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09/20/2006 Archived Entry: "Boxer retains his Portland roots on the way to fame"
Boxer retains his Portland roots on the way to fame
Stephen Forbes - The fighter is one of four final contestants on ESPN's "The Contender"
The Oregonian
Monday, September 18, 2006
INARA VERZEMNIEKS
You leave home with nothing but a suitcase and your dreams and a pair of boxing gloves -- and hundreds of miles and years pass between you and Portland, but the truth is, you never really leave.
You are still everywhere in your grandmother's rambling old home just off North Williams Avenue -- the house where you grew up; all the gloves and silk shorts from your winning fights and your first pair of snakeskin shoes are on display in a living room curio cabinet, and your two championship belts, flashing with gold and jewels, are stowed in two hinged briefcases that your grandmother brings out on special occasions.
Once, your grandmother, who helped raise you, traced your hands, small for a boxer -- "Most people look at his hands and don't understand how he can fight like he does" -- then hung their outlines on the wall, along with pictures of you at 1 month old, not long after being released from the hospital, and your respirator; at 2 years old, banging away on the drums; as a man, home between bouts, helping at your grandmother's church, standing on the back of a truck, helping put together food boxes for the poor.
Now, she watches you on television. The little boy she called Two Pound, who was so small at birth he fit in her cupped hands, has become Stephen Forbes, reality TV star, one of the final four contestants of the ESPN boxing reality series "The Contender."
The series, created by Mark Burnett, who is considered the father of the reality TV genre ("Survivor," anyone?), follows the lives of 16 professional boxers who live and train together as they battle for "The Contender" title, $500,000, and the exposure that follows. Each episode culminates in a five-round bout. The loser goes home. In Tuesday's episode, Forbes, 28, fights for a chance to advance to the 10-round championship that will air live from the Staples Center in Los Angeles on Sept. 26.
The network calls "The Contender" an "an unscripted drama," and one of its selling points is that it has given viewers a glimpse into the lives of Forbes and the other boxers -- a sense of who they are as human beings.
Forbes, who emerged early on as a favorite to win the whole thing, comes across as quiet, serious, thoughtful. He holds his tongue when the other boxers rage or boast. A classic Forbes moment comes when another boxer receives an emotional note from his wife. He's clearly choked up, overcome, vulnerable. So he turns to Forbes. He asks Forbes whether he can share the letter with him, and Forbes, fresh from the latest slaughter of one of his opponents, sweetly accepts. He sits quietly, politely reads the whole thing, then tells the man how beautifully his wife writes. He couldn't sound more kind.
Is this really who Forbes is -- the perfect anecdote -- or is it a trick of editing?
It's much easier to answer once you know where Stephen Forbes comes from: Raised in Portland's boxing gyms, the grandson of the Rev. Mary Overstreet Smith of the Powerhouse Temple Church, the woman who arranged for -- and personally paid for -- the rescue and relocation of about 40 survivors of Hurricane Katrina, when all the government could do was sputter and stall.
"That's who he is," his mother, Phyllis, says.
That's the Portland side of Steve Forbes.
As they say: You can leave home, but it never really leaves you.
Boxing stories love the cliche of the redeemed soul. The bad kid who turned his life around in the ring. Maybe that's why Forbes never got more attention, despite being the first world boxing champion from Oregon since Denny Moyer won the vacant junior middleweight title in 1962. Growing up in Northeast Portland, Forbes was not a troublemaker. In fact, once he discovered boxing, Forbes spent almost all his time in the gym or watching boxing tapes.
"I was kind of obsessed with it really," says Forbes, in a phone interview one recent morning before training. "I would stay up all hours of the night watching these tapes."
Clayton Hires, a former pro junior middleweight, trained at the Matt Dishman Community Center and remembers Forbes, "11 or 12, following me around the gym, asking me questions about boxing." Hires owned a huge collection of recorded fights, and Forbes spent many nights at Hires' place, working his way through the collection. Hires and his wife would go out and leave Forbes on their couch, engrossed in one of the videos. "We'd come back at 2 in the morning, and he'd still be sitting there watching the fights with the cat," says Hires. "I was a fight freak, too, but I was like, 'Man, you surpass me.' "
It's usually hard for anyone to articulate why he loves something. Why a life took this path and not that one. But the way Forbes tells it, his conversion to boxing came instantly and inexplicably when, at age 10, he spotted a magazine with Evander Holyfield on the cover, and he just knew that he had to box, too. (Before that he and his grandmother had taken karate together.)
Some of his decision may come from the fact that everyone called him Two Pound, a reference to Forbes' tiny size at birth; he weighed just 2 pounds 3 ounces, his mother says. When he was a few weeks old, Forbes contracted pneumonia, and briefly stopped breathing. ("I broke every law driving him up to the Hill," says Overstreet Smith.) There were chronic nosebleeds, a lot of prayer, people going easy on him on the football field.
"Everybody was extra gentle, and I didn't like that," Forbes says. He wanted people to know "I'm just as tough as everybody else."
In boxing, he found a place where he could do that, and by the time he was 13, he says, "I just knew that this was what I was going to do." Other people saw it, too.
Bill Meartz, who heads the West Portland Boxing Team, and who's now also head of the national governing body for amateur boxing, trained Forbes from age 13 to 17. Forbes lived with Meartz for a time, while Meartz helped get him ready for national competition, including the National Junior Olympics. "Steve is one of those guys that Ray Arcel talks about," says Meartz, who keeps a picture of Forbes on his office wall -- along with the likes of Floyd Patterson and Muhammad Ali. ("All my greatest," Meartz says, "People I admire and like.") Arcel was one of boxing's most storied trainers, who trained 20 world champions, Meartz says, "and he says trainers get too much attention, too much credit. It all comes down to the kid in the corner, and if the kid can't fight, you're just another bum in the park. . . . Steve can make anybody look good. He's that talented."
The move away
In his late teens, Forbes dominated the local amateur boxing scene, racking up five Oregon and Washington Golden Gloves wins. At a certain point it became clear that he needed to "be in a place where there were better fighters, fighters that would challenge him," says Hires. Hires, among others, urged him to leave Portland for Las Vegas, and at 19, Forbes headed off with a suitcase and the intent to turn pro.
Things were rough. Forbes and his first wife lived in a motel, tried to scrape together enough money for an apartment. He found work at a grocery store, trained when he could, but wasn't getting any fights. "He wouldn't complain, but holiday time I would feel led to wire some money Western Union," says Overstreet Smith. And then the story takes a happy turn: Forbes makes connections, lands a shot at the International Boxing Federation's junior lightweight world title. And he wins. There is controversy. (What is boxing without controversy?) There is a rematch. He wins again. End of controversy.
But then, Forbes lost the title. Not in the ring, but on the scales, reportedly weighing in 23/4 pounds overweight. (There's that Two Pound chorus again.)
His first thought was to return home.
Even now, although Forbes lives in Michigan with his second wife, Valerie, whom he married a year ago and who is attending law school in Detroit, Forbes returns to Portland often, taking time to help his grandmother with her church ministries, passing out coats and blankets or food, offering to speak with schoolchildren.
Local author Katherine Dunn, a boxing expert who has written about the sport for decades, and who has followed Forbes' career since he was 12, describes him as "extremely skillful and smart as a boxer -- a very cool, disciplined mind." But "he's lacked the major promoter who could make him a familiar figure to nonboxing fans."
For Forbes, an appearance on "The Contender" was another chance for the exposure that eluded him, even when he held the world title. Last year's winner of the series and several of the top finishers received boosts to their boxing careers.
What makes Forbes' grandmother and mother, watching from Portland, particularly happy, is not just his performance in the ring, but that he has acted, his mother says, "a perfect gentleman at all times." Pastor Mary, the keeper of his belts and gloves, puts it another way: "He knows I'm watching," she says.
Inara Verzemnieks: inarav@news.oregonian.com
