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03/15/2006 Archived Entry: "8 Count’s Matchmaker, Jerry Alfano, Speaks out!"

8 Count’s Matchmaker, Jerry Alfano, Speaks out!


By Juan C. Ayllon
Photo courtesy of www.8countproductions.com

aboutus (23k image)

From left to right: Bernie Bahrmasel, Dominic Pesoli, Jerry Alfano, and an unidentified friend

GAGES LAKE, IL – Jerry Alfano is an imposing, tough looking man, trim, 6’ 2” and 230 lbs. with door width shoulders, which is fitting for his profession. He’s a boxing matchmaker. At 55, he arranges boxing matches for Chicago boxing promoter Dominic Pesoli and his promotional firm, 8 Count Productions, as well as other clients around the country.

Alfano was born in Chicago and grew up in the Chicagoland area with one sister. Involved in various sports and music, he eventually became an accomplished blues musician, playing with the likes of Chicago blues legends Buddy Guy, Coco Taylor, and Junior Wells. His instrument of choice? A guitar, although he can play the drums, bass, mouth harp, and keyboards.

Alfano attended college briefly and tried various jobs before becoming a Teamster truck driver with Meyer Material for 27 years.

Remarried for the last nine years to Edie, he has two sons in the military: Eric is in Iraq in a forward operating base near Fallujah; and the other, Scott, is in his first year at Annapolis. If he stays at Annapolis, he intends on playing football for the Navy.

For the last five years, Jerry Alfano has been working as a boxing matchmaker fulltime. Following a long day, he graciously granted a candid telephone interview talking about his experiences.

JUAN C. AYLLON: First of all, tell us about your experience playing the blues.

JERRY ALFANO: For quite a few years, I had probably one of the top R & B bands around. We opened up for Coco Taylor, Buddy Guy, [and] Lonny Brooks. We played every Monday night at the Cuddle Inn at 53rd and Ashland. That’s where I put my band together, actually. The guys were from the South Side. And then, we ended up playing every Thursday night at the Checker Board Lounge. I played there with everybody. I mean, I shared equipment with Magic Slim! We were there every Thursday for about a year and a half and played all over.

I really haven’t done anything with it for quite a while; I’m so busy with the boxing. But, I keep thinking about it and going back to it. Every time a fight falls out, I go, ‘Man, I’m going to go back and start the band back again!’ [Laughs].

JCA: Shifting gears, tell us about your role as a matchmaker.

JA: I’m the director of boxing for 8 Count, but, I also have my own company called Ring Kings, and I make fights for Top Rank, Don King, Main Events, Lou Duva, DiBella, everybody. All the major league promoters call me on a regular basis, and many, many of the mid-level, and even occasionally some of the lower ones, but I don’t really do much with them anymore.

JCA: How did you get involved as a matchmaker?

JA: Well, I met Dominic; I think it was like ’98. I’d been around boxing on and off for different years and I was working with Carmela Negron when he fought Mike “The Fly” Garcia [who currently co-owns JABB Boxing Gym with Pesoli]. I think it was one of Dominic’s early shows, maybe the third or fourth show. I was working the corner for Carmelo for the Illinois State Championship, we got to talking, and I guess he was looking to make some changes in the matchmaking. And, I just started putting together a couple ideas for fights and it just kind of evolved.

I didn’t set out to be a matchmaker. It just sort of happened.

I started working with Dominic and then he hired me to do all his stuff. And once I started doing that, what happens is you call around. It’s a small business, really; it’s a network of people. You start networking with people and pretty soon, the only way you can survive in the beginning—or probably anytime—is to make some fights on the side. You have to hustle. You have to make fights for other promoters, also. That’s what I did.

JCA: Can you describe the matchmaking process for beginning to end?

JA: Usually what I do is the first thing I start out with, working with the promoter, is [ask], ‘Okay, what are you looking for? Do you want a competitive fight? How competitive? What kind of budget is there to work with?’ And then what I do, once I’ve got that information, I generally sit down and make a list of possible opponents for each guy that I’m looking to match. And, I go through the list and I sort them out. Just by looking at them, I can usually say to myself, ‘Okay, this guy’s not going to fight for that kind of money,’ ‘This guy’s too tough for this kid,’ ‘This guy’s not tough enough for this kid,’ you know, and just go down the list. And the ones that make sense, I make the phone calls and see if I can put it together.

JCA: How long does it usually take from beginning to end?

JA: That would be hard to pinpoint. Sometimes, something falls right into place immediately. Sometimes I don’t even have to make a list; somebody just pops into my head and it just makes real good sense, and I know that it fits the budget, it fits what they’re looking for, and I know the guy’s available. Sometimes, it happens ‘bada-bing, bada-boom!’

Other times, it’s a nightmare. You just can’t find anybody. It just depends on what’s happening around that fight, time period wise. You may say I’m looking for a 140-pounder for eight rounds to fight a guy who’s 10 and oh. Well, at the same time at dates very close to that date, Main Events is looking for a similar type of guy, and so is ‘Golden Boy,’ and so is Top Rank on three different shows, and they’ve all got bigger pockets to work with, you know? I’ve got to compete against—they’re calling up a guy and telling him they can give him $4,000 and I can only tell him $2,500, you know, because that’s what we have to work with.

JCA: So, typically, you can pay a guy $2,500?

JA: No, no, that’s just an example. Those prices are not representative of anything. It’s just X’s and Y’s. I’m just saying if I can offer X, they can offer X plus $2,000. And that makes it difficult.

But, sometimes you don’t have that conflict and you put the fight together just like that!

There’s a lot of different things that affects the matchmaking. And one of the biggest problems we’re having right now is all the [boxing] commissions and the ABC—the Association of Boxing Commissioners—itself have regularly come up with more medicals for fighters to get, new tougher rules, [and] longer suspensions. Every day it gets more difficult to find people to fight because more and more, these guys are on longer suspensions. They’re just not available to fight.

If we don’t remedy it soon, boxing is going to have a huge problem. We already have a huge problem because we’re running out of fighters, to be quite frank. Something has to change.

Right now, the ABC has a general meeting with all their commissioners scheduled for June or July; I forget exactly when. They posted their agenda. And on that agenda, there’s all kinds of talks by other commissioners, doctors, fight doctors. There’s no matchmakers speaking, no promoters speaking; there’s no boxers speaking, there’s no fight managers speaking. There’s no participants. They have their own meeting and sit there.

And I think they all mean well. However, they’re only dealing with one side of the story and not even asking the participants in the industry what they want, what they think is the right way to do it. That has to change.

What happens is, every day there’s less fighters available. And most particularly, ‘opponents.’ And pretty soon, the smaller promoters are not going to be able to find anybody. And then they’re going to collapse. And then the mid-level promoters are not going to be able to find anybody and they’re going to collapse. And then the only thing that’ll be left will be the guys with the deep pockets, the major promoters. But that’s even going to hurt them because now there’s no ‘farm team,’ so to speak. There’s no way for a guy to build up to a certain record. There’s no way for guys to even be ‘opponents.’

It’s just basically driving itself into the ground.

JCA: I talked with Eric French, who’s had a few losses. And he’s having a hard time finding a fight. He actually called me recently to see if I could find him someone that could get him a fight because he said he can’t fight this guy in New York unless he’s got at least one win in the last six fights.

JA: Well, there’s an example. Eric has called me to help him get fights. The truth is he’s got about 18 losses in a row, something like that. He’s like over 40 years old and there’s almost nowhere that’s going to let him fight.

And, again, like what I talked about earlier about the commissions and ABC, I’m not saying they’re always wrong or anything like that. In this case, they might even be right to not let him fight. He keeps fighting and fighting and keeps losing, although Eric usually goes the distance.

JCA: Yeah, like he gave Ed Gutierrez a good fight and, in fact, trainer Jesse Reid told him, ‘Hey, if you were in shape, you could have beat this guy.’

JA: Right. And he’s always like that. He’s always good enough to come and go the distance and rarely gets hurt.

There’s a lot of questions there to me. You can say you’re not allowing him to fight because you’re protecting him. Well, this is a grown man. My argument would be ‘who has the right to tell another man when he can work and not work.’

When I was in construction, if a brick fell on my shoulder—and it hurt a little bit—nobody told me I couldn’t work for 90 days. It was up to me. If I felt I could work the next day, I could be there. And I did. One time I broke my hand. I went to work the next day! So what? Nobody told me I couldn’t work.

And what’s the difference? These are grown men and women who choose to get in the ring. Nobody’s putting a gun to their head. And, so we go to the ‘Right to Work’ theory, there. And that’s a strong argument.

They can say they’re there to protect the fighters and all that, but a lot of these people, this is what they’re doing to make a living. They’re doing this rather than selling drugs or holding up a liquor store or whatever else they might get into. They prefer to do it honestly by getting in the ring and do it like that. But, now these people gonna tell them, ‘you can’t do it.’

So, is that right? That’s the question.

And the time length for these suspensions get longer and longer. The medicals that are imposed by some of the states, there’s no way the majority of these fighters can afford these kinds of medicals. They just can’t. And the state’s not offering to pay for them. They just say, ‘you’ve got to get this CAT Scan for $1,000,’ and such and such.

A guy gets stopped in the wrong state and they automatically issue that he’s got to get a CAT Scan before he can fight again. Where’s this poor guy going to come up with $1,200, $1,600, $2,000? Depends on where you go for a CAT Scan, and then another $400 for a neuro. These are poor people and they’re just scrapping to get by. Where are they going to come up with that money? They can’t. Now they can’t fight anymore, you know? And that’s what’s happening.

JCA: What do you do when a fighter drops out at the last minute?

JA: Pray! [Laughs] You have to scramble, you have to hustle, you’ve got to basically think fast on your feet and find somebody that makes sense, that’s still going to be a decent fight, that the commission will approve, that you can get medicals in time, that you can get to the site on time.

The thing there is, the longer you’ve been doing this, the more networked you are, the better chance you have of making that happen.

JCA: Does this happen often?

JA: It happens to some guys all the time. Some of the reasons why it happens to some guys all the time, one reason would be the lower budget shows. It happens to them constantly and it’s very simple: Somebody else is offering them more money.

Another thing is [having an] inexperienced matchmaker get fighters. Once you’ve been doing this a long time, you get instincts, okay? And you get a feel whether you can count on this guy or not. And, a lot of it has got to do with are you getting the fighter himself, or are you getting him from a guy who makes a living bringing fighters, and how accountable is that guy.

And, without seeing a fighter, I can tell you a lot about a fighter by who’s bringing him. You know what I’m saying?

There are certain fight handlers that, 99 times out of a hundred, the guy’s looking for a place to lay down in the first round. Okay? He’s not even going to try.

And, I’ve got some of these guys that bring me fighters that just don’t have quite enough to be real winners, but they come to fight. They come and try and give it everything they’ve got. There’s guys like that bring those kind of fighters on a regular basis.

And, so you learn over time who’s dependable on the fighters themselves and the fight handlers.

So, number one, the big thing is the lower budget shows it happens a lot because somebody’s offering more money. The second reason is because inexperienced matchmakers are dealing with people that they don’t know, that they shouldn’t be trusting. Once they’ve been around for a while, they’ll know.

I try to weed those out and try not to use those kinds of people right from the beginning so most of my fights stay together.

[With] 8 Counts fights, if you look over a time period, it’s very rare for our fights to fall out compared to some cards where just about every fight on the card falls out over and over and over again.

JCA: Have you had any mentor figures?

JA: Yeah. Jimmy Waldrop is a matchmaker from down in Pensacola, Florida. He’s been very instrumental and very helpful when I get in a jam and stuff like that. He’s kind of been a mentor to me over the years. And he’s been matchmaking for, oh my God, 30 years or something. He does the matchmaking for all of Roy Jones’ stuff. He is the guy down in the Southeast area. You know, Florida, Georgia, Alabama, all around there. And, he makes fights all over the country and everything, too, just like I do.

JCA: How has the sport changed since you’ve become involved?

JA: Well, the biggest thing is what I was talking about before: Continual pressure of the commissions to make all of the regulations stricter and stricter—you know, suspensions longer and longer, and more and more medicals. It’s been on a constant slide since I started.

JCA: How about the boxers? How have they changed?

JA: I don’t know if they’ve changed all that much. Boxers are a funny, funny group. Some fighters—a guy will be dependable for three years. You put him in eight fights over three years, and all the sudden, he flakes out. You never know what you’re going to get. But, you still have to go by the average of what they’ve done before.

But, as far as abilities and everything, I think the big change you seen in boxing today is I think it’s pretty obvious that the Latino faction is the most happening thing. There’s more opportunities for Latino boxers than there is for any non-Latino boxer.

In regards to television appearances, you have Telefutura’s Solo Boxeo; you have Telemundo; we had HBO Latino, which they discontinued, but now there’s Azteca America; and there’s nothing that bars the Latino from boxing on ESPN or Fox Sportsnet, either. So, basically, they have all the venues open to them. On the Latino stations, they require that any of the televised fights have at least one Latino in the fight.

So, it’s a good time for the Latino boxers. They deserve it because most of them make great fights. They make great fights with their style of fighting. The majority of them, their style of fighting is what people want to see: they’re more about fighting than boxing.

Although, now you have a new breed of Latino fighters that not only can have the fighting heart, but they have developed great skills, too! A lot of them have learned to throw straight right hands. In prior times, they all looped the right hands all the time. So, they’re learning some of the other skills. You put that together with a big heart and you’ve got dangerous guys! You know, like your Margaritos and guys like that.

JCA: What were some of the highlights of your career?

JA: Anytime we’ve had a great fight. And lately, we’ve had just an incredible string of great fights. I think the last three co-main events that were televised were all wars.

You had Jose Hernandez and Escalante, and we had Raul Martinez and Andres Ledesma and that was a war. It seems like our co-main events are on Sho-Box

Luciano Perez and Carson Jones, who took the fight at the last minute, was just a really good fight and right after that in a six round war was Jorge Gonzalez and Derrick Findley and I mean, man! That was—whew—just unbelievable!

Anytime we have fights like that, those are my highlights.

JCA: How about the low points?

JA: The only low points have been occasionally, you get a card that just none of the fights turned out quite the way you hoped they would. It’s impossible to know exactly what’s going to happen. You just have to go by the averages and what the fight seems to be. Sometimes, it just doesn’t work out and sometimes a couple fights turn out not like I thought they would be and that’s disappointing. But, there’s nothing you can do about that. You just keep trying to make the good ones.

And that’s what we do. I think that’s one of the things that 8 Count has done is try to be really fan friendly. It’s hard to be fan friendly and make fights that people want to see.

Yeah, sure we want to see our guys win, but they don’t always win on our cards. Sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t. We put the fan out right in front there, really, by doing that.

But, there’s also a plus side for fighters in that, by fighting real fights—the guys that are with 8 Count—maybe they won’t win every fight, but they become real fighters. And they know how to handle a situation when it comes up. When things get tough, they’ve already been there. So, it’s not new, and now they know how to handle it.

And so, over time—and it’s the kind of thing that will take time to develop, but I think we're almost there—there’s guys that get this experience, they’ve been in some real fights along the way, and not just padded bull [bleep], and they get in jam and they don’t panic. So, therefore, they have what it takes to become a champion.

That’s a huge part in becoming a champion.

I could take anybody—I could take your grandmother—and make her 50-0, depending on what state you’re in. Some of the commissions are real lenient on those sorts of things. But, that doesn’t make somebody a real fighter.

It’s kind of a balance: We’re trying to make great fights for the fans, make fights that our fighters will learn something in, and to do that, occasionally, they might lose, but they’ll learn from it if they’re a real fighter. If they’re not, they’ll probably fold up their tent and go away. That’s fine, though.

JCA: Tell us what you think about the Chicago boxing scene these days.

JA: The Chicago boxing scene in the last seven or eight years has [come a long way] from the last 30 years, [where] it had become an ‘A side-B side’ town, where every card, the A side was the hometown guy; [and] the B side was a bunch of guys from Cincinnati and Milwaukee who never had gloves on before as their opponents. There was no question who was going to win the fight and it was just a matter of what round, and usually the first or second round on a lot of them! I mean, it’s gone from that to real fights.

And Chicago now is well on its way to becoming one of the major fight cities in the country, I believe, in the world. In fact, some of my friends in Mexico have told me that the word is out, even in Mexico, that Chicago’s the place to go and it’s the most happening place in the country, as far as good fights.

JCA: What do you think the future holds for you and 8 Count?

JA: I think that 8 Count has been at the forefront of making all this happen in Chicago. I don’t think there’s any question about it. I’m not taking anything away from other people that have promoted here. I just think that 8 Count has taken it the right direction and stuck with it through some really hard times—some good times and some hard times. I think that things are coming around.

I believe that 8 Count is a very strong mid-level promoter right now, on the cusp of becoming even bigger than that. At some point, I think that it’s very possible that 8 Count will become a major promoter in the country.

Right now, we’re in the process of signing many more fighters. You’ll be seeing a lot of announcements of new fighters and, particularly, a lot of Latino fighters: Mexican fighters, some Puerto Rican, some from other countries, chiefly Latino fighters, because that’s where the market is, it just makes good sense, and because they make good fights.

So, yeah, I think that 8 Count is on the way to becoming a major promoter. And, right now, 8 Count is respected by every major promoter out there because we already work with all of them.

We work with Top Rank, Golden Boy—we’ve got great relationships with all these people, even the promoters we really haven’t done much with, we have good relationships with. Don King, we’re friends with him. We get along with everybody. We’ve done stuff with Roy Jones’ outfit; back when ‘America Presents’ was around, we did 30-40 shows with Art and them. We’ve made a point of business to work with all the major promoters and get along with them, and that’s paid off.

In the end, that’s going to be the difference. You can see by the schedule 8 Count has this year, every year we’re doing more. I think we have 17 to 20 shows this year.

That’s probably going to be even more next year.

Really, I would like to see 8 Count get some of its own TV dates, also. I think that Dominic deserves it. It’s proved to be an enduring enterprise; it’s not a fly-by-night. We’ve been around for a long time and proved we’re not going away. And, I think we’ve produced some tremendous product. I don’t know anybody who would argue with that.

We might have 54 rounds scheduled and it will go 48 rounds of actual boxing. That’s because the fights were competitive, you know.

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