Video: Bob Cassilly v. Pablo Weiss, Hoosierweight Boxing Bout, City Museum, March 22, 2003

Note: There will be a public memorial service for Bob Cassilly at the Sheldon Concert Hall, 3648 Washington, on Saturday, October 1, at 2 p.m. City Museum will be closed that day, so that the museum’s employees can attend; it will re-open at 11 a.m. on Sunday. Also, here’s a link to the video of the vigil held outside City Museum earlier this week.

Bob Cassilly v. Pablo Weiss, footage courtesy of Thomas Crone.

This is a story about The Night That Bob Cassilly Punched a Man at the City Museum, Often and to Hardy Applause. This incident happened on March 22, 2003, which wasn’t that long ago, in some respects. When comparing it to, say, the rise-and-fall of dinosaurs or the War of 1812, it was pretty much yesterday. On the other hand, it was a time (just) before the advent of social networks, affordable-and-omnipresent camera phones and the relentless desire to share every moment of every day with friends. Had the events of March 22, 2003, taken place in the last year, or two, there’s no doubt that Bob Cassilly’s bloody boxing match with Pablo “The Jabbin’ Jew” Weiss would be the stuff of local legend.

But it was kinda legendary, and should be considered as such. Let’s go ahead and make it official.

Because here’s what we’ve got as fact: on that magical night, over eight years ago, a camera person recorded the seven Hoosierweight Boxing bouts of the evening from ringside. (With all due respect to that shooter, the name’s long since been lost to memory; please remind us of who you are-slash-were!) The results were dubbed to a pair of VHS tapes, which passed through the hands of H.B. promoter Steven Smith, before landing in my own VHS collection. In the interests of disclosure, I was more than an interested observer in that card’s fights. While Cassilly and Weiss were fighting in the fifth fight of the evening, I was set to appear in the seventh, and final, match, giving me a strange, distracted view of their battle, to say the least.

Today, those VHS tapes show suffering from the wear of time. There’re moments of audio drop-out. Some video gremlins have worked their way onto them, too. Yet the essential visuals, the storylines and actions are still there. Today, by which we mean literally today, we have some digitized evidence of the night; if anything, that tape-wear makes the boxing match somehow even more historic, more heroic. That’d be true even without this week’s tragic passing of Bob Cassilly, though this sad twist assuredly changes the way it can be viewed.  

While the full story of March 22, 2003, might suffer from lessened accuracy with every passing day, week, month and year, the spirit of that night remains as clear to me today as it did then. If anything, the brilliance of the evening is locked in a sort of amber, the contests of that night taking on even more weirdness and wonder as the calendar keeps turning over; my brain, like my VHS tapes, is starting to bend at the corners, but the center still holds. Of all the fights that night, the one with the most star power at that moment was undoubtedly the Cassilly and Weiss affair. It went off after an intermission, and played to a crowd that unofficially topped 1,000 fight fans, who stood just outside of the then-new Cabin Inn The City, out in the elements, on the parking lot of the City Museum.

Of course by then, Cassilly was already widely known as the founder and spiritual visionary at the Museum at which the fights were held. And Weiss was a Downtown dynamo, who’d go on to found and run even more restaurants and clubs over the prevailing years; then, he was known as not only a canny builder of Downtown nightlife, but he’d scraped together several wins in the quirky Hoosierweight Boxing cards of the preceding few years, with his particular style well-known for unusual, if not illegal tactics. But in the largely-unsanctioned world of the Hoosierweights, that made Weiss that much more of a foil for Cassilly, the bout’s crowd favorite.

Cassilly won that distinction not only for the fact that he, you know, created the wildly-popular City Museum, but that he allowed the fights to find a home there in the first place. In a piece in The Riverfront Times of April 2, 2003, then-RFT culture writer Randall Roberts summed up the night’s events in great detail, and looking back on it now, it’s obvious that so many things could’ve gone wrong. Cassilly and his crew, for example, built a ring from scratch, using the same inspired and unorthodox approaches that they’ve taken to so many other jobs over the years. Ropes were made of, well, ropes; burns from those ropes stayed with fighters for weeks after the bouts. The ring was constructed of welded metal, topped by an inch-thick mesh of interlocking rubber. Built in an area that’s now well-known as the “ball pit,” the ring was most dramatic, because people could watch the fight not only from the ground level, but from the elevated mezzanines. Those paying the night’s admission to the Museum walked out onto the platforms and watched the bouts from on high, a good dozen or more feet above the ring ropes, adding to the craziness of the scene.

In retrospect, it’s probably not that surprising that state officials, reacting to the concerns of the Ozark Boxing Commission, viewed the fights dubiously. In the weeks leading up to the bouts, there were legitimate concerns that the fights would be greeted with a police presence, or, less dramatically, legal papers. As is somewhat well-known, Bob Cassilly always maintained a, let’s call it, “healthy” relationship with Room 200 of City Hall, and the threats of shutdown never came to pass. As the war of words heated up between the renegade promotion and the regional sanctioning body of Ozark, Cassilly and his crew kept building the ring. By the time of the pre-fight weigh-ins, it was obvious that the bouts were going to happen. Somehow.

And they were going down in a setting that could only be compared the Australian cult classic Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome. While no one died in the Cassilly-built battle station, there have likely been zero fights staged in anything like it. Since 2003, MMA cage fights have soared past the popularity of boxing matches held in rings; yet Cassilly’s construction predated the popularity of the UFC Octagon, done in a style that resembled the set of a really tripped-up Gothic horror film. One with a boxing scene thrown into the script for no particular reason.

Though not a boxing writer by trade, Roberts was able to craft a compelling recap of the night, penning in the RFT these words about Cassilly’s own match: “After an intermission, Pablo Weiss fights Bob Cassilly. They’re two palookas, albeit with diametrically different boxing styles. Cassilly’s a Buster Keaton-style boxer, sturdy and upright, a human Rock ’em Sock ’em Robot who keeps pecking away at his opponent. Weiss, meanwhile, is all over the place, throwing roundhouse punches that seem to start on one side of the ring and end up who-knows-where. It’s a style that leaves plenty of openings for the patient Cassilly, who occasionally manages to sneak through and poke his foe in the snoot.

“In the second round, some blood dribbles from Weiss’ nose,” Roberts continued. “Then more comes, and still more, until it crimsons the fighter’s white-shirted chest. But Weiss isn’t giving up. At one point he lands a low blow (much to the chagrin of the crowd); at another juncture, he bulldozes Cassilly out of the ring (much to the crowd’s glee). In the end, a unanimous decision goes to Cassilly.”

At which point, fireworks were set off. No doubt, the Museum’s owner felt that victory was going to be his, and he had the celebration ready. (He also had an ambulance on-site, with Weiss’ name painted onto it, just another of the evening’s sight gags.) But before the fight, there was training. And I’ll leave you with a couple short anecdotes on that.

Bob Cassilly trained with a sympathetic coach in Dan Scott. Sympathetic in the sense that Scott was a real wild card, the kind of guy who doesn’t look at an unfinished, physical space as anything but a puzzle to be solved. Most of the Hoosierweight fighters spent some time at Scott’s Gibson Street AC, a homemade, midtown boxing gym that was shaped inside of an old corner meat market. The sparring “ring,” itself, was the killing room, which featured three full walls and wide-open one. That’s where Cassilly trained, when he was able to steal time away from the Museum, and the environment made perfect sense.

In the Gibson AC, men in their 20s and 30s literally cried out in pain as Scott put them through grueling abdominal workouts before everyone moved to bags, and, finally, to sparring sessions, which had occasional bursts of in-the-moment violence. During that training season, it was lucky that no one threw a punch and missed his opponent, especially with so many novice fighters around; hitting any wall, even with 16-ounce gloves, could’ve meant an arm broken from wrist to shoulder.

On one occasion, I was tossed into the sparring pit to face none other than Bob Cassilly. I’d worked with plenty of amateurs, and even a few pros by then, but I just did not want to spar with Bob. For starters, he was strong, straight-up tough. And being a novice in his 50s, he’d be unpredictable. (Heck, in life he could be sorta unpredictable.) And there was that strength thing. It turned out that Bob could hit, but he also got the idea of sportsmanship, and moved through the spar with aplomb; I made it through the session alright, though I recall Dan Scott putting a beating on me later in the day. All in good fun.

As was the night of the fights. Much fun! Bob won his fight, but broke his hand on Pablo’s head. Both retired from the game thereafter. Though the Hoosierweight fights would continue, including another go-’round at the Museum, the fights may’ve hit their emotional peak that evening.And for the 14 of us lucky enough to have stepped through the ropes that night, it’s likely that we all felt a bit like a rockstar. Thanks, in seriously large part, to our own hometown rockstar, Bob Cassilly.