`Cuba, Cuba, take the right upper cut through his right eye. Right after he hits you, arch.
”Cuba, you know what`s happening there, you`re overextending.”
A right upper cut later, a guy with a brush and a palette of body paint ducks under the ropes, into the ring. He dabs Light Cocoa No. 2 on the sweaty shoulder blade of one of the boxers.
A polite young man with a bow tie stenciled on his sweatshirt strolls through the bleachers and asks, ”Would you like a cappuccino?”
This is no South Side boxing match. This is Hollywood come to Goose Island, the no man`s land along the North Branch of the Chicago River, once pocked by potholes and parked trucks.
Now the old warehouse at 1000 N. North Branch St. has been invaded by moviemakers: a bleacher`s worth of $50-a-day background artists (please don`t call them extras) asleep on gym bags, working crossword puzzles, chewing paper cups; a director who never takes off his brown-leather bomber jacket and jumps around a lot; a Japanese cinematographer who never looks up from a tiny video screen; and a small army of GQ movie-producer types who seem lost without their cellular phones and Porsche Carreras back on the Coast.
Then there`s Jimmy Nickerson. He`s the one in the Wrangler jeans, flannel shirt, knit scarf, baseball cap and electric-pink gym shoes pacing a splintered plank, two rows up in the bleachers. He could be your big brother, especially if you were James Caan, the actor for whom he has often doubled.
He`s coaching the fights in this film, ”Gladiator,” a $25 million Columbia Pictures production about a white boy from the suburbs forced to move to the mean streets of Chicago`s South Side, who then winds up fighting for his life and his dignity in the brutal world of underground amateur prize fighting.
Nickerson gave his fighters (in this scene, actors Jimmy Marshall as Tommie Riley, the white kid; and Cuba Gooding Jr. as Lincoln, one of the street fighters) his all, despite a raging fever and the flu on this 12-hour work day.
”It`s right, right, right. Left hook,” Nickerson called out, reading scribbled notes from his clipboard. ”Tommie blocks, then Tommie gets a right to the body, left to the body. Throws the right hand. Hook. Hook. Right to the body. Right hook.”
The ashen-faced coach, nose dripping, forehead moist from the fever, reached for a brown prescription bottle. ”I`ve never been this sick in my life,” he said, half smiling. ”This is a terrific city-great people, great restaurants, great bars. But the weather sucks. I`m trying to stay away from the fighters right now as much as possible. I`m usually right there pawing on them, barking at them-not barking, talking to them in a gentlemanly manner.
”They`re a great bunch of kids. They fight their hearts out. Possibly, this will be my finest hour ever.”
An afterthought: ”Don`t write down that I`m sick. My mother will kill me.”
That`s James Nickerson Jr., 41, the man who brought you the fight scenes in ”Rocky,” ”Rocky II” and ”Raging Bull,” to name three. The man about to bring you more upper cuts than ever in ”Gladiator.” And, yes, a man who still worries about his mother worrying about him.
He is Mr. Down-to-Earth.
Not just because he has spent the last 23 years being paid for falling to the ground. From 85-foot buildings. Burning buildings. From cars. Burning cars. Rolling cars. From cliffs. From helicopters. From the Parachute Ride at Knott`s Berry Farm.
”I`ve probably gone through more windows than anything,” said Nickerson, who is first and foremost a stunt man, and who is paid well to take time out to coordinate fights for boxing films. On ”Matt Houston,” the TV series in which Nickerson doubled for actor Lee Horsley, ”it got to be funny- a window every episode.
”They use real glass now with charges, so as soon as you touch it, it breaks. The only problem is landing on the damn stuff.
”It cuts you with all these little bitty cuts. So when you get up your face is all bloody, and everybody is fainting.”
Little bitty cuts have been the least of his problems. His medical chart is as thick as the Los Angeles Yellow Pages.
”You`re calling about our prized patient. We have to bring out the U-Haul to bring in his chart,” said Paula Kingsbury, administrative
assistant for Nickerson`s orthopedic surgeon back in Beverly Hills. Dr. Robert Rosenfeld is also team doctor for the Los Angeles Raiders. ”I think he`s had every kind of abrasion, fracture, strain and sprain you can have in your life. But I don`t think he ever broke his little toe.
”Jimmy just keeps bouncing up,” said Rosenfeld, who has rolled Nickerson into the operating room at least 10 times in the last 15 years, managing always to put him back together again. ”He`s like a cat. With nine lives.”
”That is not a badge of honor,” said Nickerson, who walks with barely a trace of stiffness. ”When you break things, it means you`ve done something wrong.”
The daily rushes
Never mind, Nickerson is still counted among the elite of the fall guys. He was inducted into the Stuntman Hall of Fame in 1985. In 1987, he walked away with top honors at the Stuntman Awards: Best Vehicular Stunt and Most Spectacular Sequence for his work in ”To Live and Die in L.A.” And he`s past president of Stunts Unlimited, a select club of 48 of the best of those who make as much as $4,000 each time they fall from high places. (Each time a stunt has to be reshot, the stunt man bags another $4,000.)
Here are his all-time favorite stunts:
In ”Freebie and the Bean,” doubling James Caan, Nickerson, driving a small automobile, was chasing a bad guy, speeding alongside a train, when the train suddenly curved across the road. ”I had to time it and jump the car between two freight cars.”
There was the episode of ”Crime Stories” when Nickerson was fully engulfed in flame, ”with no mask on, just flame-retardant gel.”
And the time Nickerson drove a car underneath a truck on ”Matt Houston,” shearing the top off the car. ”I had to get down in time,” he recalls without flinching.
”And rolling cars, I always love rolling cars.” He is smiling broadly.
”They`re like an E ticket. Remember the old Disneyland E tickets (for the scariest rides)”?
The all-time thriller: ”A remake of `Mike Hammer.` I was running, chasing a helicopter with a rope with money tied to the end. The rope must have hung down 30 feet. So I`m running under the helicopter, I`m all hooked up, and I step off into a canyon. I mean like a Grand Canyon. I said, `Man, you are an idiot.` I pulled down the helicopter like 10 feet, and he just swung me through that canyon. It took a while to get back.
”I went home and my wife said, `What did you do today?` I said, `You wouldn`t believe it.` ”
Rubber body
Sherrie Nickerson cannot count the number of similar exchanges.
Her favorite: ”I was pregnant with our first child. We`re sitting at the table, having dinner, when I noticed he wasn`t wearing the shirt he went to work in. I said, `Where`s your shirt?` He said, `Well, I couldn`t wear it home because it was all bloody. I cracked open my head, but I couldn`t tell you because you`re pregnant. I didn`t want you to lose it.`
”So I started going nuts, crying. I look at his head, there`s this cut. He was just sitting there like no big deal. He didn`t go to the emergency room. He just let it heal. He had the wardrobe lady try to wash out his shirt. It was white. It came back pink.
”There`s never a dull moment,” said Nickerson`s wife of 10 years and the mother of their two girls, Kimby, 8, and Natalie, 2. ”The baby,” she said, ”is totally fearless, just like her father,” and already hooked on climbing atop the couch and diving headfirst into pillows.
”His body,” sighed the stunt man`s wife, ”I could swear, is rubber.”
It has been that way since he was a baby.
”He had three broken arms by the time he was 8, just tripping over the dog, he was so full of life,” remembers Angie Nickerson, phrasing it as only a mother could. ”We`ve always led a pretty quiet life; I don`t know where he got it.”
Jimmy Nickerson, an only child, was born in Pittsburgh, but when the steel mills shut down, his father moved the family to California`s San Fernando Valley, where his parents still live. His father, James, is a house painter. His mother teaches ceramics.
”I was a very overprotective mother. I wouldn`t let him out of my sight. He was always climbing out of his crib, hanging on the banisters. He`d bang his head against the wall for hours. He started walking at 9 months, and running probably the next day.”
James Nickerson remembers his son as a ”tough little monkey.”
”I made the mistake of buying him his first horse when he was 14 or 15,” his father said. ”I caught him one time flipping off it. I came back and said, `You fall off? You hurt?` He said, `No, I`m practicing.` `Practicing for what?` `I see the stunt men doing that.` ”
The Nickersons` neighborhood in California was filled with rodeo cowboys and stunt men. Jimmy joined the professional rodeo circuit at 15. He started boxing at Joe Castro`s Gym in Ventura when he was 16.
His first stunt was in the TV western ”Lancer.” Nickerson was 19 and doubled William Windom. He was thrown out a window, hit the boardwalk, vaulted onto a horse and rode out of town as fast as he could.
”It was a rush and it never stopped. I haven`t had a day off at all. Except for when I`ve been hurt.”
Nickerson has been laid up for weeks at a time. Still, he seems to heal in triple time. That might be due to his daily fitness regimen: He wakes up to 10 megavitamins, a glass of fresh-squeezed wheat grass juice, wheat germ cereal, and 1,000 situps. He works out at Gold`s Gym five times a week with his personal strength trainer, the former Mr. Universe Luis Defreitas. He wears special tennis shoes, and the Los Angeles Raiders` trainers taught him a ”magic way of taping.”
Nickerson is not about to give it up. ”The fire, the passion, the desire is still there for me to do it. The only fear is the fear of failure. If you`ve got fear of being hurt, you shouldn`t be here. You worry about putting out a good product-a roll in a car, being on fire, jumping through a window.
”If I had to run and jump and dive out of the ring, I don`t think,
`Great, I`m going to make $800, make my car payments.` No, it`s the director saying, `Cut. Print.` That`s the rush.
”It`s a psych game. You prepare yourself physically and mentally. There`s usually three stages: calm, cool and alert; locked in and focused; and the other is frenzy. You have to attack things. You have to feel that you`re going to hurt a car, the car`s not going to hurt you.”
For Angie Nickerson that means one thing: ”I pray a lot. I light a lot of candles. St. Anthony, St. Jude-I use them all. They`re probably getting tired of me, I`m using them all the time. My husband`s always teasing me, I`m going to burn the house down with all my candles.”
The right punch
Jimmy Nickerson said ”Gladiator” might be his last fight film.
”There`s only so much you can do with a right and a left hand.”
Down the ”big avenue,” as he calls it, he`d like to direct, to stay home in Southern California, near his family.
He can`t stand being away from his little girls, his ”little miracles,” he said.
Nickerson is proudest of the fact that he has made fights on film more realistic.
”Before `Rocky,` so many Hollywood fights were so phony. When I was taught movie fights in the late `60s, they were nothing like real fights. The biggest thing was everyone was off balance.” And the punches, especially the windups, were exaggerated.
”With `Rocky` I tried to make everything rhythmic. Everything was trial and error. Check the difference between `Rocky` and `Rocky II.` Turn the sound off on `Rocky,` and it`s horrible.
”After `Rocky,` I got a chance to do a film, `Raging Bull.` I worked with the most realistic actor in the world, Robert De Niro. He wanted everything absolutely the way it should be.
”These days you can`t fool anybody with a bad movie fight.”
