01:00 AM EST on Tuesday, March 30, 2004

Somehow it was only fitting that Vinny Paz went out a winner Saturday night with blood on his face and "Miss U Mom & Dad" on his trunks.

His improbable tale always has been about blood. The blood in the ring. The blood of his family. The blood that's always made Paz the quintessential local story, as Rhode Island as frozen lemonade, the Democratic Party, and summer trips to Scarborough. Even as his ability took him into boxing rings around the world, far away from the Cranston of his youth.

In a sense, he's always been a page out of some storybook, the little kid who got hooked on the movie Rocky and made it his article of faith. Kids from Cranston aren't supposed to win world boxing titles. They aren't supposed to live inside this toughest of sports for more than 20 years.

They aren't supposed to go on some unbelievable sports journey and take us along for the ride.

And unbelievable it was.

Maybe you have to be a certain age to remember the glory years, to go back to 1987 when he came into a packed Civic Center and heard the big cheers. That was his coming-out party, and anyone who was there will never forget it. He was fighting Joe Frazier Jr. that night, and when he was done, he was a certified Rhode Island star.

He's been one ever since, through the soap opera that's been his life. The accident where he suffered two cracked vertebrae in his neck. The comeback. The outrageous outfits. The girlfriends who seemed to have stepped off the pages of a men's magazine. The five world titles. The sense that Paz always has been a star in his own movie. All of it. All larger than life, and all stranger than fiction.

Because it all changed after that night in the Civic Center in 1987. Paz became a public figure, right in fame's crosshairs, and there's always a certain backlash to that. We love our sports heroes. We also grow tired of them, eventually want them to move on, as if their athletic mortality reminds us of our own mortality.

There's little question Paz stayed too long at the dance. The past few years he's often seemed like a caricature of himself, trying to get to 50 wins, trying to stop time's passage, trying to hang on in a young man's game, clinging to something that was gone, an act we've seen too many times before.

And, in the end, all he had left was his heart.

You could see that Saturday night.

To someone who remembered the young Paz, it was like watching some slow-motion version, someone who was all about memories and rust. Boxing is no country for 41-year-olds to live in. But if his youth is gone, his heart isn't. He always had a heart as big as all outdoors, the one constant through all the years. I remember his second fight with Greg Haugen in Atlantic City, somwhere in the late 1980s -- a fight he lost. By the middle of each round his face was covered with blood. But he never stopped going after Haugen, as though the blood was simply some minor inconvenience. Saturday night was no different. To Paz, it was always about blood.

Which is why it's good it ended Saturday night.

It's been time for a while now.

He is 41, has changed his name from Pazienza to Paz, and there's a certain symmetry in that, too. What is Vinny Paz if not a stage name? What is Vinny Paz if not a name meant for some marquee? As if the personal life and the public life got blurred a long time ago.

Still, there's no denying his place in the sports world of this state.

For the longest time he was boxing around here, our emissary to the big fights, the big time. He went where no Rhode Islander had gone in 50 years, into the ring with some of the best fighters in the world. He saw all his dreams come true, and how many of us ever get a chance to say that?

So as I watched him Saturday night, watched him win another fight on heart and will, watched him win his last one, oblivious to the blood all over his face, I was thinking of all the different snapshots from his long career, the great ride he took us all on.

That's his legacy, and no one can ever take that away from him.

He also did it in his own inimitable style. It's not just happenstance that Frank Stallone -- brother of you-know-who -- serenaded Paz's entrance into the ring Saturday night with the old Sinatra classic, "My Way." Vinny always has done it his way.

Then again, if he didn't believe in his own instincts none of this ever would have happened. What were the odds that some little kid from Cranston would go see Rocky and believe it? What were the odds that he would become a real-life Rocky? Were there odds that high?

Some how, some way, Vinny Paz overcame them all, a veritable script written in blood.

One of the best sports stories in Rhode Island history.