Slingin drinks and throwin punches: A 30-year-old bartender stays in the ring

Publish date: 2024-07-23

It’s not that there aren’t any similarities between the Hillcrest Heights Boxing Club and Madam’s Organ. Both spots display wall art of largely naked humans: half-dressed prizefighters at the gym and stylized nudes concealed by pieces of produce at the Adams Morgan bar. Both feature rollicking music, although Human Country Jukebox, Wednesday’s regular country western entertainment at the bar, doesn’t play many gigs in Temple Hills. Both spots prize hydration – or they should, anyhow. Both smell, to varying degrees and at varying moments, like sweat.

So maybe it’s the most normal thing in the world for Sam Crossed to spend a Tuesday afternoon in gloves at the Prince George’s County gym, training for an upcoming professional fight, and then spend Wednesday night at the 18th Street standby, hauling around tubs filled with Jameson and Stolichnaya, mixing up $9.50 Long Island Iced Teas, slinging beers and interacting with his regulars.

“How you doing, my love? Have you missed me?” one customer asked Crossed early in his Wednesday night bartending shift, exactly four days before his next scheduled fight. “Then give me a hug … and can I get a shot?”

Crossed poured out some rail whiskey. So, right. There are differences, too.

“From Iverson Mall to serving frat bros,” he observed.

The 30-year-old Crossed stands at one of the lower rungs of D.C. pro boxing, fighting on non-televised cards at smaller venues, hustling to sell a couple hundred tickets (he gets a cut of sales) and hoping to make more than $3,000 on a good night — about 10 times what he would make during a weekend bar shift. Saturday night’s bout at the Sphinx Club on K Street will be his sixth pro fight; he’s facing a 40-something opponent with a 4-10 record about whom his trainer knew exactly nothing as of Tuesday. Crossed’s goal isn’t to win a world title; it’s to run his 5-0 record to 10-0 and then maybe to get lucky and find his way onto a televised card.

And he has a story that pops. He has been a regular in the D.C. bar industry, working the door at Chinatown’s Irish Channel, serving as a barback at Bar Louie, tending bar at the hipster-haven Raven and spending about six years at Madam’s Organ. He’s got a face people recognize, too, after starring with Mike Tyson and his son in a local Super Bowl ad two years ago. The producers for that Michael & Son spot wanted a white boxer, so there would be no doubt which young fighter was related to Tyson.

“My Rolodex of white boxers is very short, so it was almost like there was only one guy I could really think of, and it was Sam,” said local promoter Ross Molovinsky, who landed Crossed that unpaid gig. “The thing about Sam is he’s got that kind of aw-shucks look about him, and he’s in a sport where brutality is how you make a living. That’s kind of what Sam’s appeal has been.”

Such appeal plays on 18th Street as well – “it’s like having a bartender and a boy band wrapped up in one,” said Alex Donahue, another Madam’s regular. “He’s just beautiful; he just is,” assistant general manager Wendy Reynolds said. “It’s not a bad gig to look like Sam Crossed when you’re behind the bar,” owner Bill Duggan said.

But it also means Crossed, who fights as a cruiserweight, always seems to stick out: as a white guy in a mostly non-white sport, as a 30-year-old fighter with just five pro fights to his name, as a bartender who orders the salmon and salad from the kitchen and almost never drinks, and as the product of a comfortable enough home in Greenbelt who is drawn to an uncomfortable sport.

“Where I come from — not a lot of fighters would come from there,” Crossed said. “Because why would you get punched in the head for a living if you don’t have to, you know what I mean?”

So why does he want to get punched in the head for a living?

“Yeah, exactly,” Crossed agreed. “That’s a good question.”

‘I might as well fight’

Crossed’s mother, who died when he was a teenager, used to tend bar at the old Capital Centre. She would see broken-down fighters there — “drooling, cross-eyed,” as Sam remembered it — and tell her son to stay away from the fight game, which he already loved.

Instead, he played baseball and football, starting at linebacker on an Eleanor Roosevelt team that also featured future pros Derrick Harvey, Will Davis, Jared Gaither and Derrick Williams, at one time considered the nation’s top football recruit. Crossed went to Duquesne to play football but left after a year and came home, where he started going to community college and messing around in local boxing gyms. He tried an amateur fight, lost, “and I was like, ‘[Forget] this,’ ” Crossed said, using one of his favorite words.

Meanwhile, he was diagnosed with colitis, needed part of his colon removed, started working in the bar industry and didn’t come back to boxing until he was 24 or 25 — with virtually no amateur pedigree.

“Next thing you know I’m sparring,” Crossed said. “Then from there it’s like, ‘Well [forget] it, I’m sparring, I might as well fight. And maybe I’ll get a few amateur fights, and then I’ll call it a day, but at least I did it.”

He also became close with Mike Walters, a sometime-boxing writer and former colleague at the Irish Channel who works with well-known local fighter Dusty Hernandez-Harrison.

“He didn’t think of this as a career until not that long ago; he was just an honest boxing fan who happened to know how to fight,” Hernandez-Harrison said. “It took us like three years to talk him into turning pro.”

They told him they could get him fights, that they could get him to 10-0. Crossed saw amateurs he thought he was better than turning pro, which felt like a competitive slight. Finally he decided, “If I’m going to do this, I might as well get paid for it.”

And so, at the age of 28, he did, bringing with him a slightly atypical D.C. fan base. Crossed sold tickets to colleagues and customers from the Raven, where tough-guy talk consisted of “guys arguing over their thesis statement and the research they’re doing,” he said. He brought the gang from Madam’s Organ, most of whom had never been to a boxing match before. (“I have a hard time watching his fights,” said Reynolds, the assistant GM. “I’m like ‘Not to the head! No, no no!”) His style is atypical: He drives a Harley Road King to the gym, comes out of the locker room to the music of Motorhead and Slayer and Danzig, once wore an outfit into the ring paying tribute to Hulk Hogan, and has gotten sponsorship from Jersey Mike’s and Grow Club DC, an Adams Morgan “hydroponics equipment supplier.”

After his first fight came the Tyson ad, which landed him on local sportscasts and radio shows and made it even easier to lure a crowd. Selling 200 tickets might not sound like much, but at this level of the game, it’s more than enough.

“We knew he could sell tickets, but we didn’t know he could sell tickets quite like that,” said Molovinsky, who said Crossed is one of the best ticket-sellers he has encountered in the 65 cards he has put on over 19 years. “Guys like that don’t come along that often. … And it definitely is different from the crowd that we’re used to having: young, kind of rowdy, show up drunk, that kind of guy. It just makes me think of going to RFK Stadium.”

There’s something else, of course. Ask a boxing person why Crossed is popular, even at this small level, and it won’t take long before his appearance comes up.

“He’s a white guy. That sells,” said Steve Kim, a writer at UCNLive.com and BoxingScene.com who has gotten close to Crossed. “That’s almost out of central casting. Because it might not be PC to say, but boxing to a certain degree is still very ethnically and racially driven.”

“You don’t see too many white kids that can fight,” said Ernesto Rodriguez, his current trainer. “And when you have a white kid that can fight, I mean, white America gets behind it. That’s just the way it is. I mean, it’s the truth.”

‘Life or boxing’

Pro boxing feels a world away from Madam’s Organ, where Crossed works three or four nights a week as both a barback and bartender. Wearing the bar’s logo across his back — “where the beautiful people go to get ugly” — Crossed carries cases of beer up four flights of stairs, changes out kegs, cuts limes and makes drinks for young women who ask him for something good. (Raspberry vodka, peach schnapps, pineapple juice and and Sprite, usually.) Co-workers don’t even bother offering him shots any more because they know he will decline, and he said he will grab post-work beers once out of every 30 shifts.

Still, this still might not be the most conducive atmosphere for healthy living, from the 3 a.m. arrival home in College Park to the surroundings.

“I’ve been working in the bar industry for like six or seven years, and I’ve never done coke,” he noted proudly. “And I think that’s a pretty big accomplishment, to be honest.”

He can get as much work as he wants at Madam’s, although he said he is “kind of over the bar scene” and stays largely because of the flexible schedule. He has other sources of income, too. He does housing renovations with his uncle. He taught boxing lessons at the Jewish Community Center on 16th Street for much of the last year. He has worked as an auto mechanic, although he quit because he was doing only oil changes and not learning enough. He has thought about personal training. The jobs allow him to pursue the sport, which takes 30 to 35 hours of his week.

“In a way, you almost have to choose life or boxing because it’s hard to do it half-assed,” he said from behind the bar. “I don’t want to work here for the rest of my life. So that’s what I wrestle with: stopping boxing and moving on with my life. But I don’t want to regret anything, either.”

Walters and Hernandez-Harrison say they would never let Crossed become “an opponent,” someone who just takes checks to get punched. And while he said he thinks about the risks — “of course it does concern me,” he said — he insisted he would step away if he ever felt like he was taking serious punishment.

“If Sam wanted to stop on Sunday, [forget] it, he’d stop,” Walters said. “He’d have cool stories for the rest of his life. I wouldn’t be upset. I can’t imagine anyone would be upset. You had a good run, you know?”

In the meantime, he’s already 30 and has just those five pro fights. He hasn’t signed with a promoter and said he doesn’t want to, not yet, because “we’re doing fine without it.” Every dime he makes from the sport, he has put in a separate bank account. He had to bow out of a February date because of a broken right hand, which he said he discovered after paying $500 out of pocket for an MRI when his insurance lapsed. So he hasn’t fought in eight months, and “I’m not getting any younger, either” as he pointed out.

The plan, then, is to stay active. Saturday will be his first six-round fight. Maybe he still could fight three more times this year. Maybe he could fight in August.

“Hey Sam,” Walters said to his fighter Wednesday night as his bar began to fill up. “How many tickets you think you could sell in Pittsburgh?”

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Slingin drinks and throwin punches: A 30-year-old bartender stays in the ring