By Lisa Reisman

lisareisman27@gmail.com

Branford high school track coach Richard Biondi never set out to write “Pugilistic Paisani,” a history of Italian and Italian American boxing champions.

Then, on a visit to Cleveland’s Little Italy Heritage Museum in 2000, he met a volunteer in her mid-80s. They got to talking. At some point Biondi asked her about Joey Maxim, the former world light heavyweight champion who then lived in Cleveland. He’d learned of Maxim, among other fighters, from his late grandfather when he was a kid. The volunteer set up a phone interview.

“The whole set of events was entirely random,” said Biondi, who also teaches social studies. “But I learned that boxers, unlike most other athletes, will give you their time.”

After the interview, the 48-year-old former cross-country and track star at Branford High typed up his notes, slipped it into an envelope, and sent it to Maxim for his review. Over the next 10 years, he repeated that practice roughly 500 times. (Boxers rarely email, according to Biondi, much less have an Internet connection.)

“The boxing community is a brotherhood,” said the North Haven resident. “I’d talk to a fighter and then I’d ask if there was someone else they thought I should talk to or know about. And there was always someone else.”

The result: “Pugilistic Paisani,” a roughly 500-page wealth of biographies, interviews, and profiles of Italian and Italian American boxing champions both across the country and in the New Haven area, once a boxing mecca.

There’s Lou Russo, raised on Monroe Street in Fair Haven in the 1920s, who changed his name to “Bugs Moran” so that his mother wouldn’t know he was boxing. And his contemporary Jimmy Proto, a bantamweight from Wooster Square, who, while agreeing to retire from boxing when his wife worried about his health in the ring, occasionally “snuck out” to fight, Biondi writes.

It’s no surprise that Proto couldn’t resist the impulse to box or that Lou Russo changed his name, said Biondi, who dedicated his book to the memory of his maternal grandfather, “a boxing fan,” he writes, “who taught me to be proud of my heritage.”

According to the 2005 and 2008 New Haven Register Coach of the Year and 2008 inductee into the Branford Sports Hall of Fame, “Boxing was never a sport for the middle class. For Italian immigrants around the turn of the century who were generally poor and uneducated, especially young Italian males, fighting was a way to forge their identity and show their worth.”

That’s why former middleweight champion Jake LaMotta, the man immortalized in the Martin Scorsese movie “The Raging Bull,” told Biondi in a 2000 phone interview that he could “take a punch better than anyone else,” only losing to Sugar Ray Robinson in 1951 when the referee halted the contest with LaMotta still on his feet.

And why former world champion Joey Giardello, despite having short arms for a middleweight, transformed himself into one of the greatest counter punchers in the world.

Vito Antuofermo, who wore the world middleweight champion belt in 1979, “would eat raw meat to help himself prepare for a fight” against, among others, Marvelous Marvin Hagler, Biondi writes. And heavyweight champion Rocky Marciano, whom many historians consider the greatest body punchers of all time, “developed power by throwing punches underwater in the pool.”

Then there were those who came to boxing indirectly. Italian world champion Mario D’Agata, who was born deaf, often fought kids who were making fun of him. And Joey “Buffalo Adonis” Giambra who grew up poor in Buffalo during the Great Depression, helping his mother by shining shoes and selling newspapers. To retain his earnings, he often had to fight his way home. Finally, after being beaten up one too many times, he began to work out. By the age of 22, he was a top 10-ranked middleweight.

And on and on. Biondi attended banquets. He sat in living rooms, dining rooms, and kitchens, as well as ringside. He talked to boxing champions of every weight class, along with cutmen, corner men, referees, trainers, promoters, matchmakers, sportswriters, historians — even contenders. “It takes a very special person to walk up those three steps,” Biondi said with a measure of awe.

To each person he interviewed, he sent a copy of his book — over 500 in all. “I never made a dollar,” he said. “The experience of meeting all these people and telling their stories was so rich I never felt the need.”

No more so than when he went to the wake of Mickey Williams, born Mike Landino, legendary for his ethnically charged fights in 1946 against the Jewish boxer Julie Kogon in the New Haven Arena, and saw a book above the registry.

It was “Pugilistic Paisani” and it was opened to the page about Williams.

Editor’s note: “Pugilistic Paisani” is available by sending an email request to rdbiondi@snet.net.