By Abigail Ronck
Michael Dominguez throws punches to stay alive. He has for all of his life. At 52 years old his nose looks like that of a pug, pushed in and dented. His mom introduced him to the fight game. She was his first opponent. One night, when he was very young, he came home two hours late. His mother broke his nose. With seven other children to look after, he says, she had no tolerance for extra worry. She was concerned for his well-being. It was the most loving punch he would ever receive.
On a chilly fall evening in Upper Manhattan, Dominguez sits atop the landing of a stoop eating French fries and drinking tea. He doesn’t like alcohol. Other than marijuana, he says, drugs are a thing of his past. He wears dreads beneath a black knit cap that fall halfway down his back. His dog, Major, is down five steps below on the pavement tied to a fire hydrant. People amble by, stopping to admire the pet’s white fur, spotted with black. Dominguez is gracious until a woman, over-bundled in a winter coat, walks by with a smaller dog on a leash. She glances warily at Dominguez and pulls the leash tight.
“I’m glad you took the time out to talk,” he says to me, “because people have a misconception, which is ‘Don’t trust anyone from the projects.’” He pauses and thinks for a moment and then says, “That could be true.”
Born in 1958 Brooklyn to a Puerto Rican mother and a father who wasn’t there, Dominguez momentarily can’t recall in which neighborhood he lived. He thinks it was Fort Greene. “I got a little bit of Parkinson’s disease and I can’t remember certain things.” He talks softly, stumbling a bit over words.
Even though many of the stark buildings that people associate with low-income housing look the same to outsiders, Dominguez describes growing up in the red brick high-rises as widely varied—even within one building. “Living in the projects was like a little town,” he says. “Each floor was different.” The one he and his family eventually moved into on 90th street in New York City’s Upper West Side was not like the one in Brooklyn.
Either place, Dominguez hustled to make sure his family could buy milk. “At that time I was just shining shoes,” he says. That is how he says he met Dennis Wilson from the Beach Boys at 11 years old. When he was working in Central Park one day a woman gave him a ticket to see the band at the Fillmore East. He snuck backstage, looking for mischief. Wilson took a liking to him, he says, and bought breakfast for the two of them and then put him in a cab with $20 bucks. “Fucking $20 dollars! That was a lot of money back then, for a kid,” Dominguez says.
As a student attending school in Brooklyn, he was pushed from class to class. When I ask how far he made it through school, he says, “I didn’t.” By junior high, he landed himself in a school for troubled youths in Queens called St. John’s. There were 150 other students.
“Shit was hitting the fan,” Dominguez says. While in the all-boys home he joined the Black Spades, a violent black gang prominent in the city in the 1970s. Dominguez says he saw sexual abuse during his two years there but never experienced it himself.
“Coming out of the home, I started getting crazy. When you come back to society, to the street, you come out with a different attitude. You’re tough.” He pauses. “It was just a front though. We were all scared.”
Dominguez got a job as a porter in a high-rise building where he constructed a punching bag. He wanted to hit things. He bought some foam and wrapped a little mattress around it, securing it with wire. He covered it with a mailbag. In his downtime, he played it hard. “There used to be this guy, Joe, a nasty motherfucker who came around. One day I asked him what his problem was. He just went over to the bag and started punching it.” It turned out that Joe was an old lightweight Mexican champion. He would teach Dominguez the techniques he hadn’t learned on the streets. This was 1973.
A well-dressed man in a business suit and tie ascends the steps where we are talking. We are in his way. Dominguez says, “I live in this neighborhood.” The man looks skeptical. “You know Barney?” He knows him. “You know Brenda K. Starr?,” Dominguez continues. He knows her too.
It’s a testament to how the neighborhood has mixed itself up, street by street, class by class. Around these streets, Dominguez knows everyone who’s been here for some time, some well to do, some less so. Ask any local vendor or storeowner who sells cigarettes and Diet Coke what Dominguez once did and they’ll silently, as if on cue, throw their firsts in the air and simulate throwing right hooks.
The man in the suit eases into a comfort zone and smiles, making small-talk before unlocking the door to his apartment. Dominguez can schmooze. “That’s what you call it,” he says. “I call it shining shoes.”
After he started training at a club on 28th street, Dominguez says he set his sights on “the Academy Awards” of the street—a Golden Gloves title. Aficionados of the sport still consider this amateur boxing tournament among one of the top titles for nonprofessionals. In 1928 Paul Gallico, a former sports editor of the New York Daily News, conceived of the idea of bringing newspaper-sponsored boxers from around the country to the city to fight. The top prize was a replica pair of diamond-studded golden gloves. At that time, they cost $65.
“I would see these guys with this charm on their neck, and I wanted that charm. It has two pair of gloves. I’ll show it to you,” Dominguez says pulling out a silver necklace from beneath his gray hooded sweatshirt. It is not the same as worn by the champions. He had his pair made.
In 1981, Dominguez earned his place in the tournament. Slight of frame and only 5’ 9,’’ he fought in the 132-pound open. Madison Square Garden drew over 20,000 roaring spectators. Dominguez lost in round three.
He went on to win a bronze medal in the World Cup as an amateur. It was, as he describes it, the projects all over again. He represented Puerto Rico and every floor was a different fight with a different kind of opponent. He lost to a Russian fighter. “I knocked this guy out about four times but he just kept coming back trying to beat me. So I lost,” Dominguez says. When he came back to the neighborhood, he got congratulations. His name was in the back of the Daily News. The write-up was all about how he just kept knocking this guy down. “Boxing was a turn-on for me. It was like therapy. I like the high of being hit. Both hitting, and getting hit,” he says.
Before Dominguez went professional, he fought for the USA Boxing Team. Traveling to Sweden, Norway and Germany, at that time he says he was recognized as one of the top lightweight amateurs in the country.
Life and work were as one, Dominguez says. Both were a party, enhanced by the high of sharp blows to the face and the other kind of blow into the nose. He had started doing cocaine and was out every night in clubs like Studio 54. In 1982, Dominguez turned professional. He was 14 and one. It was the best ten years of a lifetime—and it all ended in seven rounds at Madison Square Garden. The man he was fighting had six knockouts. Dominguez shattered his hand. “I got $250. I never fought again.”
He thinks for a moment, and says, “Growing up I had to learn not to get accustomed to things too fast, because they would get taken away from me.” The wind blows and his dog barks. “I couldn’t be too sensitive.”
Dominguez grows quieter and more hesitant. He speaks very little of the period between 1983 and 1996, during which he was arrested for possession and attempt to sell. He served two years in a Buffalo prison. When he got out, he was arrested again. “When you’re in jail you have no family. Family changes. At least mine did.” Dominguez says he didn’t receive a single letter or package during his incarceration.
He is an honest man and blames the fall of a life on being financially illiterate, and not just an injured hand. “When I had things, I shared them,” he says. “When I had money, I shared it.” Today Dominguez lives on permanent disability. “I have mismanaged my life, the contracts, the women. That’s one of my big faults,” he says.
Michael Dominguez can’t read a menu. When he goes to restaurants, he studies one carefully and then orders a cheeseburger, hoping they serve one. When I ask about the Parkinson’s he mentioned earlier in conversation, he seems to have forgotten. His temper flares a bit and his voice rises. It’s the voice of a competitor. “I have it? What are you, a doctor?” He stops himself and looks away. “I got hit in the head for a living. Who knows?,” he says.
He asks me if he still scares me. I say he never did. He repeats the question. I say no. Then he asks why I like him so much. After all he’s been through, he says, he can’t understand. I guess it’s just that I do, I tell him. Everyone gets knocked around a little; it’s just a matter of how.
Tomorrow, just like every other morning, Dominguez will wake up in an apartment where he sleeps on a sofa too short for the length of his body, with light wooden arms at each end that bump his head and his feet. He will take the subway to Brooklyn, the borough of his birth and his past. He will exit at High Street and walk up the stairs to Gleason’s gym—to box. The place’s website touts it as “Brooklyn’s World Famous Boxing Gym,” frequented back in the day by Muhammad Ali and Mike Tyson. Located under the Brooklyn Bridge, the gym holds its members to this standard:
“Now, whoever has courage and a strong collected spirit in his breast let him come forward, lace up his gloves and put up his hands. –Virgil.”
There is no air-conditioning and the place smells bad. There are four rings and eight heavy bags taped up with duct tape. Just shy of 50 trainers, retired Golden Glove champs offer their expertise for around $30 a session. Dominguez goes every day to fight whoever else shows up.
As for any regrets, he says, “I’m not dead. I’ve got my freedom. I’ve got my dog.” And, he continues, everything he ever wanted came, and went, from boxing.
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