YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio—When people walk into East Side Civics, a dilapidated bar and sports club just down South Avenue from the barren city center, they’re often seeking refuge from the everyday problems that almost everybody faces in the buckle of the Rust Belt.
Another round of layoffs at the General Motors plant, more storefronts shuttered overnight, the neighbor’s house—or worse yet, their own—suddenly thrown into foreclosure.
But here, taped on the walls and plastered over the windows, are signs of hope—pictures and newspaper clippings of a scrawny middleweight champion who seemingly has lifted all of the Mahoning Valley onto his slender shoulders.
“Kelly Pavlik means everything to Youngstown,” says Lori Greenwalt, who runs the members-only club where Pavlik often retreats to throw darts. “It’s tough here and he gives people hope.”
Perhaps because he embodies the spirit of a town that has been forced to pick itself off the floor time and again, just like he did to knock out Jermain Taylor and capture the title two years ago.
“There’s not a lot to hang onto here,” Greenwalt says, “besides Kelly.”
Once a booming steel town, this city on the banks of the Mahoning River changed forever on what old-timers still remember as Black Monday, when the announcement was made Sept. 19, 1977, that Youngstown Sheet and Tube would be closing its doors. Thousands of workers lost their jobs.
U.S. Steel didn’t last much longer, and Republic Steel went bankrupt after that. All told, some 40,000 workers were left wondering what to do next.
“Happened with no notice,” recalls the champ’s father, Mike Pavlik, who lost his job when the steel mills shut down. “It used to be when the mills switched shifts, it was like an army of people crossing the river. Then all the jobs were gone.”
The city still hasn’t recovered.
Buildings are boarded up, railroad tracks overgrown. The potholes in the street just outside East Side Civics are deeper than the wallets of most of the people who live here.
“It’s tough,” Mike Pavlik says. “Where do people go? You can’t just uproot a whole city.”
And it’s not getting easier.
General Motors plans to cut the afternoon shift at its nearby Lordstown plant in April, where workers are making Chevrolet Cobalts and Pontiac G5s that just aren’t selling. About 800 jobs will be eliminated on top of the 2,000 workers who were furloughed last year, when the night shift was cut and the assembly line slowed down.
Almost a quarter of the population has moved away over the past 20 years, leaving in their wake the shell of a once-mighty town. The high school graduation rate is 7 percent below the national average, the college graduation rate 17 percent—even with Youngstown State University dominating the downtown. The median household income is less than half the national average.
The south side, where the 26-year-old champion lived growing up, has a rough reputation. The crime rate is nearly twice the U.S. average, stemming from organized crime that dominated much of the city decades ago to the more recent influx of drugs and random violence.
“There are places you definitely don’t want to go,” says Mike Cox, one of Pavlik’s childhood friends and a police officer in Youngstown the past 10 years. “I try to take a positive look on things, but there are guys on the force who’ll say, ‘This place is miserable.'”
Yet this is Pavlik’s home, where he accepts the responsibility of being everything to everyone, providing inspiration to a city with very few reasons to have any.
“Sure, it’s a struggling city, but right now the whole country is struggling,” says Pavlik, who defends his WBO and WBC belts Saturday night against top contender Marco Antonio Rubio at the downtown Chevrolet Centre.
“My dad was brought up here, I’ve always been around here,” he adds. “I’ve lived in Youngstown my whole life. It’s where I’m from.”
The people love him for it, too.
They love that he still sleeps on his parents’ couch when he’s training, and still works out at the Southside Boxing Club with Jack Loew, a driveway sealer by trade who has somehow managed to mold a middleweight champion. They love that he proudly represents a city that so many others resent.
It shouldn’t come as much surprise, though. This is the same city that produced charismatic champions like Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini and Harry Arroyo, who also carried the hopes and dreams of the people who live here.
“Most of us grew up in the same part of town,” says Arroyo, who held the lightweight title in the mid-1980s. “Just like Kelly, I never felt I was above anyone else. When they looked up to me, I said, ‘Why are they doing that?’ But it was because people needed something to hang onto.”
They got it when Pavlik knocked out Taylor to win the title in September 2007, a remarkable upset that stunned the boxing world. They’ve since followed him from Atlantic City to Las Vegas and back again, turning even his weigh-ins into rock concerts.
“I think he’s proud of where he’s from and all the things he represents,” said Nebraska football coach Bo Pelini, who grew up in Youngstown and watched Pavlik beat Taylor in a rematch last year.
“He’s a prototypical guy from there. He’s tough, the way he fights, he just attacks the guy he’s fighting. He packs a big punch. He’s been someone the people of Youngstown are real proud of.”
Pavlik has a tattoo at the base of his neck that reads “Lift Our Spirits,” with a picture of a crying angel hugging the world. It serves as an ever-present reminder of what he means to the city, as if he could possibly forget.
“Kelly knows what he has to be,” Loew says, quietly. “He’s this town’s hero.”
