Trading With Joe Fitzpatrick & Rowdy Welch On Spokane Boxing
Left to right: Don McNall, Rowdy Welch and Joe Fitzpatrick at the Onion
by Sarah Deming
SPOKANE, Wash.–On the day off from competition at the USA Boxing National Championships, we took in some local color at the Onion Bar and Grill, where the company is as delicious as the Big O Burger.
Rowdy Welch, 49, was an outstanding amateur boxer with nearly four hundred fights, including unofficial bouts across the border, in smokers, and against Spokane law enforcement. His record as a pro lightweight was 17-5-1, with decision losses to John John Molina and Jeff Mayweather.
Joe Fitzpatrick, 57, is a chiropractor specializing in horses and a former amateur heavyweight who took bronze in the 1981 National Championships. He is an ex-jockey who rode his first professional race at age ten. The two men met 35 years ago, when Dr. Joe fixed up Rowdy’s arm in the regionals.
Rowdy Welch gives Braedyn Fisher, 5, some tips during a break
Stiff Jab: What do you guys think of the competition so far?
Dr Joe: There’s maybe one or two in each weight who would have made it to the nationals back when we were fighting.
Rowdy: Or the regionals, for that matter.
Dr Joe: So many world champions came out of our Nationals: Iran Barkley, Joe Manley, Stevie Cruz, Tyrell Biggs. And they were broadcast on Wide World of Sports with Howard Cosell.[[MORE]]
Stiff Jab: Who are the best boxers to come out of this area?
Rowdy: We had this great trainer Joe Clough at the Tacoma Boys Club. He also trained fighters in Olympia. He had Rocky Lockridge, Johnny Bumphus, and Sugar Ray Seales.
Dr Joe: It was sad what happened to Sugar Ray Seales. He went blind and kept on fighting.
Rowdy: I remember when he fought Marvin Hagler in 1979 and couldn’t see, and Hagler was fighting southpaw and he switched to orthodox and caught Seales with a left hook. That was a sad moment. All the kids fighting in the junior Golden Gloves idolized him.
Stiff Jab: Why do you think amateur boxing has declined so much?
Rowdy: Because of the requirements of boxing. It’s too hard, too technical for a lot of people to grasp a hold of.
Dr. Joe: And because of cage fighting. Back when Rowdy was fighting, a lot of the smaller fighters also wrestled. Nowadays, if people are on the fence, they go over to MMA.
Stiff Jab: Were you a good wrestler, Rowdy?
Rowdy: I won a national freestyle tournament, and I got some college scholarship offers, but boxing was my thing.
Dr. Joe: He was in that movie Vision Quest. (The movie was filmed in Spokane and included a scene in the Onion Bar and Grill.)
Rowdy: I trained (actor) Matthew Modine. He was about 6’3”, 150, a beanpole. We did weights to get him to look like an athlete.
Stiff Jab: Did you ever take the college scholarship offers?
Rowdy: I’m ADHD, so I wasn’t going to do too good in school. I acknowledge that there are people who are workers and there are people who are thinkers, and I love being a worker. I love getting out there with the boys on the job. I always worked throughout my boxing career. I exercised horses, worked construction, detailed cars. I just retired after fifteen years in the laborers union because a trackhoe hit me.
Dr. Joe: He came to see me, and I referred him to an orthopedist right away. I knew if Rowdy was complaining it had to be something serious, because he doesn’t feel pain. I’ve seen him get eight stitches in his eyelid without medicine.
Dr. Joe: He isn’t afraid of man or beast. Remember that pit bull you won in the tournament?
Stiff Jab: You won a pit bull in a boxing match?
Rowdy: I got Most Outstanding Boxer at a tournament in Idaho, and I guess they didn’t have money for prizes, so they gave me a pit bull. Poor Butkis. I had to kill him.
Stiff Jab: My God. Why?
Rowdy: Because he tried to kill me! I came home one day and he’d chewed the toes out of my Tony Lama boots, so I kicked him in the butt, and he jumped up on me and went for my throat. I caught him and put him through the window.
Stiff Jab: That’s sort of a sad story.
Rowdy: It is a sad story. I figured out later that they’d made him sniff gunpowder, trying to make him like his mom. She was a world title holder. It’s a pretty brutal world when they do that to animals.
Stiff Jab: Why did you start boxing?
Dr Joe: I did it so I could be a better bouncer. I was 21 and in chiropractic school in Portland. I was a tough guy with a lot of street fights, but I wanted better skills to help me with self-defense. My first coach was Ed Millberger at Mount Scott Boxing. The disco where I bounced was called the Great Gatsby. We wore tailor-made tuxedos to work.
Rowdy: I was ten. It was the perfect medicine for me because I was so ADHD, I was doing double doses of Ritalin a day and I still got in fights all the time. Before I got out of grade school I had already broken teachers’ fingers, jaws, and legs. I weighed maybe 45-50 pounds.
Dr. Joe: He was a pit bull himself.
Rowdy’s current dog Jo Jo, who is very sweet and has never been near gunpowder
Rowdy: I was off the wall and I knew it. Mike McNall was this kid at my school. He seen that I was a hellion and he came up to me all timid and said, “Hey Rowdy, you like to to fight?” I said, “Yeah, do you want to fight me?” and he said, “No! But I go to a boxing gym. Do you want to go to the gym and train with me?”
Stiff Jab: Who trained you?
Rowdy: Tom Lefaye. He was this 6’7” 160 pound man with pop bottle glasses, blind as a bat. He never boxed himself cause of his vision, but he was a student of the game. He was just a super person, never had kids of his own but loved kids. Me and him would go fishing and stuff.
He was the greatest guy ever, but oh boy was he the beer hops king. Once he got so drunk at this tournament in Kelso that he passed out. This kid Tony Burrito and I - we were both 15 - put Tom in the backseat of his car. We had to open up the window to put his feet out because he was so tall. We drove about 400 miles back to Spokane. That’s a long ass drive for kids that didn’t even have licenses.
Stiff Jab: What weights did you fight as an amateur?
Rowdy: Everything from 106 to 178. I really weighed 135, but I went up to Canada and they needed somebody to fight their national light heavyweight champion, so I got on the scale in a sweat suit with leg weights on. Nobody cared. I whooped his ass.
Joe: Rowdy was the toughest kid I ever saw. He even got in the ring to spar me, because he didn’t believe heavyweights could really fight.
Rowdy: He knocked me on my ass, and I respected him after that.
Dr. Joe: Once he fought in Mexico 29 days in a row.
Rowdy: I was fourteen years old. I had met this Mexican family in the Junior Olympics and they invited me to come stay with them. When I got there, they introduced me to the family business, which was taking the hubcaps off the cars of American motorists. I said I didn’t want to do that, so they said I could box instead.
Stiff Jab: Tell me about your pro fight against John John Molina.
Rowdy: Oh that was an ugly one.
Dr. Joe: He had two torn rotator cuffs.
Rowdy: After I had beaten Pancho Segura, they decided, “This guy’s ripe, he’s ready to step up another notch,” so I was getting ready and training, but I was working, too. I had a job in a brick factory, lifting bricks. And I would get up in the morning at 4 AM and exercise racehorses.
So i’m getting on this horse to ride it to the gate, and the next thing I know it’s freezing up on me. I reached back and drilled it with my stick, and the thing flopped over on its side, tore both my shoulders. It started running on its side on the ground, shooting blood out of its nose. It bled to death. That was a month and a half before the fight.
Stiff Jab: Why didn’t you cancel?
Rowdy: Cause I’m not that kind of guy! I’ll look in anybody’s eyes and fight him. I don’t care if he’s ten feet tall. Plus it was a title elimination bout. The winner got to fight Jackie Gunguluza of South Africa.
It was miserable. Can you imagine? Every time I threw a punch, my arm went out, and I had to rough him up just to get it back in the socket. Plus I got dropped right off the get go, cause I wasn’t warmed up. I couldn’t do pads before the match because I could barely punch.
Stiff Jab: That was a crossroads loss. It must have been hard.
Rowdy: It was heartbreaking. I knew if I was 100 percent I would have crushed him. After that, people were dumping on me. I didn’t say anything about my injury, because I wasn’t going to make any excuses. My promoter Don Chargin dropped me, so I went back to Top Rank, but they were putting me in 6 rounders and you can’t make any money that way.
Stiff Jab: What did you make for the Jeff Mayweather fight?
Rowdy: $10,000. They needed a last-minute substitute for Todd Foster, so I took the fight on one day’s notice. It was on ESPN. I won that fight, but he was the one with the shiny record and the name. It was a joke. He hit me in the back of the head and the dipshit Montana referee called it a knockdown. I saw the ref at breakfast the next day and he said, “I blew that one, I’m sorry.” I said, “You think?”
I was kinda shot before I ever turned pro. I was a shopworn fighter. I had so many battles. I didn’t just put it on myself in the fight, I put it on myself in the gym, too.
Stiff Jab: You are in great shape for someone with all those wars.
Rowdy: It’s crazy. I mean, I’ve fought seven cops at once, had them beating me with their nightsticks. They said they were gonna arrest me for assault, and I said, “I’ll show you assault!” I broke a bunch of their jaws. I’m amazed I’m not in still in the clink.
Stiff Jab: Why should a kid today box?
Rowdy: Cause it’s gonna learn em one thing that nothing else will and that’s work ethics.
Dr. Joe: Discipline and dedication, that’s what he means.
Rowdy: Whatever I did, I could usually outwork all the other guys. If you’re not physically fit, you’re not gonna make it in life. There’s always a time when machinery won’t get the job done and you have to use your hands.