A great boxer, a heluva friend

The late Adam Marchulaitis of Greenland, N.H., aka Tony 'Bazooka' DeLuca. (Courtesy photo)

Adam Marchulaitis told me one time he learned to fight outside Gilley’s Lunch during weekend night escapades on the streets of Portsmouth.

The boxing phenom from Greenland, N.H., died two years ago, but I just found out about it today.

People seem to drift in and then out of your life, and you may never see them again, but you still think of them from time to time. An idle moment, a few keystrokes on a computer, and voila, you might find out something nice, or terribly sad. That’s the risk.

I was introduced to Adam Marchulaitis the first month I began working as a sports editor at the Portsmouth Herald.

The editor of the paper was telling me some of the important sports stories around the area and he said don’t forget to get in touch with “Bazooka,” which was Marchulaitis’ boxing name.

Actually, his full pugilistic moniker was “Tony Bazooka Deluca.” He had moved to San Diego, Calif., where he honed his rough cut boxing style into a formidable force that led to an NABF boxing title.

After my editor told me, I called Bazooka up to touch base immediately and his enthusiasm was infectious, telling me who his next fight was against, where he was fighting, what class he was in.

He was mostly a junior flyweight and I remember asking him what that weight class was and he said you don’t have to put that in, do you?”

I said of course not. And I still won’t. He might be looking down. You never know.

Anyways I wrote a story about his next fight.

The story was very well received and I began writing about who he was fighting every three months or so and then reporting on the results. Usually he’d call after a fight and describe the fight to me and I would write a story about it. I’d send him a copy of the article so he could see it out in San Diego.

One time I asked him why his nickname was Bazooka and he said it just caught on and sounded good with his boxing monkier, “Tony Deluca.” So it became “Tony Bazooka Deluca.” He said he always threw out Bazooka bubble gum to fans after a win.

Well, one day in January 1990 he calls me all excited.

“I’m fighting Michael Carbajal next month in Phoenix, and it’s going to be on NBC.”

Television is huge for an aspiring boxer, and Bazooka was stoked. He’d never been on TV.

Carbajal had just made a huge name for himself at the 1988 Olympics.

I started writing stories about both fighters, detailing their strengths and weaknesses. I interviewed Carbajal. I wrote previews. I had everybody in town stoked for the fight as much as I was.

Then the week of the fight I was thumbing through the TV Guide and looked to see what time the fight would be on, and the DeLuca-Carbajal fight wasn’t mentioned. I called up NBC and they told me that the schedule was correct. The fight would be blacked out in the Boston and New England market.

I called up the Boston Globe TV sports columnist – I forget his name – to see if he knew how this could happen. Here in the Boston TV market we had a New England fighter who was fighting a rated, former Olympic boxer who was the darling of the fight community and a huge draw.

He did some more checking with NBC and I did, too, including some arm twisting, but the situation looked hopeless. It was contractual mumbo jumbo; they were going to blackout the fight in the Boston area and show something generic like surfing championship in Hawaii or something just as silly.

I told Bazooka, and he was devastated. He had been so excited that people back home were going to be able to watch him fight. You could hear his sadness over the phone.

I was furious. I wrote columns condemning NBC and the spineless affiliates who couldn’t do what was right for their audience.

Satellite TV wasn’t very big at the time, but I heard that the former Scoreboard Lounge on Route 1 in Portsmouth had it. I called up the owner, who didn’t know it wasn’t being carried by the network, and asked him if he could check into whether he could beam the fights onto his TVs in the lounge.

He said he didn’t know if he could dial up a feed, but he’d check into it.

A couple of days later he called back. He said he could. That was on Wednesday, just four days before the fight.

So we played it up big. He put signs all over the bowling alley and lounge and talked it up with local sports enthusiasts.

I hyped it up in the paper, made sure all of Bazooka’s family from Greenland knew about it and let readers know the Scoreboard would have the fight on 20 or so of its big screens.

When Sunday, the day of the fight came around, the Scoreboard was packed with Bazooka fans long before its noontime start, and when NBC boxing commentator Jim Lampley introduced Bazooka at ringside the place went absolutely crazy. You could literally feel the enthusiasm and pride of a hometown boy making it in the field of professional boxing.

Bazooka put up a great fight against a polished Carbajal, but lost by decision. Bazooka won on our cards, nonetheless. The crowd left disappointed, but proud that their hometown hero had acquitted himself so well.

Bazooka and I continued to stay in touch but a year after that, I moved to a different paper to edit news stories and we fell out of touch.

Bazooka retired from boxing a few years later, but stayed close to the sport in his adopted home of San Diego.

I just happened to think of him today and google his name to see what he was up to.

He died of throat cancer in 2012 at his home in Chula Vista. He was 50 years old.

Here's a link to one of his fights.