A Fighter's Heart: One Man's Journey Through the World of Fighting (25 page)

I had no idea that boxers did so much shadowboxing. Most days, Andre will do ten or twelve rounds of shadowboxing, working on his movement, sliding around the ring. Day in, day out, and you start to appreciate the extreme concentration needed to stay focused, the tremendous imagination required to envision an opponent in front of you for that long every day, to try out new things on him. Virgil said, and Bobby agreed, that shadowboxing was the biggest part of training, more than bag work or pad work. I had thought about shadowboxing as something like the
katas
that other martial artists do—rigid, structured, rehearsed movements done to train the body when no other training is available. And shadowboxing is like that, but it is kind of free-form
kata,
done endlessly (in front of the mirror at first). “You’ve got to fall in love with yourself in the mirror,” said Virgil, and boxers do spend inordinate amounts of time looking in the mirror, critiquing everything about their stances, looking for flaws or holes, correcting bad habits. It leads to the effortless beauty and motion of great fighters, supreme athletes who have devoted their lives to moving well and with economy of speed and energy.

Virgil had me run the lake with Antonio at eight while he sat and had coffee. Andre was on vacation with his family. Antonio chattered a mile a minute, and we covered an immense range of topics. He was only twenty, from St. Paul, Minnesota, but he’d been fighting since he was eight or nine and had been one of the top amateurs in the country. He was filled with a supreme, unoffensive arrogance, a fully justified belief in his own powers, and was likeable. I managed to keep pace and conversation, but it took a lot more out of me than it did him. And then he took off, running at the proper speed, and left me gasping and pounding heavily along, deeper and deeper in his wake.

I caught up with him back at Coffee with a Beat, where he had finished his run and was stretching, and I stretched next to him in the cool sun. He immediately leapt back into the conversation. His gaze was rarely fixed on me at first; he watched me with his peripheral vision. He spoke of his God-given talent, and it made sense to me; Antonio and Andre were so gifted physically, so much faster and stronger than other men. Imagine that almost all your opponents are eight-, nine-, ten-year-old boys and you are a full-grown man, that’s the kind of physical advantages they have. The best way to make sense of these tremendous advantages is to say that God gave you those gifts for a reason. It’s a strategy to prevent arrogance and complacency, because in the end those gifts will not be enough. At the top level, in those title fights, you’ve got to have everything—now you’re fighting grown men, too. Antonio had also wrestled in high school, and played football, and his own opinion of his prowess was epic; he didn’t have to train or condition and he could make it to the nationals and take second, but of course that lack of discipline had kept him off the Olympic team. He knew that to take it to the next level, to win championships, his gifts wouldn’t be enough—he needed everything. Andre had everything.

I sat down next to Virgil to eat some breakfast, and he looked at Antonio, who was still stretching, and said, “Antonio met Andre at camp and was really impressed by him, by his work ethic (Andre was the only kid consistently watching tape at night with the coaches in Olympic camp), and when he came to me, I saw a kid I could reach.

“Antonio has had a tough story, he’s bounced from relative to relative, he’s been in the streets without a role model. He’s come so far since then, just in terms of self-discipline. I saw him just watching Dre, watching the way he carried himself, and he took it to heart.” Andre does carry himself like a professional, totally dedicated and immersed, with the maturity of a thirty-year-old man at twenty-two.

Virgil changed the subject. “I watched your tape last night,” he said, “and I enjoyed it.” He was referring to the National Geographic tape of my muay Thai fight, five years earlier, in Thailand. I hemmed and hawed, always a little embarrassed in front of real fighters in case they should think I was putting myself in their category. I said, “Well, you can see how bad I was,” and laughed, and Virgil looked at me and quietly admonished me: “Sam, you got to stop telling yourself and the world that you are a bad fighter,” meaning not that I was a good fighter, but for my confidence’s sake, I needed to start thinking positive.

We talked about muay Thai for a while, and Virgil said, “You said that when a boxer fights a muay Thai fighter, the Thai fighter will put the boxer in the hospital, and I disagree. I’ve seen the system and I know I can beat it.

“Now, listen, of course I am going to think boxing is superior, but here’s the truth. I watched those fights and there isn’t any lateral movement, any circling or feinting; they just come forward at each other. We use our feet, too—but not to kick, to move. And all that knees and elbows on the inside is open to being hit through.”

In my MMA fight, I had gotten a good muay Thai clinch on my opponent, and he had bombed me down the stretch with uppercuts. On the tape you could see my head snap back with the impact, so I had to agree.

Virgil continued about my Thailand fight. I had rattled the guy with that good right hand. That had hurt him, that was a boxing punch. Then I kneed him, into the bone under the heart. “There’s a narrow little bone, about an inch wide, running underneath the heart,” he said. “We don’t know what they call it but we know it’s there, and it is a great target. When he’s bending a little, with his weight coming forward, it can be decisive.” It’s where my knee had caught him.

We sat in silence, sipping and musing, and I thought that no one had ever talked to me about that fight with analysis.

“I could beat it,” Virgil said, “with the right athlete. I would get them setting up, because you have to set to kick. They can’t hit while backing up, or moving, and we can. Also, their punching power isn’t there; they punch with the elbows behind the fist, similar to how they throw elbows, and we punch with the elbow and shoulder behind the fist.”

He hit on a good point, one that most people don’t get, and that is how
hard
boxers can punch when they get to the pro level. MMA fighters and fans pooh-pooh boxers because they don’t realize how heavy some of those punches are, the result of ten years of constant training, endless repetition. Boxers are grown men who have spent their lives honing that punch, building its speed and power, and the difference between a boxer’s punch and a normal man’s punch is the difference between a baseball bat and a whiffle-ball bat. One punch can change your life: “One hit’ll quit ’em.” An uncle of Virgil’s was in a high school fight when a teacher laid hands on him, and he hit the teacher and knocked him out with one shot. World-altering power—the uncle went to jail, and the teacher was never the same again, had to quit teaching in a year. There is also the difference of being able to
handle
a punch—fighters get hit all the time, even amateurs—and knowing how to take a shot can be critical. Sometimes regular guys in bars can’t handle a punch and get hurt; one of Pat Miletich’s great fears was that one of his guys would hit somebody in a bar, someone who had never been hit before in his life, and the sheer shock would kill him.

One of the things Virgil had me working on was pivoting my hips and shoulders when I punched, getting my whole body into the blow. You’ve got to be able to hit someone hard enough to make him respect you.

I found a new place to stay. I rented out the top floor of a house on Picardy Drive in West Oakland, just a few blocks from the hood and a five-minute drive from Virgil’s house. The owners were actually next-door neighbors to a friend of Virgil’s, and I could hear him on the phone, describing me, “Yeah, he’s a writer, a white kid.”

Sheila Glenn and Kevin Thomason were a white married couple in their late thirties with two pit bulls, Amos and Stitch, both rescued from the pound. I learned a lot about pits from being around those two. Sheila and Kevin were both great and helpful and friendly, and although the dogs were a handful, they were a tremendous comfort. I missed being around dogs.

I moved in with my reduced wardrobe and then went to Virgil’s house to train.

Virgil’s house, the “training house,” was a typical big Oakland house perched on a steep hill, and looked out over West Oakland all the way to the far-off shimmer of San Francisco. The air in Oakland was clean and much better than in L.A.—the clarity of long views was remarkable. Even the tap water in Oakland was clean, the cleanest water in the state. Nobody bought water in Oakland—I actually got harassed when I bought it in the supermarket.

I joined Antonio and Virgil in the garage, with the door open and the brilliant sun streaming in, a sense of peace high above the hood, above the hustle and bustle. Antonio was on the treadmill with his wool hat on, and the radio was blaring into a feeling of clean air and space. I rode the exercise bike for ten minutes to warm up, stretched, wrapped up, and started to shadowbox, still working on those three steps Virgil had shown me. Then he had me start in on the heavy bag, in and out in a straight line. He was adamant and unwavering on the basic fundamentals, on twisting the jab all the way over. But his chief concern was telegraphing, giving a little visual cue before you punch or move.

“You drop that left off your chin every time. I’m gonna see that—either keep it pinned or let it free, but don’t drop it when you are going to punch.”

If you telegraph your punches, you add to your opponent’s reaction time, giving him more time to see the punch and slip or block it. He sees the punch before you throw it. The key to hitting is being totally unpredictable. If he can’t get any kind of read on you, you are putting him on the defensive. Virgil is the real deal; he doesn’t teach the same combinations that everyone knows and just go over them on the mitts again and again. He teaches
fighting.
Andre’s shadowboxing never looks like other boxers’; it doesn’t fall into that overly comfortable rehearsed sameness. It’s almost awkward at times, because real fighting is often awkward.

Virgil was on the phone when Antonio finished his run on the treadmill and came over next to me and started talking about the jab, showing me what I was doing wrong, and Virgil instantly squawked at him, “Yo, T, we’re not teaching Sam how to be
you,
we’re teaching Sam how to be
him
!” and Antonio got it. He laughed and said, “You right, you right,” and smiled and vanished upstairs.

“Now shadowbox this next round, doing what we worked on. I want to check your concentration,” said Virgil. I shadowboxed carefully for the round, shuffling shoes, scraping the mats.

“Now, Sam, you’re critiquing yourself, you’re thinking too much. You can’t worry so much what it looks like, you’ve got to just let it feel right.”

I went another round, worrying less about Virgil’s concerned eye and trying to enjoy myself more, and got a tight-lipped nod. “Better. Now I want you to shadowbox the whole round and pick up your feet; I don’t want to hear them.” He demonstrated in his brilliant white shoes, gliding, dancing his elegant waltz, his feet hushed. “Focus on your feet.” And so another round went by, stepping and moving, listening to the tap and scrape.

“When I hear your feet so loud, pounding, it tells me that you are too stiff, too rigid,” he said, and then we did dance. I put my jab out straight, and Virgil led me by that outstretched arm, pushing and pulling, with me stepping quietly one-two behind him, trying to keep the tension to a minimum and feel where he was going, trying to keep his feet split with my lead foot. By the end of the round, I felt a little better.

“Just feel where I am going,” he said. He would turn easily and smoothly, and I began to understand what he wanted, waltzing around the garage.

The worst was to come. We went to the mitts, and Virgil would touch me and have me jab, and then come back when I left the jab out there and
whap
me on the head. After a few times of this, he said, “Sam, I can see you tense when I come to hit, and I can see you get embarrassed and flush, I can read the lines on your forehead. Any one of those things is too much. I can make you do what I want to do.”
Wham,
he hit me again. I was red-faced with indignation. I hadn’t been hit in a long time, even just training, and felt awkward and out of joint, lumbering and tight. My left shoulder, of Brazil fame, was burning. Virgil shook his head.

Around we went. Virgil didn’t tell me to stop bouncing, but he did say between rounds, “Sam, bouncing is something that happens when you’re young. If you’re a fighter and you’ve been in the game since eleven, twelve years old, then when you’re eighteen or nineteen, you can bounce and move, like Andre. And when he gets older, he won’t bounce like that, but he’ll be able to call it up when he needs it. For a thirty-year-old man, bouncing is a waste of energy, just bouncing up and down.”

Whap,
he’d tap me, but I began to read him a little and retract my hands fast enough, despite the pain in both shoulders, still overexcited and off, and Virgil would laugh when I threw a wrong punch—he just couldn’t help himself. When I would stumble or get ahead, we would circle, giggling.

“Don’t let me rush you. Wait for things to be right, be deliberate. You don’t want to be flying down the freeway so fast you can’t see the scenery, because you’ll miss your exit. I’ll try and hurry you up, but don’t let me, stay within yourself, within what you want to do, and wait for the opening.”

We finally called it quits, and Virgil, if not happy, was at least content with my progress and understanding for the day, and he helped me take off my gloves and wraps, something no one had ever done before.

“I was thinking about what you said, you know, show me how you want to be?” I said to Virgil, glowing from the exercise. “The fighter I want to be like is Sugar Ray Leonard, with his hands like this,” and I showed him how Leonard would stand with his arms across his chest, a pocket fighter who could out-quick everyone. I was kidding. I knew what kind of fighter I could be: the tall white guy with decent punches who blocks and takes everything. Not a bob-and-weave wonder—that’s for athletic black guys. But I wanted to hear what Virgil would say. Could I be a pocket-fighter like Sugar Ray?