Three years can seem like a long time.
For a 32-year-old boxer who hasn’t fought since 2005 — Martin O’Malley’s last match, a loss in a gym near Anacortes — three years is practically a lifetime away.
But four years ago? That somehow seems closer.
After all, it was only four years ago this week — April 17, 2004 — that O’Malley was near the peak of his profession.
The writer Joyce Carol Oates has called boxing “America’s tragic theater.”
Four short years ago, those theater lights twinkled brightly for O’Malley, who was then poised for a shot at glory, that million dollar break that young boxers aspire to: a title fight.
Now, as O’Malley logs mile after mile jogging Edmonds’ familiar streets, as O’Malley laments a wrist injury that keeps him from pounding hooks and jabs into the heavy punching bag in his Edmonds home, as O’Malley remembers, every detail seems clear.
The fight was scheduled for a Saturday, it was on premium cable’s Showtime channel, and the winner would fight for the World Boxing Association’s lightweight title.
O’Malley was going to fight against a young and undefeated Houston boxer named Juan “Baby Bull” Diaz, a fighter represented by the boxing consortium Main Events. O’Malley wasn’t signed to any contract.
Diaz beat O’Malley. Diaz went on to win the WBA title — and then the World Boxing Organization title, and then the International Boxing Federation title. Diaz held all three until March of this year, earning untold millions.
“The difference between ‘right before the top’ and ‘the top’ is like night and day,” O’Malley said April 14 from his home.
O’Malley, who was a U.S. Junior Olympic boxing champion before he graduated from Edmonds-Woodway High School in 1994, is now a union carpenter waiting on worker’s compensation after a work accident tore a tendon from the bone just above his left wrist.
He keeps in near-match shape just in case, but it doesn’t seem likely he’ll box again.
He had a storied career, starting with the championship, but including fights for the United States in Ireland and against Mexico, packing gyms professionally from Edmonds Community College to Atlantic City. He won his first 17 professional fights, 11 by knockout.
O’Malley’s last fight, however, left him with a fractured cheekbone, and the right side of his face was numb for a year. It took more than one MRI to learn definitively that his brain was fine.
But it is.
“I’m unscathed, but that last fight was an eye opener,” he said. “I’m OK. But I want to stay that way.”
Now he’s engaged to his girlfriend, Kari Johnson, and he’s religious, and he’s got new things he’s working on.
Still, the passion burns inside him. He’s a boxer – pure and simple. He trained in late 1990s, he trained in the same gym with the same trainer as Mike Tyson. He sparred daily with Sugar Shane Mosley.
Now, O’Malley watches the big fights, but he also reviews famous matches from the early 1900s, can replay entire sequences from his matches in his mind, talking them out and explaining what could have, or might have gone differently.
Boxing is a tough sport, but it is more than that. It’s like chess. And, in the sense that it has stuck with him forever, it’s a first love.
He wants to be involved.
Earlier this month, he taught a seminar on boxing at Edmonds’ Boys and Girls Club. He’s waiting on surgery for his wrist.
“The Boys and Girls Club, or whatever, I want to be involved in boxing,” O’Malley said. “It’s still like I’m training for a fight. If there’s no fight coming up, that’s just the way it is.”
Reporter Chris Fyall: 425-673-6525 or cfyall@heraldnet.com
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