Lacy is a living example of how boxing can keep a kid off the streets and out of trouble. He and four of his eight siblings grew up in the hardscrabble Midtown section of St. Petersburg, where they were raised by their father, Hydra Lacy.
Jeff's two older brothers did stints in jail for selling drugs, stealing cars and such. "Me, I learned a lot by watching them," he says. "It made me wanna stay away from it. I knew I couldn't be in a cell. I couldn't even stay home."
He did, however, have an appetite for fighting. When Jeff was in elementary school, Hydra got one too many calls about his son getting into a scrap. "When I got off the school bus, he was there waiting," Lacy recounts, smiling and shaking his head. "He put me in the car, told my brothers and sisters to stay home. I didn't know what was goin' on, but we did this punishment to one of our dogs — put him in the car and dropped him off on the other side of town. We never saw the dog again. He's drivin' and I'm lookin' at every turn we're makin'." Lacy breaks into a hearty laugh.
Father and son pulled up at the St. Pete Boxing Club's old location on Farfield Avenue South. Lacy adds, bemused, "They put some headgear and gloves on me. I thought, 'This is my punishment? To box?'"
Jeff learned another lesson that day. He got into the ring with a kid who was smaller. "I thought, 'You can't beat me; I'm bigger than you,'" Lacy recalls. "I started throwin' punches and he was moving around. I thought, 'Why he won't stop?' When I got tired, he came at me. He beat my butt."
Lacy instantly became a gym rat. Hydra, who helped train kids at the boxing club, remembers, "I found out he had a big heart, a big heart. I started taking him every day." Under Birmingham's tutelage, Lacy forged a successful amateur career. And he caught nary a whiff of trouble. "I used to drive to school without a license and on bad tags," he says, and widens his eyes. "That was my bad."
He quit Gibbs High School his junior year, left Birmingham (who was concentrating on Winky Wright's pro career) and gravitated to Calta's Gym in Tampa. There he started training other kids, among them Travis Holley. Soon enough, Travis introduced Jeff to his father, prominent Tampa lawyer Jim Wilkes of Wilkes & McHugh. Just like that, Lacy had a sponsor, a mentor, "an angel," Lacy says. "I was at the right place at the right time."
The teenage boxer was able to quit his job at a car wash and work as a runner for Wilkes & McHugh. He says that in the years hence Wilkes has provided legal counsel and financial advice. (The attorney has a similar relationship with Winky Wright.) In the maelstrom of the boxing business, a fighter having a good, honest lawyer is a top priority at any price. Lacy says that Wilkes won't take a dime for his services.
As a result, Lacy maintains some semblance of free agency. While he has a manager in New York-based Shelly Finkel, he's not tied to a long-term promotion deal. He says his arrangement with promoter Shaw is on a fight-by-fight basis.
"If I win the world title, going to the Olympics will still top that," Lacy says. He didn't make the U.S. team in '96, but even though some would-be handlers urged him to turn pro, he held out for four more years and boxed at 165 in the 2000 Sydney games. His hard-hitting style didn't jibe well with the Olympics, where a light jab counts as much as a knockdown. Lacy lost to a Russian and finished ninth. "I was a little disappointed," he says. "But when I thought about it, really thought about it, my dream was just to be in that spot. Once I got to the Olympics, it was all fun for me."
His first pro bout was on Feb. 2, 2001, at the Ohio State Fairgrounds in Columbus. He won in a first-round knockout, and did the same in his next three fights.
Lacy says that during his pro campaign, he's been punched hard enough to feel the jolt down in his legs, but he's never felt in danger of losing a fight. Last summer, he beat Richard Grant and accumulated three lesser titles in the 168-pound division.
Late last year, Lacy signed on with trainer Freddie Roach and moved to Los Angeles. He lasted three months in Tinseltown. "I'll put it down to you: It's a fake place," he says. "I mean, you have people driving $100,000 cars living in apartment buildings. I didn't want that to rub off on me. And it was hard to relax. Sundays didn't seem like Sundays. At the same time, I saw that Winky was getting ready to fight Shane [Mosley]. By Winky doin' a great job and lookin' the way he did, and Dan trainin' him the way he did, I thought it would be good to get back with Dan."
