By Steve Politi

NJ Advance Media for NJ.com | June 19, 2018



The line for cash register No. 5 at the Somerville ShopRite slows to a stop as a customer searches her purse for exact change. A woman pushes her cart behind me and interrupts the mindless routine of stacking groceries on the conveyor belt with a question that is so strange, and so out of place here, that I ask her to repeat it.

“Did you know he was a famous boxer?”

She is pointing at the cashier, a squat but muscular man who does not look up from his work of sliding each item over the bar-code reader. I try not to stare as I size him up. His nose is flattened between his eyes. His gnarled hands look more suited for work behind the meat counter than in the checkout lane.

“Chizz? Chezz? What was his first name?”

The woman is now gesturing toward the nametag on his black ShopRite apron, which reads “ROBERT.” That doesn’t fit, but a smaller tag – pinned closer to his waist and almost out of sight – gives the final clue: “BOBBY.”

Now I know the woman is right.

Now I am staring.

His face is puffy and wrinkled with age, but decades ago, it was plastered on magazine covers with headlines like “Matinee Idol” and “Tomorrow’s Champion.” That face, with its dimpled chin and combed-back hair that made him look like a young John Travolta, was the face of New Jersey boxing for most of the early 1980s.

Still, none of this makes any sense. I’m standing inside a strip-mall grocery store in the middle of New Jersey, with “Runnin’ On Empty” playing on the sound system and watermelons on sale out front. This is a former world champion who earned about $2 million in his career and once fought boxing legend Evander Holyfield under the bright lights at Madison Square Garden.

This is … Bobby Czyz?

I reach out my hand and introduce myself. He shakes it and, before I can ask why he is here stuffing my purchases into plastic bags, he begins telling a story he likely has shared with countless disbelieving customers.

He tells me this is just temporary. He talks about an upcoming job as an analyst for bare-knuckle fighting that will jumpstart a once-successful broadcasting career. He mentions a horrific car accident that left him in a coma for almost a month and the medical bills that saddled him with a seven-figure debt.

He never stops working as he speaks, his thick Jersey accent mixing with the constant beeps from the cash register.

“They tell me I should thank God I’m still here, but I’m an atheist,” Czyz said, and before I have a chance to ask one of the hundred or so questions bouncing around my brain, the old boxer now running the register in lane No. 5 asks one of his own.

“Do you have your Price Plus card?”



# # #



A few nights later, at an Italian restaurant just a short walk from the ShopRite, I finally had a chance to ask a few of those questions. But the quest for answers with Czyz isn’t easy.

He is late to a dinner because, he explains, he forgot to put a rubber band around his left wrist to remind him. Once, at the peak of his fame, he walked into the ring wearing a white T-shirt with its arms cut off that boasted his membership in Mensa. Now, the 56-year-old’s brilliant mind often erases the small details of his daily life.

“It’s chaos being me,” Czyz says.

Events in the distant past are much clearer, and not surprisingly, that’s where he steers our conversation. Four decades ago, Czyz was a promising middleweight boxer in Wanaque, a blue-collar suburb in Passaic County. He turned pro a few weeks before his senior prom and became an instant fan favorite.

“He was charming. He was handsome. He had people swooning at his feet,” said Kathy Duva, whose husband, Dan, had founded the promotion company, Main Events Boxing, two years earlier. “Everyone loved Bobby.”

The venue for most of his fights was Ice World, a busy rink in Totowa that was converted each week into a makeshift boxing venue. Czyz was the star attraction even when he wasn’t the headliner, with thousands of fans – many of them adoring young women – shelling out a few bucks to shiver in their seats as he began his steady rise in the sport.

His timing was perfect. Boxing was still a marquee sport in the country, and Czyz had launched his pro career just as a new all-sports cable network was looking for programming. The ESPN cameras loved him from the start.

“Bobby Czyz was the golden boy,” ESPN founder Bill Rasmussen said. “He was a big-time name for us because he was entertaining and people were always curious how he’d do.”

His first fight was April 24, 1980. He wore black and gold trunks into the ring, a silk robe with his nickname “CHAPPIE” on the back, and with a vicious flurry of punches, earned a first-round technical knockout against an overmatched journeyman named Hank Whitmore.

“The mouthpiece is out! They’re stopping the fight!” ESPN’s announcer yelled. “What a debut! This is a great young fighter!”

He was more than that. He had the total package – good looks, charisma and a hell of a back story, too. He was headed to Rutgers in the fall, ESPN told its audience that night, to pursue a medical degree. He had turned down an appointment to West Point, his promoters said, to focus on boxing.

“I never found out how much of it was true,” Duva said. “In the end, we’re marketers, and you need a story. Back then, you could color outside the lines.”

His life story, even as he embarked on his career, required little embellishment. Czyz had missed a chance to travel overseas with the 1980 U.S. Olympic boxing team because of a car accident, a devastating blow for a fighter who was expected to use the international competition as a spring board for his career.

That entire team, 14 young fighters and eight officials, died in a plane crash en route to a tournament in Poland.

“My father called me and told me, ‘They’re all dead,’” Czyz said. “I almost collapsed. ‘What do you mean they’re all dead?’ I said. ‘The plane crashed. One hundred percent fatality. They’re all dead.’

“Then it hit me: ‘I’m supposed to be dead!’”

He was alive and thriving. He won his first 20 fights, all but eight of them in that converted ice rink, and the plan was clear. Main Events was grooming him for a title fight against Marvin Hagler, one of the greatest middleweight boxers of all time. Czyz, who entered the ring to the 1980 hit song “Fame,” seemed destined for just that.

That dream came crashing down with a Nov. 20, 1982 defeat, by unanimous decision in 10 rounds, to veteran boxer Mustafa Hamsho. Czyz earned $175,000, but left the ring with a broken hand and stalled career.

But that loss paled in comparison to a devastating night seven months later that would shape the rest of his life.



# # #



Czyz pours himself another glass of Cabernet and pushes his beef tips around his plate. The conversation had danced from topic to topic with little focus – his thoughts on Pluto losing its status as a planet, his investment in Iraqi dinar, his rule about never eating breakfast – until he arrives at June 12, 1983.

He stares off into the distance as he speaks, uninterrupted, for 20 minutes.

“My father always used to say, I would never kill myself except for two reasons: 1. If I were terminally ill, I would never put my family through the emotions and financial torture. 2. If you don’t love me, son,” he said. “Not your brothers. Not your mother. You.”

They had fought that night, but that was no surprise. Robert Czyz Sr., the man who taught Bobby how to box when he was 4, was always fighting someone. He was an abusive father and husband who beat his wife, Louise, so often that her jaw ached when it rained. He beat his four children, too, and as the eldest, Bobby had felt his wrath the most.

Czyz had to plead with a high school gym teacher to keep him off the “skins” team in pickup basketball games for fear everyone would see the bruises. He came home when he was 14 with a broken ankle from playing hoops, an injury that would cause him to miss a big amateur tournament. His father took one look at the cast and punched him in the face.

That night 35 years ago was different, however, because Czyz had gone some place he had never dare go before. “You’re dead to me,” he had told his father as he walked out the door, four words that he tried to take back when he returned home a few hours later. The father stared straight ahead, refusing to acknowledge his apologies.

Czyz gave up and went to bed, and with the air conditioner running at full blast in his room, he never heard the gunshot.

“We came downstairs in the morning, and we saw his blood and brains all over the sliding glass doors,” he said. “I wanted to find the gun because I was going to shoot myself as well. My brother found it first and ejected the clip. Then my mother came down and called the police, and after that, it’s a blur.”

His father’s suicide started a pattern of self-destructive behavior for Czyz. He started drinking heavily. He was arrested for trashing the home of his then-fiancée’s mother. He pulled out of two scheduled fights, infuriating TV network officials. The spoils that came with his profession – the fast cars, the women, the booze – threatened to be his downfall.

He started to slowly rebuild his boxing resume, moving up in class once to win the IBF light heavyweight title in 1986 and again to win the WBA cruiserweight title in 1991. Finally, on May 10, 1996, he stepped up in class one more time for a $350,000 payday against one of the most successful fighters of his generation.

Czyz was no match for Holyfield, the only four-time heavyweight champion in boxing history. He claimed after the fight that somebody in Holyfield’s corner put hot sauce on the champ’s glove to hurt his eyes, something he still believes today. (Holyfield, who dismissed the charges back then, laughed them off last week: “It wasn’t a controversy. He didn’t tell the truth!”)

The sour end, which came after his next fight two years later, didn’t matter. Even in defeat, Czyz’s legacy was secure.

“Among New Jersey boxers, you’d have to rate him in the top 10 of all time – and he’s not No. 10, either,” said Henry Hascup, president of the New Jersey Boxing Hall of Fame. “He was one of the best, for sure.”

He retired with a 44-8 record, and just as importantly, a new career. Czyz, with his high IQ and colorful descriptions, made a seamless transition to the broadcast booth for Showtime. He was behind the microphone on June 28, 1997, the man who explained to a confused audience what Mike Tyson had just done to make Holyfield so angry:

“He got bit on the ear. I can’t believe what I’m seeing!”

Even Holyfield would come to appreciate the blunt honesty Czyz brought to the telecasts as a former boxer. In a sport that leaves so many of its combatants broke and battered late in life, Czyz seemed to have it made.



# # #



The table is cleared. The leftovers are boxed. The waiter, ready to leave for the night, asks to settle the check. But Czyz still hasn’t answered the question that everyone has when they see him standing in that supermarket checkout lane.

What happened?

“I’ve got lots of regrets,” Czyz said. “I have more regrets than you have thoughts.”

Many of those regrets are well documented. His four DUI arrests between 1997 and 2003 not only cost him his driver’s license, which is revoked through 2025, but led to the passage of a New Jersey law that forced municipal prosecutors to obtain the complete driving record of anyone charged with the offense.

Czyz, a newspaper investigation had revealed, was improperly sentenced after the second and third convictions. He was held up as an example for all to see, the subject of scorn from politicians and newspaper editorials.

“They made it look like I was an out-of-control nut job,” he said.

He entered a 30-day rehab program, but then and now, he insists he is not an alcoholic. Showtime fired him in the aftermath of the negative publicity, but Czyz believes the network just used his personal problems as an excuse to get rid of him. The real reason, he believes, was his honesty about corruption in the sport.

“They canned me because, they said, of my fourth DUI,” Czyz said. “The first three didn’t bother them, I guess. Don King was a convicted two-time murderer. He was the promoter with an exclusive contract with Showtime. That didn’t bother them.”

King, convicted of manslaughter in 1967, served nearly four years in prison and was pardoned in 1983. A shooting incident in 1954, in which King said he was thwarting a robbery, was ruled justifiable homicide.

Losing his driver's license and his broadcasting career were just the beginning of his problems. Czyz, who felt that he was blackballed on other TV networks, struggled to find a steady gig. He still made good money with autograph shows and personal appearances, as much as $2,000 a pop, but a divorce settlement and bad business deals had tapped his savings.

Then came the accident. On April 13, 2007, Czyz said he was in the backseat of a Mercedes in Millstone, N.J., when a hired driver crashed into a tree at full speed. Czyz was pulled from the fiery wreck 10 minutes later and helicoptered to the Jersey Shore Medical Center with broken ribs, facial lacerations, collapsed lungs and other serious injuries.

He stayed in a medically induced coma for 28 days. He left the hospital after seven weeks, a tracheotomy scar on this throat and a short-term memory problem that would never fully improve – but, he said, a return visit to that trauma center confirmed his suspicion that his recovery was nothing short of miraculous.

“The nurse dropped her clipboard and broke into tears when she saw me,” he said. “She yelled out, ‘You can’t be that healthy!’ The doctor who worked on me was standing six feet away from her. ‘Bobby Czyz, you were dead. You flat-lined twice on the table. You were the deadest anybody’s ever been to come back to be this healthy.’”

But the celebration was short lived.

“The accident ruined my life,” Czyz said.

The hospital bill was $1.6 million more than his insurance would cover. His friends held a fundraiser at a Clifton nightclub, but his debts were too high. His lack of driver’s license made it almost impossible to find a job in the sport he loved, and those grip-and-grin appearances were too rare to pay his living expenses.

Finally, out of options last September, he walked from an apartment where he was staying in Somerville to the ShopRite and applied for a job.

He arrives most days before 10 a.m. for a shift that begins a half an hour later, carrying his work apron in a black tote bag past the flower stand and through the produce aisle to the employees’ room at the back of the store. He usually bums a ride, but sometimes, he uses a rideshare app.

“If I were taking Lyft to work and home, it would cost me $160 a week for a job that pays $250,” he said. “That’s the definition of insanity.”

When a customer recognizes him – and it happens all the time –he’ll give an abridged version of his life story. Not long after he started in September, a group of employees from another ShopRite came to pose for pictures.

“This is an assembly line. I’ve got to keep it moving,” he reminded them.

But Czyz has no control over the customers. Sometimes, they’ll pass up an empty register to stand in his line, clogging the front of the store with their carts. A woman once told him that she went home after her last shopping trip and looked him up on the internet.

“You’re a member of Mensa? You won three world titles? You should be proud of that!” she said as he bagged her groceries.

“What makes you think I’m not proud of that? Because I’m working at the ShopRite?” he replied. “I like to eat, too.”



# # #



Two weeks after our dinner, Czyz took a Friday off from the ShopRite for his induction into the Atlantic City Boxing Hall of Fame.

He was part of the same class as Evander Holyfield and Donald Trump, although neither of them made it to the ceremony on June 3. Holyfield flew his private jet out early, skipping the induction entirely. And the former promoter turned president?

“Unfortunately, Donald Trump is stuck in his day job,” Hascup, the emcee, told the crowd in the Claridge Hotel’s theater.

Czyz soaked up the attention, getting stopped in the hotel lobby for snapshots and sharing old stories with the fighters he knew from his prime, but it was a rocky weekend. He passed out while sitting ringside during a fight card at Boardwalk Hall and had to be carried back to his room.

He blamed the blackout on an allergy medicine that someone gave him – and not his drinking – but an ex-girlfriend who drove him to Atlantic City packed up and went home. When he stepped to the podium on Sunday night in a brown suit, he had no friends or family in the audience.

He retold a story about beating a much older and stronger boxer as a teenager. “It was the first time I believed I was special, I believed I was different,” he said, his voice catching slightly, and the crowd gave him a nice ovation.

But then he took a sharp turn into his personal beliefs.

“Unbeknownst to most of the public, and I hope this doesn’t offend anyone, I’m not a religious person,” he said. “I’m an atheist. I don’t believe in God. I’ve done the research. There are almost 3,000 religions in the world, and …”

“Bobby, not that story!” Ray Mercer, another inductee, yelled from the front row.

“I’ve got to do that story,” Czyz continued.

“C’mon, man!”

His speech meandered for another few minutes, about atheism and his career, and as he walked off the stage, someone in the audience yelled,“God is real!” Vinny Paz, another inductee, teased Czyz during his acceptance speech, getting big laughs from the room.

“I promise you I will not go as long as Bobby Czyz,” he said.

“When are you going to make a speech as smart as mine?” Czyz shot back.

A half an hour later, Czyz pulled his luggage to the hotel bar and ordered a double vodka with a splash of orange juice and ginger ale. He was alone. Paz entered the restaurant, looked his way, and then walked with his entourage to a table in the back of the restaurant.

Few in the boxing world, at least the people I asked, seem aware of Czyz’s current life far away from the spotlight he once demanded in their sport. Most, like New Jersey boxing commissioner Larry Hazzard, express their surprise at first – “Is that what he’s doing?” – before praising Czyz for “doing what he needs to do.”

Others were more blunt.

“The alcohol got him. He couldn’t let it go,” said Chuck Wepner, the Bayonne boxer who inspired “Rocky” and battled his own demons. “Bobby had a problem. It breaks my heart to think of Bobby Czyz as a bagger in a supermarket. But he’s still Bobby Czyz. You can never take that away from him. Bobby will get back on his feet.”

On that final point, Czyz agrees. From his stool at the hotel bar, he checked in with the promoter for those bare-knuckle fights, leaving a voice mail. He’ll be broadcasting those fights in August, he said, his first step to getting back on his feet.

And if not?

“I’m in the sports history books three times,” he said. “I can’t die. I can’t die. It’s like Julius Caesar can’t die and presidents can’t die and Hitler can’t die. The reason for boxing is, I needed a legacy. I need something to be in place when I’m gone.”

He finished up that drink and a few more, but at 10:47 p.m., he said it was time to go. He called for a Lyft to take him back to the house where he is staying – a ride that would cost the former boxer about $250. He had no other choice.

He had to be back at his cash register in the morning.