Ed Willes traces Michael Olajide’s journey from city boxer to Hollywood trainer
East Van’s Olajide traded blows with boxing’s best middleweights before rubbing elbows with celebrities
During his two decades in the film industry, Michael Olajide has helped choreograph the fight scenes in Ali, The Black Dahlia and Chuck, the 2016 picture about Chuck Wepner, the Bayonne Bleeder.
He’s trained, among others, Hugh Jackman, Will Smith, Liev Schreiber, and it goes without saying, Dustin Hoffman. His current project is an exercise app with Chris Hemsworth. He’s also worked with Spike Lee and Brian De Palma.
One of his regular gigs used to be training supermodels for the runway. His clients there included Linda Evangelista and Iman.
“I was approached by everyone I ever worked with,” Olajide says matter-of-factly over the phone from his home in New York. “They found me, I didn’t find them.”
Olajide, the former No. 1 middleweight contender from East Vancouver by way of Steveston by way of Liverpool, has been chatting away amiably for more than an hour — dropping names, telling of his many great adventures — when it’s put to him that the movie of his own life would be his greatest project.
He thinks about this for a few seconds, then answers.
“I’m still trying to process everything from when I started boxing to now, and I’ve just been in one mind,” he says. “You’re creating something. You have children. You have responsibilities. You don’t want the demons to come up.
“But at some point you have to reflect on everything that’s happened. When I was 16, I remember thinking my life is the most boring thing. When is something going to happen? Then all of a sudden, boom, everything started to happen. The story’s still being told.”
So it’s difficult to tell a story that isn’t complete. But this would be the hardest part about capturing Olajide’s life in a movie.
Who would believe it?
EYE INJURY FORCES RETIREMENT
Here are the broad strokes: Under the tutelage of his late father, Michael Sr., Olajide became one of the top-ranked middleweights in the world in the late 1980s. After losses to
Iran Barkley and Thomas Hearns, an injury to his right eye forced him to retire. He now wears a patch over the eye that makes him look like a character from Game of Thrones.
With his boxing career over, and faced with the prospect of returning to Vancouver, a chiropractor named Alessandro Pireno referred some of his patients to Olajide. The former prize fighter didn’t know much about physical therapy but he knew about boxing and he began to build programs — minus the getting punched in face part — based on training for the ring.
He did this at a church in midtown Manhattan.
The programs became popular. An article in the New York Post brought him notoriety. Olajide, who has never lacked for charisma, eventually landed a gig at Equinox, one of the It gyms in Manhattan, where he met Kathy Smith, then America’s fitness darling.
They did a video together and it became a bestseller. Celebrities approached him. His profile grew. He got married and had two sons with his wife, Maryann Levesque. He opened Aerospace, another It gym in Manhattan, with former ballerina Leila Fazel.
Now, at 56, he still sounds a little bewildered about the events that have shaped his life, but he tries to stay in the moment, focusing on the work that’s brought him his own measure of stardom.
It’s just hard to keep things in perspective when Dustin Hoffman is making you a brisket sandwich.
“He wanted to work with me and invited me to his place,” Olajide says. “We’re in his kitchen and we’re talking and he says, ‘Can I make you a sandwich?’
“I’m watching The Marathon Man make me a sandwich. I just couldn’t get my head around it.”
His world is filled with these anecdotes.
Michael Mann, the celebrated director, was looking for someone to help out with Ali when he reached out to Angelo Dundee, Ali’s former trainer.
As it happens, Dundee trained Olajide for his fight with Hearns and knew he had worked choreographing fight scenes on Broadway. A couple of calls later, Olajide was working with Will Smith.
“I know it sounds crazy but I’ve been doing this for a long time now,” Olajide says. “I started doing it because the will to be a fighter was still there. That was the energy I brought. I expected the people I was working with to do it exactly the way a fighter would do it.
“They loved it. They loved that I was investing energy in them.”
FATHER OPENS EAST VAN GYM
He came by his love of training honestly. The fight game is another story.
Michael Olajide Sr. moved his family from Nigeria to Liverpool to Steveston, where his son said he enjoyed an idyllic upbringing before Michael Jr. moved to East Van with his mother Olive and sister Tracy.
That wasn’t as idyllic, but it put a series of events in motion that led Olajide Jr. to the ring. His father started a gym, Kingsway, in East Van. The teenager enrolled at Templeton High School, where his classmates included Tony Pep, another Vancouver kid who would become a ranked super featherweight.
Manny Sobral, yet another Vancouver resident who would make a name in boxing, was a couple of years behind Olajide and Pep at Templeton.
“I’m 13, they were 17, and they were huge to me,” says Sobral. “I wanted to be like them.”
Pep and Olajide trained with Michael Sr. at Kingsway. They fought locally as amateurs. The father, who had boxed in Nigeria, could see his son had a gift. He also saw he could make money as a fighter, and Olajide Jr. turned pro shortly after his 18th birthday.
“I want people to understand that fighters who make it today have an incredible amount of amateur experience,” says Olajide. “I had maybe 20 fights as an amateur. I just didn’t get the experience I needed to build a strong foundation.”
Olajide spent four years fighting locally, learning his craft, building a reputation. There were 11 fights in Vancouver in such colourful locales as the Royal Towers Ballroom and the Kensington Park Arena. He won his first 14 fights, 11 by knockout.
That got him a shot against Elio Diaz, a ranked fighter from Venezuela. Olajide took him out in the seventh round at the Pacific Coliseum and the boxing world took notice.
After a couple of fights in Atlantic City, Olajide was offered a contract by the promotional arm of Madison Square Gardens. He and his father relocated to New York City and began working out at the fabled Gleason’s Gym, where a whole new world was revealed to them.
“It was amazing,” he says. “You would look around and see 15 guys who were champions or top contenders. Hector Camacho, Wilfred Benitez. And you’re working out with them.
“I was a big fish in a small pond. Once you step out of that pond, you have to fight the best in the world. You have to adapt and if you don’t adapt fast enough, you can get hurt.”
He had three fights at MSG and three more in Atlantic City before he was thrown in against Frank Tate, the gold medallist from the Los Angeles Olympics, and like Olajide, a rising star. The Canadian was ahead on points when Tate knocked him down with a big right hand. He lost a 15-round decision.
Olajide was 23-0 to that point in his career. He lost four of his next eight fights, including TKOs by Barkley and Hearns, before retiring at 27.
“I came along when it might have been the strongest middleweight division in history,” he says. “Everyone in the top 10 was capable of winning a world title.”
Was he good enough to hang with the best middleweights of his era?
“I’ll just say this. There are less talented individuals who’ve won world titles.”
Talent, in fact, was never the issue with Olajide. But he had other forces working against him. He suffered a severe injury to his right eye while sparring at Gleason’s. He’s now legally blind in that eye.
His relationship with his father/trainer also became strained, then fractured.
“Obviously we had a lot of conflict in my career, and as I grew more mature, we conflicted more,” Olajide says. “I don’t think it would have been possible for me to get where I got to without my father.
“But he can only get you so far. Then you bring in the people to get you to the next stage. That’s what I needed at that point.”
Olajide Sr. eventually ran his own gym in New York City. It was also called Kingsway. He died 10 years ago.
“I’m not sure,” Olajide says when asked if he ever fixed things with his father. “There were a lot of things that were left open, but I reconciled things within myself.”
SISTER LOSES HER WAY
Other wounds didn’t heal. When he was a teenager, his mother Olive worked two cleaning jobs to provide for Michael Jr. and Tracy. Michael had boxing. Tracy fell into drugs.
She supported her habit with prostitution. In 1995, her body was found by a logging road near Agassiz. It was one of three murders committed at the time that have never been solved. Tammy Pipe and Victoria Younker were the other victims.
“I saw how that storm happened,” Olajide says. “If feels like it was yesterday to me. She was such a beautiful person with such beautiful energy. The wrong people came into her atmosphere.
“It’s so deep, I can’t do it justice talking about it.”
He has a brother (David) and a sister (Sandra) who still live in Vancouver. Both are musicians. He has two sons with Levesque. Kayin and Alessandro, who just graduated from the Naval Academy and is a second lieutenant in the Marines.
“Ultimately, I think I’ve had a pretty good life and I owe that to my mom and my father,” he says. “Would I do some things differently? Well, hindsight is always 20-20 and I don’t have 20-20 vision anymore!”
The fighter, who still remains, laughs at that one.