---------------------------------------------------------------------Page 82 Philadelphia Daily News Wednesday, November 11, 1998

SLONE PUTS RING CAREER ON HOLD TO PURSUE LOVE OF PAINTING
by Bernard Fernandez/Daily News Sports Writer

Everyone has a role model, someone to look up to and emulate.

Richard Slone has two: former heavyweight champion Joe Frazier and LeRoy Neiman, the famous sports artist. You might say the 24-year-old native of Cumbria, England, is torn between two forms of personal expression.

“Boxing and painting both require tremendous discipline and 100 percent dedication,” said Slone, a sometimes heavyweight boxer who moved to Philadelphia in 1992 to train under Frazier. “The difference is that if I make a mistake in art, I can throw it in the trash. If I make a mistake in boxing, it could cost me my health.”

Perhaps that is why Slone has put his boxing career on hold to pursue his other dream – becoming the best known boxing artist since LeRoy Neiman, who went to art school in Chicago on the GI Bill and began sketching fighters (and other athletes) in the late 1940’s. Neiman’s color-splashed portraits of sports stars are distinctive and expensive, and the flamboyant artist himself has become as much of a celebrity at the events he attends as his subjects.

Not that Neiman – who once was an amateur boxer, in his hometown of St. Paul, Minn. – would advise anyone to choose boxing art as a career option. If he painted only fighters, Neiman said, he’d still be in his starving artist phase.

“I do boxing out of pure passion,” said Neiman, who has sketched fighters from Sugar Ray Robinson and Joe Louis to Mike Tyson and Oscar de la Hoya, said from his New York studio.

“There’s no money in boxing art. Anybody who wants to become a boxing artist is crazy. It’s like I told Muhammad Ali once, ‘I never made any money off you.’ There are greater commercial opportunities in baseball, in golf, in basketball. Tiger Woods is very hot now, and I just did Mark McGwire.”

Slone eventually might broaden his range, but for now he’d rather capture the likeliness of, say, “Prince” Naseem Hamed and Roy Jones Jr. than members of the Eagles, Phillies, 76ers and Flyers who might be willing to sit for him.

“Growing up in England, I don’t have the appreciation of basketball, baseball and other American sports that I have for boxing,” he said.

“But baseball art is very lucrative. I’m in the process of doing a painting of the late Mickey Mantle on consignment for his restaurant in New York”.

Maybe Slone and Neiman are more alike than either man realizes. Neiman, who began fighting in church basements – “I had a few moves,” he said, “but nothing to speak of” – was not born into a life of privilege The again, few . boxers ever are.

“I came from a poor family,” Neiman said. “But I didn’t become an artist to make a lot of money or to become well-known. I did it because I had talent and loved to paint.”

After his military-service hitch, Neiman – with no real thoughts concentrating on sports art – talked his way onto the field at a Chicago Bears game, where, he said, “I got hooked up with (owner/coach) George Halas. That led to baseball, basketball…all the sports, really.”

And, of course, his first sporting love, boxing.

“Boxing was a great subject,” Neiman said. “It still is. When I sketch a fighter, I like to see good balance, someone who bends his knees, moves gracefully. I see the beauty in boxing.”

The most beautiful fighters, Neiman said, were the elegant and self-absorbed Robinson, who seldom took note of the guy off to the side with the sketch pad, and the charismatic Ali, who instinctively knew that his art and Neiman’s could be mutually beneficial.

“Every now and then Ali would stop working out and grab my pad to see what I was doing,” Neiman said. “He wanted to see if I was getting him right.”

Slone appreciates boxing beauty – “I could paint Ali all day long,” he said – but he is more drawn to what he calls the warriors, fighters like Frazier, Rocky Marciano, Marvin Hagler, Mike Tyson, and Jack Dempsey, whose appeal is more primal, more, well, dangerous. With Ali, you got substance and style in equal measures; a guy like Frazier is as basic as a left hook to the chops. There is beauty there, too, but it is framed by rough edges. You need only know what to look for and how to look at it.

Neiman, as is the case with all artists, is a composite of numerous influences.

“I go back to all the classic artists from the Renaissance,” he said. “I love the German Impressionists. There is some of that, I think, in my work.”

“But there is difference between influence and imitation. I don’t like imitators. That’s why I like fighters who are distinctive, who have their own style.”

The self-taught Slone, who started out in pen-and-ink and has graduated, so to speak, to oil painting and watercolors, couldn’t agree more. Yes, he said, he admires Neiman, whose style he describes as “bold and original,” but his straightforward images are as different from Neiman’s as Ali is to Frazier, or Monet to Picasso.

“My first published work was in 1996, for Boxing ’96 Magazine,” Slone said. “It dealt with the first Oscar de la Hoya vs. Julio Cesar Chavez fight. I had the cover and five inside drawings to illustrate the writers (Tommy Deas Jr.) conception of how the fight would go.

“Art is like any trade or profession. You have to pay your dues. I’m in the dues paying phase now. But I am getting more recognition. I’m the official artist of the Boxing Hall of Fame in Canastota, N.Y., which is a great honor.”

The more Slone stakes out a piece of Neiman’s turf, the likelihood of his returning to the boxing ring as a active participant diminishes. He does miss aspects of that part of his life.

“Joe’s been on me to get back in the gym to fight again” said Slone, who has continued to be affiliated with Frazier. He told me that I have mastered the art of painting and now I should master the art of boxing in the same way.

“But I don’t know if I can afford to do that. People tell me I’d be crazy to box again, and that I might hurt my hands or something. It’s something to think about.”

This article appeared as a full page report in the Philadelphia Daily News, Nov 11 1998.