A Fighter's Heart: One Man's Journey Through the World of Fighting (24 page)

Boxing has been in decline since the twenties, arguably, but still had massive popularity in the fifties and even seventies. It is an oddity, a curio of old Anglo-Saxon values that arose with the decline of the duel in Victorian England. Its popularity grew with the growth of all athletics in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. In his book
Manhood in America,
Michael Kimmel points at boxing’s rise to prominence at the turn of the last century, along with the popularity of sports in general, as a counter to industrialization and the effeminacy of modern society. Boxing was about the return of the true craftsman, the “artisan.” Kimmel talks about the artisanal vocabulary instantly adapted by boxing, which persists to this day. Boxing was a “profession,” and boxers were “trained” in various “schools.” Combatants “went to work” and “plied their trades” in the “manly art.”

Before the rise of prizefighting you have to go back to ancient Greece and the early Olympics to find men fighting with fists or gloves for entertainment or defense (at least in the Western world; obviously, the East was different). Gladiators used weapons.

Prizefighting became popular alongside bull-and bearbaiting and their “dark sister,” public hangings. Bare-fisted fighting favored the careful, conditioned man, as fights went on for hours with two to three punches thrown a minute. “The fancy” refers to the men who were fans and connoisseurs, of both dogfights and prizefighting, and as the fancy began to participate, the use of gloves evolved. Pressure from political antifight groups culminated in the London Prize Ring Rules in 1838, prohibiting striking below the belt, kicking, and butting. Later, the more famous 1867 Marquess of Queensberry rules solidified the use of gloves and the three-minute rounds with a one-minute rest, plus a ten count for a knockout. These rules in fact were a tremendous boon to prizefighting, legitimizing it, reducing the sky-high rate of fatalities, and bringing it into respectability.

Jack Johnson, the first black heavyweight champion, in 1910, chased the white champions all over the world before he got someone who would fight him for the title. His story is incredible. This was back when the heavyweight champion of the world was the be-all and end-all of manhood, the paragon of virtue, and the fact that a black man had the title was an almost impossible cross for white sportswriters to bear. Johnson didn’t give a damn, either; he was doing Muhammad Ali in 1910. They pulled Jim Jeffries, the former unbeaten white champ, out of retirement, and Johnson beat the shit out of him, laughing all the time. The outcome sparked race riots and led to many deaths—mostly of black men, of course. Virgil’s comment was, “Jeffries was exploited, man”—his sympathy lies with boxers, not color. And Virgil, although he was born in Berkeley, has roots in Texas; and the uncles who taught him to box had a direct stylistic link to Jack Johnson, who fought out of Galveston. Johnson was one of the first defensive fighters to be hugely successful, with a slippery, elusive style that confounded opponents. Virgil calls his own personal style, descended from what Jack Johnson did, “Texas slip ’n’ slide.” Over the decades, the game evolved from an Anglo-Saxon “stand-in-front-of-him-and-hit” brawl to the modern strategic and tactical masterpieces that were enacted throughout the twentieth century.

Just look at the numbers: In 1939, Sugar Ray Robinson won the Twelfth Annual Intercity (amateur) title, the Golden Gloves, at Chicago Stadium, in front of 20,000 people. You can’t get 15,000 fans to come to a professional title fight these days. Dempsey-Tunney, in Philadelphia in 1926, had a live gate of 126,000. Pay-per-view extends the live gate at forty bucks a pop but is perhaps promotionally shortsighted, as it limits the audience.

Television runs the show, and there has been much hue and cry about how it has killed boxing, with A. J. Liebling leading the charge in the thirties and forties. Local gyms and fighting venues dropped off precipitously—because you could see good fights on TV—and a strict boxing gym today has a sense of decay to it, the feeling that twenty years earlier there were three rings and two hundred guys in there working every day, but now there is one and it is empty. The bottom line is financial. Good athletes can make so much more money playing other sports without the risk and damage of boxing that it would be silly to fight. Football and other sports gained in popularity and took the best athletes at all levels; and the corruption of the “alphabet soup” organizations, and mandatory title defenses, muddied the waters.

I think the source of boxing’s decline lies deeper in American society. Kids used to fight more; violence wasn’t so frowned upon and didn’t escalate as it does today with the prevalence of firearms. The penalties are severe today—getting in a few bar fights can lead to weeks or months in jail, heavy fines, and tremendous
hassle
. The cops will invariably arrive. Everybody in the early part of the century, through the Depression, would be in fistfights, especially as young kids. You would know who was the toughest kid on your block, and how you compared to him, and then you would know how he compared to the toughest fighter in the neighborhood, the city, the state; and you would see how the best fighter in the state got his clock cleaned by Sugar Ray Robinson or Jack Dempsey, and you would have a direct relation to and understanding of that controlled violence.

Even among fight fans boxing has been in decline—because of bad decisions and rampant corruption, fighters owned by the Mafia throwing fights, and scandals. Still, fight fans will pay to see big fights, and boxing remains big business, albeit for only a few top fighters. The huge purses of the eighties and nineties, riding on Tyson’s mythic status, have likewise faded into legend. When Holyfield fought Tyson in the rematch in ’97, they both made thirty million dollars.

Boxing is also filled with nostalgia, as Liebling noticed, and sometimes it’s nostalgia for its own sake: He saw, even in his day, that everyone contended that boxing used to be better. The old fighters thought it was better back in the days when they were still fighting; and the writers thought it was better back in the old days when they first fell in love with the sport. Liebling calls the boxing writers (who last longer) “the most persistent howlers after antiquity.”

Virgil, Andre, and Antonio returned, triumphant and easy, and Virgil gave the boys some time off. I met him often in the early mornings at Coffee with a Beat and got to know Nate, the owner, a little bit and even bought some T-shirts from him; he was a childhood friend of Virgil’s. Virgil pretty much frequented only black-owned businesses. His mother had been politically active in the civil rights movement, and being in Oakland, near Berkeley, Virg retained some of that militant outlook, heavily seasoned with a street education.

We would sit and talk for hours, meeting people, carrying on conversations through multiple interruptions and digressions. Virgil had derived some of his philosophy from Miyamoto Musashi’s
The Book of Five Rings
—a samurai treatise on fighting strategy—and when he saw that the Olympic symbol was five linked rings, he knew Andre was going to win gold: “His style, his philosophy is too much for anyone to get a handle on in four two-minute rounds.” Virgil had intentionally kept Andre out of international competition, because that way it was harder for the much more experienced, older European fighters with eight years of amateur experience to get tape on Andre, to come up with a plan for him. They couldn’t figure him out in the short sprints that make up amateur boxing. Virgil mentioned Bruce Lee and jeet kune do. “Bruce Lee nearly got his ass whupped by a man off the street, a big, strong, tough man, and only because of his conditioning was he able to win. So he changed his system. He realized he was too locked in place by tradition. In a fight, I’m free. If I’m locked in a system…Here’s Andre in the Olympics, and the first fight he wins, the thing the other fighters are thinking about is his speed. Once I got speed on your mind, I got you thinking and halfway beat. So you’re wondering if you can hit me, and then I keep you from hitting me for the first round, and now you’re convinced you can’t hit me.

“Like Tyson,” he continued. “People would train to get away from the punch, and convince themselves that they couldn’t handle the punch. They would do his work for him, and then Buster Douglas and Evander showed that you just had to have confidence in the fact you could
handle
his punch, and if you frustrate a puncher you got him beat—because he’s used to people disappearing when he hits them. He’s got no science to fall back on.”

Boxing is full of great fights in which big punchers have been exposed. The most famous, classic example is the “Rumble in the Jungle,” Ali-Foreman in Zaire. Foreman was thought to be an unbeatable force of nature, the greatest puncher of all time. Ali took a horrendous pounding, absorbed it lying on the ropes, and as Foreman tired, Ali came dancing back in the eighth round and knocked him out. He beat Foreman’s mind as much as his body. Liebling had written, “Any fight in which one man can punch and the other must disarm him is exciting, like watching an attempt by a bomb squad to remove a fuse.”

The Leonard-Duran fights are probably my favorite. In their first meeting, Leonard, the boxer, was a young, fresh kid out of the Olympics, and Duran (a shoeshine boy from Panama) was the most feared boxer-puncher in his weight class, maybe in history. Duran was called
Manos de Piedra,
“Hands of Stone.” Leonard stood in and brawled with Duran, instead of boxing, and although Duran won, he was frustrated because Leonard had taken his best shot and kept fighting. The second time they met, Leonard stood in the middle of the ring when the bell rang, Duran’s usual spot; and Leonard moved and danced and showboated and so confused and twisted Duran’s mind that he quit, with the now infamous “
No más,
” to the howling outrage of the boxing community. Leonard took Duran’s legend and wove it into his own. Making somebody quit—that’s domination.

Virgil turned to me and said, “It’s like this: When I was a kid in Oakland, we used to collect those big wolf spiders. We used to fight those spiders, the kids would, because they would tear each other up. Especially females. Now, I knew that in my basement there was a black widow spider. I had seen her many times, and I would go and check on it and find it in the same place. So I got the spider and cleaned up the whole neighborhood.” That’s Virgil’s attitude: Think outside the problem, win with something overwhelming, leave nothing to chance.

I was curious as to how Andre’s opponents were chosen. At this stage in a fighter’s career, I knew from reading, it was important to bring him up slowly. Andre had what Teddy Atlas loved to call the “amateur pedigree,” meaning he had more than 150 amateur fights, starting when he was ten years old, and he had the greatest amateur achievement—he won gold in the Olympics. Antonio had about 250 amateur fights, and some fighters will have more than that before they turn pro. It means that every week since they were ten or twelve years old they were jumping into the car, driving to a tournament, and fighting. Records aren’t kept, as your win-loss ratio isn’t so critical, but Andre hadn’t lost an amateur fight since 1997 (and he claims that that was a judging error and wants to avenge the loss). Professional fighting is something totally different. It’s scored differently, the rounds are longer and there’s more of them, and of course there is no headgear. You’re not looking to score points as much as to hurt the guy. To start a pro career, you might fight four or five four-rounders and then five or six six-rounders, then eights, and so on, depending on how you do. But the goal is title fights, and those are twelve rounds. As I heard T, one of Andre’s managers, say, “They don’t give away belts for nothing less than twelve-rounders.” And title shots are the only goal as far as money is concerned.

There is a principle that Angelo Dundee (the legendary trainer of Ali and Leonard) referred to as “slow-teach,” which is slowly exposing your fighter to bigger challenges. Just enough to stretch him, not so that he is seriously challenged or even lose, but more to just expose him to something he might not have seen, to force him to adapt and grow as a fighter. For Andre, the guys he had fought so far
knew
they couldn’t come close to matching him in speed or skill, so they were forced to try to intimidate him, to rough him up and shake his confidence. It infuriated him. “They look at my baby face and say, ‘Oh, you have to rough up Olympic champs,’ and I’m like,
‘What makes you think you can rough me up? Now that I won, I’m pampered?’
I went and took that medal from a bunch of tough guys.”

In Andre’s last fight, against a white kid from Louisiana, the kid had been hopelessly outclassed and had responded by fouling repeatedly, until he was disqualified. Andre smiled, his eyes soft, warm, pitiless brown pools. “He was looking for a way out. He knew he was going to be knocked out and didn’t want to go like that, so he just kept hitting after the break.”

I had seen Andre’s fights so far, complete blowouts of much less talented individuals, nonthreats, called “opponents,” boxing lingo for someone brought in to lose to your prospect. There are, of course, varying degrees of opponent; your fighter might be 4–0 and the opponent might be 2–6, and there are infamous opponents whose records might run 4–16, guys who are used to losing and are just out looking for a payday, record padding for young hungry contenders with money and intelligence backing them. A contender in today’s world isn’t taken seriously unless he is 20–0; remaining undefeated is incredibly important, and two or three losses can be the end of a career. MMA is different. There are so many ways to lose that guys at the top level can have six or eight losses. It depends more on who they fought.

In the gym, Virgil would have me shadowbox in front of the mirror, moving in super slow motion for five or six rounds, the slower the better. “Slow works the tendons, the sinews, and it hurts more; but it makes you stronger, gives you power. Speed will come when the mechanics are right.” I thought about tai chi. My arms and shoulders would be screaming, and when I finally went to the heavy bag next to Antonio, it was a huge relief to be able to hit fast. Antonio was like a snake, in and out, his punches snapping the bag.