It should surprise no one that boxing is a plebe-year requirement at the United States Military Academy. West Point’s ultimate purpose is to prepare students to lead men into combat, and striking and being struck in the face isn’t a bad introduction to such training. It should also surprise no one that after four years of unique preparation, West Point graduates possess a unique form of character.
What may be surprising, though, is that unlike in football and basketball – where the post-grad service requirement can chase away the best recruits – West Point still produces some of the finest amateur boxers in the country. These are superstar athletes, then, whose athleticism is leavened by a sense of honor and humility not always common in our beloved sport.
Boyd Melson is a 29 year-old southpaw prizefighter with a record of 2-0 who turned pro, in part, to raise awareness about the need for spinal-cord-injury clinical trials. He fights Thursday at Roseland Ballroom in New York City. He is also a West Point graduate – Class of 2003 – who is making a unique show of character for a friend.
Her name is Christan Zaccagnino, a young woman paralyzed at age 10 in a diving accident, someone Melson met in his third year at West Point. Their friendship led to a 7 1/2-year romantic relationship that survives today as a friendship and motivation for Melson’s young prizefighting career. It has also taken them on an intriguing journey to lands far-flung as China and Jordan and enlisted their impassioned support for the nerve-conductivity work being done by Rutgers’ Dr. Wise Young.
But boxing came first.
Melson, the son of a Creole father and Israeli mother, first laced up boxing gloves at the late age of 19 as part of West Point’s physical-education requirement. Some of us spend freshman year gaming classes like epistemology and theater of the absurd; cadets learn to leverage punches and break noses. Melson did it better than his classmates.
“I was always aggressive growing up,” says Melson of his theretofore undiscovered talent for pugilism. “I liked the contact and the one-on-one element.”
Plebe year at West Point begins with an initiation known as “Beast Barracks.” Before classes begin, cadets spend their summer in a form of basic training more harrowing even than a prizefighter’s training camp.
“Beast Barracks, there’s no break,” Melson says. “In boxing, you get to take a break. Boxing is more mentally exhausting. But Beast . . . Beast just sucks. That’s the word to use. It just sucks.
“I woke up a couple times, in the middle of the night, stood and saluted. I must have been dreaming about it.
“And Beast is all you know. You just got there. It’s all you know. Four years of that?”
Later, Melson’s company entered him in a boxing tournament dominated by upperclassman. They did it for the reason upperclassman at USMA do many things.
Says Melson, “They liked putting plebes in boxing just to haze us.”
Melson startled a number of people in that tournament and caught the eye of the All-Army team’s boxing coach. After graduation, Melson would go on to win the Armed Forces Boxing Championship in 2004, 2005 and 2007. He would also be asked to return to West Point.
“They let me put Officer (Candidate School) off,” Melson says. “West Point let me come back and teach plebe boxing as a second lieutenant.”
Shoulder injuries ended Melson’s amateur career in 2007. Forced to justify a full workday, Army boxers trained thrice daily. Combined with the rigors and dehydration of making weight, that much training for that many years proved to be too much.
Melson went to work in the private sector and found things different from what he was accustomed to, as the son of a career soldier and adherent to the Cadet Honor Code.
“The biggest thing is that people say they’re going to do things and then they don’t,” Melson says. “I had to learn the code language (of corporations).”
The Honor Code is short and direct: A cadet will not lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do. The corporate code is short but circuitous: Please the shareholders however you may.
Melson was not the first to grapple with this transition. Without the joint regimens of boxing and West Point in his life, Melson struggled.
“It didn’t work out,” he says. “I was in a weird place.”
He worked as a personal trainer, and his romantic relationship with Christan Zaccagnino came to an end. His return to boxing, though, coincided with a return to the corporate world.
“I’m turning back into my old self now that I’ve got a regular job,” Melson says of his current sales position with Johnson & Johnson. “And Christan laughs and tells me that she told me I’d become a professional fighter. I used to tell her, ‘You’re crazy. I don’t even want to box.’”
Melson has now combined his disparate interests – boxing, spinal-cord injuries, and overall competitiveness – into a compelling package bound with a charismatic ribbon. His father is in a wheelchair. His close friend is paralyzed. And Dr. Wise Young needs funding to conduct clinical trials in the United States.
The work Dr. Young is doing occasionally gets dropped in the unpalatably political stew of stem-cell research. There are compelling arguments to be made on either side of the debate about using cells from fetuses. Those arguments, though, have no part of the cause that Boyd Melson is raising awareness for.
“These cells are coming from the umbilical cord, after birth,” says Melson. “It has nothing to do with abortions.”
According to Rutgers.edu, Dr. Young’s research has “upended concepts that spinal cord injuries (are) permanent, refocused research, and opened new vistas of hope.”
Dr. Young’s work concerns itself with cell regeneration. It’s an idea like this: Few injuries see the spinal cord fully severed. If the right kind of cells can be introduced properly, they can spark a form of healing in the spinal cord not unlike the scar tissue that forms in other organs. And patients can begin to feel sensations in previously insensate parts of their bodies.
“I don’t know what the ‘cure’ is,” says Boyd Melson of this experimental treatment. “But independence is a cure.”
If Dr. Young is able to raise funds enough to continue in this country clinical trials he’s begun in China, a breakthrough is possible in the next 10 years.
“Ten years?” says Melson. “One year! Next year. I’m betting my life on it.”
No one needs a reminder of how dangerous prizefighting can be. What can be equally daunting for a person trying to raise awareness about a medical program, though, is America’s collective attention span. We are a charitable but distractible people, in a recession. While the late Christopher Reeve – a patient of Dr. Wise’s – brought attention to the need for spinal-cord-injury research, Reeve is no longer with us, and our attention has turned to a plethora of other noble causes.
Melson will be donating his prizefighting purses to a clinical-trial fundraiser called JustADollarPlease.org. It is a novel concept put together by the mothers of children afflicted by spinal-cord injuries. Rather than requesting a million dollars from a single philanthropist, the group hopes to raise a single dollar from a million philanthropists.
An undefeated prizefighter championing the group’s cause is a major asset. But that prizefighter had best succeed in the ring. If Melson can continue winning in the junior middleweight division, his story will become an international one. If he makes lackluster showings on the blue mat, though, the merits of his cause will lose nothing, but others’ interest in it will flag; there are 0-3 prizefighters who care deeply about important causes, surely, but nobody interviews them.
“I’m very serious,” Melson says about his prizefighting career. “I love it. I train hard.”
A world championship is what Melson hopes to accomplish. He’s giving himself four years. As a cerebral southpaw, he is fondest of middleweight world champion Sergio Martinez’s style. It is an unorthodox one that relies on athleticism and timing.
“I’m trying to find my space,” Melson says of life in general right now.
The search for that space comprises three important influences. One is boxing. Another is Christan Zaccagnino. And the third will be visible this week.
“Thursday night,” says Melson, “I’ll be wearing ‘West Point ‘03’ on my trunks.”
Bart Barry can be reached at bbarry@15rounds.com
Those interested in making a contribution to the cause Boyd champions should visit JustADollarPlease.org.
