The short boxer stalked forward with the slow reflexes of a drunk, wobbling in half steps with his hands too low. Each time he ducked punches he sacrificed balance, spreading his feet too wide, then absorbing the attacking fists anyway. Sweat flew into the air as right hands and left hands hit him square in the face, inciting wild cheers from the crowd as people swilled over-priced and flat beer.
The big man in front of him punched and moved. Beads of blood showered some ringside fans shouting, “Knock the fucker out!”
Caramel-colored dreadlocks swayed back and forth from the big man doing the damage, the one fans called Beauty Salon. He moved his 6’7 body like a door on a hinge, swiveling 250 pounds on his toes. All the while the referee looked closely as each punch landed on the short man’s scarred eyebrows and flattened nose. Beauty Salon had world-class size, and his promoter had found him a tough guy that would offer no tricks, and little danger. The fans didn’t shout the short man’s name, but his last name, “Carthron,” could be seen tattooed across his shoulders in big empty letters, like a label printed over an item on clearance.
“God, he’s a mess,” a man in a sport coat said.
Photo: Peter Politanoff
He stood amidst a clutch of regulars who traveled in June of 2013 to the Orange County Fairgrounds in Costa Mesa, Calif., to a steel-chambered venue with a 50-foot high ceiling called The Hangar. A place nestled among the safe neighborhoods and manicured lawns of red-state southern California, it’s known for one-sided contests between men on the way up and men on the way down, doomed to careers as professional losers. The Hangar is home to a minor league of combat sports cards, where the small purses do nothing to diminish the damage a fighter endures or the cruelty of the crowd paying $50 a pop to watch.
The talk among the men intensified between rounds.
“I’d knock him out in two rounds, easy,” said another man, a boxer who called himself “The Sniper.”
“He can be a beast when he wants to be,” a mustached Mexican-American said of Carthron as he drove Beauty Salon against the ropes. “I heard he used to do pornos.”
Photo: Peter Politanoff
He didn’t do those anymore. The payoff wasn’t enough to keep him in the porn game. Besides, he had boxing.
Carthron continued to try to mount an assault as the six-round fight entered the second half. At only 6 feet and nearly 40 pounds smaller than Beauty Salon, to compete he needed to get close, to employ quickness, head movement and rhythm, qualities he had never possessed. There were moments where he did just what he should, wedging Beauty Salon against the ropes, and whacking him with hooks and the occasional uppercut. But he wasn’t able to do it often enough, or long enough and when a punch landed, it failed to get Beauty Salon’s attention. With each swing, Carthron let forth a resounding Shu sound so loud it rose above the din.
“That’s why he still gets fights,” the man in the sport coat said. “He’s got heart, and he’s exciting.”
It was his heart that had always propped him up.
Carthron had done his job, pushing Jonathan Hamm, aka Beauty Salon, in a competitive but not too competitive fight, keeping his value as a professional opponent intact in the unanimous decision. The industry politely refers to such disposable fighters as journeymen, and less politely calls them tomato cans, just a body on the end of a punch thrown by a fighter with a real name. They suck up space in the minimum wage ranks of the sport, often earning too little to be full-time fighters and taking bouts with little to no notice.
Months later, Carthron walked about the Powerhouse Gym in Burbank, sporting pink leopard print spandex leggings, not wholly admitting his fight with the big Beauty Salon was a mistake, but not denying it either, even though the loss further inverted the 32-year-old’s record to 6-10-2. He spoke with the muddy pronunciation of a man who had been hit by too many hard punches from bigger men. He talked to a writer in a voice that approached a shout. Yet when he mentioned people from his past, he used exact dates and addresses, spelling out first and last names as he talked, sometimes asking how long they had been in the “reporting game,” or “doctor game.” He unspooled where he had been and where he was going, and how one day he would be champion.
He believed he would ride a recent wave of luck to get there. He had moved out of manager Chris Baldwin’s garage into an apartment, secured a job as a part-time security guard, and pestered Hall of Fame trainer Jesse Reid, mentor to 23 world champions, including Johnny Tapia and Roger Mayweather, until he agreed to take him on. Carthron had even won a fight about six months after losing his battle with Beauty Salon, outlasting a fat and out of shape Helaman Olguin in another sloppy and sweaty affair in Los Angeles. It was a typical performance for Carthron, a gutsy fight that sometimes seemed more barroom brawl.
Carthron was twice dropped in the opening round of that fight. Swaying back and forth as punches looped around his guard, Reid’s pleas for head movement seemed to go unheard. When the bell rang to end the first three minutes of action, Reid gave him an earful.
“Listen to me, don’t walk straight in, roll in there. Dig to that body hard. This guy’s going to run out of gas,” Reid said. “I don’t want you getting hit this round, goddammit.”
Carthron seemed to get the message, though his execution wasn’t quite right. He tried slipping underneath Olguin’s punches by bending at the waist instead of with his legs, and his own fists were wild, often missing. Relentlessness brought the knockout win, exhausting his squishy opponent into submission as he went to his knee twice, all but conceding defeat.
Photos: Peter Politanoff
It was Carthron’s first win since 2011, and Reid didn’t take it lightly.
“What we did was like getting a kid who can’t read to get straight A’s,” Reid said just outside his gym a few weeks after the fight. Slick-haired and crooked nosed, the former college quarterback and pro boxer stopped mid-sentence to answer the phone.
“I’m doing an interview about a boxer who shouldn’t be fighting,” Reid said. Then he explained why he had decided to train the man who had just been thoroughly schooled in sparring by a 19-year-old with only seven amateur fights; a broke and nearly broken man who had recently failed a neurology exam.
It was to protect him, Reid said, adding that he wasn’t doing it for the money, that each fight with Carthron earned the trainer only a few hundred dollars. After all, Reid had bigger clients, like Vanes Martirosyan, a world-class 154-pound fighter with legitimate world championship aspirations. But for Carthron, he said, the goal was to go out with dignity.
“Drae can win because he’s fighting losers,” Reid said. “Drae’s not a loser. He just hasn’t been treated right.”
Boxing is scattered with the remains of the swindled and duped, a rich tradition in the sweet science. Perhaps the most famous alleged cheat is Don King, who once counted Muhammad Ali and Mike Tyson as clients. Through some dubious business practices, King earned a reputation as one of the slickest charlatans in the game. But there are many others of far less repute. Lots of fighters haven’t been treated right, including champions. Even Tyson and Ali fought well past their best days. At the lower, less visible levels of the sport, there is an endless supply of desperate fighters who drag their tattered bodies into the ring for next month’s rent. And there are plenty of promoters willing to give them a push.
Carthron places his first manager in this category, a guy who plucked him from Freddie Roach’s Wild Card Gym in Hollywood, and says he didn’t put him in a position to win. He was 26-years-old, fresh off being asked to try out for the U.S. Olympic Boxing Team, and a runner-up in the 2008 National Golden Gloves.
Then, Carthron possessed better quickness and speed. You can still see it, sometimes, in the way he attacks and withdraws, the way he commands his feet. Never a technician or a particularly big man, Carthron fought at heavyweight when he should have been in a smaller division.
Photos: Peter Politanoff
Had he fought at another class, or possessed better technique, he may have had a chance to build a better record. But apart from size, he lacked some fundamental skills, like side-to-side head movement, and a mind for cornering opponents who had superior reach. Though he was not without gifts, his greatest resource was unteachable, unknowable, ancient — a quality men are born with or not born with.
In the world of boxing, the fighters call it heart. It’s a quality not easily explained, but nearly every boxer will claim he has heart in unlimited quantities, though few men actually do. Heart can come from desperation, disdain of opponents, or from some deeper less logical place that urges a fighter to fight even when the body has been beaten and bloodied. It’s the sensibility to throw two punches back after just taking three, when the vision is blurred and the ears ring, when victory looks distant and survival doubtful. This heart is what can make a fighter great, or help seal his ruin.
“Most guys with those mantras don’t believe it. Deep down they know they’re frauds,” Carthron’s friend and matchmaker Whit Haydon said. “Drae had genuine disdain for other heavyweights and thought he could beat them.”
And for a while, he could. In 2009 when Carthron traveled to Reno, Nevada to face Tyler Hinkey, that disdain helped carry him to a majority decision in six rounds.
“[Carthron] was flopping around on the ground like a fish, like he had just had an out of body experience,” Haydon said. “Then (Carthron) pops up and grabs the mic and I think, ‘What the fuck is he going to say?’ Then he says ‘Hello Obama from Reno, Nevada!” The president wasn’t there, and the fight wasn’t on TV.
A month later, that same attitude didn’t work against Seth Mitchell. A former Michigan State linebacker, Mitchell had freakish strength and trapezius muscles swollen like engorged snakes. Aired on ESPN “Friday Night Fights,” commentator Joe Tessitore called Carthron’s right hand “deliberate,” a diplomatic way of saying slow. Sometimes the will to win isn’t enough. Carthron didn’t make it out of the first round, eating a crisp, looping right hand that dropped him to the canvas. So much for heart.
He kept on, losing more than he won. He became an opportunist, grabbing cash where he could. Outside of the ring, he lacked the focus to keep his life together. In 2011 Carthron said he entered a Social Security claim for disability, citing physical and mental problems. He wore his wife’s red wig to a hearing, saying the “voices in my head told me to wear it.”
His heart in the ring had always been bolstered by need, and when other jobs didn’t pan out, he returned to his body, to cash in his pound of flesh. Never having fought in a meaningful fight, never approaching anything close to a title bout, Carthron had become hungry watching his sparring partners and friends succeed. A frequent visitor to Roach’s Wild Card Gym, he sparred nearly every day, something most boxers consider gratuitous over-training and an unnecessary risk.
When it came to his physical preparation, Carthron always seemed dedicated enough, showing up at his fights in good shape and ready to go. He hounded Reid to train him, just as he had blown up Haydon’s phone to try and get fights. That tenacity attracted some, while repelling others. Sometimes just getting him to the ring was almost not worth the effort for promoters.
And then there were the other quirks that rubbed some the wrong way, like the series he published on YouTube called “Drae’s Video Blog,” where he interviewed various members of the boxing community. In 2012 he drew the ire of Roach, as highly regarded a figure as exists in the sport today.
“Freddie’s snitchin’, now,” Carthron said in one installment. “We got Freddie snitchin’ on camera,” leaving it uncertain what he was really talking about.
“You say it and I’ll knock you out, you fuckin faggot,” Roach says.
The trainer gets angrier, and as he gets close to the camera, the feed goes black. The 28-second video offers no context or explanation, and was one of last annoyances by Carthron that encouraged Roach to kick him out of the gym. What led to the divorce is not clear, and calls to Roach’s gym to figure out what actually happened met annoyed replies.
“We don’t talk about that person,” a woman’s voice said.
As he puts it, the pain he felt in the ring was often a relief compared to what he endured in the real world.
It’s an old story. He came from a fatherless home in South Central Los Angeles. A shy overweight kid, Carthron says he wore the same clothes for weeks at a time and was the target of jokes. When he was 12 his mother was institutionalized for a mental disorder. Home, he says, didn’t give him the direction he needed. So when his childhood tormentors shouted “fat ass” louder and more often, he answered them with his fists, and when that didn’t work, he sought refuge with a new group of friends.
It was this group that came up with an idea. A foolhardy plan to knock off a jewelry store, and a 14-year-old Carthron would be the gunman. The robbery, by some miracle, was successful, until one of the conspirators was snagged, quickly rolling on Carthron. He was shuffled off to Fred C. Nelles Youth Correctional Facility in Whittier, a sprawling 74-acre site where he would remain until he reached adulthood.
Photo by Elacy/Wikimedia Commons
This is what saved him, at least for a time, a 113-year-old state corrections facility that forced an education into him. There he kept fighting, not yet with gloves and referees there to keep order, but in the unsupervised corners of the campus where certain types of looks were understood as challenges, the reasons ranging from race, to presumed gang affiliation. Somehow, he put the ugliness and the distractions behind him, using it as motivation to forge a path forward. First he enrolled in Santa Monica College, then Los Angeles Valley College to study and play running back for the football teams.
And for the first time, he realized his body had value.
In need of cash, he looked in the classified pages of the LA Weekly, an alternative publication, home to ads forbidden from traditional newspapers. He paged through the classifieds and came across an ad seeking male talent to appear in adult films. Sex and easy money, why not? He had the body.
At first he’s reluctant to talk about his days in porn, saying they’re behind him and that he was lucky to escape without an STD and with his health intact. But once he gets started, he’ll tell a room full of strangers about his days in porn. Maybe that’s where he got his theories on women.
“The grocery is the best place to meet women,” he’ll say. “You can see what they eat and if they’re healthy.”
In March of 2014, in a 24-hour fitness facility about four months after his win against the ill-prepared Olguin, Carthron held court in a cramped co-ed sauna, sweaty bodies squished together. He sat in his sweats, a raincoat-like, full body suit designed to help him drop another 11 pounds to meet the 200-pound weight limit for his next scheduled fight, against Felix Cora Jr. He talked about how it would be broadcast on ESPN and how everyone there could see him knockout his foe the coming weekend.
Some people listened. Some didn’t. One more guy just talking shit. Then he talked about doing porn, how the casting director measured his dick in a room full of people when he answered the LA Weekly advertisement. Even the women listened.
“I got $500 for my first scene, and it was with Cherokee D. It didn’t last very long.”
He was referencing Cherokee D Ass, unsurprisingly known for her jiggly and oversized buttocks, and unrealistic moaning.
“You what?” said a stunned, envious kid.
“Yeah, I did.”
The kid threw his head back and covered his eyes before shaking his head, saying:
“You’re a lucky man.”
“I was fucking bitches that wouldn’t give me a second look on the street,” he said.
A thunderclap of laughter swept over the sauna. Love handles and slack midriffs quaked.
“I was sometimes working three, four days a week,” he said. “The first time I did a gang bang, it was totally awkward as shit.”
He appeared in low-budget films in a career that spanned about seven years, a body on the cover of a DVD, sometimes wearing sneakers and a newsboy cap throughout the sex scenes, his face often barely visible. The website Iafd.com, a porn version of Imdb.com, notes that Carthron, under his alias “Gorgus Drae,” performed in 40 films, but the number is likely much higher. He is credited with appearances in such diverse titles as 5 Guy Cream Pie 25, All that Ass, Black Snake Boned, Jelly 15, Kick Ass Chicks 51: Big Black Butts, Pump that Rump, Throat Gaggers 7, Tear Me a New One 1, Mouth Meat 7, Bomb Ass White Booty 5, and White Trash Whore, numbers 35, 36, 37, 38, and 40, each title another punch, pounding away at who he was, just a body at the end of a camera lens, a money shot.
It was fun while it lasted, but the combination of several AIDS scares that rippled through the Southern California porn industry and his imminent marriage in 2008, were enough for him to walk away from porn for good. Besides, there was boxing.
That’s the only title he wanted. That’s the only one he cared about.
Just before his trip to Galveston, Texas in 2014, he explained his plan: he would beat Cora, move on to a title fight, then retire with money in the bank and a job as a boxing analyst for a major TV network. Pure fantasy. Magical thinking.
The trip had a rough start. Reid was unable to attend, sending his son instead, and just before the fight Carthron talked the promoter into paying him $7,000 instead of $5,000. But contrary to what he told people, the fight was not on ESPN. Cora, a 200-pounder of similar height, owned a 24-6-2 record, and used to be a decent prospect. In the twilight of his career, he looked to ratchet up his value as a higher-priced opponent for prospects trying to become contenders. It was a fight between two men with similar goals, fighting for a paycheck and the chance for future paychecks.
This time, Carthron didn’t last. When Cora attacked, his punches found their place on Carthron’s body, his cheek, his kidney, his forehead. Except this time Carthron couldn’t take them, his heart so shaken by each blow that each subsequent punch took just a little more of who he was and will be. The ability Carthron had shown against Beauty Salon, to turn away punches as he had many times before, was gone.
A veteran of a modest 99 professional rounds and only 32 years old, Carthron had the look of a fighter who had become old before he was old, sending his value into an abyss from which few boxers ever crawl back.
Cora knocked him out in the second round of an eight-round bout, and Carthron’s worth as an opponent plummeted. With the shame and embarrassment of defeat came resentment. Carthron had always felt mismanaged, that the fighters across from him were always better looked after. Now whatever feelings of gratitude he had toward his manager and Reid turned to anger and suspicion. As his head rang from the knockout and disappointment of defeat, he felt he had been set up, served to fail, even suspecting a side deal had been arranged to get him to the fight. Whatever the financial details, Carthron’s rage shook his relationships with Reid and Baldwin.
Those relationships went down like others Carthron has had. Like his wife, who left him last year and has fought him for custody of his 5-year-old daughter.
Again, he was alone.
But not quite alone. He still had his body. Underneath the steady flow of televised fights exists an undercard of promoters and fighters with no shortage of motivation or bills past due. For the broken boxer there is almost always some promoter willing to scoop him up and place him on a card, and different states have different health standards for competing fighters.
While in Galveston, Carthron thought about returning to work in an oil field for a month, but then he met a new ally, and a new plan began to take shape, a plan to figure out his comeback. Well, it was more than that, actually, it was a plan to get Carthron back on track to where he thought he should be, to the perch in boxing he alone felt he deserved: a heavyweight title belt, and a big payday to take into retirement.
Back in Los Angeles, Carthron said, “In Galveston, Texas, I met the president of the WBF (World Boxing Federation), and he wants me to go to Virginia to fight, then go to Australia for a $60,000 payday.” He would, he said, be allowed to pick his own opponent, one he knew he could beat, win the organizations’ heavyweight title, and then go to Australia to defend it for big money. That kind of a payday would be unprecedented for a man whose skills in the ring had fallen so far.
But tomato cans don’t pick opponents. Maybe it was Carthron’s delusion or desperation that made him believe what could not be true, or made him hear it in the first place.
“I told him in no uncertain terms that he’s an idiot and that he’s getting played,” Haydon said. “Everyone could see it but him.”
As preparations for the bout moved forward, the facts went askew, deviating from the plan. He would not be fighting in Virginia. Instead, it would be in Winston-Salem, N.C.. And he would not fight an opponent of his own choosing, he would be fighting the man he met in Galveston, who was not in fact the president of the WBF, but a fighter himself, Chris Vendola. He had only been in Texas to supervise Carthron’s fight for the WBF. What Vendola found in Carthron was an opponent of his own.
If Carthron was old when he began boxing at 23, then Vendola was ancient when he picked up the gloves at age 38. He had just one amateur fight before he became a professional, treating his training as a serious hobby rather than a full-time job. He made much better money as a manager at Arlington Toyota in Jacksonville, Florida.
“Guys like Andrae and me, we only get a week or so of notice and hardly any time to prepare,” Vendola said. “After doing that a few times, I decided I wasn’t going to put myself through that again.”
Vendola stopped taking short notice fights and began actually training for his bouts, studying his opponent and putting in the work he needed to win. That was his only offer to Carthron: plenty of time to train for the fight. There was no purse, and Carthron would even have to pay for his own plane ticket and a portion of the sanctioning fees.
Carthron licked his chops. All he saw was that he’d be fighting a now 45-year-old fighter who had fashioned a 7-5 record on rancid competition, winning four of his bouts against boxers fighting for the first time, and that if he won it would be his big break. Once he got that strap around his waist, against all logic and evidence, Carthron believed he would go to Australia to get that big payday, a title and everything else.
He got none of it. On August 23, 2014, he was stopped on cuts in the third round by the middle-aged car salesman, and sent home, his body bleeding, without a single dollar for his effort.
“He fucking hustled me,” Carthron said.
Photo: Peter Politanoff
This time, there would be no comeback. The body that had always taken him places and helped him put money in his pocket had begun to fight against him. His friends had noticed the declines in his speed and coordination, but what had gone unnoticed was his heart. As he swallowed the bitter loss to Vendola, his life again dipped toward turmoil when he failed to make payments on his apartment, forcing him into a new home.
Five months after his loss in North Carolina, he took another fight on short notice and arrived in Hartford, Connecticut to fight a 2008 Chinese Olympic silver medalist for $3,000. A pre-fight EKG revealed a serious problem.
“I was yanked off the scales and rushed to the emergency room,” Carthron said.
They told him he had the heart of an 80-year-old man, weakened and incapable of supporting exercise. No salt, no sex, and no boxing. It was a stunning diagnosis for a man, now 33, who had always lived a physically active life. Twenty months after his spirited combat with Beauty Salon, Carthron did not believe it. This was just one more obstacle. He had always hurtled obstacles, and quitting still did not occur to him.
“That’s not even an option for me not to fight. My back is against the wall,” Carthron said, “which is a familiar place.” Better up against the wall than flat on the canvas.
He's almost 34 and wants to keep going, to fight his way out of the corner. “I’m not quitting right now,” Carthron says. Besides, people still don’t know him, and still don’t always say his name quite right. It’s not Carth-run, it’s Car-thron, just as it’s spelled on his back.
He’s just a willing body at the end of a punch, a guy who lost to fighters who no one knows anymore, someone who never did get the recognition in the ring that he wanted, that he hoped for, that he felt he deserved. So he walks away with nothing but the name, his jersey tattooed on his back in big empty letters. It’s all that’s left of a spent force. An unfinished label on a dented can, a wounded heart and nothing more, a clearance item now past due.
