NEW YORK -- The hometown fighter climbs into the ring to the thumping bass of Matisyahu, the Hasidic reggae singer. Orthodox Jewish men in black suits with long beards and unlit cigars bounce and chant to the rhythm.
"Dima!"
"Dima!"
"Dima!"
"Dima" is Dmitriy Salita, a 23-year-old super lightweight from Brooklyn, by way of Odessa, Ukraine. He is also a Hasidic Jew.
He is 5 foot 9, and officially 143¼ pounds, with close-cropped brown hair and an unscarred alabaster face. His robe is black silk with white lettering: "Dmitriy 'Star of David' Salita."
It's a Thursday night. There's more money in a Friday night fight -- live TV and bigger crowds. But Salita doesn't fight on the Sabbath.
The Manhattan Center is packed anyway. Fans from Brownsville, Brooklyn, and Spanish Harlem mingle with the Orthodox crowd. They all scream for Dima.
Following Salita to his corner are his manager, Israel Liberow, who is the brother of the boxer's rabbi; Hector Roca, a Panamanian trainer of world champions and Hollywood stars; and Jimmy O'Pharrow, a black trainer well-known on the amateur circuit.
"With me, Hector and Israel, we've got a league of nations," O'Pharrow says.
O'Pharrow, known to friends as "Jimmy O'," has been a mentor to Salita since he taught the young boxer to jab at the age of 13. Jimmy O' is 80 years old now.
"Dmitriy and I became very close friends," he says. "When he gets hit, I feel it."
Salita is the World Boxing Association's eighth-ranked fighter; his friend and trainer thinks that maybe, in a year or so, he'll be ready for a title fight.
It's been more than 60 years since Jimmy O' first strapped on boxing gloves and 30 since he started training kids. His beard and hair are gray and his long hands are wrinkled. But his jab is still quick. So is his mouth.
"Dmitriy looks Russian, he prays Jewish, he fights black," Jimmy O' likes to say. "I came up with that. Don't quote it from someone else."
Salita is focused on being a champion and Jimmy O' wants it for him. But he knows there is more to life than boxing.
In the unlikely relationship that began over 10 years ago when a smooth-faced kid walked into his gym, Jimmy O' has found a quest that gives meaning to his later years, and a second act in the sport he loves.
It sounds like a Hollywood story, and Disney has taken notice, with a screenplay in development and Eminem penciled in to play Salita.
Jimmy O's boxing story begins in the 1940s. After a brief amateur career, he hung up his gloves, got married and found a job at a corrugated cardboard factory.
But for 30 years, he never forgot his jab.
In the mid-'70s, he moved to Starrett City, a mostly white housing project in Brooklyn, where his family stood out "like flies in the buttermilk."
He wanted to start a gym and Starrett City's board gave him a modest space below a parking garage with "nothing but the four walls." He focused on giving poor kids purpose; many were brought to him by the police.
Jimmy O's four walls became one of the country's top amateur gyms, producing dozens of Golden Gloves champions and some notable professionals including heavyweight Shannon Briggs.
One day in 1995, four years after the Salitas moved to the United States, Dmitriy was led in by his brother Michael.
Young Salita would come home from Starrett City shadow boxing. He watched fight videos. He talked about nothing else.
His parents, particularly his mother, Lyudmila, were not pleased. They wanted a doctor, a lawyer, a nice Jewish boy. Not a boxer.
Then they met Jimmy O'.
"He's a gentleman," says Salita. "For my mother, the fact that I was around Jimmy brought her a certain amount of calmness, because she knew that Jimmy would look out for me."
So when Lyudmila got cancer, she came to talk with Jimmy O'.
"She said, 'Jimmy I want you to take care of him.' She knew she was dying, you see."
While visiting his mother in the hospital, Salita met an Orthodox man attending to his sick wife, and they debated the godliness of boxing. Salita, who had not been raised Orthodox, wondered how there could be anything immoral about the sport he loved. The man suggested he visit a Chabad Lubavitch rabbi.
The rabbi, Zalman Liberow, encouraged Salita to strengthen his faith -- and to box.
Salita was glad he found the Chabad synagogue. He was bereft when his mother died. But it helped to go say Kaddish, the Jewish prayer of mourning.
At first, it was enough to pray. Gradually, he took little steps toward Orthodoxy.
Jimmy O' encouraged Salita's spiritual development, though it complicated his career. At the New York Golden Gloves tournament, Salita was scheduled for Friday. Jimmy O', who carries weight in New York, spoke to the management. They rescheduled.
Salita won his weight class, but Jimmy O' told him to skip other tournaments.
"I sometimes think that God put him down here for another reason. I don't think it's completely boxing," Jimmy O' says.
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