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FORGOTTEN CHAMP
Ozzie O’Neal begrudges not being remembered with other Valley boxing winners
By JOHN BASSETTI
bassetti@vindy.com
YOUNGSTOWN
Photo
Ozzie O'Neal
Most fighters will say they’ve been robbed at some point in their ring careers, and many will say they’ve been forgotten.
But how many will ask to be remembered?
Ozzie O’Neal, 53, is one.
Originally from Mississippi but fighting out of Niles at the time, O’Neal was probably best known for beating Joe Frazier Jr. in 1987.
The fight in Sandusky lifted O’Neal’s record to 14-6-1 and he was issued a belt designating him the Universal Boxing Association’s Pan-American junior welterweight (139 pounds) champion.
After beating Frazier, Ozzie was the talk of the town.
There was discussion to get he and Hector Camacho together. If the fight would have materialized, O’Neal says that promoters were considering restructuring his UBA Pan-American title to be recognized as a world title.
But then O’Neal fought Victorio Belcher in Florida in April 1988.
It was his undoing.
“It’s the way it was stopped,” O’Neal said of the fight, shown in the record book as a third-round KO. “I wasn’t down. I wasn’t staggering.”
O’Neal said that Belcher was booed by the crowd.
“Before that,” O’Neal said, “I knocked him [Belcher] down and they could have counted out 30 seconds,” he said, adding that the referee even helped Belcher to his feet.
After resuming and throwing a combination, O’Neal said that the referee stepped in and raised Belcher’s hand as the winner.
“It was an injustice,” O’Neal said. “They stole it from me. I lost to a guy I felt I beat. The [TV] tapes don’t lie, people do.”
O’Neal went from his greatest moment to his worst.
Still, to this day, the biggest disappointment is not having the belt.
It may have been a somewhat obscure crown, but it was precious to O’Neal.
“They left me with no sign of being a champ,” said O’Neal, who discovered it missing after losing to Belcher.
“Most guys kept their hardware, if they didn’t pawn it off or something,” O’Neal said, noting that champs before him were able to keep their belts.
He hinted that Top Rank could have been responsible for its disappearance.
Ozzie went into a funk and stopped training.
“I didn’t have it,” O’Neal said of his motivation level.
But fighters are vulnerable and gullible, so, six months later, he was in the ring with Mark Breland and lost via first-round knockout at The Palace in Auburn Hills, Mich.
Although O’Neal fought to one draw in 1990, he didn’t win again and finished 14-15-2, according to Boxrec.com.
One of those fights in his swan-song losing streak was in December 1990 to Simon Brown, who was 32-1 at the time. In 1993, Brown’s knockout of Terry Norris was named The Ring Magazine Upset of the Year.
Another example of a what-might-have-been scenario was in June 1986 against Harold Brazier.
O’Neal was KO’d in the 10th, but he claims that Brazier had some doubts about the validity of the outcome.
“Afterward, he [Brazier] said on TV that he didn’t feel he beat me and was willing to give me another shot,” O’Neal said.
Brazier then lost on points to Meldrick Taylor, the 1984 Olympic featherweight gold medalist.
However, Brazier went on to have a long career of 105-18-1.
Possibly leading to O’Neal’s decline was an eye injury he received during sparring. It eventually resulted in a detached retina in his right eye.
“My vision was blurry, but then it went dark,” he said of the condition that, to the victim, resembles a permanent lunar eclipse.
O’Neal, who was born in Marks, Miss., on a cotton plantation, came to Youngstown in the 1970s and met his wife here. They moved to New Orleans, then returned to the area for about 20 years.
He moved back to the South, but when Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, O’Neal and his family returned.
O’Neal said he was listed as a boxer from Niles because he trained there.
“I might not have been born here, but I lived here a long time when I fought and carried the Youngstown name. I represented Youngstown when I fought and I thought I represented it well. Yet when they bring up champions, my name is never there.”
At one time, O’Neal said that Top Rank billed him as the most feared fight on the East Coast in the junior welterweight division.
“Fighting was my world at that time, but they took it away from me and left me no proof of being a champ,” O’Neal said.
“There are a lot of decisions made in the fight game that aren’t right, but you’ve got to live with it.”
Obviously, the Belcher outcome was one of those.
“I was treated wrong. It’s been so long, people probably don’t want to hear it. But get the [TV fight] tapes and look. It ain’t gonna tell you no lie.”
If the story doesn’t sound incredulous enough for Ripley’s Believe It or Not, it would qualify for Ozzie’s Believe It Or Not.