The fighter and the writer

I was about to decide that an evening of watching movies at home might not be so bad after all.

Sports brought us together in the first place.

The Environment

There was no ring where Joe Fragale had his first fight. No rap music to stir the crowd up, no fancy introductions. There weren’t even refreshments.

The back alleys in the south St. Louis neighborhood where he grew up weren’t equipped with such luxuries.

They didn’t have to be, just as long as the bully got the message: Joe Fragale might have been one of the smallest first-graders around, but he wasn’t going to stand for being abused.

Fifteen years later, Fragale is still fighting. But his fights are not about a touchdown at recess, and there are no teachers to break them up. They are sanctioned through the Columbia Boxing Club and held indoors. In a ring. With ropes.

He isn’t the main event, like he was in grade school. That night he led off a 16-fight card at the National Guard Armory in Jefferson City, priming the crowd for the next bouts.

Still, the MU junior’s passion for boxing is unchanged.

“My goal is to, by next year, before I graduate, be in the Golden Gloves and hopefully get a Golden Gloves title,” Fragale said.

Then, he said, he will give up fighting. He will be at ease about the whole thing. As a result, so will his mother.

Boxing is too violent a proposition, let alone when it involves one of her own. So attending matches is out of the question.

“She’ll never come,” Fragale said. “I could be fighting for the world title and she wouldn’t even watch it on TV.”

Limitations

Fragale is more stubborn than many his age. At 20, most young men and women have concluded that sports is solely recreational and abandoned their childhood dreams of becoming a career athlete.

No matter the sunny philosophy of parents who preach to their children that anything can be accomplished if you put your mind to it, most kids get the cold, hard facts.

You can’t play center field for the Yankees if you can’t hit a curveball. Only the best 5-foot-8 players go on to the NBA.

Ultimately, Fragale knows this. But he doesn’t think about letting go. His love affair with sports is too passionate.

He credits it to his old neighborhood, where pickup games started up on most afternoons after school and were the order of every summer day.

“It was more of a blue-collar type situation,” Fragale said. “It was just what I was accustomed to: The type of people, their upbringing, what we did. Playing hockey in the schoolyard, just kind of running around the neighborhood, always mixing it up.”

He also played sports for his grade school teams and during P.E. and recess. One of the games was “unfair soccer,” so-called because body checking and the use of hands was allowed.

“That game just digressed into complete chaos,” he said. “Those were some heated battles. You had to perform at recess. You had to perform or you were going to think about it all day.”

On the playground

Living in the city meant that there were dozens of kids always looking for something to do. On school holidays and during vacations, Fragale and his friends turned to pickup games to fill the void.

At times, the minor disagreements that arose during these games followed until the next day, long after everyone had parted because of the bell, sundown, or to get home for dinner.

During the school year, the taunting from a game-winning play could fester into fights after class.

When these squabbles weren’t broken up, Fragale, passionate about most things, was involved in them.

He learned to fight to deal with bullies. Sometimes on the walk home from school, other students would wrestle his book bag away from him, toss it as far as they could, and kick him down.

Fragale consulted his father, Joe Sr., who had boxed for a couple years as a teenager. After a couple weeks’ worth of tutelage, he was ready.

Steve McDermott wasn’t.

“It’s very vivid in my mind,” Fragale said. “I was six years old, first grade. He grabbed my bag, threw it, and kicked me. I grabbed him and in one hit, just laid him out.”

Though these incidents didn’t disappear after that, he said, Fragale was at least ready to defend himself.

But that would end up being the extent of his fighting adventures for a while.

Reunited

Years later, when I walked into the armory, I saw Joe Fragale Sr. nervously chatting with his eldest son, Nick. At that point, the conversation had outlasted two temporary lulls that occurred during Nick’s trip to the concession stand to get two diet colas for he and his father.

The extra caffeine only added to his excitement.

I re-introduced myself to Joe Sr. and Nick and caught up on things for a few minutes. I learned nearly as much about Fragale’s opponent as I did the events of the decade that had passed.

Fragale would be facing a stand-up fighter who was taller and heavier. He should have been an easy target and quick to tire. Even in the short span of the fight – three two-minute rounds.

At any rate, six minutes was probably longer than any of has previous matches on the schoolyard.

Fragale and his family moved to Eureka, about a half-hour west of St. Louis, after he finished the fifth grade.

They stayed there for six years, but things weren’t the same.

“You might have one friend within three miles,” he said. “Kids who sat around and played Nintendo all day. I used to wake up on Saturday mornings and try to get people to play something. It was useless.”

They returned briefly to the city before relocating again, this time to St. Louis County. Fragale’s parents both grew up in St. Louis and wanted to be closer.

Between moves to and from the city, Fragale took up boxing again. His parents didn’t know. He took a bus downtown from his grandmother’s house to train at the South Broadway Athletic Club, his father’s old gym.

He said the secrecy of it all made it more fun, but his primary goal was to stay in shape.

After his family moved again, he said, “It just kind of got put on the back-burner.”

Fragale came to Missouri in the fall of 2003 and joined the ROTC in hopes of getting scholarship money.

In the spring of 2004, he learned that he wouldn’t be receiving the ROTC scholarship and he had to leave MU.

Fragale went to community college in St. Louis and saved enough money to return to MU. He returned to Columbia last fall.

Boxing called again.

“I had a little extra time at school and wasn’t really involved with anything,” he said. “I just figured I’d give it a run.”

He began training with the Columbia Boxing Club in August.

“It’s just one of those stones from my youth that I kind of left it unturned,” Fragale said. “I’m just giving it a run and seeing where I go. I don’t plan to be in it too long. Then I’ll just be at ease about it. It just burned me up. It just wasn’t normal the way I would think about it all the time every time I turned on the TV. ‘I shoulda’ or ‘I coulda.’ I never got my chance to do it. I just wanted to do it so bad, I don’t know what it is about my personality.”

Into the ring

His old bouts in the back of school rivaled this one for excitement. Fragale won by decision by doing the little things and wearing his opponent down.

Dodge the long jab. Cut down the angles. Move around the ring.

There were times when Fragale looked dominant. Three times he was able to land a quick flurry of combinations before his opponent could push him away or try to lock him up. These moments were the difference in the fight.

At the end of the third round, following the referee’s conference with the judges, Fragale’s name was announced as the winner.

It was horribly mispronounced. In fact, the name was spelled “Frasere” in the program.

He met with his trainers and then briefly retreated to a locker room in the back of the armory.

Joe Sr. and Nick were waiting for him when he emerged.

Fragale stood to his father’s right and nodded, letting the advice and constructive criticism soak in like the blood and sweat on the towel draped over his shoulder. He was relishing the feeling of his first amateur win. His father was already focused on helping him get No. 2.

Fragale greeted me a few minutes later. What brings you here? How have you been?

I didn’t know until then that he looked upon his active childhood with such reverence.

Connections

He lived in a house six blocks away from me until the move to Eureka.

I organized the pickup games he cherished. Fragale was usually near the top of my list and often awaited my daily calls.

That night, as we talked in the armory and made plans to reconnect, I thought about the moral of it all.

The fighter and the writer.

My athletic dreams had long been put aside. I toiled at the bottom of the batting order for a select baseball team during the summer entering high school and sulked because the coach’s son occupied my long-time position, third base. I convinced myself to be happy with taking walks or getting hit by a pitch.

My high school cross-country coach wasn’t keen on the idea of me staying after school to aid in the editing and layout of the school newspaper instead of practice. I lobbied to make up my miles in the morning but had no luck.

By the last race of my sophomore season, my decision had already been made.

I would still be involved with sports, but only as someone who wrote about them.

My friend took another road.