The Wild Card Boxing Club in Hollywood is musky and hot when trainer Emanuel Steward strolls in dressed for the near 100-degree heat all in beige, with matching loafers, slacks, open-collar shirt and no socks. His ensemble is accented with gold, including Rolex watch, bracelet, necklace and a ring commemorating his 1996 induction into the International Boxing Hall of Fame.
The big, square room is packed with young pugilists and tough old-timers, but Steward has flown in from his famed Kronk Gym in Detroit to reunite with a single prospect, Wesley Snipes, the actor he coached, in this very club, for his role in “Undisputed,” the prison fight movie that opens Friday.
In “Undisputed,” Snipes plays Monroe Hutchen, a once-promising light-heavyweight who is now a murderer serving a life sentence in a maximum security prison in the Mojave Desert. Competing in the Inter-Prison Boxing Program, Hutchen has become invincible–67 wins, no losses in 10 years of fighting. The inevitable conflict is set when Ving Rhames, playing the equally invincible, reigning heavyweight champion, George “Iceman” Chambers, convicted of rape, is sent to the same desert prison.
Director Walter Hill (“48HRS.,” “The Long Riders”) and his co-writer and producer, David Giler, dreamed up the story for “Undisputed” over lunch at Le Dome. They were interested in exploring the dramatic possibilities that unfold when “a heavyweight champion goes to the toughest environment possible in American culture, the American prison system,” Hill said in a phone interview. They selected actors and settings to accentuate boxing’s savage appeal as well as its precision and artistry.
“I was determined not to have a movie where it looked like” the actors couldn’t box, Hill said. “We always thought of Wesley in the principal role. He’s obviously a very fine actor, but both he and Ving have the physical attributes that I thought could play credibly as fighters.” Snipes, 40, has played athletes before, most notably a playground basketball hustler in “White Men Can’t Jump” and a boxer in the 1986 film “Streets of Gold.”
Snipes arrives at the Wild Card a few minutes after Steward, and the two step into a back room to catch up on old times. “Wesley called me up in 2001, around the first of the year,” Steward recalls. “He asked me would I be interested in training him [for the movie], and I said, ‘If I’m going to get involved, I’m going to train you exactly as if I would be training you for a championship fight.’ ”
As an avid boxing fan, Snipes knew that Steward had trained 29 world champions, among them the great Detroit fighter Tommy Hearns and the current world heavyweight champ, Lennox Lewis. “[My character] was supposed to be the best,” Snipes said, explaining his reasons for contacting Steward, “so if I’ve got to look like the best, and live up to this character, I’ve got to get the best and work with the best.”
Marquee trainers from the real world of pro boxing are rare in fight films. Angelo Dundee, one of the greatest trainers in boxing history, advised Will Smith in “Ali,” but Smith was actually trained by a relative unknown, Darrell Foster, who once trained Sugar Ray Leonard. In “The Hurricane,” Denzel Washington was trained by the equally little-known Terry Claybon, a three-time Golden Gloves champ with only five pro fights.
Perhaps the greatest of the movie trainers was the late Al Silvani, who never fought a round but perfected his trade in the vaunted Stillman’s Gym in New York, where he trained Rocky Graziano and Floyd Patterson (Dundee was a mere assistant trainer in Stillman’s). Silvani trained Elvis Presley in his boxing movie, “Kid Galahad,” was an assistant director and advisor for John Huston’s “Fat City,” was the “cut man” in “Rocky” and the technical advisor in “Raging Bull,” among other films. But for all his technical brilliance, Silvani was never well known to the public, and Steward is arguably the most renowned trainer to coach an actor “hands on” for the silver screen.
When Hill contacted Rhames, the actor was already in training with John David Jackson, one of Steward’s former champions, for a future role as Sonny Liston in a feature film about the late heavyweight. “We called Wesley,” Hill recalled, “and said that we’d start looking for a great trainer to get him in shape and he said, ‘Don’t worry about it. I’ve already got Emanuel Steward.’ ”
‘He Was Ready to Fight’
Steward began training Snipes earlier this year in a little Santa Monica studio, “where people do ballet and stuff,” Steward said. “I was amazed at how quickly he caught on. I was teaching him basic steps, the jabbing, how to move, slipping and taking punches. I’d tell him once and he’d say, ‘Gotcha, Coach, gotcha.’ Things I thought it would take him about three weeks to do, by the third day he was doing perfectly.”
After 10 days, Steward moved Snipes into the Wild Card, where they trained for six weeks. “I still call Wesley ‘Champ,’ and he still calls me ‘Coach.’ He was so good that I really would love to see him actually have a real professional fight, because when we were finished training, he was ready to fight,” Steward said.
The climactic fight scenes for “Undisputed” were filmed in Las Vegas, but Hill and his crew still had some technical difficulties to overcome. “Wesley weighed only 178 pounds,” said Steward. “Ving was about 220 at the time, and that was a handicap.”
To mask the disparity, Hill’s fight choreographer, Cole McKay, who had staged the fight sequences for the cable TV movie “Joe & Max” (about the epic fight between Joe Louis and Max Schmeling) and for the cable series “Resurrection Blvd.,” had Snipes fight upright and Rhames hunch forward in a crouching stance. McKay took over the training of Rhames once he reached Las Vegas, and Steward and McKay worked together to heighten the believability of each round of the bout.
“Emanuel and I got along really good because once he realized how we had to do it for the film, he was 100% behind me, and it worked out tremendous,” McKay said.
Following the dramatic arc that Hill and Giler prescribed for the fight, McKay crafted flurries of exchanges, but only for the beginnings of each round.
“We’d choreograph six or seven movements and then we’d improvise,” Snipes said. “We improvised the tail-end of each round, and that gave a certain amount of spontaneity and reality to it.”
Neither actor used a body double, and all of the body shots are real. Steward was delighted with the authenticity and pacing of the fight, and that its ultimate outcome was kept secret from the real-life Nevada prisoners employed as on-screen spectators.
“Everybody on the set was wanting to see, ‘Man who’s going to win the fight?’ ” Steward recalls. “There were no ‘John Wayne punches’ in this movie at all. It was the closest that I have ever saw to real fightin’. I was mad because we didn’t have [someone] to knock out for real.”