“I thought Tom Cruise was going to play me, and Miles Teller is just as good, if not better.”
“I just thought, wow, someone is going to make a movie out of this, this is crazy,” Paz says. Billed as “the most unlikely comeback in sports history,” it stars actor-of-the-moment Miles Teller as Paz. Paz always thought his life would make a great movie, and this week, at age 53, he got to see that long-shot wish fulfilled, too.īleed for This, a feature film from director Ben Younger based on Paz’s story, hit theaters Friday. And after 13 months of grueling rehab, he was back in the ring defeating Luis Santana and on his way to winning three more world titles. In a display of pure will, Paz started working out again just days after he got home from the hospital. “I didn’t know I would be okay, but I was like, ‘Let’s do this, Paz Man.’ Its not going to be easy, it is going to be different, and things worked out for me, luckily enough. “I wasn’t taking no for an answer, and I wasn’t letting anybody stop me,” he thought to himself, after hearing the grim diagnosis. But just a few weeks later, after finishing a training day in the gym, Paz got in the crash that broke his neck. Within months, he had won his second title, the World Light Middleweight Championship, beating Gilbert Delé in 12 rounds.
That year, Paz connected with Kevin Rooney, a trainer who worked with Mike Tyson, and returned to the ring at a heavier weight class. Vinny Paz in the ring with Nelson Bolaños 1986. “I have too much to offer.” He assured them that “The Pazmanian Devil” would be back. “I’m just too young, and just too good,” he told reporters at the time. But by 1991, following a string of losses, promoters had started counting him out, and there were rumors he might retire. In the early years, he wasn’t taken seriously until he won the Lightweight World Championship in 1987, at age 25, defeating Greg Haugen. In fact, Paz broke his nose more than 100 times during his career, but, as he’ll tell you proudly, he never got knocked out.
“I woke up the next morning, drank the eggs, went jogging - I did the whole nine yards, and I got my ass kicked in my first fight.” I loved that he never went down and he never got knocked out.” As a boy, he boxed neighborhood kids in his basement and trained at a local gym. Although the boxing world often dismissed him, he had knack for proving the naysayers wrong, winning a total of five world championships over a career that spanned more than 20 years.īorn a fighter, Paz modeled himself after Muhammad Ali, starting at the age of 5. He never married - because, as he says, a warrior can’t be tied down - and he genuinely believed he was the greatest boxer on the planet. “You don’t understand what kind of man I am.”Ī lifelong boxer from a close-knit Italian family - the Pazienas - in Cranston, Rhode Island, Paz was the kind of man who oozed determination and lived by a simple philosophy: win, fight, or die. Doctors had told Paz his career was over, and that any false move could mean paralysis. The world-champion fighter was wearing a “halo” with four metal screws drilled into his forehead to support the breastplate and steel rod stabilizing his spine.
On November 14, 1991, after breaking his neck two days earlier in a near-fatal car accident, 28-year-old boxer Vinny Paz sat before a group of reporters and promised a full recovery.
Actor Miles Teller as Vinny Paz in Bleed for This.