Kickboxer from Centerville living a dream

Before we get to that pugnaciously perfect nickname, let’s focus on the time Joe “Stitch ‘em Up” Schilling became unstitched.

“I was a pretty angry kid growing up,” he said. “I had some issues with my parents divorcing and I didn’t have a great relationship with my dad, who was an alcoholic.

“As I got a little older I got into a lot of trouble smoking pot, sneaking out of the house, nothing violent, but I was not a respectful young man at all.”

Growing up in Centerville, Schilling said he had little interest in school, got into fights and eventually got the boot — first from St. Charles Catholic school when he was in the sixth grade and then Tower Heights Middle School as an eighth-grader. His first year at Centerville High School he said he managed a 0.68 grade-point average.

He was sent to an alternative school in Middletown for a year and after that his mother shipped him to an outdoor boot camp in Idaho that helped him begin to turn his life around.

“When I got home my mom said, ‘Joe, I don’t know what I’m going to do with you. You’ve got to find a hobby,’ ” he said. “So I figured, ‘Well, I get in a lot of street fights and I’m good at it, so I’ll box.’

“So she picks me up at school one day and drives me over to the Tama Martial Arts Center on Woodman. When she pulled up, I saw a sign out front that said ‘Kickboxing’ and I threw a hissy fit. This wasn’t boxing. I started screaming in the car and crying like a little girl.

“I wanted to be a boxer. I thought kickboxing was for girls.”

But it’s funny what a few roundhouse kicks to the ribs and snoot can do to a guy’s perspective.

Fast forward 14 years to this Saturday night at Madison Square Garden.

That’s where “Stitch ‘em Up” Joe — who owns a world championship middleweight title — will fight unbeaten Wayne Barrett of Queens, N.Y., in a non-title Muay Thai kickboxing bout that will be shown on Spike TV as part of a much-hyped Glory 12 kickboxing show.

Chasing a dream

That day his mom — the now-remarried Robin Brun — walked him into the Tama school, Schilling said he was taken aback by the instructors — Master Manuel Taningco and especially student-instructor Robert Shelley:

“I sat and watched Robert and had this profound respect for him. He seemed like a total bad-ass and the girls in the class all thought he was cute and he scared the hell out of me. I ended up telling my mom ‘all right I’ll try this.’ ”

Schilling said he thinks his mother prepped the instructors about his need for discipline. Wednesday, Master Taningco confirmed that:

“His mother and I, we worked hard to keep him out of trouble and to stay focused, and though it was bumpy at first, he soon took to it and got to enjoy it.”

Schilling fought for the school’s kickboxing team, competing in tournaments at Ohio State, Chicago and Las Vegas, and soon was teaching a class of his own.

“My life really started to turn then,” he said by phone from Los Angeles. “People I thought never respected me because I was a punk kid — I’m talking about lawyers, doctors, businessmen — were asking my opinion and appreciating what I had to say.”

When he was 17, he said he fudged on his age and entered a toughman-like contest at a bar in Middletown and was matched with a much bigger, 30-year-old construction worker who he stopped with a breath-stealing right hand to the gut.

“Afterward people came up and told me how great I was and girls talked to me and that feeling of being somebody was the greatest thing ever,” he said. “I got hooked on that feeling. At that moment I didn’t know if you could make a living out of kickboxing, but that’s what I wanted to do.”

He eventually graduated from Centerville in 2002 and soon after decided to move to Los Angeles to chase his kickboxing dream. His mother gave him $400 and a gas card, though she thought he’d be back in Ohio soon after.

In L.A. he first got a job as a room service bus boy at the Bonaventure Hotel, took classes to become a personal trainer, worked on his own fistic skills at a local boxing club and fought amateur bouts — smokers — every chance he got.

Early on in L.A. he began to date Cina Brown, who soon became pregnant.

He said when he went to face her parents, he knew his speech sounded far-fetched:

“I said, ‘I’m a kick boxer. I’m gonna open a gym one day and be a professional fighter. I’ll take care of your daughter.’ And I know they had to be thinking, ‘Yeah, great.’ ”

It all pays off

As for the nickname, it was the natural byproduct of his early fights.

He won his pro debut in 2006 after landing close to four dozen elbows on a heavier, more experienced fighter. Afterward the bloodied opponent got his eyebrow stitched up and then the flap of one of his ears was sewn back on.

“In my second Muay Thai fight the other guy got like 33 stitches,” Schilling said. “After that, someone just came up with the name.”

Just as colorful is the artwork he has inked on his upper body. The first tattoo, though, came with a challenge.

He got a pair of gloves and “Muay Thai” tattooed on his chest here in Dayton. That was before he even had had a Muay Thai fight and some gym veterans thought it was a bit precocious.

“One of the guys I trained with used to give me a hard time every time I missed practice.” he said. “He’d call me and say, ‘Hey, you know that’s a pretty cool tattoo. If you ever want to get it removed, I can bring over a bottle of bleach and some steel wool and we can take it right off.’

“That really motivated me every day when I looked in the mirror. I didn’t want to be a phony.”

Eventually he began to live up to his artwork and his promises.

He and his trainer Mark Komuro opened a gym called The Yard in the Lincoln Heights neighborhood of L.A., and in the ring Schilling began to excel.

He fought across the United States and in Thailand, scoring several knockouts, and won three prestigious U.S. titles as a super-middleweight and light-heavyweight.

Along the way there were a couple of devastating knockout losses and one ill-advised sanshou bout that left him with a torn ACL and MCL in one knee and cartilage damage in the other. That required two surgeries and a year of rehab.

Finally, last September, the 29-year-old Schilling landed a berth in the much-anticipated, four-man, $150,0000-to-the-winner Glory 10 middleweight world championship tournament in Los Angeles.

After overwhelming Kengo Shimizu of Japan in the semifinal, he met No. 1 ranked Artem Levin, a much-favored Russian fighter, who he put down twice and decisioned in an extra-round fight.

Instantly Schilling felt overwhelmed by emotion.

He looked up and there was his brother standing on the ring apron. Somehow his two young sons — “Little Joe” and Jackson — got into the ring with him and out in the crowd he saw his mom, his fiancé and sister.

He was handed the oversized check for $150,000 and by the time he returned to the dressing room he said his phone had blown up with congratulatory messages from across the world.

“It’s hard to put the feeling then into words — I guess it would be ‘satisfaction,’ ” he said. “It was incredible. You always want to believe in yourself, but you don’t really know until it happens.”

And afterward here’s exactly what he knew:

He wasn’t a phony

He was a world champion.

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