A segment of the population might have trouble understanding the motivations many years ago that guided Joe Feliciano on his life’s path, so it’s worth a moment to explain a place in time distinctly different from the social environment in which we live today.
In the olden days, we consumed the world around us in much different ways than we do in the 21st century. Back then, twitter was the sometimes annoying high-pitched sounds that came out of birds, if you heard “face book” in a sentence it probably had something to with a dedicated bookworm nerd and, oh yes, there was no internet.
Most of us had three or four channels on the living room television set, which was often found in a large console that also contained a radio and a record player. Yeah, there was no streaming, no audio cassettes, no CDs or DVDs.
So when something big came on television, it truly captured the imagination of the nation in ways that the sliced and diced and cable-centric news today is incapable of doing. This helps explain what is known as ”The greatest game ever played,” the 1958 NFL championship when Alan Ameche bulled over the New York Giants defensive from and fell into the end zone for an overtime victory. Later it helped the Beatles become a virtual overnight sensation, it made John Kennedy a president because he looked cool and composed on stage in black and white against the sweating face of Richard Nixon.
But for those of us who followed sports, that era before cable television and online gambling and all the rest will always be treasured for showcasing some of the greatest boxers who ever lived. Sugar Ray Leonard, Marvelous Marvin Hagler, Tommy Hearns, and the heavyweights, people like George Foreman, Joe Frazier and the most iconic pugilist who ever stepped in a ring, Muhammed Ali.
Imagine a world in which, on the week of a heavyweight title fight, it was all you heard people talking about, all week. From keiki to kupuna, your granny and her friends discussed the bout. We were, as a nation, consumed in ways that can’t be compared to today’s realities.
“I was so young I can’t even remember when I first fell into it,” said Feliciano, a Hilo native and the highest ranking boxing official on the Big Island. “I saw it, Ali and all the others, and I was immediately interested, it’s what I wanted to do, who I wanted to be.”
There used to be a school of thought expressed by many a boxer and trainer in those long ago days that said there were two kinds of people in the world — those who loved boxing and boxers and those who hated boxing and boxers.
Feliciano found his way to Andrews Gym at one point, and saw a ring, then met a couple of trainers, John Calisto and Sam Alameda. Feliciano was taking it all in, looking at the ring, the small and the big bags, when Alameda approached him. He asked two questions that day, there first an inquiry on Feliciano’s interest in hitting a bag.
On went the gloves, a brief bit of explanation and Feliciano started in on the bag. Before long, he recalls Alameda asking one other question.
“You wanna box?”
It started from there and Feliciano was soon so caught up in the new disciplines he was learning, he made a bold prediction to his mother.
“One day when I was 8 years old, I told my mom, ‘Mom, when I grow up, I want to be a boxer and a policeman.’”
He was an amateur boxer, then had a brief pro career before channeling his energies into understanding the job of the third person in the ring. And yes, when he isn’t traveling the globe officiating boxing matches, Feliciano spends his time as a member of the airport police force in Hilo.
“It has given me so much, right from the very start,” he said last week over a latte. “When I started in the ring I wanted to know everything there was to know about the techniques, how do you outbox an opponent? I realized I needed to learn defensive skills, as one coach told me, ‘It’s the way you learn to take your opponent’s least hardest punch,’ I learned all that stuff, I learned to bob and weave, to move laterally, how to get my opponent off balance and then attack.”
From the moment he started, Feliciano said boxing, “mellowed me out, it made me think about what I was doing, what my goals were. You have all this energy you release and it makes you kind of slow down and think, which is good.
“I used to love to dance,” he said, “and when I learned a little about moving around in the ring, I used music to enhance the rhythm I was looking for; it’s like hearing that bass and drums in a band and responding to it, it all comes in a flow, you could say.”
His boxing career might have had more legs had he not broken his thumb in a national finals amateur bout in Winston-Salem, N.C., that required a long recovery time and opened his thoughts to officiating.
These days, Feliciano has been a certified boxing official for 30 years, and was just elevated to a three-star referee after successfully completing and passing a detailed, six-day process of examination in Cuba, where he worked matches involving boxers from Thailand, Morocco and Cuba.
The door is now open for Feliciano to officiate major competitions virtually anywhere in the world, whether at the U.S. Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, Colo., various amateur World Championship tournaments, or maybe the Olympics themselves one day.
“It was a great experience,” he said of his second Cuba trip. “The boxing was very good, the Thailand boxers were tremendous, very technical, smart and tough.
“The Cuban people understand boxing, they take it very seriously. You would see pictures and tributes to Kid Chocolate (a self-taught Cuban who became junior middleweight world champion in 1931), right next to the ones about Ernest Hemingway.
“It was a thrill be there and I hope I get to return one day,” Feliciano said.
His interest in the sport has taken him from Hilo to Iraq, Costa Rica, Cuba, and there will be more travel ahead now that he has reached a new plateau as a referee.
“Our job, wherever we are, whoever is in the ring, is to protect the boxers as much as possible and, as we say, ‘Let the boxers fight.’ We don’t want to be the story, we want to be invisible and let the boxers be the show, but you have to know what you’re doing in order to do that.”
It won’t be like it used to be, those days are long gone and will never return, but one day you might flip through the cable channels, stop on a channel that shows boxing and see the Big Island ref maintaining order in the squared circle.
Because a long time ago, when someone asked if he wanted to box, little Joe’s eye lit up, he broke into a smile and said yes, opening a door that led from Hilo to the world.
