I Hung Out with the Champion Boxer Who Inspired 'Bleed for This'

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I Hung Out with the Champion Boxer Who Inspired 'Bleed for This'

You ever broken your neck? It really, really hurts. You ever boxed? It really, really hurts. Vinny Paz did both, within 13 months of each other and won the world championships five times.

You know when you play that hypothetical game with all your hypothetical pals where you wonder who would play you in a film about your life? There is always that one wonky-looking guy who says "Brad Pitt!" and you all laugh, and you laugh and you laugh and you laugh and you laugh. But the joke here isn't that your friend Stuart looks like a bad foot; the joke here is you and everyone else in the room have such viciously banal lives that it would be a stretch to even make it onto an episode of Deal or No Deal, let alone have a film made about you.

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But then I guess that's life, isn't it? Not everyone can be remembered. Not everyone can be the bright, protagonistic sun that the lesser scum revolve around like moons. Most of us don't even get to come close to the playfully ruffled bouffant of Noel Edmonds, such is the awe-inspiring jejune of our lives.

But Vinny Paz—born Vinny Pazienza, dropping down to "Paz" in 2001—the former five-time world boxing champion of the world with the "5X" inked on his dangerous right hand to prove it, got to live that life. When Paz plays that game with his pals and they ask him, "Who would play you in a film about your life?" he will say "Miles Teller"—in a thick Italian American accent that makes it sound like "Miyuls Telluh"—because that's who actually plays him in the new biopic, Bleed for This. The film charts the highs and lows of Paz's career, peaking by crossing weight classes to win multiple world titles, dealing with a mid-career car accident that snapped his neck, and documenting one of the greatest sporting comebacks of all time. Pazienza worked back into the ring just 13 months after the car wreck that almost killed him.

I meet Paz, 53, in a boxing gym in Euston, in the midst of an onslaught of press promotions: He woke up at insane o' clock to do back-to-back interviews with curt journalists and glazed-eyed TV presenters, and has been on the trail for a couple of days now (well, in London: He's been trekking the world doing interviews for months now). Yet still he's energetically bounding around the gym, punching bags, using the speedball and bobbing and weaving like a man half—OK: maybe a third—his age. "I still train every day, I shadowbox everyday, lift weights, that kinda stuff," he tells me. "Not like I used to, but I'm still fast. You better believe I'm still fast." I believe it. See him attack a speedball, and you see that coltish, pedigree athleticism still lurking in him. Good for him, but bad for me, because we'd talked about having a little spar later on. Maybe the sequel will be Paz bossing a prison after being sent there for accidentally slaughtering me.

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Up close, his face definitely looks like one of a man who's been in a few tear ups, with a collection of faded scars and nicks around a pair of eyes that conversely never look anything but friendly and relaxed. As he tells me about his fairly typical early life and career—he was inspired, like every boxer in modern history, by that heady combination of Muhammad Ali and Rocky films—he punctuated every hit from his early career fights with a fist slapping into a palm or a punching motion. He nonchalantly recalls moments in his storied life—like when he fought for the US boxing team in front of Fidel Castro in Cuba, or when he won his first world championship belt—like they are just average anecdotes anyone could have.

Trailer for 'Bleed for This' via

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But Bleed for This centers on an incredibly turbulent period in Paz's life, starting at the lowest ebb of his career where he almost died from dehydration after losing to Roger "Floyd's Uncle" Mayweather. "Straight after that fight, I passed out," he says. "I remember hearing the nurse saying that I had only a few moments left to live, and when she says that my father grabbed hold of my shirt and screamed "DON'T DO THIS CHAMP!" At that moment I was going up to the clouds and it felt great, but when my father did that to me, I came back down and I lived."

It was after this wake up call that Paz decided to team up with a new coach, Kevin Rooney (played by very relatable fat and bald Aaron Eckhart in the film), who recognized that he was dangerously dehydrating himself to make a lower weight he wasn't naturally suited to. He moved him up two weight classes—only the second professional boxer ever to do it, after perennial Paz nemesis-stroke-idol Roberto Duran—and in his second fight at Light Middleweight, he won his second world title.

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If a man almost dying and then coming back to life to win a world title once wasn't already enough, he then decided to do it all over again. Shortly after reaching the highest professional peak, Paz suffered a broken neck as the result of a head-on 50mph car crash. The doctors told him he would never fight again—there was a chance he'd never walk—but Paz had other ideas.

"When they got you counted out, and you're on the inside of a coffin and you're knocking to get out, when you finally get out and win the world title, you don't wanna give that up. So when the car crash happened, I told the doctor I wasn't going to accept what he said, and even though my mom was crying, I told everyone that's what I wanna do, simple as that."

Doctors wanted to fuse his neck to give the boxer a better chance of walking again, but Paz refused—without neck flexibility, he'd never be able to fight, and the way he saw it there was no point in living if he couldn't fight. Doctors fitted the riskier, agonizing "Halo" brace instead—pushing metal screws into Paz's head to hold it in place, bracing his neck, sealing him into a torso-wide chest girdle—and told him he was lucky to be alive, and oh: Don't hit your head too hard off anything, your spine might sever. Yet he seemed completely unfazed. "I got lucky," he says, calmly. "I was strong, and worked hard. You need four things in any situation: persistence, determination, hard work, and to not quit. You get a lot of stuff done with those four things."

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But was he not worried about the whole, y'know, medical science thing telling him he might die at any moment?

"I was thinking about it all the time. All I was thinking was, This is it, we're gonna find out if I can fight again or not. I was that… I dunno what you're willing to call it—desperate, focused, or driven to fight again—but I was gonna go to any expense."

He began training again, with metal bolts in his head, and once they were taken out (which he describes like "a 747 was fucking flying through my fucking head"—the screws calcify in the skull after three months in place, so it's like literally unscrewing bone), ended up coming back to win another three world titles over a further 11 years of his career, retiring in 2004 after winning his 50th fight. Miraculously, he actually fought more of his career after breaking his neck than before it.

Boxing and professional sport is no stranger to post-retirement downward spirals. There are numerous cases of athletes losing control of their lives after retiring because the sport was all they lived for, and nothing in normal life could ever replace that void. I expected Vinny Paz—with his wild, sine waving life story trailing behind him—to be somewhat more lost and at odds with retired life, but not so. "I was just so happy with my 50th win," he says, holding that big 5X mitt up to prove it. "I set myself a target of 50 wins, and I made it. I was offered big money to fight again, but I thought, No, it don't matter." He adds, "Ultimately, I'm happy, lucky, fortunate. Who the fuck is gonna win five world titles and 50 professional fights? I did that, I don't give a fuck who's better or worse, I did this."

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When Paz changed his surname from Pazienza to Paz, he tells me it was purely as a nod to his idol Muhammad Ali (also, "people keep fucking up saying it"). But it's a neat coincidence that it actually means "peace" in Spanish, because for a man who has had as fractious a life as Paz, he is incredibly at ease with his lot. If he could go back and remove the struggles he's had, would he do it? "Nah. If you change one thing, the whole story changes," he says. "If it changed, I wouldn't be here right now, and I'm glad I'm here, y'know, things happen for a reason."

As we take to the ring for a bit of shadow sparring, I instantly see close up that although I am 24 years younger, five inches taller, and much heavier, Paz could have beaten the fuck out of me like it was nothing if he wanted to. Like: hH could've really fucked me up. You could see that he moved around the ring naturally and without thinking, decades of muscle memory embedded in every punch, skip, and bob. I want to know how he remains so seemingly nonplussed when there is a Martin Scorsese–produced film being made about his life?

"So much has happened to me that nothing really affects me anymore," he says. "No matter what happens in life, if I'm not dying, what the fuck difference is any of this really gonna make to me? People have tattoos of me, name their children after me, which is great, and I'm very humbled by that, but in the end, what's the difference in my life because of that? Nothing, I still gotta go on every day, or there's no food or heating in my house." For someone who has had two rounds of global recognition, Paz seems very humble—and, in his own way, hugely inspirational. He has seen the bottom and the top, yet still remains steadfastly content with what he has achieved, and wants no more, or less. "I lived my life like that, kept it simple. Sometimes you gotta suck it up, stay strong, and keep fighting. Life's a fight every day."

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