BY MICHAEL WEINREB
STAFF WRITER
February 11, 2006, 11:00 PM EST
Once they saw the video evidence, once they saw that this man in their midst was indeed something tenable, something real, the voices of the assembled at Adolf Schreiber Hebrew Academy of Rockland County rang out from every corner. It was then, after the rabbi delivered his introduction and the DVD of Dmitriy Salita's career highlights as a boxer was completed and the lights in the segregated auditorium again were lifted, that the questions came pouring forth.
The questions came from the right side of the aisle, from the boys in the technicolor yarmulkes, and the questions came from the left side of the aisle, from the girls in the flowing print dresses. The questions were brutalistic (What was your worst injury?) and the questions were status-conscious (Have you ever been on "SportsCenter"?) and the questions were practical (How much money do you make?) and the questions were academic (Where do you go to college?), and after a while, the rabbi just wanted them all to be quiet and keep their tuchases in their seats so they could hear the answers to their own inquiries.
"I go to a college called Touro," Dmitriy Salita said, and there commenced much whispering in the auditorium, and someone said: "Oh my God! My sister went there!"
Salita, a compact 140-pound junior welterweight with a 24-0 record as a professional, has what his promoters would call a "winning" smile, a bemused smirk that endears him to strangers on sight. He is 23 years old, and he is still finding his way as a public speaker in the same way he's still finding himself as a Jew, and as a boxer. He had never entertained an audience as young as this one; most of the yeshiva audiences he spoke to (and it is Orthodox tradition to separate males and females) previously were of high school age, not elementary and middle-school students.
But the rabbi here, Leible Chaitovsky, had heard Salita's story on a radio show one morning, a tale of an Orthodox Jewish boxer who refused to fight on the Sabbath, perhaps the only one of his kind on this Earth. Once the rabbi had gotten over his disbelief, he had begun a yearlong e-mail campaign inviting Salita to come up to Monsey, to their little red-brick yeshiva set on six wooded acres near the New York State Thruway.
Now that the fighter was here before them, the questions kept on coming. They began to delve deeper, into issues of faith and identity, into the subjects that have loomed over Salita's career, over his life, since he committed himself to Orthodox Judaism as a teenager, in the wake of his mother's death from cancer: How do you feel, telling people that you can't fight on Shavuos? Have you ever dealt with anti-Semitism?
Questions like these have always made Salita a little uneasy. Because, really, who is he to speak with authority on such things? Religion, he says, is a personal thing, and the laws of the Talmud, the governing principles of the Jewish faith, are famously arcane and complex, and when he was the age of his inquisitors, Salita knew nothing of them. He still knows so little. He is so new to all of this, and already he has been endowed with so much meaning. "I'm trying to do the best I can, you know what I mean?" Salita had said at a Brooklyn kosher restaurant a few days earlier. "I might slip somewhere, because I'm human, you understand? The media has a tendency to make athletes perfect, and then it's a crash landing, and that's something I want to avoid, you know?"
Soon the question-and-answer session was cut short, no more, put your hands down, the rabbi said. It was time for the afternoon prayer, time for the boys to daven mincha. But they wouldn't let Salita alone. The boys began clamoring onto the stage and begging for autographs ("Menachem, SIT DOWN!"), and Salita obliged every one of them, because every little act of kindness, every little mitzvah, counts for something. He signed for Menachem, he signed for Matthew, he signed for Esther, he signed until the rabbi had to pull him away so they could start the afternoon prayer, and afterward, he signed until the driver he'd hired to take him to Monsey pulled him out the door.
"He looks like a yeshiva boy, sitting there," a female teacher cooed. "Such a baby face."
On road to big screen
In a short time, if all goes according to plan, Dmitriy Salita's life story will become subject to the whims of the Hollywood machine, courtesy of a screenwriter named Gregory Allen Howard ("Remember the Titans") and a producer named Jerry Bruckheimer. It will most likely be sanitized and compressed and embellished, because this is what celluloid does to true-life stories, especially when those true-life stories are produced by Bruck.heimer, who has the distinction of producing some of the worst and some of the highest-grossing films in American history (categories that often -- as in the case of "Pearl Harbor" -- aren't mutually exclusive).
If it happens, it could make Salita into one of the most famous boxers in the United States, and the sort of boxing role model Jews haven't had since fighters such as Benny Leonard and Barney Ross emerged from the Lower East Side ghettos in the 1930s. It also will expose the world to Salita's made-to-order story, which goes something like this:
Born in Odessa, Ukraine, amid a culture infected by anti-Semitism; moves to Brooklyn, and at age 14, meets a black trainer named Jimmy O'Pharrow at the overwhelmingly black Starrett City Boxing Club; becomes a fixture at the gym; while his mother is dying of cancer, meets an Orthodox Jew in the hospital who engages him on his faith (or lack thereof) and directs him to a local Chabad synagogue; slowly, under the tutelage of a rabbi named Zalman Liberov, Salita embraces the traditions of Orthodoxy; possessed of preternatural skills and quickness, he becomes a legitimate contender in his weight class, despite (and perhaps because of) his refusal to fight on the Sabbath and other Jewish holy days.
"I think he has a market most other boxers don't have," said promoter Lou DiBella, who -- because Salita won't fight in any of the televised Friday-night boxing series, which fall on the Sabbath -- has used him as the headliner on his Broadway Boxing card. These are a series of Thursday-night fights at the Hammerstein Ballroom in Manhattan, populated by ethnic fighters with neighborhood followings, such as Edgar Santana, a Puerto Rican from Spanish Harlem, and Curtis Stevens, a black middleweight from Brooklyn.
What DiBella's experiment has led to are homogenous scenes such as the one at Salita's last fight, in December, against a no-name from Denver, Robert Frankel: Great packs of Orthodox Jews in the front rows, identifiable by their head coverings, intermingling with blacks and Hispanics, the whole thing resembling the opening of an off-color joke. "I see it as the American dream," said Chaim Marcus, an advertising and PR man who counts Salita among his clients. "All these people are getting out of the synagogue, getting out of their closed communities, to mingle with others."
Amid the hot knishes and the corned-beef sandwiches at the kosher concession stand, amid the waitresses with T-shirts pulled up to the breaking point and the old-school rap beating out of the speakers and the bearded elders in brimmed hats who resembled Talmudic scholars, you could find men like Dov Friedman. He is 23, nattily dressed and curly haired and gregarious, the same age as Salita (whose fans refer to him as "Dima"). He had rounded up 100 tickets for his friends, and for friends of friends, for anyone who wanted to catch this phenomenon while it was still on the upswing.
"For the first time in my life, I know I have a guy I can go for," said Friedman, who is Orthodox, and who works as a mortgage broker. "He's part of you. He's your people. My whole heart is behind him."
It took 10 rounds and a narrow (but unanimous) decision for Salita to put away Frankel. There were some anxious moments for his flock, including a flukish first-round knockdown of Salita, and the consensus among his people afterward was that he needed a test like this, that he needs more tests like this if he hopes to make it as a championship contender, that he's still a year or two away from a major fight. What they would like is to bring him along slowly. "Right now, he's on his way up the ladder," O'Pharrow said. "He's in the incubator yet."
Pressure of being a role model
Normally, in this day and age, when the fight game is mostly an exercise in nostalgia, when even promoters such as DiBella admit that boxing is "on a downswing," the wait for a fighter to mature wouldn't be such a big thing. But there is nothing typical about this situation. This is a fighter who is managed by the brother of his rabbi, a fighter whose bouts are regularly covered by The Jerusalem Post, a fighter whose sponsors include a kosher catering service, a fighter who already has been showered with absurd nicknames such as "The Kosher Kid" and "The Hebrew Hammer" and "Star of David."
All of which breeds the sort of ratcheting hyperbole that, Salita insists, "didn't come from me. It is what it is. It becomes like a game of telephone, you know?"
"It's creating an anxiety in him which may not be fair to the kid," said Hank Kaplan, a boxing historian who's met Salita several times. "He's trying to be a hero to his followers. With that kind of anxiety, the artisanship suffers."
But how can they help it? This is a community that hasn't had an athletic role model in so long that they seem to have forgotten such a person could exist. In Salita, they see possibility. In him, Lord knows, they see themselves.
"I already told him and I told the rabbis, 'God put him on this Earth to do more than just box,"' said O'Pharrow, who recently gave way in the day-to-day training to Hector Roca, who works out of Gleason's Gym in Brooklyn. "He's going to be a world leader, I believe."
This is a great burden to put on any man, let alone a man still finding his way. But here he is, a role model at age 23, standing in a Rockland County yeshiva with his head buried in a prayer book. He's davening in a series of dips and bows, murmuring through pursed lips, a borrowed yarmulke perched atop his head in place of the Calvin Klein winter hat he'd come wearing. And the boys cannot stop stealing glances at him, this stranger in the back of the room who looks like them, who prays like them, and who, by clenching his fists, has shown them a whole new way of being.
STAFF WRITER
February 11, 2006, 11:00 PM EST
Once they saw the video evidence, once they saw that this man in their midst was indeed something tenable, something real, the voices of the assembled at Adolf Schreiber Hebrew Academy of Rockland County rang out from every corner. It was then, after the rabbi delivered his introduction and the DVD of Dmitriy Salita's career highlights as a boxer was completed and the lights in the segregated auditorium again were lifted, that the questions came pouring forth.
The questions came from the right side of the aisle, from the boys in the technicolor yarmulkes, and the questions came from the left side of the aisle, from the girls in the flowing print dresses. The questions were brutalistic (What was your worst injury?) and the questions were status-conscious (Have you ever been on "SportsCenter"?) and the questions were practical (How much money do you make?) and the questions were academic (Where do you go to college?), and after a while, the rabbi just wanted them all to be quiet and keep their tuchases in their seats so they could hear the answers to their own inquiries.
"I go to a college called Touro," Dmitriy Salita said, and there commenced much whispering in the auditorium, and someone said: "Oh my God! My sister went there!"
Salita, a compact 140-pound junior welterweight with a 24-0 record as a professional, has what his promoters would call a "winning" smile, a bemused smirk that endears him to strangers on sight. He is 23 years old, and he is still finding his way as a public speaker in the same way he's still finding himself as a Jew, and as a boxer. He had never entertained an audience as young as this one; most of the yeshiva audiences he spoke to (and it is Orthodox tradition to separate males and females) previously were of high school age, not elementary and middle-school students.
But the rabbi here, Leible Chaitovsky, had heard Salita's story on a radio show one morning, a tale of an Orthodox Jewish boxer who refused to fight on the Sabbath, perhaps the only one of his kind on this Earth. Once the rabbi had gotten over his disbelief, he had begun a yearlong e-mail campaign inviting Salita to come up to Monsey, to their little red-brick yeshiva set on six wooded acres near the New York State Thruway.
Now that the fighter was here before them, the questions kept on coming. They began to delve deeper, into issues of faith and identity, into the subjects that have loomed over Salita's career, over his life, since he committed himself to Orthodox Judaism as a teenager, in the wake of his mother's death from cancer: How do you feel, telling people that you can't fight on Shavuos? Have you ever dealt with anti-Semitism?
Questions like these have always made Salita a little uneasy. Because, really, who is he to speak with authority on such things? Religion, he says, is a personal thing, and the laws of the Talmud, the governing principles of the Jewish faith, are famously arcane and complex, and when he was the age of his inquisitors, Salita knew nothing of them. He still knows so little. He is so new to all of this, and already he has been endowed with so much meaning. "I'm trying to do the best I can, you know what I mean?" Salita had said at a Brooklyn kosher restaurant a few days earlier. "I might slip somewhere, because I'm human, you understand? The media has a tendency to make athletes perfect, and then it's a crash landing, and that's something I want to avoid, you know?"
Soon the question-and-answer session was cut short, no more, put your hands down, the rabbi said. It was time for the afternoon prayer, time for the boys to daven mincha. But they wouldn't let Salita alone. The boys began clamoring onto the stage and begging for autographs ("Menachem, SIT DOWN!"), and Salita obliged every one of them, because every little act of kindness, every little mitzvah, counts for something. He signed for Menachem, he signed for Matthew, he signed for Esther, he signed until the rabbi had to pull him away so they could start the afternoon prayer, and afterward, he signed until the driver he'd hired to take him to Monsey pulled him out the door.
"He looks like a yeshiva boy, sitting there," a female teacher cooed. "Such a baby face."
On road to big screen
In a short time, if all goes according to plan, Dmitriy Salita's life story will become subject to the whims of the Hollywood machine, courtesy of a screenwriter named Gregory Allen Howard ("Remember the Titans") and a producer named Jerry Bruckheimer. It will most likely be sanitized and compressed and embellished, because this is what celluloid does to true-life stories, especially when those true-life stories are produced by Bruck.heimer, who has the distinction of producing some of the worst and some of the highest-grossing films in American history (categories that often -- as in the case of "Pearl Harbor" -- aren't mutually exclusive).
If it happens, it could make Salita into one of the most famous boxers in the United States, and the sort of boxing role model Jews haven't had since fighters such as Benny Leonard and Barney Ross emerged from the Lower East Side ghettos in the 1930s. It also will expose the world to Salita's made-to-order story, which goes something like this:
Born in Odessa, Ukraine, amid a culture infected by anti-Semitism; moves to Brooklyn, and at age 14, meets a black trainer named Jimmy O'Pharrow at the overwhelmingly black Starrett City Boxing Club; becomes a fixture at the gym; while his mother is dying of cancer, meets an Orthodox Jew in the hospital who engages him on his faith (or lack thereof) and directs him to a local Chabad synagogue; slowly, under the tutelage of a rabbi named Zalman Liberov, Salita embraces the traditions of Orthodoxy; possessed of preternatural skills and quickness, he becomes a legitimate contender in his weight class, despite (and perhaps because of) his refusal to fight on the Sabbath and other Jewish holy days.
"I think he has a market most other boxers don't have," said promoter Lou DiBella, who -- because Salita won't fight in any of the televised Friday-night boxing series, which fall on the Sabbath -- has used him as the headliner on his Broadway Boxing card. These are a series of Thursday-night fights at the Hammerstein Ballroom in Manhattan, populated by ethnic fighters with neighborhood followings, such as Edgar Santana, a Puerto Rican from Spanish Harlem, and Curtis Stevens, a black middleweight from Brooklyn.
What DiBella's experiment has led to are homogenous scenes such as the one at Salita's last fight, in December, against a no-name from Denver, Robert Frankel: Great packs of Orthodox Jews in the front rows, identifiable by their head coverings, intermingling with blacks and Hispanics, the whole thing resembling the opening of an off-color joke. "I see it as the American dream," said Chaim Marcus, an advertising and PR man who counts Salita among his clients. "All these people are getting out of the synagogue, getting out of their closed communities, to mingle with others."
Amid the hot knishes and the corned-beef sandwiches at the kosher concession stand, amid the waitresses with T-shirts pulled up to the breaking point and the old-school rap beating out of the speakers and the bearded elders in brimmed hats who resembled Talmudic scholars, you could find men like Dov Friedman. He is 23, nattily dressed and curly haired and gregarious, the same age as Salita (whose fans refer to him as "Dima"). He had rounded up 100 tickets for his friends, and for friends of friends, for anyone who wanted to catch this phenomenon while it was still on the upswing.
"For the first time in my life, I know I have a guy I can go for," said Friedman, who is Orthodox, and who works as a mortgage broker. "He's part of you. He's your people. My whole heart is behind him."
It took 10 rounds and a narrow (but unanimous) decision for Salita to put away Frankel. There were some anxious moments for his flock, including a flukish first-round knockdown of Salita, and the consensus among his people afterward was that he needed a test like this, that he needs more tests like this if he hopes to make it as a championship contender, that he's still a year or two away from a major fight. What they would like is to bring him along slowly. "Right now, he's on his way up the ladder," O'Pharrow said. "He's in the incubator yet."
Pressure of being a role model
Normally, in this day and age, when the fight game is mostly an exercise in nostalgia, when even promoters such as DiBella admit that boxing is "on a downswing," the wait for a fighter to mature wouldn't be such a big thing. But there is nothing typical about this situation. This is a fighter who is managed by the brother of his rabbi, a fighter whose bouts are regularly covered by The Jerusalem Post, a fighter whose sponsors include a kosher catering service, a fighter who already has been showered with absurd nicknames such as "The Kosher Kid" and "The Hebrew Hammer" and "Star of David."
All of which breeds the sort of ratcheting hyperbole that, Salita insists, "didn't come from me. It is what it is. It becomes like a game of telephone, you know?"
"It's creating an anxiety in him which may not be fair to the kid," said Hank Kaplan, a boxing historian who's met Salita several times. "He's trying to be a hero to his followers. With that kind of anxiety, the artisanship suffers."
But how can they help it? This is a community that hasn't had an athletic role model in so long that they seem to have forgotten such a person could exist. In Salita, they see possibility. In him, Lord knows, they see themselves.
"I already told him and I told the rabbis, 'God put him on this Earth to do more than just box,"' said O'Pharrow, who recently gave way in the day-to-day training to Hector Roca, who works out of Gleason's Gym in Brooklyn. "He's going to be a world leader, I believe."
This is a great burden to put on any man, let alone a man still finding his way. But here he is, a role model at age 23, standing in a Rockland County yeshiva with his head buried in a prayer book. He's davening in a series of dips and bows, murmuring through pursed lips, a borrowed yarmulke perched atop his head in place of the Calvin Klein winter hat he'd come wearing. And the boys cannot stop stealing glances at him, this stranger in the back of the room who looks like them, who prays like them, and who, by clenching his fists, has shown them a whole new way of being.
Copyright 2006 Newsday Inc.
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