Chuckie Vanquishes A Happy Warrior

Some of the people on press row thought the dude looked like a fugitive from WWF or MMA. Not me. He looked right out of “Mad Max” to me: spiky Crazy Biker hair, various tattoos, and a goofy, never-ending grin.

This was back on December 4 at Bally’s Atlantic City when Wildwood’s Chuck “The Professor” Mussachio pounded out a lopsided unanimous eight-round cruiserweight decision over the boxer cum biker, Theo Kruger (he didn’t want to be known as Teddy Kruger for apparent reasons), the pride of Punta Gorda, Florida.

At the weigh-in the day before, Theo was going to present Chuckie, a teacher (guidance counselor, actually) in Ventnor, with an apple, but because he’d had to pull weight and was hungry and dehydrated, he chomped the apple himself. What was up with this cat?

What was up was that Theo Kruger has six kids to feed, fights all over the world, has a mediocre record of 10-11-2, 3 KOs, is tough as a Boardwalk plank, and really loves the fight game. He’s a truly happy warrior, who gives his not-quite-good-enough best every second of every round, but leaves all the trash-talking and faux toughness to the jitterbug kid boxers who seem so taken with that kind of gangsta baloney.

A less focused fighter than the Professor might have been thrown off his game by the apple gambit at the weigh-in, as well as a cordial conversation he had with Theo in which the Florida fighter recounted how when he had fought in Germany recently, at the press conference there all the European photographers were madly snapping his photo with big grins on their faces, and then he looked behind him and saw a poster of - are you ready? - Freddy Kruger.

Chuckie was a little nonplussed at the end of his brief conversation with Kruger at the weigh-in, and as they parted, he wished his opponent luck, and then added, “Not too much, though.”

In the ring the next night, Theo Kruger needed all the luck he could get, as Chuck Mussachio, despite an almost 25-pound weight disadvantage (Kruger gained more than 14 pounds since the weigh-in), used his 6-1/2-inch reach advantage to keep the Floridian on the end of his highly educated jab throughout the one-sided contest. Yet even though he was taking an as-whipping, Theo fought every round with a bemused look on his face, as if he was enjoying the pain.

Chuckie was having as much fun as Theo, giving the Floridian Floyd Mayweather shoulders and even breaking into a couple of Hector Camacho butt-wiggles from time to time. I guess it’s all right to showboat a little when you’re pretty safely out of harm’s way.

It was a good workout for Mussachio and brought his record to 17- 1-2, 5 KOs. After the fight, he was amazed at Theo Kruger’s durability. “I hit him with everything I had and he was still there,” he marveled. For his part, Kruger was still having fun, sticking his grinning face into the after-fight photo sessions with Chuckie in the ring.

The downside of the evening was a severely bruised Mussachio hand from the endless bouncing off the Kruger skull, which he said would take a couple months to heal, and thus precluded a possible fight in, of all places, Kazakhastan against Gayrat Ahmedov. A win there would have given him a chance for a WBA world light heavyweight title shot against champion Beibut Shumenov.

I guess a win isn’t always a win.