My father used to say, “Time is so everything doesn’t happen all at once. Distance is so everything doesn’t happen to you.”
He may have been quoting something he’d read, or he might have made it up. Maybe it was something he’d heard in some bar, a ways back down the road.
I thought of that when a 28-year-old Taunton, Massachusetts, man named Arthur DaRosa went on a stabbing rampage in that small city. He killed two people before being shot to death by an off-duty sheriff’s deputy. He did these things in a house and a shopping mall, on the same night, 30 minutes from the newspaper office where I work.
But in January, I watched DaRosa fight in the Golden Gloves. He fought at 165 pounds, and dropped a split decision to a fighter named Ayoule Tom Jones, out of Providence, Rhode Island.
I found my story from that night. I called the DaRosa/Jones fight the “fight of the night.” Jones was a better boxer, but DaRosa was fairly hard to hit, and in the second round both men punched nearly continuously. By the third, my notes tell me Jones was up on his toes, hitting a very game DaRosa who was, I write in my notes, falling behind. “Good, good fight,” my notes say. It was a close fight with a lot of action: Fight of the Night.
Some guys will meet a famous organized crime guy in a bar in New York, and spend the rest of their lives telling people, “He was sittin’ right next to me,” like it makes them a famous criminal, too.
It doesn’t.
My old man was right, of course. At the fights, the distance between Arthur DaRosa and I wasn’t very big, and we were there at the same time. What saved me from being killed by him is that I was not in the same place at the same time when he began killing people.
That’s not much to hang your life on, but it’ll do.
Every source I’ve seen says DaRosa had some kind of mental problem, and had been treated. On Facebook, where time and distance don’t matter much, DaRosa is being used to prop up anti-gun control arguments because a guy with a gun shot him and stopped his rampage.
Over the decades, I’ve watched fighters in the ring who were or later became professional criminals. Some of them are dead. Some are in jail. A few of them ended up killing someone. It doesn’t make me tough. I’d have been afraid to sit next to most of those guys on a bus.
I saw Arthur DaRosa fight a hell of a fight, and a boxing ring is a good place to give your devil some exercise, tire him out, and make him too sleepy to cause trouble. Of course, some devils never get tired.
Everybody’s a victim in this one. Even the cop who shot DaRosa may find he has acquired a hard-to-tire devil. The bell is ringing and it’s time to come out for the next round.