Joe’s story

The story of Joe Firtha’s boxing career starts in Akron more than 25 years ago.

Joe says he became interested in boxing when he was about 6 years old.

“We had a group of three or four teenagers who had boxing gloves in the neighborhood,” Joe says. “During the summer, they would get out the gloves, put up trash cans and rope off an area to box.”

The kids who boxed ranged in age from about 6 to 14 years old. When he was about 7, Joe boxed for the first time. The boy he fought was four years older, and the teen who helped him get ready told him that he was going to get beaten because he was so young.

But Joe ended up winning the fight.

Joe boxed in the summer with those kids for four years. The group drew as many as 60 children, all under the age of 15.

Joe says while he didn’t box for a few years after that, it was something that was strong in his mind, leading him to learn all he could about boxing. Then, as a junior at Hoban High School, he went to a “stag party” at the school that led him back into boxing.

The head boxing coach at Hoban brought trainers to the stag night and set up matches. The manager who came that evening passed out cards to some of the boys and told them to call him if they wanted to start training to be boxers. Joe and his brother both got cards.

Joe’s boxing career almost ended prematurely when he had his first big fight at the Pittsburgh penitentiary. He was in great physical shape, but he didn’t have the skills to win the fight, he says.

“I was set up with an inmate in the penitentiary, and I got banged up pretty bad and I lost,” he says. “I almost quit then.”

Joe’s trainer set him up with Johnny Cerrone, a trainer in his 60s from New York with more than 200 fights under his belt.

“I never knew my grandfathers,” Joe says, “so he became a grandfather figure to me.”
Joe started boxing again when he was 17 and continued until he was 21, when he stopped to attend the University of Akron. When he was 23, he decided that he would give himself one more year to see if he was good enough to go pro. The last guy he ever fought, Jeff Lankin, who was then ranked fourth in the nation, went on to become a world champion.

“At the time, my attitude was that I had to not just win, but dominate at that level before it made sense to go pro,” Joe says. “I had to be spectacular.

“If you have a shot at being a millionaire, the risk is conceivable. I didn’t see it as conceivable. The risk relative to the reward wasn’t worth it.”

While Joe tried to get himself out of the boxing arena in the following years, his son’s burgeoning career would bring him back.