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October, 25th 2004
Boom Boom pulls a new punch
BY DANIEL CHANG
dchang@herald.com
Taking a punch and hitting back harder used to make Ray ''Boom Boom'' Mancini feel righteous, like he could take on the world.
Until the night he punched a man to death in Las Vegas more than 20 years ago.
Then the punches stopped motivating Mancini. Instead, they brought his life into focus: He could be next and all that he had fought for -- the championship that he won for his father, the financial security, the pride -- would be lost.
So Mancini quit the ring, though it wasn't easy. He tried a comeback, twice, and failed each time. Rather than light a fire in his belly, losing silenced the self-doubt and opened a new road before him: acting and producing movies -- and, like so many others, reinventing himself in Miami.
Now Mancini chases a Hollywood dream with the trademark tenacity that earned him the World Boxing Association lightweight championship at the age of 21.
He's 43 and still light years away from Hollywood's equivalent of the championship, an Oscar, but -- funny how some things never change -- that only makes him try harder.
''I wanted to be a fighter to be the world champion,'' Mancini says over matzo ball soup and a glass of red wine at the Fontainebleau Hilton in Miami Beach. ``Why would I expect anything less as an actor and producer?''
Mancini's latest effort to transform himself into an entertainment industry player has brought him to South Florida, where he envisions filming movies and TV shows and building a Hollywood-style studio. Never mind that there isn't one here at the moment.
''I think I could become a real force down here,'' says Mancini, who has appeared in 18 movies and produced two. ``And there's other people that want to be players down here. There's a lot of money people down here that just don't know how, that are just not in the game.
``You bring it down, people are going to come to the table.''
In town to scout for a new home and offices for his business, Boom Boom Productions, Mancini, who lives in Los Angeles, says he will do this despite the flagging local film industry, which has attracted fewer productions each of the past five years.
''It's a tough business to be in,'' says Jeff Peel, director of the Miami-Dade film office. ``Getting development deals and getting a movie off the ground is a long and painful process almost no matter who you are.''
Mancini says he relishes those long odds, always has, since before he won the WBA lightweight championship in 1982 despite critics who doubted that the 5-foot-6 brawler could stand up to the best in the sport.
''I heard on the way up that I would never be a world champion,'' he says. ``Never.''
A HARD HITTER
Mancini never had lightning punches or fancy footwork. He was brutally direct, even reckless, and he often took more punches than he gave. But he was usually the last one standing.
The fighter's face used to be a bloody mess after most fights. Today the nose is straight but flat, the forehead peppered with tiny scars. His hands are big and broad, the knuckles still red.
He's still taking punches, but they're less direct.
He says Academy Award-winning actor Dustin Hoffman once gave him sage advice: ``In boxing, you get knocked on your ass and you know it. In this business, you could be knocked on your ass and you won't know it for a month.''
Mancini is counting on his experience as a boxer to see him through. ''Same thing it takes to be a good fighter it takes to be a good actor or a good producer,'' he says, ``and that's plenty of focus, discipline and focus.''
Like most everyone else who knows Mancini, writer and producer Sam Henry Kass (TV's Seinfeld and Arli$$) believes the former fighter's resolve will make him a successful producer.
Kass met Mancini in 1989 when the former champ starred in a series of one-act plays that Kass had written for an off-Broadway production titled Siddown! . . . Conversat
source: Miami Herald
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