Worcester Police Department patrolman Neal Sullivan back in ring for Punch-Out at Polar Park
Neal Sullivan last entered a boxing ring six years and a month ago, fighting to a four-round draw in his pro debut at the DCU Center in his hometown of Worcester.
While he did his best to stay in shape by occasionally jogging and hitting the heavy bag now and then, fighting was then shelved as Sullivan set out on a path to become a police officer.
“I was like, ‘I can’t be fighting. That’s foolish because if something happened and I lost out on a good job because I went to box, that would be a terrible, terrible decision,’ ” Sullivan, 30, said Monday morning from Hampton Beach, where he’s vacationing this week with about 20 family members in two rented homes.
Sullivan, a 2011 graduate of Doherty High, earned a second diploma when he graduated from the Worcester Police Academy in June of 2019 after completing a six-month training program following a nearly year-long vetting process after scoring well on a civil service test.
He’s currently a Worcester Police Department patrolman who works the 4 p.m. to midnight shift in the Main South area responding to 911 calls as part of the Operations Division.
“Honestly, it was a stable job that I thought I could do,” Sullivan said when asked why he pursued a career in law enforcement. “No one in my family was ever a cop. I just like people and I’m not particularly handy or anything ‒ I don’t have a trade and I didn’t go to college ‒ but it was always something I had some interest in.”
Sullivan’s interest in returning to his pugilistic ways was piqued a couple of months ago when he took a call from Kendrick Ball Sr., who owns Camp Get Right, a boxing gym housed at 55 Millbrook St.
Ball was co-promoting Punch-Out at Polar Park with Chuck Shearns and wanted to know if Sullivan was interested in being a part of the pro-am event that will take place Friday evening (with a rain date of Saturday) at the home of the Worcester Red Sox.
“When he called me out of the blue, I couldn’t say no,” Sullivan said. “This was the perfect opportunity and it’s always been kind of nagging at me. I had the draw, so there was no real finality with it. If I had gotten beat up, I’d be like, ‘Alright, this isn’t for me.’
“But I was so close (to winning). I wanted to get a professional win, have (another) professional fight. ... I already had this week off from work, so it was like the perfect storm. I was like, ‘You know what, let’s do it. One last hurrah.’ ”
The 6-foot-2 Sullivan, who left for vacation at his fighting weight of 175 pounds ‒ down from 205 at Christmas ‒ will meet Michael Medeiros (0-4) of Nahant by way of Brazil in a four-round light heavyweight bout.
Interestingly enough, Saul Almeida, the boxer Sullivan drew with in his pro debut, is also on the card in a super middleweight bout.
In addition to Sullivan, the local pro contingent includes light heavyweight Kendrick “Peppa” Ball Jr. (20-1-3, 12 KOs) and super featherweight Philip Davis (3-5-2), both of Worcester, and, in his pro debut, welterweight Robert Degaetano of Douglas.
Doors will open at 5 p.m. with the first amateur bout starting at 6 p.m. and the pro card scheduled to get underway at 7 p.m.
As for how Sullivan got his start in boxing, it began when he was 12 or 13 years old and became enamored with the sport while passionately watching Wednesday and Friday night fight cards on ESPN. He then persistently pestered his parents to give him permission to step into the ring.
“I don’t think they knew whether to make heads or tails of it,” Sullivan said with a chuckle.
Finally, in the summer prior to entering high school, Sullivan got the OK and signed up for an eight-week program run by Worcester trainer Sean Fitzgerald that taught the basics of boxing.
Sullivan played freshman football for the Highlanders, but quickly came to the conclusion he was neither heavy nor fast enough for the sport. It was all about boxing from then on as he started training under the tutelage of the great Carlos Garcia and the late Mike Briggs Sr. at the Boys & Girls Club of Worcester.
“They were both very big (influences),” Fitzgerald said of Garcia, who’ll be honored during Punch-Out at Polar Park and Briggs, who passed away 11 years ago.
Sullivan’s first fight was in September of 2008. To his recollection, he finished his amateur career with a 10-20 record, the final bout taking place in 2014.
“But I’ve never been off my feet and I’ve never been stopped,” Sullivan said. “And I fought a lot of the good guys from New England. … Guys who actually had pretty good pro careers. I didn’t beat them, but I hung with them.”
Sullivan then took three years off from boxing as “life just got in the way” before making his pro debut. So Friday’s return to the ring will mark his second ‒ and final ‒ comeback as he astutely plans to heed the advice of his girlfriend and parents and hang up the gloves for good afterward.
Tickets are priced at $205 for field VIP, $155 for VIP (rows 1-4 in sections 5-11), $75 for home plate reserved seating, and $45 for reserved seating. They can be purchased online at polarpark.com/boxing, at the Polar Park box office or by calling (508) 500-8888.
—Contact Rich Garven at rgarven@telegram.com. Follow him on X @RichGarvenTG.
This article originally appeared on Telegram & Gazette: Worcester Police Department patrolman makes return to ring at Polar Park
