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12/27/2023 08:30 AMEast Haven native Joe Cusano has refereed over 1,000 boxing matches. He has met some of the sport’s greatest fighters, made calls in the ring nationwide, and has a sixth sense for the energy (or lack thereof) emanating from someone ready to hop into the ring. Now, a new point: his lifelong love for boxing has been filmed for a purpose other than a title belt.
Joe is featured as one of the boxing referees in The Featherweight, a biographical sports film focusing on a difficult point in the life of the late champion Connecticut boxer Willie Pep. The film premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September and will debut in Connecticut at the Norwalk Film Festival on Saturday, Jan. 20, 2024.
A member of the board of directors for the Connecticut Boxing Hall of Fame, Joe says he had met Pep at many matches. He called the late boxer approachable and said that it means “a lot on a personal level with me to be involved in this movie.”
“I never ever imagined that I’d be a referee in a movie about his life.”
Joe says.
Though he never expected to be in a film, Joe says that he was prepared to act like a referee while boxers sparred around him.
“I thought they were actually going to be sparring and hitting, and I’m gonna be moving around like a referee, but it was really the director that controlled everything,” says Joe. “They put me into the ring for 45 minutes, moving around like a referee. Those were my instructions. There’s no boxers in the ring; there’s no actors.”
But Joe was not acting as a referee; he was simply doing what came to him naturally when in the ring while doing shoots. Over the last 18 years, Joe has refereed all over the country at amateur-level matches.
“I got to work Olympic qualifying events all over the country. I worked with the ’96 Olympic team; I worked with the 2000 Olympic team. I did the New York Golden Gloves. I worked in Disney World and New Orleans.I worked at the Olympic training center in Lake Placid, the same building [where] the US Olympic team beat the Russian [hockey] team,” says Joe. “My amateur career was very important to me.”
Joe understands very well that being a referee is no easy role. Even against the jeers and hollers of a fighter’s fanbase, difficult decisions must be made since “the main focus for a referee is the safety of the boxers,” Joe says.
“When you lose that, you’re doing it for all the wrong reasons…You cannot protect the fighter from getting knocked out cold with a one- or two-quick punch combination. That’s gonna happen. But you’re not going to allow a fighter to take a beating round after round one round and layup against the ropes.”
Having been around fighters for years, Joe recognizes that energy and attitude are everything as a fighter. If it is not there, then a victory is not possible.
“I’ve never met a fighter who didn’t have supreme confidence,” says Joe. “If he didn’t go into that ring thinking he was absolutely the best, he was going to come out on a stretcher. I would look for those signs. When I go into the dressing room to give the instructions before the fight, I would look for little panic signs, little nervousness.”
Next to Pep, Joe has met many of boxing’s other greats, including George Foreman, Muhammed Ali, and Joe Frazier.
“I was refereeing at Madison Square Garden on an HBO show, and George Foreman was the ringside announcer,” remembers Joe. “I’m sitting right next to him and his legs and arms were so huge.”
Joe’s barber shop, Hair to Eternity, located at 204 Kimberly Avenue, East Haven, displays his love for the sport. Several photographs of himself in the ring hang on the walls, along with other boxing-related items. Even his ringtone is the famous “Gonna Fly Now” theme from the Rocky franchise.
Because The Featherweight is a more human-based story revolving around a difficult point in Pep’s life, and the fighting sequences being “minuscule,” Joe says, “I think the movie would appeal to a broader base, not just a sports fan.”