Fighting the odds

Thwakata-thwakata.

Click-click.

Four-thirty a.m. and Danny Bonaduce pounds a freestanding heavy bag in the gym in the basement of his Center City apartment house. His girlfriend holds a timer in one hand and a counter in the other.

Bonaduce lands another left and a right. Click-click.

An electronic bell ends the round. In three minutes, Amy Railsback has ticked off 225 blows. Bonaduce stops, heaving, his Under Armour shirt taut against his chest, sweat traversing the nooks and crannies of his face.

Railsback resets the timer. Bonaduce returns to the bag.

In another phase of his life - not too long ago - Bonaduce might be getting home at this hour, but that was before he landed in his hometown in November to take over the morning show at WYSP (94.1). And before he agreed to get into the ring with Jose Canseco, the former baseball star, for a celebrity boxing match.

Bonaduce is playing the underdog in the ring Saturday night (at 5-foot-6 and 165 pounds he is a full foot shorter and 100 pounds lighter than Canseco) and on the air (WYSP is aiming to regain its footing after a series of format changes in the post-Howard Stern era).

"I am here to win," Bonaduce says after the bell rings again. He drags on an electronic cigarette (fake smoke, real nicotine), satisfied with the 45-minute workout. Railsback has clicked off 282 punches this time.

Who stands before us is a Danny Bonaduce on the cusp of 50 with seemingly no time for Random Acts of Badness - the title of his 2001 autobiography, a familiar refrain of post-Partridge Family debauchery, demons and despair (homeless at 22, radio career at 28 starting at Philadelphia's late Eagle 106, arrested for beating a transvestite prostitute at 31).

After the predawn workout last week, Bonaduce hosted his four-hour WYSP show (mainly talk revolving around money and girls, plus four songs an hour from 6 to 10 a.m.), took business calls about a few reality series he's developing (a lucrative sideline), did a second workout (sparring with a guy 17 years his junior), returned to the station to host a late-afternoon talk show for Los Angeles while he chugged Muscle Milk, did a third workout, and got home by 8. He said he's been off drugs for years, and allows himself no more than three drinks a day.

"There's a lot of people in [12-step programs] who will say five years from now, I'll be in jail," Bonaduce says in that fine-tuned rasp that turns heads wherever he goes in town. "But at the moment my life consists of a five-block walk that I do sober. I work 5 in the morning till 6 at night. I don't have a lot of energy to get in a bar fight."

At 49, Bonaduce lives in a two-bedroom in the Ben Franklin House with Railsback, a former 10th-grade math teacher 23 years his junior. They met in 2007 after his wife, Gretchen, convinced him that she wanted a divorce. The Bonaduces married the night they met in 1990; the union's rocky state became the basis of Breaking Bonaduce, a 2005 VH1 reality series.

After the divorce talk, "I decided I could blow my brains out or go to Starbucks," Bonaduce said. "So I went with Starbucks. Six minutes from my house. I'm sitting there crying, and I hear, 'I like your show,' and I wipe one eye."

It was Railsback. The age difference, she says, means nothing. "She's the mature one," says Bonaduce, who was so taken with Railsback's mother, Kathy, that he had her name tattooed on his arm. Realizing that this might be off-putting to Kathy's boyfriend, Bob, he nobly had "Bob" inked on his buttocks.

Though Bonaduce complains on the air about his $16,000 monthly support payment, he seems to get along with his ex. He said he misses his children, 14-year-old Countess Isabella Michaela and 7-year-old Count Dante Jean-Michel Valentino.

Gretchen Bonaduce wishes "only good things" for the man she calls "a mad genius."

"He has found someone he really likes," she said from her home in the Hollywood Hills, which he has agreed not to sell until the real estate market recovers. "I'm really proud of him. I was worried that without a family that he would completely implode."

Since this is America and this is a story about Danny Bonaduce, you should know that Gretchen Bonaduce landed her own reality show, Re-Inventing Bonaduce, which starts shooting this month.

Bonaduce's path back to Philadelphia, where he's had two previous radio jobs, began in late 2007. He was teamed in Los Angeles with Adam Carolla, but the match soured. ("I think he's brilliant," Bonaduce says, "but he doesn't understand how to do radio." Carolla did not return a message left with his publicist.)

CBS pulled Bonaduce and assigned him a one-hour show on the same station, Bonaduce says, at his same $500,000 salary.

Over the summer, Andy Bloom, an executive at CBS-owned WYSP, was looking for a morning show. "Kidd Chris" Foley had been fired in May over a guest's racist song.

A one-year deal was crafted under which WYSP picked up most of Bonaduce's $750,000 salary, Bonaduce said. He is teamed with Michael "Metro" Cerio, 25, who was Foley's producer, and sidekick Shila, 28, last in Detroit. Cerio, who produces both Bonaduce shows and works the same ungodly hours, calls him "a sweetheart of a guy."

WYSP has been toward the middle of the pack since Howard Stern left three years ago. It may be too soon to assess ratings, as Bonaduce has only one month of data behind him. But if revenue is the criterion, he's a winner to Bloom, ticking off a list of new advertisers.

When asked why he'll get into the ring against a Goliath like Canseco, Bonaduce paraphrases mountain climber George Leigh Mallory: "Because he's there. And the second is, I actually think I can beat him."

Why get in the ring at all?

"I like to test myself," says Bonaduce, who in his first celebrity fight in 1994 won a decision over Donny Osmond while smoking between rounds. He then vowed to train. Bonaduce is now 12-0 in the celebrity matches, with 10 knockouts.

NBC10 sports director Vai Sikahema, who's a bit taller than Bonaduce, knocked out Canseco last summer in the first round. Sikahema, a former Eagle, is due on Bonaduce's show tomorrow.

Damon Feldman, promoting Saturday's match at the Ice Works Skating Complex in Aston, Delaware County, would not disclose Bonaduce's purse. Without qualms, Bonaduce would: $2 from each viewer on the pay-per-view at GoFightLive.tv. He hopes for a $50,000 payday.

Not that he needs the money. "Radio is my career," Bonaduce says. "It's my hope that I stay here until I grow out of the demographic and have generated enough ratings and revenue to see CBS move me over to a station I'm age-appropriate for. Paul Harvey signed a $100 million contract at age [86]. . . .

"That's me, with a much shorter life expectancy."

Danny Bonaduce and Jose Canseco will box three rounds as part of a card of fights at 7:30 p.m. Saturday at Ice Works Skating Complex, 3100 W. Duttons Mill Rd., Aston, 610-497-2200; tickets: $30 and $50. Pay-per-view: www.gofightlive.tv.EndText