The fastest and best boxing action around plus a candid look inside the fight business make this a great film for aficionados of the sport. But there is not a lot there for most others
Russian immigrant Dmitriy Salita didn’t have much going for himself when he and his family emigrated to New York City in 1991 from Odessa, Ukraine. From a strongly observant Jewish family, he barely spoke English and was the object of every taunt and joke imaginable; the dues that have been extracted from every immigrant from Ireland to Greece and Norway to Vietnam since the creation of the Big Apple. But he found a gym in his neighborhood and found that he could use the punching bag as an outlet for his frustration. Fifteen years later he is the North American Champion welterweight with a record of 27 wins and one draw and he is still winning.
On top of all this, Dmitriy is a Jew, which not only added to the taunts that awaited him in America but gained him a few extra punches in the head and torso during his first few months at the fabled Starrett City Boxing Gym, on Jamaica Bay between JFK airport and Coney Island. As legendary boxing trainer Jimmy O’Pharrow puts it, “When he first came, everybody wanted to fight him. They were all saying, “Come on Jimmy, let me fight him…no me..no me..” “so the first day he was here he got beat up. And the next day and the next day. But he kept coming back. And in a while, he was beating them up.”
This great little documentary does a good job of tracking Dmitriy’s life at the gym and his life as a vigorously practicing member of the Jewish faith. The people in both places are no strangers to good public relations and they took their share of videos of the developing boxer learning the ropes as he learned the scriptures.
Starting off at the gym at about ten years of age, in his late teens he captured the under-19 Amateur National Championship and the coveted NYC Golden Gloves. Frustrated with the restrictions of fighting as an amateur, he signed as a pro with a Jewish promoter, Bob Arum, with the stipulation that he would never have to fight on the Sabbath or any other Jewish holiday. As long as anybody can remember, that was the first time such a restriction has ever been a part of a professional sports contract.
The move to the pros helped him around fighting on the Sabbath as the main card fights usually start after sundown on Saturday, after the end of the weekly Sabbath period. Thank God for small favors!
As for the characters in the film, they are as real as they get. Starrett Gym’s Jimmy O’Pharrow (“Jimmy O”) is the closest real life counterpart to Morgan Freeman’s Eddie “Scrap-Iron” Dupris character in “Million Dollar Baby” that you will ever see. Eventually, as Dmitriy moves up the ladder, Jimmy O is replaced with an even tougher Hispanic coach.
The camera follows the fighter through the travails of contract negotiations as well as the body blows of the ring. The audience sees how a good negotiation works and how a bad one works, as well. Promoters try to move payments in and out as much as possible, always cutting payments down or moving them farther into the future in order to lock up the athlete while putting out as little money as possible.
Even champion welterweights are almost unknown in the world of boxing and it takes every trick in the books to keep them in the public eye. Plus it keeps a loyal family and neighborhood to keep them in room and board while they pound out the miles in roadwork, at the training camp and at the gym. The fights are too few and far between.
All this and some great action shots of Dmitriy’s latest fights, including his biggest, the showdown for the North American welterweight title, make this a fun film for fight buffs. But there are few persons outside that august group who will have the patience to watch it.
Release: January 25, 2008 - Note limited release, see bottom of Prod Notes for details.
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