Assault in the Ring, about the 1983 Billy Collins-Luis Resto fight, replays a lot of the more vicious highlights. And we watch knowing that Resto fought with tainted gloves. Gloves with more than half the padding missing. Each right-hand, left hook to Collins's face was, basically, bone-on-bone. "He's stronger than I thought," Collins says on his stool in-between rounds, water rolling down his face. Horrific swelling, bumps like big-toes, under his eyes. Before this beating, Collins was undefeated with 14 wins and 11 KOs. So, it's pretty incredible that, despite never experiencing anything close to this harm, he didn’t fall nor did he even consider taking a knee. Instead, he tried and did land counter-shots, though all arms. There's a spectacular moment after the fight when Resto goes over to shake-hands with the Collins corner. Billy Collins Sr. touched Resto's gloves and yelled to the referee that the gloves weren't kosher. Two things noted while watching all this: Billy Collins's heroism; Resto's villainy. And it's the former that moved me more than the latter. But, Collins is dead. This fight was his last. Despair over a cut-short career, alcoholism, and death-by-drunk-driving immediately followed. Assault in the Ring, therefore, isn't Collins's story, but the story of the surviving players in Resto and his trainer, Panama Lewis.
In the film, Resto is now a 50-year-old man with gray in his eyebrows. There are scars just above his eyes and on the bridge of his nose. After all, dude was a brawler known for throwing punches. "I was a body fighter," Resto says, but in the Collins fight, he was all about going to the head. His wardrobe these days seems to consist only of a few pairs of jeans and a single green sweater with 'Mitchum' on the back. Panama Lewis, on the other hand, has gold for upper teeth and knuckles. While Resto spent the following decades alone and on drugs, Lewis continued to make a pretty flashy living by training fighters (unofficially, as he's banned from working corners). He worked with Zab Judah prepare for Miguel Cotto. "Use the jab," he says to the TV screen in a New York sports bar where he watched that fight. "Distance." And after Judah got stopped, we see Lewis smiling and not very concerned.
So, Assault in the Ring sets up Lewis as our villain and Resto as our hero. (Even before the Collins fight, Panama Lewis was already infamous for slipping something extra-special into Aaron Pryor's water during the first fight with Alexis Arguello. Pryor immediately went on to smash Arguello's cheek-bone and get the TKO.) Lewis as the manipulator, taking rolls of cash from the filmmaker Eric Rath for interviews. Resto as the dim, working-class fighter who professes to not have known, while he was blinding Collins, that his gloves were missing padding. Eventually, the film follows Resto as he tries to make amends with Collins's family in Nashville. Collins Sr. refuses to even see Resto and he (Collins Sr.) sends a little girl to tell Resto to get off their porch or "We'll call the police."
Scenes follow of Resto visiting the site of Collins's fatal crash, a dried out creek about 20 feet below the road, and, finally, Collins's grave. "Sorry Billy," he says, sitting on and picking at the grass beside Collins's flat tombstone. There's a disconnect, though, between the Resto who is a simple pug who does as his corner says and the Resto, as the film argues, who is a deeply sorry man. The film works hard to try to show Resto's regret, but Resto is not particularly charismatic or articulate or complex and I got the impression that he was sorry for a lost career, only, and not hurting a man. “It’s like in that movie,” Resto says, then goes on to misquote, “’I could have been a champion’.” Ring of Fire, another documentary about tragic ring-violence, had complicated Emile Griffith, with his dandy-voice and admission that, yes, he liked going to gay bars, but his denial, no, he wasn't gay. Resto is a person like he is as a fighter: simple and straightforward. The film argues that Resto was manipulated by Panama Lewis. A fighter just following instructions. Feels like Resto is, in this movie, just following instructions, too, and going through the motions. In this case, he has a director (ironically, a former boxing manager) instead of a coach.
All the moving moments come from Collins's corner, from Collins and his cornerman father. Billy Sr. doesn't appear on camera, but we do get to hear his drawl as he refuses the director's appeals to appear in the film: "My son is dead.... there's nothing to cease my hurt." If you knew about the fight before watching the film, you go in thinking: Collins Jr. a martyr; Collins Sr. an oracle; Resto a dull and slightly shady fighter; and Panama Lewis a wholly shady villain. After the film, you think the same about all of them. Assault in the Ring labors uphill to vindicate Resto, but when it comes down to it, it was his naked knuckles doing work.
