MICHAEL BRUNTZ / Lincoln Journal Star | Posted: Friday, January 7, 2005 6:00 pm
The name always meant more than its five letters. It carried a reputation and lofty expectations. In Lincoln, the name raised fists, symbolized toughness and defined excellence.
The 1940s read like a who's who of boxing history. Joe Lewis was The Champ. Sugar Ray Robinson and Jake LeMotta made headlines and thrilled audiences.
In Nebraska, Larry Emery was Mr. Boxing, and he came tantalizingly close to writing his own name into the annals of the sport, just missing the Olympics and a possible professional career.
While some men crunched numbers or punched timecards, Emery knocked out challengers as an amateur fighter and then trained teams of boxers who won 12 Southeast Nebraska and four Midwest Golden Glove championships.
He and his wife, Jody, had their first son in 1951. Although Larry stopped fighting two years later, his reputation followed the boy like a shadow boxer on the wall.
When you're Larry's kid and the only thing that kept your dad out of the 1952 Helsinki Olympics was future heavyweight champion Floyd Patterson, the expectations ratchet up a few notches.
The name puts a target on your back when the kids in middle school are looking for a fight. It creates expectations that make finding a niche even more elusive for a teenager who just wants to fit in.
Most kids grow up with fathers whose names wouldn't raise an eyebrow outside their own kitchens. Before Doug Emery was out of diapers, he was a walking effigy to one of the best amateur boxers in Nebraska history.
The pressure was enough to delay a young boxer's entry into the sport. Every time he stepped in the ring, Doug squared off against more than another fighter.
"The weight of the name just got too big to carry around for a while."
During one of his first sessions in a boxing gym, Larry Emery punished a heavy bag as a few coaches watched. His fists battered the bag like two gloved missiles, landing one after the other. He felt anger rise with each blow to the bag as he remembered a fatherless childhood.
He kept punching, hoping to erase two assault and battery charges that left him with the choice of becoming a boxer or being sent to the Boy's Training School in Kearney.
He'd been arrested a few times for street fighting in his late teens. Lancaster County Attorney Fritz Wagner told Larry he was tired of the teen "smelling the bar rag and thinking he was Jack Dempsey." The prosecutor sent the 18-year-old to Lloyd Perry, who coached boxing at the downtown YMCA.
Long before he was a boxer, however, Larry Emery was a target.
In Albion, where he was born and lived with his grandmother following his parent's divorce, he was an easy victim of playground bullies. Because his grandmother prohibited him from getting into school fights, he took the constant harassment.
In the sixth-grade, he moved to Lincoln to rejoin his mother and, without his grandmother's restraints, he started fighting back and never quit.
He hardened his fists defending a northeast Lincoln street corner where he hawked the Sunday Lincoln Star during the Depression. Woe was the entrepreneur who threatened Emery's balance of supply and demand.
He eventually progressed to throwing back a few beers in Lincoln taverns before throwing a few punches in bar fights.
Back in the YMCA gym, auditioning for his fate in front of the coaches, he punched the memories of all those kids who picked on him when he couldn't defend himself. He pounded until the punches sent tingling sensations up his arm and into his lower back. His fists fired in succession like high-powered pistons until there was a small release of air the bag had finally relented. The coaches looked in disbelief at the deflated heavy bag and the newcomer standing before it.
Larry Emery wouldn't be going to Kearney.
Once he'd established himself as a boxer, he returned to Albion for an amateur boxing card. The welterweight knocked out his opponent and as he exited the building, Emery came face to face with one of his childhood tormentors.
The curious who knew the significance of the encounter stood quietly nearby, watching past and present collide. Emery's pulse quickened as he remembered the times when he couldn't fight back and even the weakest kid in the neighborhood pushed him around.
He asked the son of a bitch if he wanted to push him around that night like he had in grade school. After what the former bully had seen in the ring, he wisely stepped down.
"You could hear a pin drop in that place," Emery remembered. "I carried that hatred with me for a long time; it wasn't pretty then."
In the 1940s, Larry Emery mowed through opponents and became a boxing institution in Southeast Nebraska.
Boxing was different then. Fighters today punch like they're tapping a hot stove they jab and run up points in hopes of winning decisions. In the days of Joe Lewis and Rocky Marciano, the only way to ensure a victory was to put your opponent on the canvas and keep him there.
Standing eight counts didn't exist and neutral corners were only mentioned in rule books. If fighters fell, they had better get up ready to go. Their opponent probably pressed the referee's back, waiting to finish off them off. The only way out of the ring in those days was a 10-second detour to the canvas.
Emery's right hand was his greatest weapon it made up for the lack of conditioning that sometimes plagued him. No matter how far behind he fell in a fight, he was always one right hand away from a knockout.
"Power is a God-given gift," he said. "You can work with somebody and improve on it, but power is something you're born with. If I could hit you with a right hand, you weren't going to get up."
Emery used that right well as he advanced through competition at the Olympic Trials. He and a rangy fighter from Omaha named Eddie Anderson put opponents on their backs with regularity and finally met in the finals.
The two traded shots under the hot ring lights of Pershing Auditorium. Midway through the fight, Larry threw his trademark punch, which caught Anderson across the chin, locked his knees and sent him sprawling.
"I can still see the rosin from the canvas rising in the air."
Doug Emery started boxing as a 5-year-old. He and another young boxer would trade punches for three, one-minute rounds between fights at the 4-H Building at the State Fairgrounds. The bulky gloves looked like oven mits on stick figures.
His father had already moved on to coaching by the time Doug was old enough to lace up a pair of gloves. The Emery basement turned into a mini-gym with boxers coming and going throughout the day. One side had wood paneling and a heavy bag hanging from the floor joists. Doug often watched from the basement steps as fighters boxed shadows on cinderblock walls.
The elder Emery never exerted pressure on his son to get into the ring. He knew there would be expectations from the first punch. He'd be fighting his opponent and the notions of strangers sitting in the darkened auditorium. A win meant more expectations. Each loss would send the name to the canvas.
Junior boxing opportunities in Lincoln were limited then and Doug focused on wrestling and cross-country at Lincoln Northeast. But success in other sports didn't diminish the importance of boxing to his family.
If he started boxing again, he'd have to give up wrestling. Finally, in 1969, he had his mother sign the waiver for the Southeast Nebraska Golden Gloves tournament because he was afraid his father would talk him out of fighting.
Larry worked as a traveling salesman and had been out of town two nights before the tournament started at Pershing Auditorium. Before the night was over, he saw his son beat Dale Stroud to earn a trip to the Midwestern Golden Gloves in Omaha.
In Omaha, Doug drew Tommy Cisneros, a skilled boxer from Scottsbluff who had more than 115 fights to his credit and eventually won three Midwest Golden Gloves titles during his career.
Larry didn't want his son to fight. He had coached Cisneros a few years earlier, helping develop the style that would soon be unleashed on his son. He knew that although Cisneros didn't hit hard, he was quick, technically sound and would easily win a decision.
Larry told Doug he didn't have to fight, that he'd send him back on Interstate 80, tell the officials he'd hurt his hand or twisted a knee in an earlier fight.
But leaving wasn't an option. Doug had worked too hard training for the fight. Any haymaker couldn't equal the pain of getting that far only to quit before the fight and tarnish the name.
The house lights dimmed and the ring lights came up. Nearly 7,000 people crammed into the building to watch fighters batter one another for three rounds. Doug came out swinging with the bell; pummeling Cisneros like his heart would stop if he stopped punching.
Fighting those five letters swinging at those damn expectations.
Cisneros glided around the ring like everybody knew he would, landing punches before slipping out of Doug's range. Always moving. Doug kept swinging, hoping his fist would find the sweet spot on Cisneros' chin and end the fight.
"If the lights had gone out and I grabbed a chair, I might've won that fight," Doug said. "It was clear we could've been in there for a long time, and he wasn't going to lose to me."
Midway through the third round Cisneros threw a punch that caught Doug off balance and put him down. He got a standing eight count and the referee stopped the fight.
He had entered the ring an 18-year-old high school senior at the intersection of adolescence and manhood. He left the ring bruised and beaten, but as the applause flowed from the crowd, he also left with an identity.
Sometimes defining moments don't end with victory celebrations.
"If that was his intention, to impress anybody, he got the job done," Larry said. "I think a lot of it was for himself, too."
Some juniors were fighting in Greenwood, and Larry Emery needed an official. He called his son, who by then had hung up his gloves and was working for the U.S. Postal Service.
As they made the short drive, Larry passed along simple pointers.
Keep moving.
Stay neutral.
Be decisive.
Larry stood ringside and passed along advice between rounds.
After the first tournament, Doug started traveling with his father to fights in North Platte, Columbus and others. He gained experience and learned technique. His ego also took a beating.
Car rides home in the dark became critique sessions as time and mile markers passed. Doug began to wonder if he was cut out for officiating.
"I'd been critiqued for 130 miles and one of the things he said was, If you're going to go to a national tournament and carry my name, you'd better do it right.'"
A 4-by-6-inch, black-and-white picture hangs on the wall in Doug Emery's office.
A Knoxville photographer in the upper deck listened as the referees were announced before a round at the 1987 National Golden Gloves tournament. Larry was in ring two. Doug was in ring three.
At the national tournament, fights run continuously in three different rings. Once a fight ends, the next begins a few minutes later.
A few father/son referee combinations had worked at the same national tournaments, but never simultaneously until that day. The photographer didn't catch Doug's smile when the ring assignments were announced. The camera couldn't document the pride that welled inside Larry. Sometime between rounds father and son briefly locked eyes and smiled.
But the photo did show two generations at a crossroads one a fading ex-champ on his way out, the other a promising referee just hitting his stride. After all the junior fights and the criticism between Lincoln and any-town Nebraska, he wasn't Larry's kid anymore.
"It probably meant more to me than it did him," Larry said.
The picture hangs in the middle of Doug's wall, surrounded by several awards and other photos. Images of him smiling with Muhammad Ali, Evander Holyfield and Oscar de la Hoya sit on a table in the corner of the office.
"That is one of the most cherished pictures I have," Doug said, referring to the one of him and his father. "There was a long time where I didn't appreciate being Larry's son."
In 2000, Doug was in Scranton, Pa., applying to become an internationally licensed boxing official.
The process is known as "hell week" and puts candidates through a regimen of tests. Only the top two are eligible to work the Olympics and other International events. In Scranton, 12 of the top 24 officials in the United States competed for the two openings.
An international judge critiques each referee as he works several matches during the week. If the evaluator sees a hold and the official doesn't call it quickly enough, it could ruin his chances. The top two referees often become certified by just fractions of a point.
Everything came together that weekend. Doug was firm and decisive in the ring and left Pennsylvania as an internationally licensed boxing referee.
Finally, he achieved something all his own.
"When you test for IEBA, they don't know who Larry Emery is," Doug said. "I no longer feel like I have to validate who I am."
Since being certified in 2000, Doug has worked tournaments in Cuba, Germany and other countries. He also served as a timekeeper at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta and was named USA Boxing Official of the Year in 2002.
He's one of the most seasoned officials in USA Boxing, America's Olympic boxing organization. During the 1990s, Doug refereed nearly every boxer who later turned professional. He reffed Oscar de la Hoya and Shane Mosley before they earned $20 million per fight.
The difference between a good referee and a great referee is subtle. Anybody can call break or deduct points. The best know when to stop a fight without embarrassing a fighter. They see that little wobble in the knee, the first giveaway a boxer hurts more than he's letting on.
Like a fighter, each referee has his own style developed from the people who helped him through the small bouts in places like Aurora and McCool Junction.
"I have met a lot of people who have helped me develop my style," Doug said. "But the nuts and bolts of that style were my dad."
Larry and Jody drove to Kansas City last May for the National Golden Gloves. After they arrived and settled into their hotel, Larry made some calls to see if he could secure passes for the fights.
Word started making its way up the chain: Doug's dad was looking for two tickets.
Recently, while Larry was working as an event staff member at Memorial Stadium, Doug was refereeing the U.S. Military Boxing Championships in Arizona. Next year, he'll go to South Africa for the World Boxing Championships.
It's been nearly 25 years since Doug became a referee. It's been twice as long since Larry made the Emery name with a hard jaw and a harder right hand.
Things have changed.
The son carries the family name now. It's no longer a burden.
And that's fine with the father.
"I'd seen it coming, and that's how it ought to be."
Reach Michael Bruntz at 473-7254 or mbruntz@journalstar.com.