On the night of June 16, 1983, on the undercard of the Roberto Duran/Davey Moore middleweight title fight, undefeated up and comer “Irish” Billy Collins Jr. stepped into the ring as part of the undercard. His opponent was a man named Luis Resto; a tough guy with a strong amateur background, but a disappointment as a pro with a pedestrian record. Collins promoter Bob Arum matched him against Resto as a “step-up” fight. Resto was likely to test Collins, but no one was expecting Resto to prevail. Over ten brutal rounds, Resto continually got the best of Collins, but there was something strange happening to Collins’ face. His welts and bruises were gigantic. Even in the most ruthless of bouts, a fighter seldom exits the ring having taken that much obvious damage.
There was a reason for that.
Resto’s trainer, the colorful and infamous Carlos “Panama” Lewis had doctored Resto’s gloves. He carved out the padding, soaked Resto’s handwraps in plaster, and effectively made Resto’s hands into anvils. Despite the extraordinary punishment Collins took at the hand of Resto’s enhanced knuckles, he finished the fight on his feet with a face that hurt to look at. This was no normal beating. These were not normal injuries. When Collins hugged Resto at the end of the fight, he called out for Resto’s gloves to be checked. They were, and eventually the result of the fight was changed from a unanimous decision victory for Resto to a no-contest.
But that’s not where the story ends. Then boxing manager Eric Drath became fascinated with the case of Collins and Resto. Their intertwined lives effectively ended that night in the ring. Collins suffered from a torn iris and never fought again. Resto was found complicit in the doctoring of the gloves, which led to what turned out to be a lifetime ban from the sport. When Collins stopped fighting, his life spun out of control. He abused his wife. He drank too much. And then one night, less than a year removed from the Resto fight, Collins drove off the road, crashing his vehicle, and dying shortly after. Sports Illustrated reported that the crash was intentional. Resto lived on, but with no other skills or source of income, his life crumbled too. Resto and Lewis were both found guilty of assault for their actions on the night of the fight, and in 1986, Lewis was sentenced to six years, Resto three.
When Drath began working on the film in 2008, he was presented with a conundrum: how to tell the story of Billy Collins Jr. nearly twenty-five years after his death. So Drath did the opposite: he told the story of Luis Resto. A poor uneducated kid who became a poor uneducated man. Yes, Resto was the perpetrator of a crime, but was he the true (or only) villain? Despite having never made a feature length film, Drath cobbled together a modest sum of money, tracked down Resto, and created a remarkable movie about the perils of the sport, the type of people who become involved in boxing, and most incredibly, provided Resto with a path to a degree of redemption.
As boxing documentaries go (and there are a number of excellent ones), it’s as fine a film as you will ever see on the subject. Apple has recently gained the rights to the film, and on Friday, September 13, 2024, fifteen years after its original release, the film makes an exclusive return to streaming audiences on Apple TV. Drath and I sat down to discuss his almost accidental classic boxing film. The route Assault in the Ring has taken over the years has been a circuitous one, but now that it’s headed back into view, it should not be missed.
FightsATW: This is the 15th anniversary of Assault in the Ring. I’m curious as to what drew Apple’s attention to it and making it an exclusive on their network.
Eric Drath: The film originally premiered on HBO sports, before I knew anything about filmmaking. It was our first film. It’s a great story about how it got there. I’ll start from the beginning on the distribution side of things. I had known about the story because I met Luis Resto, and I had heard all of these whispers about how Luis was this guy who had committed this crime, he was banned from the sport, he’d gone to jail, somebody was killed. There were all kinds of stories out there. I found him living in the basement of this gym in the Bronx. I did a little research and he had fought this kid, Billy Collins Jr., this Irish kid. And I went to my buddy Barry Murphy, who is Irish, and we didn’t know anything about making documentaries. I asked Barry, would you want to try to make a documentary about this? He liked it because it was Billy Collins Jr. I said the only problem is we only have Luis Resto. We don’t have Billy Collins. So we had to do it through Luis Resto’s perspective.
We pulled together some money, I think we put together about $25,000. And we went out and just shot the movie and did interviews. I had worked in the news business, so I knew about doing interviews, but I had never put together a long-form film. We got it to a rough cut. I had a friend who was coaching a girls’ lacrosse team in Westchester. The father of one of the girls on the team was the executive producer of HBO Sports at the time, so we got him the DVD. Then we get the call. He loves it. They helped me finish it. There were some differences from what we shot, the stuff of me walking in the beginning of the film and at the end and a couple of pickups. They really helped. Although, at the time, if you would have asked me, I was this young director thinking that they were ruining my film. (Laughs). They paid us 75 grand, which at the time was like whoa, this is great. So it airs there. Before I got it to them I’d actually pitched ESPN, and ESPN in 2009 was coming out with this series to be called the 30 for 30. Their whole marketing plan at the time was to get big-time directors and Ice Cube and Barry Levinson and whomever, and say, what’s your favorite story? Go make a film. So I went in there and they’re like yeah, we like it, but we don’t know you and sorry, it doesn’t fit. So I said okay.
Then HBO Sports takes it and finishes it. They said that they had always wanted to do the story, but they were going to do it from Billy Collins’ perspective. Because when you Google the story, it’s Billy Collins, Billy Collins. And they submit it for an Emmy and it gets nominated. So I realized I better tell everybody I know that it’s nominated because it’s never going to win. At least I can be an Emmy nominated filmmaker. Lo and behold, we get to the Emmys and we’re up against all these great 30 for 30s, the first batch, Jimmy the Greek, Without Bias—the Len Bias story, and I thought we’d never win. Lo and behold, we won. That’s a roundabout way of talking and getting to where it is now. So not only did I get a chance to make my next film for ESPN, which was a 30 for 30 on Renee Richards, but after Assault in the Ring went out of license on HBO, I was doing so much business with ESPN that they bought it.
So then all of a sudden it was on ESPN for three years. Years later, I got the Hector Camacho film that I did for Showtime, and Showtime asked if the rights were available for Assault in the Ring because it’d be great to put both films together and so Showtime got it. Also along the way, it’s been at CBC for Canada and a whole host of other countries had bought it. These aren’t big money deals, but it’s something, so we got our money back. Then Showtime Sports closed the brand and merged with Paramount. So we were looking for a new home and someone in my office, one of our dynamite producers, Danielle Naassana, who was instrumental in Macho as well as our latest doc that just came out on PBS The Dream Whisperer, was able to get connected to a distributor who got it on Apple. So here we are. It was on YouTube for a while and I think we had maybe a million unauthorized views, which, at the end of the day, I really didn’t mind. This is a story that I felt is so important. I’m not driven by money for this. It’s about getting the story out there because it’s an important story for everybody involved, including myself.
FATW: So, it was just accidental that it had happened to be the 15-year anniversary?
Drath: I think what they said was we love it, we want it, what’s something we can connect it with? So though it wasn’t like they were waiting for the 15 years, it was that when these networks want to release something, they want to peg it to some kind of anniversary or something. So it wasn’t all that profound. (Laughs).
FATW: This was your first movie. You had worked in boxing as a manager, so you knew the sport, and as you had mentioned, you worked in a newsroom before, so you had some sense of filmmaking. Are you shocked now looking at where you were then? You just had a drive to tell a story. Was there any great intent of going into filmmaking, which is where you live now?
Drath: It’s funny. I still don’t see myself as a filmmaker, and I think I’ve directed about 20 titles now. While I was doing that I was doing so many other things. I never had a golden parachute. I was given a lot of opportunities, education wise. I grew up around a lot of affluence with my friends, but I had to kill whatever I ate my whole life. So even getting into boxing, I started as a driver. Joe DeGuardia gave me a job driving the fighters from the airport to the Yonkers Motel and to get their medicals and whatnot. He hired me as a PR person. And really what that was was me driving these guys.
Everything I’ve done, I started from the bottom. I became enamored by boxers, their stories, the idea of what they do for a living has always been incredible, something that so few people ever have the courage to do. And I found that boxers are some of the sweetest, nicest people I’ve ever met. So I’ve always been interested in their stories and the story of boxing. I love the fights. In fact, tomorrow I’m flying to Flint to produce Dmitriy Salita’s boxing live on DAZN Big Time Boxing. So I’m still involved in the live end of the sport. We come out with the trucks and I actually direct the live boxing too. But it’s always the stories that really had the biggest impact on me.
FATW: I’ve been writing on boxing for over 10 years now, and I find that I have this sort of love-hate relationship with it. When you look at the sport as a whole, there’s a certain beauty to it, the footwork, the setups for the punches, and of course they’re glorious athletes in many cases, especially at the highest level of the sport. At the same time, when I watch a boxing match, I’m more inclined to say can we stop this a little early if somebody’s really in trouble than to wait and give them this second and third chance. Do you have any ethical challenges that you sometimes toil with, around the sport?
Drath: Look, it’s a brutal sport. I’ve not only gotten a chance to meet and be around fighters in their prime, but also fighters past their prime. And it’s heart-wrenching to see, the slurred speech, the inability to recall. The blunt force of boxing is like no other, MMA is not even as bad. It’s a brutal sport, but I never felt like I could go on a crusade to change it. I’m more of an observer of humanity. Now, that’s not to say if I see something that’s morally wrong or ethically wrong happening in front of me I won’t stand up for what’s right. But with the sport of boxing, yeah, I have been conflicted. Where I was most conflicted was actually not from the brutality in the ring but from the unfairness of the sport.
For a while, I was an agent representing B-side opponents and bringing them over to Europe. These guys were so poor. Some of them would come with a brown paper bag as luggage. They didn’t want to bring their trainer because they didn’t want to give an extra 200 to the trainer. The way they’d get flown on extra legs on their flights, the mismatches of weights, and the bad decisions from judges and referees, were more conflicting than some of the stoppages that I thought should have happened earlier. There are definitely things about the sport that have not sat well with me.
FATW: The Resto bout is the only fight Billy Collins ever lost, because he never fought again. Resto was a tough guy, but he’d been knocked out three times. He was an opponent. He was a step over guy. Everything on paper says he was a good step-up fight for Collins, except for what happened inside of Resto’s gloves. When you think about the ethics of the choice that was made to make Resto almost a bare knuckles fighter versus a guy with padded gloves, it had to be part of the attraction to telling the story, but did it also leave you with a sense of offense? Like how could somebody do this?
Drath: I’ve never really been able to articulate it in a way that seems to really make sense, but I’ll try. When I first met Luis Resto, he was proclaiming his innocence. He had been proclaiming his innocence for basically 25 years to the point where I think he almost believed it. Then I started understanding who Resto is, his limited education and the stakes for him in that fight. That fight was a big stepping stone fight for him too. Knowing his personality and his ability to be completely manipulated, I think he was presented with a dilemma that I don’t think he had the capability of doing anything differently than what he did. You like to say he could have said no, he could have stood up and said Panama, this is wrong. I’m not going to go in the ring. But when you look at who Resto was and is and the stakes, like I said, I think he was in a situation where he couldn’t say no. What was he going to say? Oh, inspector, my trainer/manager/meal ticket/father figure is doing something wrong.
You’re going to rat on your father? He was complicit, unwittingly, but yet wittingly, because he had no choice, he had no choice. I think one of the things that always haunted me spending the time with Resto in his limited ability to understand really how significant it was what he did, was that I think he really probably could have won that fight without the gloves being tampered with. I think that’s the other big tragedy in this whole thing. Resto could have won the fight. In a certain way he was still proud of the way he boxed against Collins and he was almost upset that these gloves were tampered with and that besmirched what would have been his greatest performance ever. On a lot of levels, it’s hard to just pin it on Resto because of the situation and the unbelievable power that Panama had over him.
FATW: Speaking of Panama Lewis, what is fascinating here is we have this tendency to want to make the fighter most responsible. There’s some logic to that, of course. But a lot of fighters, Collins included, don’t come from wealthy backgrounds. They don’t have a lot of education. I know of one or two college educated professional fighters who won a championship in their careers. The list is like two people.
Drath: James “Bonecrusher” Smith and I don’t even know who the other guy was.
FATW: Juan Diaz. But yeah, that’s it. This is a very short list, right?
Drath: Out of hundreds of thousands or however many fighters.
FATW: So what I felt, as I was watching it again, is that Resto became very sympathetic despite the complicity/non-complicity space that he was living in, this gray area. Panama Lewis really struck me as the villain. He had the most control. You do what your trainer tells you, especially if you’re a journeyman fighter I think it’s even more likely, because, as you said, he was Resto’s meal ticket. When he and Resto meet later in the film, he was still manipulating Resto even after ruining him.
Drath: It is funny, that scene that you’re talking about when they first meet again–I’ll give you a little behind the scenes. We went down there and I was like all right, Luis, this is your chance to confront Panama. You can say to him, what happened? Why did you do this? I know you did this. Stop lying. We get out of the car–for real cinema buffs, you can notice that this is one long take. James Fideler, our great DP, shot it–we walk in following him through the doors and Panama is standing up on the ring, towering figure, and Resto enters. I’m thinking this could be a big fight. Fisticuffs could come out here. He’s going to confront him.
And what happens? Resto goes and completely cowers and crumbles. It’s almost like—what is that called in art history—the Pieta of Mother Mary and Jesus in his hand and the control that Mary had of Jesus. I don’t mean to get all philosophical on this, but Resto just puts his head in the armpit of Panama, puts his head down and starts crying. That scene, I have to tell you, we took the plane back and we had almost run out of money at this point, and I was so pissed. I was like Resto, I can’t believe it. We went down there. You didn’t even confront him. As a filmmaker, it felt like such a missed opportunity. It wasn’t until all of a sudden, with the editors at our office, I was like wait a minute, guys, you got some gold here. Then when we watched the scene, it was like wow. You just don’t know what you’re going to get until you finally get it back into the studio.
FATW: In a way it was a problem that turned out to be an opportunity, because it exposes Resto’s psychological need to be approved of by Panama.
Drath: Right, and I love father/son stories. In fact, most of my films have some kind of father/son story. Obviously, Macho was mother/son. But, this idea on so many levels of father/son, you have Billy Collins Jr. and Billy Collins Sr., you had Resto and Panama, and this control that fathers have. Billy Collins Sr. never wanted to accept the fact that his son lost, and rightfully so, and sued and sued. It’s incredible that he didn’t win, he should have won. That’s another tragedy, the fact that he’s living in this tiny 700 square foot house, and that’s where he wound up and his son was dead. Some people said that Collins might have been able to fight again, but his father thought that the lawsuit was there, and so he held him back. So there’s these fathers betraying their sons, both with Collins Sr. and with Panama, which is the ultimate. A father betraying his son, how many stories of that do you know?
FATW: On the other hand, Resto’s meeting with Collins’ family and their willingness to forgive was extraordinary, and countered Panama’s devious nature and showed us the best part of humanity.
Drath: I agree. When I found the transcripts where he had admitted it and I confronted him, it was another point where I said, what are we going to do now? We have this film about a guilty guy who says he’s not guilty, but he’s guilty. What are we going to do? People said you don’t have anything. Once it’s successful, everybody says oh, it’s a great movie. But at that point, there were people, and I’m not going to name them—but very close to me, who were like what are you doing? You’re chasing this story. It’s such a small story. Nobody knows about it. I said to myself when you’re wrong, and you’ve been confronted, what do we teach our kids? Part of our society is to honestly admit our wrongs. And that is the route to redemption, to honestly say I failed, I was wrong, whatever it is, and to put your cards on the table. I said Resto, will you do that? And he said yeah. I was like alright let’s go. I helped facilitate the meetings. I asked him to pick up the phone and call the Collins family and locate them. And this was before it was so easy to Google somebody. This was 2007 and ’08. Going down really freed his spirit. It didn’t completely expunge his guilt. I agree with you, the forgiveness that the Collins family granted him is what we all aspire to in life, this ability to be hurt, but also to be able to forgive.
FATW: It’s a strange thing because putting on those gloves knowing that they were cut and there was plaster inside is obviously not a courageous act. To carry that weight for many years and to live in this denial is incredibly psychologically unhealthy. But then to release it and to do it with Collins’ family, just points out how complicated human beings are, that you can be courageous about something you did that was horrible.
Drath: It takes courage to admit we’re wrong. We live in a society where nobody wants to admit they’re wrong about anything. Making an honest admission of guilt takes courage and through that comes strength.
FATW: The movie ends with Resto trying to get a license so that he can be a corner man and he is denied. Now, 15 years later Luis is a fair bit older now, do you have an update on Resto?
Drath: Resto is right now living in Atlantic City and he’s working out at a gym. He’ll be in a gym until the day he dies. That’s who he is. That’s what he’s got. That’s what he knows. To ask anything more of him would not be fair. I thought it would be great for him to get his license back, but maybe it’s not, maybe this is what society needs to do so it doesn’t happen again. I don’t know if it’s really a deterrent, considering what happened with Antonio Margarito. It didn’t seem to affect Margarito, but he also was on the correct side of the promotion. Resto never had a promoter behind him. He was always on the B-side. And we know what happens to the B-side.
FATW: We haven’t talked a lot about Billy Collins. He was a young guy from Tennessee, of Irish background, poor, and not well educated. This is a theme in boxing that poor kids fight and sometimes poor kids end up as adults fighting for a living. This is maybe an unanswerable question, but Collins was a legit undefeated prospect, he had defeated title-contender Harold Brazier, but as a guy who was around boxing at the time, how good do you think Collins could have been?
Drath: It’s hard to know. As I alluded to, when you’re being promoted by not only a good promoter, a great promoter, like Bob Arum, you’re being very carefully matched. I know that was a tough fight with Brazier, but it’s hard to really know. I think this was a fight that he should have won. I don’t think he would have won, like I said, either way, whether the gloves were tampered with or not. So I don’t know how good he was. I do know that he was heading for stardom though. Even if he would have lost, Arum would have found a way to keep him going.
FATW: I think the thing that’s so hard when you’re watching the fight back is Collins’ face. He looks like he’s been hit by a bag of sledge hammers over and over again. You look at that and you think that Collins had this one route to success in his life and it was taken from him on one night by injudicious decisions made on the other side of the ring with his opponent and his trainer. Is it any real surprise that he crumbled the way he did after not being able to get back into the ring and suffering a torn iris?
Drath: As you pointed out, boxing was everything. This was his meal ticket. This is what his dad was raising him to be since he was a kid. There was probably pressure from his dad. You look at a lot of great fighters and their dads were fighters, but weren’t great fighters. They passed their baton. Look at Mayweather. Billy Collins was an okay pro, but Jr. was probably going to be even better. I think he had so much at stake, and he was so upset that it was stolen from him that way.
He was a kid still, relatively young at 21. He didn’t know how to handle it. He drank. He beat his wife. He was out of control, and that was it. Then his dad saying no, you can’t fight. You’ve got to hold back and make sure that we’ve got a lawsuit here. Let’s see what we can get. He was robbed of everything. He was robbed of his ability to compete and that was the most important thing of his life. So I think that was really what killed him that night, it took his soul.
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