A Fighter's Heart: One Man's Journey Through the World of Fighting (26 page)

“Well, you’ve got to have the reflexes to dodge and slip if you want to fight out of the pocket like that, but it’s possible. What you’ve got to remember is you are seeing Ray Leonard after three hundred amateur fights and twenty professional. He didn’t start out like that. You got to fight like
you,
who
you
are. If I got a guy who can moonwalk and throw a bolo punch and land it every time, then I’ll have him throw it. That’s who he is.”

That afternoon, I spoke to Pat Miletich on the phone, and he said, “You’re going to fight a pro fight, right?” Pat has always had a slightly exaggerated take on my abilities; if I could stay in one place and train full-time for a year, maybe. Virgil eventually warned me that if I really got into a gym and stayed there, somebody would try to take me pro.

Over the next few days, I got a handle on what Virgil wanted to try to do with me. Self-expression, slowness, fundamentals. He wanted me to be able to punch with balance by the time I left, and then I could develop on my own from there. “We’re not going to spar you until the end. I want to get you right,” he said.

Back in front of the mirror at King’s, I was going slower and slower, just two punches for five straight rounds. Virgil sat right on top of me, making me slow down. I could have been embarrassed, but there was no point. Just try to learn, see if you can get it right. There were a lot more beginners in the gym that day anyway, a lot more college-looking kids. Virgil said it was because of Andre and the exposure he’d given the place. Slower and slower, to the point where I was punching at tai chi speed.

V was in my ear, about balance and that rear foot being like a shark’s tail, streaming out behind the body, where power comes from. “If you get the feet right, everything else will fall in place, that’s where speed and power come from,” he said. And I could hear the echo of Pat Miletich saying, “If you want your hands to move faster, you have to move your feet faster,” and William C. C. Chen saying, “Everything from the toe.”

Every morning, I would get a call from Virgil around seven or eight o’clock with the plan for the day. We would meet for coffee, or run the lake, and after a few days he called with a different plan.

“Sam, I want you to meet me over in Hayward, at Joe’s place. We are going to work with Heather—I’m going to work you together.”

Heather Hartman was a woman whom Virgil and Andre had known for years. They would see and talk to her around the gym all the time, as she was working with the same strength coach, Mike Benz. She was a professional soccer goalie, but the women’s pro league had folded; she was still playing but not making any money. She was twenty-four years old, and she and Virgil had discussed it for months before they decided to train her. “Virgil kept saying I had long arms,” she said.

Joe’s Karate Gym, in Hayward, a town just south of Oakland, was where Andre and Virgil had first met, many years ago. Virgil had just finished his workout (he was still fighting), and a nine-year-old boy was hitting the bag, and peeking at him. Virgil saw something in him, and gave him an approving nod, and the boy went back to hitting the bag. Joe and Virgil had maintained their relationship, and the boxing ring was open for Virgil to use in the mornings, and so Heather, Virgil, and I often met there.

Heather was a tall, strong blond woman, powerful through the shoulders and legs and sporty in a way that reminded me of the New England girls I had grown up with. She was very serious and dedicated, and one of the reasons she was sick of soccer was that she was tired of being the most serious player on the field.

We shadowboxed in front of the mirrors, hit some pads with Virgil, and then sparred. Heather would come after me with everything, and I had to work on my defense and keep her from hitting me, sometimes touching her with my gloves if she was too open or standing still where I could hit her. She was deadly serious and came out swinging, looking to take my head off; I was surprised by her genuine aggression. She was tenacious, and I had to move and block and be careful, because she
wanted
to hit me.

Virgil was deeply satisfied, because I needed the defensive work and she needed to start the process of getting comfortable in the ring. Not that I was comfortable—it was the first time I had been in the ring in more than a year. We went five rounds that first day, but in the days that followed we would go eight or even ten rounds, Heather usually charging, and me dropping back, and as she got better I had to work harder to avoid getting cracked. I came to see Virgil’s wisdom in training us together, because it was good for both of us.

“There’s a method to my madness,” he said. “I am using you and Heather because you can complement each other. I want to work on Heather’s natural strength and aggression, because she’ll be able to overwhelm these other girls. You need to work on your defense, especially against amateurs, who are going to be charging. You need to touch and move, instinctively—you’ve got to outthink them. It’s a thinking man’s game.”

Virgil and I once discussed Heather while we walked around the lake.

“You know, I got the women’s finals for the nationals at home on DVD and I’ve been watching them, and I can see from the way they hook that they’ve been trained to fight like men, instead of doing what comes naturally,” he said. “You got to look at what you got; their hips are different in the way they move. The mechanics of how they throw a hook is going to be different. The first thing I’d be drumming out of a woman fighter is that this is a man’s sport.”

Heather’s real strength lies in her aggression and determination. “She has the fuel,” said Virgil. “Every fighter needs to have fuel, and she’s got it. Fighters feel helpless. They have been victims, and then they start victimizing others and then themselves, and real fighters learn to use it, to harness that aggression. I never thought I would train a girl. We were talking and she said, ‘God would work it out,’ and I realized that God had put us together for a reason.”

Heather’s mom had been in and out of mental hospitals her whole life, diagnosed as schizophrenic when she was really manic-depressive. She tried to kill herself numerous times. Heather had a twin sister and an older brother, and they had to deal with her mother going through spurts of health and sickness. “You could see it coming, her bad days,” Heather said, very matter-of-factly. I could imagine what that must have looked like to a young child, seeing your mom sink into a funk and knowing that she might really kill herself this time. Heather’s father died in 2001 from some sort of infection. After Heather told me these things, her constant relentless aggression in the ring made total sense, and Virgil knew he had something. Heather had the fuel; I had to wonder if I had it.

The days began to develop a rhythm, running in the morning, training at King’s in the afternoon, sometimes at Joe’s with Heather, sometimes at the house.

Antonio and I would run the lake easily, chatting about girls and movies, and then he would blast off and run five stairs before I could run two. He said to me as we finished up once, “I don’t like fighting but I love it, you feel me?” and I did, I felt him. What he meant was that he doesn’t start fights, doesn’t want them to happen, but he loves it when he’s in it, the flush and rage, the joys of hitting and being hit.

Virgil said that Antonio was “uncoachable” until he reached him. Virgil, with all his experience at the juvenile hall with troubled kids, is a master at reaching them, because he speaks and understands street language and credibility. He commands respect—that’s how he can reach tough street kids, because he was one of them and understands their mentality, and he is interested. His attentiveness and ability to listen are intense, and his ability to see into a person profound.

Later that day I worked with Virgil down in his garage; the door was up with a cool breeze coming off the ocean, and the sun was blasting down on Oakland below us. We listened to up-tempo jazz and Cuban drums, complicated rhythms. Boxing is all about rhythms; Sonny Liston would only work out to “Night Train” on an endless loop.

“Sam, you go through changes in your career, even you. You have to be objective and look at yourself honestly, and the situation—this goes back to knowing who you are. You change. There are different phases of fighting, and right now you are thirty years old—you’re not thinking about being a young fighter, you’re thinking about being the toughest thirty-five-year-old man on the planet. Better than you ever were in your twenties.”

V had me throwing the straight right into the bag and then coming back with the hook. He wanted me to stand still when I did it, but as I threw it, over the course of the round, I crept to my left. He said, “Look where you are now. That’s what happened without you even thinking; it means you want to punch moving left.”

I already knew this about myself, and I thought it was inevitable for an orthodox fighter. An orthodox fighter is right-handed and leads with his left, keeping his stronger hand in reserve for the power punches. As you move with each punch, you are always taking tiny steps with your left foot, and it means most orthodox fighters drift to their left as they fight. I had noticed this even back at Harvard, in sparring; I told a friend that anybody who could move right would kill everyone.

Virgil brought me back to the present. “Now concentrate on staying in the same place,” he said. “As soon as you start moving, you become predictable. I’ll see what you do, and in the later rounds I’ll have you moving into my right. I’ll set you up.”

In between rounds, in the one-minute rest period, Virgil would elaborate. “It’s like mountain climbers reading a mountain, when you start reading a fighter. You study, you look for different routes; ways up and ways down, things you would do if you were hurt, if the light changed. But you study just like a subject in school—you go back to it and check it. I give you a double jab and see what you do, and then I give it to you again, and then later I come back to it—‘Yeah, you’re still doing it’—and then I find the right moment.”

We hit mitts and my left arm began to burn, and Virgil whapped away at me, slapping my head and going to the body, forcing me to cover and have defense and then throw the quick four, jab-right-left-right,
bapbapbapbap
—and he kept saying, “You’re killing it, don’t try and kill it, just relax, relax your face, just deadpan your face and it will relax your whole body,” and I instantly felt how my face had frozen into a rictus. I relaxed it and let it slump expressionless, and finally my whole body started to relax, my shoulders eased, and I just tapped the mitts and Virgil was happy. “Relaxed, you can go on and on.”

He told me, “The more relaxed you are, the more economy you’ll have in your motion. The first time Holmes fought Norton, he threw maybe seventy punches and landed thirty-five—and when he fought him three years later, he threw fifty punches but still landed the same amount.”

That night in my room, I heard gunshots, not too far away, the loud flat cracks, closer than expected. I waited for sirens, and it was much later when I finally heard them and saw the chopper, strangely quiet out the window. The choppers here must have had some kind of noise-reduction system, because they seemed so much quieter than the ones I used to ride firefighting. They would flutter over at night like in some kind of science-fiction film, robot hunters from the future.

I woke early, at five or six, and there was a particularly vocal bird outside my window in the deserted predawn, singing a song that sounded familiar. Eventually, I realized it was the car-alarm progression, the one that everyone knows, the varying beeps and blares of a standard car alarm. The bird had picked it up and built on it, but the underlying theme was recognizable.

I climbed into my car and rode down to King’s through the hood, my daily ritual. What made a poor neighborhood in Oakland was the same as what makes a poor neighborhood anywhere; it’s the numbers of people loitering, with nothing to do but hang out and watch the street go by. I drove through the wide streets without looking too hard, only peripherally noticing the windows and doors guarded by wood and iron, the out-of-business shops and restaurants, old cars, things that could never be on the street in Massachusetts, sometimes with brilliant spinning chrome rims, music thumping, in front of and behind me.

One morning, I met Andre and Virg down at Coffee with a Beat and sat chatting with Virgil while Andre did a local TV interview. The Emile Griffith documentary,
Ring of Fire,
had just been on TV and we ended up discussing it at length. Emile Griffith was a very tough fighter in the sixties, who had won something like six world titles, and who also preferred to relax at gay bars. Benny “the Kid” Paret had insulted him at the weigh-in, called him a
maricón
(“faggot” in Spanish), and in his anger Griffith killed Paret in the ring. At least, that’s how the story goes, that’s the one-sentence Hollywood pitch. The documentary was excellent, with an emotional meeting between Griffith and Paret’s son. Griffith begged for forgiveness, and got it.

Virgil mused that it was the smaller guys who were usually getting killed in the ring, often taking bad beatings, walking out on their own power, and lapsing into comas and dying. Pat Miletich said that boxing averaged ten deaths a year worldwide. The American Medical Association puts the figure at .13 per 1,000, whatever that means, and I’ve read anywhere from five hundred deaths since 1884 to nine hundred since 1920.

The lighter-weight fighters are often the ones “drying out,” cutting weight to make the fight. Fighters will cut ten or fifteen pounds to make weight, and that dehydration makes them more prone to severe injury. It seems that it’s not the one big punch that proves fatal; it’s the accumulation of damage in a long fight that is so dangerous. It’s actually safer to get knocked out than to stay in there and take repeated beatings. There is a key difference between MMA and boxing, which in fact makes boxing
more
dangerous. It has to do with “stoppage,” when a referee stops a fight. In boxing, there is the standing eight count if you are stunned (rarely used these days) and the ten count if you are knocked down. This means you have eight or ten seconds to clear your head of the effects of a blow. It’s from the old rules, to give a man a “sporting” chance, so that some lucky punch wouldn’t decide a fight. In MMA, because the game continues on the ground, and a stunned fighter is in danger of getting hit unprotected, the referee stops the fight more quickly if one fighter cannot “intelligently” defend himself. So if you get caught stunned, just a little bit, just for a second—something that might get you a standing eight in boxing—the fight is over in MMA.