One tough fundraiser
Bruised ribs, misaligned jaw and bloody nose to fight cancer

By Dan Plouffe
Orléans Star
Tuesday, March 10, 2009

It wasn’t a blood drive, but Transcontinental Media regional manager Michael Curran and East Ottawa Star columnist Walter Robinson each donated a bit of the red fluid on Saturday, March 7 for a charity boxing event in support of cancer research.

The two “white-collar” matches featuring the east-end combatants were actually two of the more entertaining bouts on the Fight for the Cure card at the downtown Westin Hotel. They may not have been able to box like some of the top amateur athletes in the four other bouts, but they also didn’t have quite the agility or defensive awareness necessary to get out of the way of many punches – which led to quite the slugfests.

“My chest is heaving right now. I’m out of breath. I’m done,” said Robinson, who has boxed in both editions of the annual event, but is reconsidering fighting for a third time following his bout with Randy Woods. “I didn’t get hit a lot last year. This year, I made up for more than two years of boxing.”

No winners were declared for the white-collar matches, but that didn’t keep the competitors from taking it seriously and displaying some real boxing skills. For Curran, his involvement started innocently enough when he signed up for a few classes at the Ray Friel Recreation Centre. Things grew more important, however, once he agreed “in a moment of weakness” to step into the ring.

His three-times-a-week workouts were at times “excruciating,” Curran said, but it wasn’t until he began sparring with live boxers that things really got difficult. The first sparring partner for “Magic Mike” was older and smaller than him – which provided nothing more than a delusion of what was about to come.

“He kept snapping my head back, and after about 40 seconds in the ring, I feel this drip, drip, drip from my nose, and of course, it’s blood coming down on my shirt,” Curran recounted. “It was kind of like, ‘Oh God, What have I gotten myself into?’”

In a later sparring session with one of the “real” boxers on the card, Curran suffered a rib injury that kept him from sleeping for two days, and he couldn’t chew a full day either until his jaw realigned itself properly.

“My secret to success has been Advil and beer,” Curran noted. “I don’t know if that’s a part of every boxer’s regiment, but that combination has got me through a few sore nights.”

Curran held his own on fight night despite a rough first round against Paul Power, his opponent from Confluence Consulting. The tough sparring, he noted, prepared him well.

“It’s never the same when we walk into a real boxing ring though,” said Curran, who got to experience the whole sha-bang with an intro video, entrance music, flashing lights and ring girls for his first career fight. “The adrenaline is pumping and it’s much more intense than the sparring.”

More than landing a few punches however, the night was about raising money for the Ottawa Regional Cancer Centre – although Robinson saw parallels between the two even if the likelihood of blood being shed is higher inside the ropes.

“Boxing is about surviving in the ring, staying in shape and a healthy lifestyle,” noted the past chairman of the cancer centre foundation. “That’s what cancer’s about to a great degree – it’s about fighting and surviving.”