THE DIFFERENCE A MENTOR, AND A BOXING RING, CAN MAKE
Boxer Mike Tyson once said, “Everyone has a plan ’till they get punched in the face.” For “The Pittsburgh Kid,” Paul Spadafora, former IBF lightweight champ and McKees Rocks-native, the problem was never in-fight strategy, as he ended his stellar career with a record of 49-1-1.
In 1999, he brought Pittsburgh its first boxing title in fifty years and was thought of, for a time, as a franchise himself, behind only the city’s professional sports teams in recognition and popularity. But legal and personal issues arose outside the squared circle — including going to prison for shooting his girlfriend and a series of assault charges later —mostly stemming from his alcoholism and drug use. And like a car wreck on the Parkway, this story is hard to turn away from.
Spadafora’s childhood included his father dying of a drug overdose when he was nine, and being homeless for several weeks as a teenager, a stint that led him to live with a coach who’s now a registered sex offender. “I was poor and stayed by his side to get things I needed,” Spadafora told his biographer Chris Scarnati. “It was a survival technique. To this day, I don’t feel bad about how things went down.”
Scarnati, a teacher at Sto-Rox Upper Elementary, first wrote on the homegrown boxer for Sports Illustrated in 2013, covering Spadafora’s comeback after a stint in rehab. He would “bare his soul and tell you everything about this life,” Scarnati said in a recent interview with the school district’s newspaper. “It’s refreshing for a journalist because a lot of your subjects keep everything very guarded.”
His book, “Paul Spadafora: Fighting Till the End,” transforms Spadafora’s trauma and the near-tragedy of his life into something that approaches the redemptive. And a big reason is the man who came into his life as a trainer who became a mentor.
Fatherly mentors
Spadafora followed his older brother Harry to the gym and started boxing when he was eleven. His first trainer, Charles “P.K.” Pecora saw him as a prodigy and convinced Paul, underwhelming academically, to leave school in 9th grade to focus on becoming a professional.
Boxing has never been a country club sport, with its ranks often coming from marginalized populations. What Scarnati gets readers to consider is not only the gritty details of Spadafora’s upbringing and personal life, but how people playing a sport based on single combat rely on mentors, with trainers often taking on a fatherly role for those looking for
discipline and needing guidance.
It’s a story often told. Even “Iron Mike” talked extensively in his HBO documentary on the legendary Cus D’Amato helping him find structure.
Pecora was Spadafora’s first mentor. Before he passed from a stroke, he tabbed a former fighter from Ambridge in his late twenties, Tom Yankello, to take his place in Paul’s corner. Yankello’s own career had recently been short circuited by multiple labrum injuries.
“Someone once told me that the definition of Hell is when the person you are meets the person you could have become,” he told Scarnati. “That is hard to swallow.” His own early career setbacks had shaped him into a member of the PA Boxing Hall of Fame while also using the sport as outreach toat-risk kids in the Beaver Valley.
In an interview with the Post-Gazette, the trainer provides insight into his own journey that has both dovetailed and diverged with Spadafora’s since they first began working together in the ’90s. Still fit for the ring, Yankello balances affability with a technical acumen as he spars and produces boxing tutorials that have gained hundreds of thousands of followers.
He credits his beginnings to watching “Rocky” when he was five, which gave him his earliest memory of boxing. He “fell in love with the sport at that moment. I got my first pair of boxing gloves soon thereafter as well as a heavy bag, a double end bag, and a speed bag.” His father built a ring in their basement.
He practiced there on his own for the next six years, mixing boxing with basketball. “It wasn’t until I was about 12 years old that I actually started going to a boxing gym. Most of my boxing tips were given to me by my uncle Mike, my grandfather, and my dad.” His uncle had been the Naval boxing champion.
A boxing lifer
When asked about his favorite boxer to work with, he’s diplomatic yet effusive about Spadafora’s prodigious skills, skills he helped refine. To many, boxing is pure power and imposition of will. Yankello believes “positioning beats speed, and deceleration is as important as acceleration. The concept that slow is smooth and smooth is fast, and Paul had that skill!”
Spadafora was “able to take the power off the opponents’ punches because of his ability to soften himself up and decelerate to take the impact of his opponents’ punches off and at the same time. … He always knew how to dictate the pace of a fight.” In short, Spadafora was a boxer’s boxer.
It feels like this boxing lifer could spin endless anecdotes, given his pride in the success stories of fighters. Calvin Brock, for example, who rose to be the 7th ranked heavyweight in the world and fought twice for the world heavyweight championship.
A will to give back seems to drive him. In his own gym, World Class Boxing in Ambridge, he’s surrounded by what he loves as the concrete details of the sport: sounds of people jumping rope and hitting the bags and pads, the ringing of the bell, the smell of sweat and leather. It’s a place where he can emphasize “work ethic, sacrifice, discipline, dedication, and self-esteem” to new generations in a sport that’ll test “every fiber of your mind and body.”
One way he’s giving back is through his nonprofit, Stay Off the Streets. The organization encourages “at-risk youth in Beaver County, those ages 7-18 … to shift their paths, and avoid the pitfalls found on the streets.”
A real teacher
As Spadafora continues to battle the addictions that kept him from being, in Yankello’s mind, “one of the greatest in the history of boxing,” “The Pittsburgh Kid” is training his own son. Now there’s a hopefulness in his life, one that allows him to use his experience, good and bad, to himself become “a real teacher.”
Maybe a teacher, and a mentor, like the one he once found in Yankello, a mentor able to turn physical gifts and hard work into a lesson that endures long after the final bell sounds.