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Niles boxer went 6-0 as professional
By Joe Scalzo
YOUNGSTOWN
Rusty Rosenberger made a name for himself as one of the Mahoning Valley’s best boxers of the late 1970s and 1980s.
Many believe his brother, “Razor” Ray, could have done the same thing.
Razor Rosenberger, 57, who died at his home on Tuesday, was a standout amateur fighter during the area’s boxing heyday in the late 1970s. He later went 6-0 as a professional from 1978-80, fighting in New Jersey, New York and Ohio.
“Razor couldn’t make up his mind what he wanted to do,” said Bob Miketa, who started training Rosenberger when he was 17. “I said, ‘Razor, just donate three years to the fight game and you’ll never have to worry about money again.’ But when you’re young like that, you want to enjoy life and he couldn’t make up his mind to stay with it.”
Razor Rosenberger won a Youngstown Golden Gloves title in 1977 before losing a three-round split decision to Clevelander Jeff Stoudemire in a 147-pound open division bout at the Cleveland Golden Gloves tournament on March 11, 1977. Rusty was so incensed by the decision, he refused to fight his 165-pound bout.
A year later, Stoudemire won a national Golden Gloves title.
“The worst part is,” Miketa said, “Razor beat him [Stoudemire] up so bad, he couldn’t make the trip to Honolulu [for the 1977 national tournament] because he had a busted ear drum.”
Youngstown fighters Ray Mancini and Harry Arroyo also won Cleveland Golden Gloves titles in 1977 and Jeff Lampkin joined them a year later. All three would later become world champions while Rusty went 20-8 as a professional and won the New Jersey middleweight title in 1979. But Razor quit after beating Lamont Hopkins at Packard Music Hall on Oct. 28, 1980.
“He was a hell of a fighter,” said area boxing historian Mike Cefalde. “He was actually better than his brother, but he had too many problems.”
Added O’Neill, “I never sparred with him because he was a bad---. He was tougher than he even knew. If he had the right people behind him, like Ray Mancini, he probably could have been a world champion. But he liked to have fun. That was his downfall.”
Rosenberger worked for years at the family business, R&R Floors, and also spent five years as a truck driver for ODOT. But his true talent was in boxing and Miketa is left wondering, “What if?”
“You’ve got to have that hunger,” Miketa said. “A guy like that comes from a middle-income family, so he wasn’t trying to fight his way out of the ghetto. He always had good jobs and the rest of that. If he would have just beared down and given me three years, that’s all I asked. After that, we could see where we’re at.
“He was one hell of a kid. A lot of people loved him. And he was a hell of a fighter.”