight (168 pounds) in most boxing surveys, Lacy fights for the vacant International Boxing Federation title later this year against Syd Vanderpool, a 31-year-old Canadian with a 35-2 record.
Amid the upsurge in Tampa Bay boxing, many experts think Lacy can become our first true superstar. He has more than just a wrecking-ball punch. His Adonis-like physique turns heads. He possesses a radiant smile. "The fact that he's not in trouble, not done drugs," says his promoter Gary Shaw, picking up the list of virtues. "He's an All-American kid, willing to sign an autograph or stop and take a picture. He's very humble."
Humility and prizefighting often seem mutually exclusive, but, Birmingham says, there's always been a place in the game for the Gentleman Boxer. Look at Evander Holyfield, a soft-spoken, nice-guy pugilist who enjoyed a lucrative, much-admired career. He happens to be Lacy's top role model. About the only thing missing from the Lacy package is a certain personal flamboyance; he'll probably never be a quote machine who dazzles 'em at press conferences. "Jeff lets his hands do the talking," Shaw says. "He's not a reporter's dream."
And yet, in a way, he is. During a couple of interviews, Lacy comes off as a genuinely likeable young man. "Life is good," he says with a disarming sense of wonder. "I don't have to worry about how my next bill's gonna get paid. I'm happy and I'm healthy. That's all you can ask for." Lacy's fond of saying how much he loves boxing, but it doesn't come off as some practiced mantra.
Life is, indeed, good for Jeff Lacy. Largely because of his Olympic experience, he commanded ample paydays as soon as he joined the pro ranks. For his last few fights, he says he's grossed $200,000-$300,000. That's afforded him a nice home in the Brandon area and a prized possession parked a few steps from the boxing club door: a tricked-out Hummer H2, brilliant silver with 24-inch rims and a sound system that can rock the next zip code. He lounges in the vehicle's spacious front seat during one chat, wearing green combat pants and sandals, his shirtless torso highlighting a thick diamond-encrusted necklace with a large cross on the end.
If Lacy continues to rampage through opponents, it shouldn't be long before he starts banking seven-figure purses. Already a favorite at Showtime, he could well graduate to pay-per-view, where the money gets obscene.
Another thing: Lacy's timing is impeccable. He comes along when the sport is due for another breakout star. The heavyweight ranks are in a slump, populated with such less-than-stellar figures as Vitali Klitschko, John Ruiz and Chris Byrd. The glamour division's biggest name, Mike Tyson, is an international joke. Light heavyweight Roy Jones Jr., often called the greatest fighter of his generation, got knocked out in May by Tampa's Tarver. Both are 35. The book on Winky Wright, 32, is that his disciplined style and lack of knockout flair may prevent him from becoming a household name. Storied middleweight Bernard Hopkins is 39. Oscar De La Hoya, the sport's matinee idol, is 32, but slipping. To wit: He's signed on to be the host for a Fox boxing reality show, The Next Great Champ.
The chips keep stacking up for Lacy, yet even though serious fame may soon come knocking, he feels grounded and ready for it. Lacy likes to hang out at home. Although he doesn't drink or smoke, he'll occasionally pop into a nightclub, but only with a handful of close friends. Don't look for him to turn up with an entourage; that's just asking for trouble, he says. "I carry myself like I'm just like everybody else," he says. "It's just that I'm doin' something that I like to do and it's being recognized. It's a good feeling to know that kids look up to me. I like being a role model."
Lacy is a living example of how boxing can keep a kid off the streets and out of trouble. He and four of his eight siblings grew up in the hardscrabble Midtown section of St. Petersburg, where they were raised by their father, Hydra Lacy.
Jeff's two older brothers did stints in jail for selling drugs, stealing cars and such. "Me, I learned a lot by watching them," he says. "It made me wanna stay away from it. I knew I couldn't be in a cell. I couldn't even stay home."
He did, however, have an appetite for fighting. When Jeff was in elementary school, Hydra got one too many calls about his son getting into a scrap. "When I got off the school bus, he was there waiting," Lacy recounts, smiling and shaking his head. "He put me in the car, told my brothers and sisters to stay home. I didn't know what was goin' on, but we did this punishment to one of our dogs — put him in the car and dropped him off on the other side of town. We never saw the dog again. He's drivin' and I'm lookin' at every turn we're makin'." Lacy breaks into a hearty laugh.
Father and son pulled up at the St. Pete Boxing Club's old location on Farfield Avenue South. Lacy adds, bemused, "They put some headgear and gloves on me. I thought, 'This is my punishment? To box?'"
Jeff learned another lesson that day. He got into the ring with a kid who was smaller. "I thought, 'You can't beat me; I'm bigger than you,'" Lacy recalls. "I started throwin' punches and he was moving around. I thought, 'Why he won't stop?' When I got tired, he came at me. He beat my butt."
Lacy instantly became a gym rat. Hydra, who helped train kids at the boxing club, remembers, "I found out he had a big heart, a big heart. I started taking him every day." Under Birmingham's tutelage, Lacy forged a successful amateur career. And he caught nary a whiff of trouble. "I used to drive to school without a license and on bad tags," he says, and widens his eyes. "That was my bad."
He quit Gibbs High School his junior year, left Birmingham (who was concentrating on Winky Wright's pro career) and gravitated to Calta's Gym in Tampa. There he started training other kids, among them Travis Holley. Soon enough, Travis introduced Jeff to his father, prominent Tampa lawyer Jim Wilkes of Wilkes & McHugh. Just like that, Lacy had a sponsor, a mentor, "an angel," Lacy says. "I was at the right place at the right time."
The teenage boxer was able to quit his job at a car wash and work as a runner for Wilkes & McHugh. He says that in the years hence Wilkes has provided legal counsel and financial advice. (The attorney has a similar relationship with Winky Wright.) In the maelstrom of the boxing business, a fighter having a good, honest lawyer is a top priority at any price. Lacy says that Wilkes won't take a dime for his services.
As a result, Lacy maintains some semblance of free agency. While he has a manager in New York-based Shelly Finkel, he's not tied to a long-term promotion deal. He says his arrangement with promoter Shaw is on a fight-by-fight basis.
"If I win the world title, going to the Olympics will still top that," Lacy says. He didn't make the U.S. team in '96, but even though some would-be handlers urged him to turn pro, he held out for four more years and boxed at 165 in the 2000 Sydney games. His hard-hitting style didn't jibe well with the Olympics, where a light jab counts as much as a knockdown. Lacy lost to a Russian and finished ninth. "I was a little disappointed," he says. "But when I thought about it, really thought about it, my dream was just to be in that spot. Once I got to the Olympics, it was all fun for me."
His first pro bout was on Feb. 2, 2001, at the Ohio State Fairgrounds in Columbus. He won in a first-round knockout, and did the same in his next three fights.
Lacy says that during his pro campaign, he's been punched hard enough to feel the jolt down in his legs, but he's never felt in danger of losing a fight. Last summer, he beat Richard Grant and accumulated three lesser titles in the 168-pound division.
Late last year, Lacy signed on with trainer Freddie Roach and moved to Los Angeles. He lasted three months in Tinseltown. "I'll put it down to you: It's a fake place," he says. "I mean, you have people driving $100,000 cars living in apartment buildings. I didn't want that to rub off on me. And it was hard to relax. Sundays didn't seem like Sundays. At the same time, I saw that Winky was getting ready to fight Shane [Mosley]. By Winky doin' a great job and lookin' the way he did, and Dan trainin' him the way he did, I thought it would be good to get back with Dan."
Lacy moved back to the Bay area in April. He has no plans to leave.
His most recent bout was in June against Russian Vitaly Tsypko in Joplin, Mo. The two duked it out for the No. 2 spot in the IBF rankings, but an incidental head butt forced Tsypko out in the second round. The fight was ruled a no decision.
In mid-July, the details for the Vanderpool fight had not yet been worked out. Lacy was hoping to meet him in September, but it was beginning to look like it would get moved back to November. In the meantime, he'll maintain a moderate training pace and spend a good amount of time resting, relaxing and spending time with his girlfriend, whom he proudly points out is a model.
So yes, life is good for Jeff Lacy, but it can't be perfect. Can it? "One thing I'm disappointed with, it seems like I can never leave my job," he says. "People's always asking questions about boxing, out in public, in the gym. It's, like, I could talk about anything else but boxing, but I find myself talking about the same things over and over with 50 different people throughout the day. It's like a broken record."
Then Jeff Lacy pauses. It's as if he's suddenly realized that he might sound a little petty. "I get frustrated sometimes," he says, his voice softening. "But I smile, 'cause boxing is what I do."
This article appears in Jul 29 – Aug 4, 2004.