By Mitch Abramson
When Maddalone (21-2, 15 KO's) hit the canvas on July 23, it was the first time in his career as a fighter that he had ever been down, first time as a former tough man contestant, first time in the amateurs, he was never even knocked down in sparring. So when it happened it was like “a tree falling over” to use his own words, something that happens as often as a sighting of Haley's Comet.A week later Corona's Edelmiro “Tiger” Martinez, with the IBF's No.2 ranking in the super featherweight division at stake, got disqualified in his match with Nate Campbell at the Mohegan Sun Casino in Uncasville, Conn. Martinez, a resident of LeFrak City where he works as a maintenance man, was dropped three times in the second round before a series of low blows, one of which he was deducted a point for in the fourth round ended the match. In reality though, Martinez lost the bout before he stepped into the ring, about a week before the fight, when Martinez tore a ligament in his left biceps sparring at the Powerhouse Gym in Corona. The day before he had been lifting heavy weights and with his arm still throbbing, stepped into the ring in his final sparring session in preparation for the Campbell fight. A doctor advised him to pull out, but Martinez, a grizzled veteran of the fight game, had more banking on this fight then his ranking.”I was in the best shape of my career,” he said. “I threw a left hook to the body and I heard something pop in sparring. I fell to the canvas and was sliding around all the over the place because I was in so much pain. But I couldn't pull out of the fight since so many people I knew had bought tickets to see me and had flown in and had already bought their plane tickets. I didn't tell anybody about (the injury).”Martinez internalized the pain and was upbeat going into the fight, but in the dressing room he reaggravated the injury hitting the pads with his trainer. He probably should have stayed backstage because the fight was a disaster. Martinez, a slick boxer who many thought had defeated Campbell the first time they fought, a draw in May of last year , was defenseless against Campbell's bull rush and paid the price, basically going from corner to corner and taking whipping. It's a wonder he lasted four rounds.”He was trying to find a corner and absorb punches,” said his promoter, Sal Musumeci, who could tell something was wrong midway through the first round. “He shouldn't have been in the ring. He couldn't throw any punches. He needs to take care of his injury and get Campbell into the ring again.”Fighters are resilient sorts used to taking their licks, and for some, the suffering they endure outside the ring is an extension of the punishment they take inside the ropes, as is the case with Martinez, who has been in this position before, forced to return to the ring after a considerable setback. Although he turned pro in 1991, he has fought just 25 times, compiling a 21-3-1 (9 KO's) record that screams of inactivity.”I've been off maybe 10 years combined since I turned pro because of injuries and stuff,” he said. His father died in 1992, and it goes without saying that he shelved that year and didn't fight once and who can really blame him? The next year his trainer died and he only fought twice. Against Gerald Gray in 1996, Martinez broke his right hand landing a shot to the top of his head in the third round in a fight he won by a decision. He didn't fight again until December of 1998. The only positive from that experience other that he won was that he learned how to fight with one hand. His problem in the Campbell fight was that he damaged his left hand, or his jab hand, the key weapon for a fighter who boxes as much as Martinez does. So what else could he do but run wind sprints around the ring? He had two surgeries to repair his hand from the Gray fight, and surgery Friday to mend his recent torn ligament, but how do you recover from a knockout? Along with Maddalone, another prospect was unceremoniously KO'd for the first time in his young career.Far Rockaway resident, Rohnique Posey (7-1-1, 6 KO's) entered his fight with Francisco Rincon at the Orion Palace May 14 in Brooklyn with more then a chip on his shoulder. That same day he was expecting a call from representatives of Oscar De La Hoya's show: “The Next Great Champ,” a reality series that pits unknown fighters against each other in four-round bouts on national television while telling their hard-scrabble stories. When Posey learned that his fight against Rincon was a scheduled six-rounder – a technicality that put his status in jeopardy for the show – his already edgy state of mind went into a tail-spin.”I was upset, then I go into the ring, and I'm mad,” said Posey, a graduate of Beach Channel. “But my mind was off. When the bell rang, he hit me with a hook, and I tried to brawl because I had so much anger in my system. He hit me with a hook behind my right ear and all of a sudden I had spaghetti legs.”Posey, once told by his trainer, Bob Jackson, to go to the ropes and wait for his opponent and throw the hardest punch he ever threw if he ever got hurt, was in position to do just that when Rincon backed off and hit Posey with a counter right hand that knocked him down and ended the fight when the referee ruled that he couldn't continue at 1:56 of the opening stanza. To cap off the miserable evening, the call he was expecting from the show never came.It's too bad because Posey has a lot of material he could have used on the program. Growing up in Far Rockaway, both of Posey's parents were casualties of the crack epidemic that swept through New York City in the '80s. His father ended up in jail and his mother was basically a non-entity growing up. His grandmother, a full-time nurse who worked the night shift, filled in, but Posey was forced at a young age to be the father of the house, and he raised his three cousins who lived with him basically on his own.To complicate matters, Posey grew up with his hands always balled up into fists and a lot of anger in his system, and fighting took the place of collecting baseball cards or playing sports in the beginning. As a youngster, he would scream out “McClellan” after former WBC middleweight champ Gerald “G-Man” McClellan knocked out a challenger from around the corner. Soon the whole neighborhood was calling out “McClellan” every time they got into a scrap. But if boxing came easy to him, then nothing else did. He suffered a ruptured blood vessel in his right eye during a sparring session as an amateur when his opponent thumbed him in the eye. Posey tried to use that as an excuse to run away from boxing for good, and he actually left the sport for four months, vowing never to come back. But soon his washboard stomach began to soften up and the pounds started to add up, and Posey found himself back in the gym, working harder then ever before. He won so impressively on his first fight that he dropped his opponent five times. The problem was that one of those times he broke his hand on the top of his head. Now he must make another comeback, not unlike his cousin, Tab Miller, 13, who fell into Jamaica Bay with his cousin, Devin Erwin, 7, when they were skipping on the rocks above the whistling waters earlier this month.Miller was swept out with the current, later to be saved by a firefighter, but he may need more saving because he's now fighting for his life at Long Island Jewish Hospital. Erwin was rescued by Saide Palmer, a neighbor who heard the boys screaming from a nearby house and tossed the greatest shot of his life into the screaming waters, throwing a couple of basketballs into the Bay. Erwin grabbed the first ball and floated back to safety, but his cousin wasn't so lucky.”The whole episode made me think about life,” Posey said. “Now I know what I have to do while I'm here.” “Posey always bounces back,” Bob Jackson said. “It's easy when you're winning and everyone is telling you how good you are. But what happens when things aren't going so well. Then what do you do? But he's always been a hard worker.” What's interesting about fighters is that after they've been knocked out, most of them can't wait to return to the ring. Fighters, ingrained with the attitude that what happened to them was some sort of accident, a fluke that comes around as often as a solar eclipse are usually eternally optimistic. Martinez, Posey and Maddalone would fight tomorrow if they could, but the commissions belonging to the states where they fought have rules regulating how long they must wait following a loss.For getting knocked out, Posey and Maddalone were suspended for 60 days, an incidental amount of time since they wouldn't be fighting so soon after a loss anyway. For Martinez, the Mohegan Sun Tribal Department of Athletic Regulation suspended him for 90 days for suffering a concussion and rupturing his biceps. It's not really a big deal. Knockouts and tough losses are part of boxing. “It takes heart to get up from a knockdown,” Maddalone said. “All the great fighters get knocked down. It's just a matter if you get up or not.”
