Issue 046
February 2009
Al “Stankie” Stankiewicz has lived many different lives, any one of which might seem enough for most people, writes Ben Fowlkes. At 67 years old he’s been a cop, a pro boxer, a salesman of nearly everything, a cop again, and a fight trainer.
It’s the last job that he finds most satisfying, though he never thought he’d wind up doing it on TV, as he did during season eight of Spike TV’s ‘The Ultimate Fighter’. He certainly never thought he’d do it in the sport of mixed martial arts, which he didn’t think would go anywhere to begin with. And yet here he is.
To hear him tell it, this all started one day in 1967. “I saw Mando Ramos fight at the Olympic Auditorium and I was mesmerised,” says Stankiewicz. “I thought, ‘I can do that!’ Mando Ramos was the greatest fighter I had ever seen in my life. At 18 he won the world championship. So I started training just to learn, and six months later I turned pro.”
Stankiewicz was 27 years old, an undercover cop in the LAPD vice squad, and suddenly he decided to change his life completely and try a career in the ring. “I had never really boxed but I knew I could do it. Then I tried it and I kept getting beat up and beat up. There’s an old saying: those who can, do; those who can’t, teach. I believe that. I liked it and I like helping people, so that’s what I did.”
Stankiewicz’s dual passions for fighting and for helping others melded when he returned to the police force, this time in the juvenile division. Working LA’s tough Mexican barrio (neighbourhood), ‘Stankie’ began taking the kids he caught fighting in the streets and teaching them the finer points of boxing in the basement of the police station. He never imagined the heights some of those kids would one day reach.
“I got Paul Gonzales when he was eight years old. He was fighting in a park in Hollenbeck. I took him down to the gym and started training him and he swallowed up everything I taught him. He ate it up. Eleven years later, when he was 19, he won the gold medal in the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics.”
Eight years later ‘Stankie’ would take another fighter to a gold medal in the ring, this time a skinny kid named Oscar De La Hoya. It was the same year his son, Andy Stankiewicz, signed on to play professional baseball with the New York Yankees.
“Stankie the Yankee,” he says. “It was a good year for me.”
But they weren’t all success stories. Stankiewicz found out how cruel the fight game can be during his own career, but he didn’t know how hard it would be to watch others fail, often because of their own doing.
“I had kids who went to prison for armed robbery or murder. My captain told me, ‘Stankie, if you’re going to claim the glory for the champions, you also have to claim the guys who didn’t make it.’ And I did. I still feel bad about those kids and it makes me want to cry. They don’t all make it.”
His career as a trainer seemed to have stalled after a falling out with De La Hoya’s father. But, in 1995, Hollywood movie producer Jon Peters asked him to help a young Brazilian fighter competing in a brand new sport: mixed martial arts. Though ‘Stankie’ knew nothing about it, he did know fighters, so he agreed to have a look. The 18-year-old fighter Peters took him to see was Vitor Belfort.
“I worked with him, and I thought, ‘This kid has some of the fastest hands I’ve ever seen.’ This kid was super fast, he hit hard, he was great. So I said I’d work with him and Jon looked over at one of his assistants and said, “Cut Al a check for $10,000 to get him started.” I looked up at the Lord and said, ‘Thank you, Lord. Thank you,’ – because I was broke.”
Watching Belfort was the first ‘Stankie’ had ever seen of MMA. It struck him as too complex, too hardcore for mainstream American sports fans to pick up on. He thought it a passing curiosity. His wife insisted otherwise.
“She said, ‘Al, this going somewhere.’ She said women would love it. She told me to stay with it. So I did and now I love it. It’s great. These guys are real fighters. You get knocked down, and boom! The other guy is on you. There’s no time to recover. You got to be tough to do this sport, and these guys are.”
In his travels to Brazil with Belfort, Stankiewicz would come to know another MMA fighter who impressed him: Antonio Rodrigo Noguiera. Only with ‘Minotauro’ it was his range of physical and mental abilities that sparked Stankiewicz’s interest, what he refers to as the five D’s and two A’s.
“Desire, determination, dedication, drive, and discipline. And the two A’s: ability and attitude. He’s got the attitude to be number one. The Brazilians, they know what it’s like to have to fight and scratch and claw for their money. There’s no welfare there. If you can’t feed your babies the government doesn’t help you. You’re out on the street. You got to fight your way up and fight to stay there.”
Fighting to stay at the top is exactly what prompted Nogueira to bring ‘Stankie’ on as a boxing coach. It’s a position for which the elder man says he is eternally grateful.
“To get to do something you love, and do it around people that love it as much as you do, that’s the greatest gift anyone can get. You just hope to be able to give it back.”
