FIGHT COMPETITION Bad, BADDER, BADDEST

By STEPHEN SIFF
VINDICATOR TRUMBULL STAFF
THE SUPERMAN SHIRT DIDN'T protect Mike Gresko. "I thought I was in shape," said Gresko, who also wears a Superman tattoo on his right bicep. "I was wrong."
From the moment his fight began, the clean-cut Applebee's waiter was driven back by flailing blows from Glen Wells, a 37-year-old from East Liverpool.
By the third round, Gresko didn't have much fight left in him, but neither did Wells.
The boozy crowd of about 500 in Warren's Packard Music Hall Saturday began to hoot, eventually pacified by the appearance of the women in Bud Light bikinis, who pranced around the ring between rounds.
Wells was handed the fight by decision, but Gresko still achieved his goal -- to fight in the ring.
"I just wanted to say I had done it," said Gresko, 21, who said his previous fighting experience consisted of a few scrapes in the street. "You have to do this kind of thing when you are young, I guess."
Prize: Twenty-eight pugilists, including two women, paid $70 each to fight for the cheer of a crowd, a glimmer of recognition and a shot at the grand prize: $1,000 and a jacket.
"It takes grapes to get in the ring," said Vangy Tonies, who organizes about a dozen fight competitions a year working out of a Norton tavern and restaurant.
"These people have a dream, and I'm fulfilling it."
Among them were a few trained boxers, a karate instructor and a car salesman. In the midst of pre-fight jitters, it was the car salesman who seemed least convinced of his reasons for being there.
"My boss put me up to it," said Pierre Parfaite, of Canfield.
As well as paying the entry fee, his employer, Fairway Ford, took out a full page ad in the fight program, he said.
"They thought it would be good for business."
Parfaite said his co-workers were impressed by the fact that he served in the Army Rangers.
"They think I'm a bad---," he said. "I smoke a pack a day and sit on my ---."
Hit hard: Some of the first-time fighters didn't fare as well as Gresko.
Elmer Porter, 26, of Sebring, ended his fight on his knees, gasping for breath.
He was swatted out of the air by a blow from Davy McBride, 20, of Leetonia, who has won several of these things in the past.
"I do it for the money," said McBride, a slender forklift operator with a wisp of a goatee.
McBride seemed calm in the bullpen before the fight, but his legs jiggled restlessly beneath yellow nylon pants. His father also stood backstage with the fighters, waiting for the event to begin.
"My mom comes to my fights too, but she spends a lot of the time standing in the hallways smoking," McBride said. "She is always nervous."