Brutal_ The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger's Irish Mob - Kevin Weeks [41]
Spending more time with Jimmy Bulger, however, I got to see that his personal habits were pretty simple. Unlike me, he didn’t care for sports. He considered professional sports prolonged adolescence and felt they prevented people from moving forward with their lives. All sports, not just professionally played sports, were not only a waste of time, but were dangerous. For instance, if you were playing a pickup basketball game, you might get injured and miss work. You were better off, he’d tell me, reading a book than playing a game of ball. Working out and keeping yourself in shape was different. That you did for yourself and there were less chances of getting hurt.
And he certainly didn’t approve of the paintball games I enjoyed or the tournaments I went to four or five times a year. Nor did he support my interest in karate. I was in my mid-thirties when I started taking karate lessons with Pat Nee, a friend of mine, at the Boston Athletic Club. Pat and I had only been taking the classes for two weeks when we heard about an upcoming tournament for the New England championships. As it turned out, none of the black or brown belts who had been taking lessons for years at the karate school wanted to enter the tournament and represent the school. So Pat and I went to the instructor, Clarence Wilder, and told him we would fight in the tournament. Clarence, who was a fifth-degree black belt, felt that we were too inexperienced and that it wasn’t a good idea for us to go. But after Pat and I assured him we could take care of ourselves, Pat, Clarence, and I headed to the tournament at the Walter Brown Arena at Boston University.
Students from karate schools all over New England were there, with nine rings set up for fights scheduled in every ring. In my first tournament fight, when the signal was given to start, my opponent suckered me with a right hand. They stopped the fight and gave him a warning for illegal contact. I went back to the corner and told Pat and Clarence no one was suckering me and that I was going to knock this kid out. Pat called over a couple of black belts he knew and told them, “Kevin’s mad. You better watch this fight.”
When the fight resumed and they gave the signal to start, I hit the kid a left hook and knocked him out with one shot. But because he had hit me illegally first and then I had hit him illegally, he could no longer continue. As a result, I was allowed to go on to the next round of fights.
Pat won his first fight, too, though legally. In my second fight, because of all my years of boxing, I had the advantage with my hands. So when my opponent threw a roundhouse kick, I stepped inside and hit him a right hand to the ribs, breaking his ribs. When he couldn’t continue, I went on to the next round. In Pat’s second fight, he won a close decision, so the two of us continued on to the third round.
In my third fight, in the quarterfinals, I hit my opponent in the chest and knocked the wind out of him. He went right down. When he couldn’t continue in the time allotted, they stopped the fight and I got a warning, but was allowed to go on to the next round. Pat won his third fight easily.
In the semifinals, my opponent jumped up in the air to deliver a kick to the head. I stepped inside to hit him a body shot underneath his heart, but when he came down, he landed on his feet and went down lower than I expected. I caught him square in the jaw, knocking him out, and was disqualified from the tournament. They said I was being malicious, intentionally trying to cause bodily harm. In all four of my fights, my opponents had gotten hurt. It wasn’t that I was trying to hurt them. I just knew I couldn’t compete with them with their feet and that they couldn’t compete with me with my hands. So when I hit them, I tried to hurt them. Pat got outpointed in his fourth fight, so we