My First Boxing Coach
ROLLIE An Old Palooka Who Can Teach You A Thing Or Two
New London
At 79, HE'S GOT A BAD RIGHT HIP, A BUM LEFT shoulder, and broken fingers on each hand have healed to point in a different direction.
"I had five nose operations," he says. "See this here?" He flattens his nose on his face. "I got no bone."
Still, on any given weekday afternoon, Rollie Pier, dressed in gray sweats, a white towel flung over his shoulder, can be found in the Bank Street gym of Team Strike Zone and Whaling City Boxing, teaching young fighters all that he knows about the sweet science.
"Rollie?" says Raymond "Coach Ray" Hodges Jr., who works with kids at the gym. "He's forgotten more than most people ever know: Life, boxing, you name it, man, the guy's a walking dictionary."
"I'm active in the gym," Pier says. "If I didn't have this bad hip, I'd still spar with guys, but I don't because I get vertigo now ... dizziness. Everybody says it's boxing related. Who knows?"
And so the world finds Rollie Pier: five foot six ("I shrunk an inch and a half"), faded blue eyes, dull copper hair cropped like a monk's, a man in the twilight years of a fighting life.
In his day, he fought 102 times, including amateur, semi-pro and pro. He was a welterweight, weighing 150 pounds, and when asked about his record, he says, "I lost 62 fights. I'm not braggin'. I'm tellin' you the truth. And I won - this is not totally accurate - 38 or 39, but I would generally go the three or four rounds, just about make it, you know?"
He sums up his boxing career this way: "I was a phenom that never phenomenated. I was a late bloomer that never bloomed. But I could get in the ring and fake it, and I looked pretty good. People would say, 'That guy knows how to fight.' But I was never great. I was a tomato can or a palooka.
"See, in the vernacular of boxing," he explains, "you've got your champions, you've got your contenders and then, after that, you've got your good opponents, and then you've got opponents, and then you go down to ... palooka. A palooka's a little ahead of a tomato can. I'd say I was a palooka."
Stuff to chew on
It's a Saturday night in the New London High School gym. There's a red, white and blue boxing ring set up in the middle of the floor, surrounded by some 300 people in the bleachers and on folding chairs. It's "The Whaling City Classic," a fundraiser for Heavy Hitters USA, a nonprofit group that teaches kids how to box.
Pier arrives, one of his students, Bethany Geary, in tow. That's right, Pier has been teaching a girl - several young women, actually - to box.
He admits he didn't want to at first.
"I guess it was machismo in boxing. I don't know," he says. "But then we had several girls ... that I taught and they were very good, I mean, they listened."
And that, he says, is what made him change his mind.
"I said, 'All right, c'mon,' gripin' to myself. But the attention span was there. And they'd come back and do me favors. Like now ... I've got type two diabetes and I get a weak spell occasionally, and they bring me stuff to chew on."
Most recently, he's coached three women: Geary, of Westerly, Marsha Agripino, of Groton, and Kelsey Kaiser, of Waterford.
Unfortunately, no women are fighting tonight, he says. It's hard for them to get a fight.
"Bethany's had one fight," Pier says. "She lost. And the other girl already had 10 fights. There's no one else to fight. You can't find 'em. If you go to New York, you can."
But Pier can't talk for long; here, he's a celebrity. Everyone in the gym seems to know him, and there's a constant stream of people coming up to him, shaking his hand, throwing their arms around his shoulders.
Most of those fighting tonight are 17 and 18 or young men in their early 20s. They each fight three rounds of three minutes each, if they can go that long.
Three minutes can seem like forever. In most of the fights, both boxers start out strong, but by the middle of the second round, they clutch and lean into each other.
"I told you, that's how it is," Pier says. "It's a different kind of tiredness, you understand? You've got to be in real good shape to go three rounds. People say, 'Ah, I could do it.' You're waiting in the dressing room. The dressing room's crowded. You learn the guy you're gonna fight's over there. He's lookin' at you. Your hands are being taped. OK, you're next. And that takes a lot out of you. It's enough to destroy guys."
And then, he says, "you've got to fight somebody, and you're not mad at him."
Roberto Vega, another one of Pier's students, gets into the ring, and the crowd lights up. Geary yells, "Don't wait! Don't wait, Roberto," and "Flurries! Flurries!"
Vega and his opponent fight fiercely, with Vega throwing flurries of punches to his opponent's head. Vega wins.
"That was good," Pier says. "They box nice. You won't see a better fight than that tonight."
Kicked in the head
Born Oct. 16, 1929, Roland Pier-Federici grew up on the streets of New London. But he went out into the world and had some adventures before he came home to stay.
You might say his boxing career began the night he got pistol whipped in Mississippi. Not that he hadn't dabbled in boxing before. But that drubbing, he admits today, inspired him to do more than dabble.
"I thought I was going to die," he says. "They kicked me in the head."
Now, as he sits in his basement, surrounded by hundreds of videotapes of boxing matches, he explains, "this is way back in the '50s now, when Yankees weren't too well appreciated."
He and a bunch of other college kids from New London were drinking in a dive in Meridian, Miss., when, "unfortunately, my friends went and asked some girls to dance."
Their boyfriends were not amused.
"They came out and all of a sudden a fight ensued. Guy come out with a gun, started shootin', shot my friend, Louie Casimono, and we all ran different directions. And to make a long story short, the sheriff was the guy that shot my friend, but he survived - leg wounds, back wounds - and I got pistol whipped and the other guys got beat up."
It took Pier a while to get through college.
"I went to six colleges," he says. "I traveled all over. It wasn't uncommon then for guys to go from college to college ... I ended up going for 10 years."
He played football, basketball (even though he admits he was a terrible basketball player), baseball and he boxed. He got a degree in education.
And came home to New England and got a job in Ledyard, where - for 28 years - he taught fifth grade. And that's when he legally shortened his name.
"I did it for convenience purposes," he says. "It was misspelled too much."
Days he would spend in a classroom, teaching the three Rs; night's he'd spend in a gym in Hartford, honing his left hook.
Sometimes, though, his nights in the ring were all too obvious the day after.
"I'd come back to class with black eyes," he says. "The kids, 'What happened?' The principal would go, 'Ah, jeez, this is not what we want in a teacher.'"
A dream denied
Folks with long memories will remember that Pier was also the guy behind the Vagabonds, better known as the Vags, New London's own semi-pro baseball team.
The team played from the '60s all the way through 1986, he says. "And we had a lot of players that could have played pro ball."
But it is boxing that is Rollie Pier's greatest love.
He says he loves the loneliness, the inescapable fact that you're on your own.
"Football is vicious, I know," he says. "Those big guys could kill ya. But you've got teammates. You go out, defense, offense. Boxing, there's no timeouts, nothing. A guy's startin' to get to you, you've got to cover up, and you're getting hurt, and you can't quit."
And he misses the old gyms.
"There used to be old-time fight arenas, with sawdust on the floor, drunks laying there, and you're steppin' over them to go to the ring," he says. "Honest to God."
Pier rubbed shoulders with everyone from Willie Pep to Rocky Graziano, and his dream was to fight just once in Madison Square Garden.
"That would have been it for me," he says. "I would have been the happiest guy in the world. Win, lose or draw, I didn't care. As long as I could come up the ramp."
It was a dream that, at the age of 38, he came within a death of achieving.
"I used to go to the gym in New York called New Garden Gym right by Penn Station, and I got to know this guy Joe Garfield good," Pier begins. "I said, 'Joe, I've been coming here now, and you could do me a great favor: Just get me one four-round fight at the Garden. That's my ambition: one four-round fight.'
"And he says, 'Ah, you don't want it. You're old; you're gonna get killed.' I said, 'Nah, I'll be all right.'"
Garfield said if he could hold his own sparring with a pro, he might get him a fight. And Pier sparred, barely getting through the four rounds.
Finally, Garfield called and said, "OK, you got the fight."
Pier was ecstatic. He had two months to train, and he worked himself hard to get in shape, never telling anyone but his wife, Yvette, that he had a fight coming up in the Garden.
He was training in his basement, jumping rope, when the phone rang.
"And I picked it up, and they said, 'Rollie? Rollie Pier?' And I said, 'Yeah?' 'Joe Garfield died.' 'What?' And I said, 'What about the fight?' And the guy said, 'I don't know about the fight.'"
Nobody, it turned out, would honor the promise of a dead man.
Yankee doodle
As it happened, Pier's biggest fight came a couple of years later, before a crowd of 10,000 at a ring in London. It may be the only time Yvette saw him fight.
"She went with me to the fights," he says. "But if I was fighting, she only went to one out of 102. She didn't like it."
"Yeah, I don't deal well with that," says Yvette Pier. "It's not my cup of tea. I go with him to some of the fights, like I go to the football games with him, but if he's fighting, I don't want to be there.
"I don't hate boxing," she insists. "I just don't like it, just like he wouldn't like knitting."
He and Yvette were on vacation in London, and while she went shopping he would train at the Thomas à Beckett gym. It was there someone approached him and asked him if he could fill in on a fight.
"Now I was like 40 something, but in good shape, looked 30," Pier says. "I said, 'OK, I'll do it.' I wanted to just do it. Like I didn't fight at the Garden, I wanted this ... I remember taping my hands. You sit in a chair. You know how they do. Tape your hands. And they go, 'OK, Yank, you're on,' and I come out of the runway there, I'm telling ya. And they played 'Yankee Doodle Dandy,' you know that song?"
Pier breaks into song, "I'm a Yankee doodle dandy... Wow, I can't tell ya how I felt. It didn't wear off for weeks."
The guy he fought was P.J. Clarke. Pier went the whole four rounds with him and lost.
"He was an English fighter," Pier recalls. "They jab, jab, move, jab, throw rights. He could box real nice."
Surrounded by his stacks of videotapes, Rollie Pier will be the first to tell you that he'd rather watch one of his hundreds of fight tapes than anything that's on the tube today.
"I live in the past mostly," he says. "It's a bad thing. But I come from another era. Up in the gym they play all hip-hop and music where they swear. I can't take it. Turn that off! I turn it down. I can't get used to that. I can't."
And he doesn't like the way some dress.
"Guys coming in, they come in with their pants down, way down, and their hats sideways. No. You've got to adhere to the rules of the gym. To me, it's a shrine."
K.ROBINSON@THEDAY.COM
At 79, HE'S GOT A BAD RIGHT HIP, A BUM LEFT shoulder, and broken fingers on each hand have healed to point in a different direction.
"I had five nose operations," he says. "See this here?" He flattens his nose on his face. "I got no bone."
Still, on any given weekday afternoon, Rollie Pier, dressed in gray sweats, a white towel flung over his shoulder, can be found in the Bank Street gym of Team Strike Zone and Whaling City Boxing, teaching young fighters all that he knows about the sweet science.
"Rollie?" says Raymond "Coach Ray" Hodges Jr., who works with kids at the gym. "He's forgotten more than most people ever know: Life, boxing, you name it, man, the guy's a walking dictionary."
"I'm active in the gym," Pier says. "If I didn't have this bad hip, I'd still spar with guys, but I don't because I get vertigo now ... dizziness. Everybody says it's boxing related. Who knows?"
And so the world finds Rollie Pier: five foot six ("I shrunk an inch and a half"), faded blue eyes, dull copper hair cropped like a monk's, a man in the twilight years of a fighting life.
In his day, he fought 102 times, including amateur, semi-pro and pro. He was a welterweight, weighing 150 pounds, and when asked about his record, he says, "I lost 62 fights. I'm not braggin'. I'm tellin' you the truth. And I won - this is not totally accurate - 38 or 39, but I would generally go the three or four rounds, just about make it, you know?"
He sums up his boxing career this way: "I was a phenom that never phenomenated. I was a late bloomer that never bloomed. But I could get in the ring and fake it, and I looked pretty good. People would say, 'That guy knows how to fight.' But I was never great. I was a tomato can or a palooka.
"See, in the vernacular of boxing," he explains, "you've got your champions, you've got your contenders and then, after that, you've got your good opponents, and then you've got opponents, and then you go down to ... palooka. A palooka's a little ahead of a tomato can. I'd say I was a palooka."
Stuff to chew on
It's a Saturday night in the New London High School gym. There's a red, white and blue boxing ring set up in the middle of the floor, surrounded by some 300 people in the bleachers and on folding chairs. It's "The Whaling City Classic," a fundraiser for Heavy Hitters USA, a nonprofit group that teaches kids how to box.
Pier arrives, one of his students, Bethany Geary, in tow. That's right, Pier has been teaching a girl - several young women, actually - to box.
He admits he didn't want to at first.
"I guess it was machismo in boxing. I don't know," he says. "But then we had several girls ... that I taught and they were very good, I mean, they listened."
And that, he says, is what made him change his mind.
"I said, 'All right, c'mon,' gripin' to myself. But the attention span was there. And they'd come back and do me favors. Like now ... I've got type two diabetes and I get a weak spell occasionally, and they bring me stuff to chew on."
Most recently, he's coached three women: Geary, of Westerly, Marsha Agripino, of Groton, and Kelsey Kaiser, of Waterford.
Unfortunately, no women are fighting tonight, he says. It's hard for them to get a fight.
"Bethany's had one fight," Pier says. "She lost. And the other girl already had 10 fights. There's no one else to fight. You can't find 'em. If you go to New York, you can."
But Pier can't talk for long; here, he's a celebrity. Everyone in the gym seems to know him, and there's a constant stream of people coming up to him, shaking his hand, throwing their arms around his shoulders.
Most of those fighting tonight are 17 and 18 or young men in their early 20s. They each fight three rounds of three minutes each, if they can go that long.
Three minutes can seem like forever. In most of the fights, both boxers start out strong, but by the middle of the second round, they clutch and lean into each other.
"I told you, that's how it is," Pier says. "It's a different kind of tiredness, you understand? You've got to be in real good shape to go three rounds. People say, 'Ah, I could do it.' You're waiting in the dressing room. The dressing room's crowded. You learn the guy you're gonna fight's over there. He's lookin' at you. Your hands are being taped. OK, you're next. And that takes a lot out of you. It's enough to destroy guys."
And then, he says, "you've got to fight somebody, and you're not mad at him."
Roberto Vega, another one of Pier's students, gets into the ring, and the crowd lights up. Geary yells, "Don't wait! Don't wait, Roberto," and "Flurries! Flurries!"
Vega and his opponent fight fiercely, with Vega throwing flurries of punches to his opponent's head. Vega wins.
"That was good," Pier says. "They box nice. You won't see a better fight than that tonight."
Kicked in the head
Born Oct. 16, 1929, Roland Pier-Federici grew up on the streets of New London. But he went out into the world and had some adventures before he came home to stay.
You might say his boxing career began the night he got pistol whipped in Mississippi. Not that he hadn't dabbled in boxing before. But that drubbing, he admits today, inspired him to do more than dabble.
"I thought I was going to die," he says. "They kicked me in the head."
Now, as he sits in his basement, surrounded by hundreds of videotapes of boxing matches, he explains, "this is way back in the '50s now, when Yankees weren't too well appreciated."
He and a bunch of other college kids from New London were drinking in a dive in Meridian, Miss., when, "unfortunately, my friends went and asked some girls to dance."
Their boyfriends were not amused.
"They came out and all of a sudden a fight ensued. Guy come out with a gun, started shootin', shot my friend, Louie Casimono, and we all ran different directions. And to make a long story short, the sheriff was the guy that shot my friend, but he survived - leg wounds, back wounds - and I got pistol whipped and the other guys got beat up."
It took Pier a while to get through college.
"I went to six colleges," he says. "I traveled all over. It wasn't uncommon then for guys to go from college to college ... I ended up going for 10 years."
He played football, basketball (even though he admits he was a terrible basketball player), baseball and he boxed. He got a degree in education.
And came home to New England and got a job in Ledyard, where - for 28 years - he taught fifth grade. And that's when he legally shortened his name.
"I did it for convenience purposes," he says. "It was misspelled too much."
Days he would spend in a classroom, teaching the three Rs; night's he'd spend in a gym in Hartford, honing his left hook.
Sometimes, though, his nights in the ring were all too obvious the day after.
"I'd come back to class with black eyes," he says. "The kids, 'What happened?' The principal would go, 'Ah, jeez, this is not what we want in a teacher.'"
A dream denied
Folks with long memories will remember that Pier was also the guy behind the Vagabonds, better known as the Vags, New London's own semi-pro baseball team.
The team played from the '60s all the way through 1986, he says. "And we had a lot of players that could have played pro ball."
But it is boxing that is Rollie Pier's greatest love.
He says he loves the loneliness, the inescapable fact that you're on your own.
"Football is vicious, I know," he says. "Those big guys could kill ya. But you've got teammates. You go out, defense, offense. Boxing, there's no timeouts, nothing. A guy's startin' to get to you, you've got to cover up, and you're getting hurt, and you can't quit."
And he misses the old gyms.
"There used to be old-time fight arenas, with sawdust on the floor, drunks laying there, and you're steppin' over them to go to the ring," he says. "Honest to God."
Pier rubbed shoulders with everyone from Willie Pep to Rocky Graziano, and his dream was to fight just once in Madison Square Garden.
"That would have been it for me," he says. "I would have been the happiest guy in the world. Win, lose or draw, I didn't care. As long as I could come up the ramp."
It was a dream that, at the age of 38, he came within a death of achieving.
"I used to go to the gym in New York called New Garden Gym right by Penn Station, and I got to know this guy Joe Garfield good," Pier begins. "I said, 'Joe, I've been coming here now, and you could do me a great favor: Just get me one four-round fight at the Garden. That's my ambition: one four-round fight.'
"And he says, 'Ah, you don't want it. You're old; you're gonna get killed.' I said, 'Nah, I'll be all right.'"
Garfield said if he could hold his own sparring with a pro, he might get him a fight. And Pier sparred, barely getting through the four rounds.
Finally, Garfield called and said, "OK, you got the fight."
Pier was ecstatic. He had two months to train, and he worked himself hard to get in shape, never telling anyone but his wife, Yvette, that he had a fight coming up in the Garden.
He was training in his basement, jumping rope, when the phone rang.
"And I picked it up, and they said, 'Rollie? Rollie Pier?' And I said, 'Yeah?' 'Joe Garfield died.' 'What?' And I said, 'What about the fight?' And the guy said, 'I don't know about the fight.'"
Nobody, it turned out, would honor the promise of a dead man.
Yankee doodle
As it happened, Pier's biggest fight came a couple of years later, before a crowd of 10,000 at a ring in London. It may be the only time Yvette saw him fight.
"She went with me to the fights," he says. "But if I was fighting, she only went to one out of 102. She didn't like it."
"Yeah, I don't deal well with that," says Yvette Pier. "It's not my cup of tea. I go with him to some of the fights, like I go to the football games with him, but if he's fighting, I don't want to be there.
"I don't hate boxing," she insists. "I just don't like it, just like he wouldn't like knitting."
He and Yvette were on vacation in London, and while she went shopping he would train at the Thomas à Beckett gym. It was there someone approached him and asked him if he could fill in on a fight.
"Now I was like 40 something, but in good shape, looked 30," Pier says. "I said, 'OK, I'll do it.' I wanted to just do it. Like I didn't fight at the Garden, I wanted this ... I remember taping my hands. You sit in a chair. You know how they do. Tape your hands. And they go, 'OK, Yank, you're on,' and I come out of the runway there, I'm telling ya. And they played 'Yankee Doodle Dandy,' you know that song?"
Pier breaks into song, "I'm a Yankee doodle dandy... Wow, I can't tell ya how I felt. It didn't wear off for weeks."
The guy he fought was P.J. Clarke. Pier went the whole four rounds with him and lost.
"He was an English fighter," Pier recalls. "They jab, jab, move, jab, throw rights. He could box real nice."
Surrounded by his stacks of videotapes, Rollie Pier will be the first to tell you that he'd rather watch one of his hundreds of fight tapes than anything that's on the tube today.
"I live in the past mostly," he says. "It's a bad thing. But I come from another era. Up in the gym they play all hip-hop and music where they swear. I can't take it. Turn that off! I turn it down. I can't get used to that. I can't."
And he doesn't like the way some dress.
"Guys coming in, they come in with their pants down, way down, and their hats sideways. No. You've got to adhere to the rules of the gym. To me, it's a shrine."
K.ROBINSON@THEDAY.COM
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