A Fighter's Heart: One Man's Journey Through the World of Fighting (23 page)

What endeared Master Chen to me was his constant talk of fighters. He always used the reference of a fighter to illustrate his points, and when I told him I was a sometime fighter, he was delighted—I wasn’t just there for the health benefits. I could understand a lot more of what he was talking about than most of the Manhattanites.

The common conception of throwing a punch is that the arm should be loose for speed but the hands strong in a fist. Master Chen described it as “hollow arms,” meaning that the arms are empty except for the energy that activates them, and the hand should be open, curling into a fist as it hits. His hands were always in the shape of hands inside boxing gloves—never fists, the gloves won’t allow it. You strike with two knuckles; Chen quoted Jack Dempsey about hitting with just those top two knuckles. In his book, Chen had detailed diagrams of bullets, showing how more powder and cartridge width increased velocity. He talked about generating speed from pressure changes and generating power from speed in a speech that made me think of Virgil Hunter. Chen was practical to the tips of his fingers. In the short form, one’s movements should be led by the fingers (activated off the toe), and punches were the same. It’s all about velocity, sinking down and rising—not up, but into a shape. And as all hard artists, like boxers and karate disciples, should study tai chi, so should tai chi practitioners study the hard arts, so that both supplement yang with yin.

Chen’s most interesting concept was that of compression. He had this argument with many martial artists. When you’re learning about strikes, you’re taught to exhale on the strike. But it’s not just exhalation; it’s also compression. When a boxer hisses as he punches it’s a form of compression. This is one of those obvious, head-slapping truths: An exhalation, an open-mouthed “whoo” of air, has no power. But when you control the air, when the karate guy shouts “
Kiai”
as he punches, that compression is what generates force. It’s like a grunt when you pick up something heavy; you have to make an internal compression to generate power. Boxers hiss or grunt; the Thais yell.

“They say tai chi is about ‘relax,’ but really they mean ‘relax with compression.’ When you lying in bed, you are relaxed, but little compression. It’s like a sick person in the hospital; they are walking around like a skeleton.” Chen would demonstrate walking without compression, a perfect facsimile of a very old sick man, frail, scarcely moving. It was great because it wasn’t acting; he was demonstrating a different way of being.

Chen continued, “When they say a boxer is ‘out of gas,’ they not mean tired, they mean cannot make compression,” and I thought about my fight. He was dead right. It wasn’t that radical an idea, but I had never heard it before.

“When you walk around with compression, you are thinking: How cool I am. The compression is filling you up.”

Master Chen had an open-minded approach to his art, which gave him great strength. He was always thinking about it and refining ideas. I was extremely lucky to have walked into his studio. For him, tai chi wasn’t about doing tai chi every day, running through the form (although that had to be done). You couldn’t just run through the form blindly every day and think that in ten years you would get all the health benefits, become spiritual. It’s work. Every time you went through it, it had to be done as close to perfect as possible. He tried to do tai chi as it was intended to be done, not necessarily as he had been taught it, or others had shown him.

He had other ideas he was working on, concepts he’d been pondering for the past five or ten years. Ideas about the hydraulics inside the body, ideas about why tai chi was good in the context of Western medicine—the internal organs are suspended and massaged, and circulation is vastly improved. His latest thoughts were about a punch: The impact is absorbed by the muscles; that is all the muscles are there for. Certainly, boxers have shown that big muscles don’t equal heavy punches, although overall weight is a good indicator.

Chen said that great boxers learn to do all this naturally. I noticed right away that some of the postures in the short form looked very much like old-school boxing pictures of Joe Louis, coiled in on himself. I remembered Pat Miletich pointing to a picture he had on the wall of the gym and saying, “You see that picture? All the old-time boxers would pose that way, coiled up for an uppercut, because if you posed that way, it showed you knew what you were doing, you had been educated in the science.”

Chen taught the short and long forms, and his attitude was that students should learn the short form all the way through, and
then
perfect it—instead of trying to get every posture perfect before moving on to the next. That way, you could start to derive the benefits of the form more quickly. Everything came from the short form; everything could be learned by learning the short form, although Chen laughed and said, “For fighting, you have to hit the bag and lift the weights, too.”

When I talked to Master Chen’s son, Max, who was preparing for the Golden Gloves, he said he just used the short form as a type of relaxation, of moving meditation. I was reminded of the
ram muay
and
wai khru,
the traditional, slow-moving dances that we had done before muay Thai fights. These had been moments of relaxation and could be considered moving meditation. But Max and his sister, Tiffany, didn’t think that tai chi had given them a big advantage in boxing or san shou; they thought it was just “good for you.” Master Chen said his own children didn’t have the maturity to understand what he was talking about, but they would learn it. They were pretty good, tough kids, although I never got a chance to work with them. Tiffany loved boxing and was training at Gleason’s, the most storied boxing gym in the world, while Max was more interested in the san shou and, someday, K-1.

On some nights, there was “form application,” applying the moves of the short form to actual self-defense and fighting, and on those nights Master Chen had everybody put on boxing gloves and punch the wall, again focusing on mechanics, on slamming and retraction.

He did hit hard as hell, I have to admit. His hips and body coiled and uncoiled, and he had a kind of snarling yell, shockingly loud, as he punched the wall. It was all about mechanics, pivoting, winding up, punching through, and impact. I almost never got it quite right, but he smiled and laughed and showed everyone again the differences. They were subtle, but they existed, and they allowed the seventy-year-old man who weighed about 140 pounds to hit the wall like a much heavier person. The fingers activating, the toe, the compression, the sinking and exploding, all the myriad details flowed together.

In the end, the sum is greater than the whole. Tai chi is about the generation of power, hitting terribly hard and moving smoothly and uncoiling perfectly. But there is something more, something greater.

Master Chen had been a student of Cheng Man-ch’ing’s, a man Robert Smith called the “Master of the Five Excellences” and one of the most legendary tai chi practitioners in history. According to Smith, Cheng had been dying of tuberculosis when he met Yang Cheng-fu, the greatest tai chi practitioner in the world. Tai chi reversed the tuberculosis and completely healed him. It’s not quite levitation, but I wouldn’t turn it down.

I was with Chen for only a few months, just long enough to learn the short form and get a sense of what it was about, but on the last day I had a minor breakthrough.

Master Chen was always repeating things, telling the same stories over and over, not because he was forgetful but because you needed to keep hearing them. You might have understood what he was saying, but you didn’t quite
get
it. And then, one day, suddenly something would slot into place and you would understand what he had been talking about all that time.

Tai chi has an entire vocabulary in Chinese about varying forms of energy and
tantien,
the place below the belly where chi builds up. Master Chen almost never used those words, as they smacked of mysticism to him, and he avoided that. Instead, he would use the analogy of tires inflating with air.

On my last day, there were only a few people in class, and we were refining the form. Master Chen kept talking about shrinking and growing, sagging and waking up, and a certain tenseness in the
tantien.
Suddenly, I started waking up with the inhalation in my lower stomach; it would fill and tense, and a concept that had been eluding me fell into place. I could feel my
tantien.

Master Chen smiled and shook my hand and I thanked him, and he said, “I think you have enough to work on your own now. It will help you.”

It takes constant effort to keep the slippery, naked, near-formless fact of hitting swaddled in layers of sense and form. Because hitting wants to shake off all encumbering import and just be hitting, because boxing incompletely frames elemental chaos, the capacity of the fights to mean is rivaled by their incapacity to mean anything at all.

—Carlo Rotella,
Cut Time

 

I drove cross-country to Oakland in the spring. I was going to see Virgil Hunter and Andre Ward. Andre had won a gold medal at the Olympics in Athens and was 3–0 as a pro.

My shoulder was feeling better. The endless pulling on rubber bands seemed to have had some effect. I had talked Virgil into taking me on as a student. “Just imagine I’m a cruiserweight prospect,” I said to him. He laughed. Virgil would never be able to pretend I was anything other than what I was. It’s part of what made him a great trainer. I told him I wanted an amateur fight—having a fight focuses the training and clarifies the mind; it gives you a sense of urgency that helps you learn. I wanted a different kind of relationship with a teacher, more than I’d had in Rio or even Iowa. I wanted the one-on-one attention. If I was going to fight bare-fisted in Myanmar or MMA again anywhere, I better do it right. If my true love was hitting and getting hit, I figured I should have the best instruction available, at least for a while. And I was fascinated by Andre’s story, the life of a red-hot young prospect with all the advantages, being groomed for greatness. Finally, I thought it would be good for my understanding to take a look into the big-time world of professional boxing, from the inside.

The amount of literary material on boxing is staggering. World-class writers have fallen in love with “the sweet science,” from Hemingway and Mailer to Joyce Carol Oates; far, far better writers than I have addressed the issue. In general, they fall into all kinds of hyperbole, all kinds of difficult and complicated constructions and emphatic descriptions, in attempts to describe the visceral. Boxing writing often veers from the sublime to the ridiculous.

So I was going to get some one-on-one attention with a world-class trainer and fight an amateur fight. It almost seemed a step backward, to fight an amateur fight at this point (four two-minute rounds, headgear—are you kidding me?), but the fight was just an excuse to train hard. And I wanted to see Andre in depth, close up. People didn’t realize that although Andre had won gold at light-heavyweight, 175 pounds, he’d fought most of those fights weighing under 170 pounds. He beat a European champion and a huge (six-five) Russian world champion and gave up seven pounds. The critics were sniping at him for turning pro at middleweight (“
Didn’t he have the power for light-heavy?
”), or 160—but he had never been a proper light-heavyweight.

I arrived in Oakland without a place to stay, and through a friend of a friend ended up crashing on the floor of an unfurnished apartment in East Oakland. The neighborhood was bad, in the process of gentrifying but not there yet. Rough open streets, old factories, and rundown buildings: the West Coast urban wasteland.

The next morning I was up to meet Virgil in the pearly gray dawn, and as I headed toward my car, I could see a rat’s nest of papers and litter on the front seat. I walked slowly around the car in the warm morning light, with the ocean coloring the sky. One of the rear triangular windows had been neatly mashed in—the rock that had been used as a tool was still by the rear tire—all the doors had been unlocked, and the trunk had been popped. For some reason, I had thought things would be safe in the trunk. Of course, the trunk only keeps things safe from prying eyes; once you’re in the car, you just pop the trunk with that little latch on the floor. All my sparring and workout gear, plus a backpack filled with street clothes, was gone. Ah, well, at least I’d brought my camera and laptop inside. Who needs street clothes anyway?

I drove through the morning calm to Coffee with a Beat, the coffee shop that Virgil called his office, on the park next to Lake Merritt in downtown Oakland. The sun came up warm, but it was cold in the shade, and through the trees I could see the glimmer of the lake. I walked up and saw Virgil, looking the same, regal and smiling. We shook hands warmly; he seemed genuinely happy to see me. He was instantly recognizable, tall, broad-shouldered, and lean, with his head shaved bald and a black mustache, an Everlast ball cap, and sunglasses. He dressed in trainer chic, crisp athletic gear that was clean and sharp. When his sunglasses were off, you could see his eyes were intense, probing; he wore the glasses almost like a poker player does, to help him conceal his thoughts and where his eyes were, so you couldn’t read him.

We drank coffee and talked, moving one of the little outdoor tables into the sun. We caught up. I asked after Andre, and Virgil mentioned the cage-fighting article, which had been published in
Men’s Journal
with maximum gore. “I hate to see you like that,” he said lightly, and I laughed, because the editors had gone with pictures that made it look as bad as possible, despite my protestations and the photographer’s wishes. I told him the whole story, about the weight mix-up and everything.

He shook his head. “You aren’t fighting to take punishment,” he said. “A true fighter learns how to say no if the fight is unfair. You don’t have to fight; it’s not a million-dollar title shot on the line.”

He chuckled to himself quietly, mulling over his words. He looked at me through his sunglasses and said, smiling, “It’s prizefighting, not pride-fighting.”

We talked about what I wanted to accomplish, and what he was doing with Andre and Antonio Johnson, a fighter who had recently come to him. Antonio was another kid with a gigantic amateur background, and he could have made the Olympic team but didn’t make weight—a sign that his discipline was a mess.

We made plans to meet up later at King’s Boxing Gym, and as we stood up, Virgil said in his dry voice, “It’s all about figuring out who
you
are.” It’s something you hear again and again in boxing: Boxing is about knowing your identity. If you are a boxer, someone with skill and technical virtuosity but perhaps without power, then box; use your science, move and hit and defend. If you are a puncher, with power to hurt with just one punch, then get yourself in a position to let your hands go and punch. “Let your hands go” is the refrain everywhere for “Start throwing punches.” Your hands are trained to punch in combinations, just let them go and do what they want. Trainers and bystanders will implore fighters who seem oddly frozen, who could win the fight if they would only land a few combinations. Of course, everything is different for the man in the ring.

I drove back through Oakland, hot and dusty with those wide, hardscrabble streets. East Oakland was a picture of neglect and emptiness—though here and there old warehouses were being turned into fancy apartments because it was an easy commute to San Francisco, just a few blocks from the Bay Bridge. The sun beat down through a perfect blue sky, and the ocean was a presence I could feel and know, but not see or hear.

I remembered King’s Boxing Gym from the last time I had been there, and it was essentially unchanged, sandwiched between the highway and the train tracks, between chop shops and massive concrete walls. A simple sign and a narrow metal door in an accordion garage door led the way inside.

King’s was long and dark, sweaty and well worn, cavernous. I noticed some changes—some new equipment and more college-looking kids, a tiny bit of upscale. There was a refrigerator with protein drinks for sale. The price of membership was still right, thirty bucks a month to work out, fifty with a trainer. There were more hacks, more white guys with running shoes, and maybe fewer professionals. But it was still a serious place, a pure boxing gym, and the walls were covered in posters and flyers for fights, history peeling and aging on the walls everywhere you looked.

It was good to see Andre again—he smiled and we shook hands with genuine good feeling. I instantly noticed the subtle differences that age, maturity, and the crucible of the Olympics had brought him—he was a man now, and he knew it. In the year and a half since I’d seen him, his eyes had acquired a layered wisdom. The gym had pictures of him and a huge banner congratulating him on his Olympics win, and I muttered to him with a smile, “So this is your gym now?” and he grinned back and replied, “Something like that.”

I met Antonio Johnson, a light-skinned black kid with a handsome, boyish face and a feathery mustache, almost Latino-looking. He had just turned pro at 140. He was as verbose as Andre was quiet, filling the air with a stream of street banter, discussing a fighter they knew on the TV show
The Contender,
a fighter Virgil had trained. “Babyface, he can crack a little bit though,” Antonio said with finality. “He can crack” means he can punch hard, something every boxer lusts after, knockout power in each hand.

Andre said, “If they had me on that show, they would have to do it without my family.” He was referring to the way the TV show always built up to the fights by having the fighter’s wife and kids in the dressing room for tearful good-byes and good lucks, a sort of relentless, smarmy tear-jerking. Andre kept his wife and kids at a distance when he was fighting; he actually left the house and “went to camp” at Virgil’s training house down the road weeks or months before the fight, to focus himself.

Andre had a fight coming up in just a few days, so I didn’t talk to him, as I didn’t want to mess with his focus. A critical element for a fighter is focus, something Virg started drumming into me on the first day. On the wall was a poster saying “The Three C’s for Fighters: Conditioning, Coachability, and Concentration.” More than any athletic ability, any natural speed or strength, those three C’s make real professional fighters.

Virg looked at me with pursed lips and said, “I need to see what I got. Why don’t you get up in the ring and shadowbox.” I went through the ropes, feeling on display, and shadowboxed fast for a round or two, trying to look good. Sidelined by my shoulder, I hadn’t really done anything since the Miletich camp, almost a year ago, and felt awkward and ungainly. But not too bad, I thought.

Virg stopped me after two rounds and climbed into the ring with me. “Now, real slow, I want you to step and jab, step across with a jab, then step back with a jab-right-jab,” and he demonstrated for me, elegant and tall and graceful, almost balletic. I frowned and concentrated and tried to block out the watchful gaze of Antonio and Andre. I danced like Virgil had just shown me. I was very aware of how tight I was, everything seized up and bunched. Step, step, step back with the left-right.

At the end of the round, Virgil came off the ropes and told me, “Sam, your concentration was terrible. Twenty-six times you did that, and every time you ended on a straight right. Now, if I know you are throwing the right and then just standing there, I’m going to make you throw it and then come back on top of it.”

“So never end on the right cross,” I said dumbly. They call it “posing,” or “taking a picture”—a fighter throws a punch and finishes frozen, contemplating the beauty of his last punch, there to be hit by a counterpunch. Keep moving, move your head and body after you punch.

“Come back with the jab, so that even if I’m countering, the jab is there to disrupt me. And jab as you move away.”

I quickly came to understand one of Virgil’s governing precepts, which is fight when it’s good for you. Don’t stand and fight when your opponent wants to. Move around—fight only when it’s better for you. Muhammad Ali’s first fight with Floyd Patterson is a perfect example. Ali just kept moving and moving and moving, and every now and again paused to hit Floyd, and then moved some more. Boxing critics hated him for it, the “cowardice” of it, but it was unbeatable. Floyd didn’t have an answer.

I felt like a fool in the ring doing these slow, basic beginner moves, after I had been shadowboxing fast and well (in my mind, anyway). There were maybe four or five other complete beginners in the gym, just like me, college kids in running shoes with iPods, fat girls, a tiny Asian girl.

But I got over the embarrassment. I moved beyond those feelings—if what Virgil wanted me to do was slow and basic and endlessly repetitive, I reasoned, then I’d do it. I knew who I was—I was a writer trying to learn something. Virgil had told me that he was going to give me a straight right and a straight left, and with those two punches you could beat almost anybody in the amateurs, until you started getting along—and by then you would know how to improvise a hook, an uppercut. To be fair, I was somewhat discouraged—all this time and now I had to go back to the two most basic punches? But it’s better to do a few things perfectly than a whole bunch of things badly in boxing. Championships have been won with great jabs. If I fought MMA again, having good straight punches would be a big help.

Afterward, as I was taking off my wraps, Virgil said, “Fundamentals, Sam, fundamentals. If you don’t have them, you will run into somebody else’s.”

The next day, I went back to King’s by myself, acutely self-conscious. Andre, Virg, and Antonio had all gone to Southern California to fight. I skipped rope for fifteen minutes, the bell dinging away like some kind of call to prayer. It divided the hours of the universe into three-minute rounds (with a green light) and one-minute rest periods (with red). For the last thirty seconds of the round, the light would go yellow and ding a certain tone, meaning “
Hurry up, the round is almost done, the end is in sight, give it everything you’ve got now
.” I read all the signs fading on the walls as I jumped, and jumping rope was about the only thing I could do competently. I shadowboxed in front of the mirror for three rounds and then wrapped up and hit the heavy bag. My first thought was
Damn, that thing is hard,
as my hands and heart shuddered at the impact. The bag seemed like concrete, and by the end of each round I could barely keep my hands up. My punches would not have bruised a fly. My shoulders burned, and my left was shockingly weak. I had always prided myself on a decent jab, but right now it wasn’t anything more than a love tap to the bag. I forced myself through four rounds.

Virgil had introduced me to Bobby, an older trainer who was a good friend of his, a big ancient black man with a beautiful, creased face, like a cartoon of the sun. Bobby was seventy-five and healthy and happy. He had a huge smile, and Virgil called him “Blackburn,” after Joe Louis’s legendary trainer. Bobby was old school to the highest degree and convinced that the Brown Bomber would have beaten Ali because (of course) Ali pulled straight back. I stood next to Bobby and chatted companionably as one of his fighters was shadowboxing. There were already a few women in the gym, but another good-looking woman poked her head in, and Bobby said, “Million-dollar baby,” with a huge smile, and we laughed. He told me about boxing in the army and being stationed in Germany in the fifties and going on leave to Paris with cigarettes to trade on the black market. He is a living reminder of the decline of the sport.