A rough spell but…

Early spring of 1967—one year after I had been homeless in Toronto—my benefactor and manager, Bertie, enlisted me to fight in the U.S. Golden Gloves. The regionals were held in Buffalo. Nervous as hell and fighting as a middleweight, I made the trip every two weeks starting in early March, accompanied by my trainer Bev, Bertie, and a couple of others.

Somehow, I won three fights in a row. During that time, I also watched another middleweight tear through his opponents, and it seemed we were destined to meet in the finals. Willie “The Worm” Monroe—so nicknamed for the way he controlled the ring—knocked out everyone he faced within two rounds. Pretty impressive. But having knocked out two of the three fighters I faced, I was confident my left hook could straighten him out.

For the finals, a few carloads came down from Toronto to Buffalo, including Claude, my high school girlfriend’s father.

At the opening bell, I came out cautious but confident. I had not yet lost a fight, though I’d only had a dozen by that point.

To this day, I have no memory of the fight itself. My mind felt like a film reel that had snapped—blankness where there should have been vivid moments of battle. Slowly, fragments drifted back. The pounding of gloves against flesh, the roar of the crowd muffled as if underwater, and the harsh glare of the overhead lights.

Then, suddenly, a new scene materialized: the dull hum of a busy hall, voices overlapping. I found myself at a cluttered table surrounded by the murmur of spectators and the clinking of plates. The taste of sweat still lingered on my lips, mingling with the faint aroma of fried food from nearby booths.

“Bobby! Bobby! You gonna order?”

The voice cut through the haze, sharp and clear, pulling me fully into the present. I turned my swollen eyes to scan the scene, trying to gather my scattered senses. Everything felt heavy—the ache behind my eyes, the bruises on my face—proof of the battle just fought.

Before I could speak, Claude remarked, “I am astonished—as was everyone—that you went the distance.”

I had lost a decision to The Worm, who, as a professional middleweight, would later become the first man to defeat Marvin Hagler.

And so my fight career got its launch, as it became known: “Bozic will fight!”

It was the late summer of ’74 in Los Angeles when I stepped into the ring for a grueling ten-round bout against Mel Marshall. By the sixth round, the fight was taking its toll—my head spinning and body battered, but still holding on. That’s when she appeared: a comely, busty brunette who approached my corner with a suggestive invitation, “So, after the party, how about we go back to your place or mine and get to know each other better?”

I scrambled the words around in my dazed head before managing a snorting chuckle. Speaking was difficult—not just from the dizziness and nausea, similar to the aftermath of a heavy night drinking, but also because of the eight stitches in my bottom lip, fresh from the doctor’s care in the dressing room.

She had caught my corner’s attention earlier between rounds six and seven. They were confused when I shrugged and said, “I have no idea who she is.” They promptly shooed her away, but she wasn’t easily discouraged. Now, there she was again at my so-called victory party—a chic Los Angeles restaurant gathering celebrating my win.

I emphasize “so-called victory party,” because while I had technically won a ten-round decision, my body told a much different story. The eight stitches on my lip were the least of it; my eyes were nearly swollen shut, and my lower jaw was cracked—so badly that by the next day, it would be wired shut. The night after the fight, I’d spent lying in my friend Gene’s bathtub, vomiting intermittently, fighting the fear that if sleep came, I might not wake up.

Did I mention I won this fight? And as they always say in boxing circles, “You should have seen the other guy.”

A minute into my fight with Larry Holmes in the early fall of 1974, after absorbing one of his vaunted jabs and suffering a broken nose, I realized my quest to add another mark to the win column was futile.

By the middle of the third round, a straight right that knocked out three of my front teeth convinced me the evening’s task was nearly impossible

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Yet, having traveled this far—to face the soon-to-be heavyweight champion of the world at Madison Square Garden—I felt compelled to show the crowd who I was by refusing to quit.

A year later, needing money to fund the next chapter of my life, I asked Teddy Brenner, the Garden’s boxing promoter, for another fight.

His reply: “Sure, kid. But I gotta tell ya—if you’ve got the same balls in life as you do in the ring, you’ll be fine.”

A few months later, I landed in Madrid to begin that next chapter

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