THE last time we left Ricky Hesia, he was headed off to Bulgaria or some place. Have gloves, will travel. Hesia fighting inactivity
in boxing careerInstead, he wound up in Los Angeles -- South Central, to be exact -- and going nowhere, boxing-wise.
So it was good to see Hesia on national TV -- well, Fox Sports West anyway -- and looking good in scoring a unanimous 10-round decision over Cuban Giorbis Barthelemy last night at the Great Western Forum in Inglewood, Calif.
Hesia, 29, not only impressed the ring announcers. He caught the attentive eye of Mike Machado, executive director of the Hawaii State Boxing Commission.
Poor Mike. He must feel like the Maytag repairman or some solitary lighthouse keeper. He coordinates a commission that has handled only one boxing card this year. No wonder he is reduced to watching boxing on TV.
Anyway, Machado was duly impressed, as I was, with Hesia's performance.
"He looked good. I was impressed. The guy he fought was tough and Ricky went 10 rounds without a sweat. That's a good sign, considering his inactivity."
Indeed, Hesia's performance was a good sign, considering he hadn't fought for 14 months.
To get an idea of his inactivity, when Hesia knocked out Prince Wilberforce Kigundu of Uganda on Feb. 28, 1995, in his last local appearance at the Sheraton Waikiki, that improved his record to 17-2 with 14 knockouts.
He's now 19-3 with last night's well-deserved victory. In other words, Hesia has had only three bouts over the last 29 months.
But he has won two in a row in his comeback quest. He avenged a knockout loss to Javier Altamarino with a clear-cut decision in his last appearance (May 20, 1996) before last night.
ONE interruption in his boxing career came in 1990 when he suffered a near-fatal electrical shock while working on a construction site. He amazingly recovered, but ran into a couple of managerial problems that further inhibited his ring career.
To know Hesia is not necessarily to love him. He had a bitter parting of the ways with Mike Cutter, who first gave Hesia the nickname, "Rockin' Ricky." Hesia left him for another manager, Mario Silva.
Now Hesia and Silva have parted ways, rather acrimoniously at that.
Let Hesia tell it:
"Mario's like a leech. He promised me this and that and nothing happened. He fooled a lot of people and he fooled me. But enough is enough. I finally caught on, bruddah."
Hesia recently settled an arbitration which ended his contractual obligation with Silva. That was part of the reason for his latest period of inactivity.
"But I'm in shape. I've been training hard all this time," he told me in a telephone interview from his Pico Rivera, Calif., home last Friday.
"Everybody thought I was finished. Probably you, too. If you get a chance, watch me fight on TV. Tell the people back home that I'm going to be all right. You'll see."
And Hesia proved that he's far from finished.
THERE'S a reason for the "new" Ricky Hesia, he says.
"I got married -- on Valentine's Day. She's from Los Angeles. Her name's Michel Hernandez. Michel my belle."
Hesia, who's managing himself, hopes to keep busy.
He was originally supposed to have fought Alfred Ankamah, an L.A. welterweight, last night. "But he didn't want to fight me," Hesia said.
And Barthelemy, 24, who had more than 300 amateur fights in Cuba and a 17-1-1 record as a professional, was not your usual stand-in.
Hesia wasn't surprised. "When you fight at the Forum they don't put you against anybody easy. But I'm ready."
He proved it too.