A Fighter's Heart: One Man's Journey Through the World of Fighting (27 page)

I asked Virgil, “Shouldn’t the cornermen have thrown in the towel?” and he nodded judiciously. “But remember, the corner works for the fighter; the fighter pays his salary. Now, as for me, if I don’t see a way to win, then we’ll be back to fight another day. But Paret’s trainer knew he could take shots. He’d taken beatings and come back to knock people out—maybe he was playing possum. But here’s where his trainer is going wrong—that’s no game plan. His trainer should have been working to fix that problem, not to accept it as part of the plan.”

Paret had indeed been famous for the legendary amount of punishment he could absorb, and many feel that the referee, who has been criticized for the slowness with which he stopped the fight, was waiting for him to stage another comeback. Griffith had Paret in trouble, and the referee seemed sluggishly frozen as Griffith laid into Paret as he slumped in the corner.

Virgil places the blame on Paret’s manager, a man who knew little about boxing and who exploited the illiterate Cuban for one last fight. Three months earlier, Paret had fought Gene Fullmer and lost a particularly brutal match. Fullmer was equally famous for the amount of punishment he could deliver, and he himself said he’d never hurt anyone as bad as he had Paret. The documentary showed a brief clip of that fight, and the shelling Paret was catching made me cringe. “Man,” said Virg, “Fullmer used to come up here to Oakland to get sparring, and his partners would have to wear baseball catcher’s gear to keep their ribs from getting torn up. He was perfect for what he did, which was get in and hurt you.” Paret’s damage from that earlier fight had contributed directly to his death.

Andre finished up his interview and came and sat with us. He told me how former world champion and all-time great Roy Jones Jr., one of his promoters, had said that Andre still fights like an amateur. In the amateurs, you are just worried about scoring points in the brief time you have, while in the pros you’re more concerned about hitting harder, pacing yourself, and doing damage. An interviewer asked Andre about what Roy had said, and he just laughed and replied, “Well, I’ve had a hundred and fifty amateur fights and three professional, so what do you expect? Ten years of my life I’ve been an amateur, so it’s going to take time…but that works for me, because I can use that for leverage when they want me to fight somebody I’m not ready for, if they try to push me too fast. I’m on a four-year plan for a title, and right now I don’t care if there’s two people in the audience—as long as I am getting the right fights.

“I respect Roy, he’s the fighter I’d want to emulate—he didn’t have a Hagler, a Hearns, a Leonard in his era. He didn’t fight bums, but he made them look that way. He’s out of boxing, unscathed, plenty of money, brains and family intact—that’s a great fighter.” Roy bucked the system and started his own promotional company, another thing Andre admires.

We sat away from Virgil and just talked. Andre sipped his green tea, and I sipped my fourth cup of coffee. Andre was slender and strong, with broad shoulders and a dense torso, a rocky, solid core. He has big brown eyes that are almost soft, and I could see why they call him baby-faced, why his opponents hope that he’s just a pretty boy who has been boxing clean in the amateurs and whom they can rough up. His look is polite and church-going, with a wispy young man’s mustache and beard. But there is a slight droop, a downward tug at the edges of his face, a look of sadness and knowledge. He has suffered; he knows his identity in the world, and despite his apparent youth, no one will rough him up and shake him from his game.

We chatted about his two kids, Andre Jr. and Malachi, and their mother, Tiffany, and how they met. Andre’s brother had been going to school up in Olympia, and Andre was visiting him when he met her. “My brother was boxing until he was fifteen or sixteen, and then he got tired of it. He had the talent of the two of us,” Andre says demurely, “but he pursued other interests. He didn’t love boxing, he just liked it; and to do what I do, you have to love it, that’s the bottom line.”

I asked Andre if he ever struggled with the commitment, and he replied instantly: “All the time, all the time. I didn’t understand what was possible, but my father did, and Virgil did. My brother and I, we went to school and then went to the gym every day; other kids got to play at each other’s houses, or get jobs. I didn’t understand it then, but looking back, I’m glad we sacrificed so much. It hit me recently, I’d say about eighteen or nineteen, when I had Andre Jr., my first child. I realized the best way to make an income was to go out and win the men’s U.S. National Championship. I set goals for that at seventeen and won it in the under-nineteen bracket, and got fifteen hundred a month as a stipend. There are so many camps and competitions abroad. That’s when boxing started getting real to me. There was a time even before my father died that I just wasn’t in it. I knew how to come into the gym and make it look like I was working, but I was just going through the motions.”

He sipped his tea and continued. “It was in 2002, my last under-nineteen fight. I was up at the Worlds, and my father was working, so he wasn’t there. One of my rivals, Curtis Stevens, was there, and the brackets came in the first night, and he was my first fight. So I called my dad and said, ‘You gotta be here.’ He grabbed his wife and jumped in his CRX and came down. That’s how he was—he would tell his boss, ‘Sorry, my son’s fighting,’ and come, there was no missing it. I’ve got that same spirit. He came, I won, I looked good; and I won the next night, and that was the last time my father saw me fight. He looked great. I thanked him and told him I loved him.

“The day after we got back, we were supposed to run this hill at five a.m., but he called me at four-thirty and said he wasn’t feeling well—and my dad doesn’t do that; he’s always there for training. That was the last time I talked to him. The next day, I was just back from a run with Virgil and was still wet when I answered the phone, and my cousin Debbie was crying. ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked her, and she said, ‘Lemme talk to Virg,’ and I said, ‘What’s wrong?’ and she said, ‘Your father—’ and I said, ‘My father what?’ She didn’t want to tell me, but now I was going crazy, and she broke down and said, ‘He’s dead.’ I just threw the phone. It didn’t make sense to me.”

We paused on the sunny morning. I was very quiet, just listening, careful not to break his thoughts. He was very intentionally telling me this story; it was a part of him that he wanted me to know.

Andre continued: “I went upstairs to Virg and I kept saying, ‘It’s over man, it’s over,’ and he broke down and was crying. It was a crazy time. At my father’s funeral, I made a vow. I told him, over his casket, ‘Papa, I’m going to bring the gold back.’ But it was hard, I was depressed for six months, a year even. I didn’t want to box. I just wanted to be depressed. I couldn’t pray, couldn’t read my Bible. God slowly but surely put the right people around me. My mother, Bishop Calloway, and my whole family, even though they were hurt, too. Slowly I just kept coming back, I started getting that itch to be in the gym. My first fight back I looked great, I knocked him out. That’s how we are in my father’s family—we take a loss, we come back hard. It’s not that we’re big and bad, it’s just in us, in the blood.

“Plus, there’s the spirit of God in me—people take that lightly. It’s like the new fad to profess Christ. But this is real. Reporters made comments like ‘Andre Ward found God on the way to the Olympics,’ like it’s some new thing, like once I got success I started talking about God—but it’s real. I get revelations that are hard to explain, but you just know, nobody sustained you or delivered you but God. You just know.

“I know God is real, and I really believe that I have a bigger task than just boxing. I mean, I have an idea of what it is, to share the gospel, to get it out, to tell people the good news about Christ—but I’m not sure what form it will take. Boxing is a platform, a pedestal to get eyes on me, to get the word out.”

Though sometimes in his postfight interviews Andre sounded fanatical, the more time I spent around him, the more his ardent faith felt real and sane. I hadn’t spent a lot of time around people who had really taken God into their hearts, although my older sister had recently been “saved.” But as I got used to the language and the constant references, the quoting of scripture, it came to feel more normal to me.

Andre was a much needed shot in the arm for Oakland’s boxing community and a source of great pride to all kinds of people throughout the city. When I wore an “Andre Ward S.O.G.” (Son of God) T-shirt, guys stopped me at the taco stand down in the hood and in the mall in Emeryville, and once a little old white lady stopped Virgil at Lake Temescal to say how impressed she was with Andre. I went with him to throw out the first pitch at an A’s game, and beforehand we joked around that he was going to bring some heat. When he got out there, he lobbed the pitch in to home, and I asked him, “What happened?” and he laughed and said, “It’s a little different out there with everyone watching—I just had to get it over the plate.” We walked as a group, Virgil and Antonio and a few friends and I, and everywhere we had to wait patiently for Andre to sign autographs and pose for pictures, something he did tirelessly. He would linger and chat and pose for as long as people wanted him to, and he wouldn’t be rushed.

Andre would sometimes go to Vegas or elsewhere to watch big fights—part of building a name for himself was to be seen at ringside, and his promoter would arrange for it. ESPN’s
Friday Night Fights
was coming to San Jose, just forty-five minutes south of Oakland. San Jose had a larger Hispanic population and was more of a boxing town. Boxing in the United States has always resided with the poor, with the immigrants. It was Jewish and Italian and Irish, and then black, and now it’s Hispanic.

The way television was working those days, they would broadcast mid-level bouts on cable, but the big title fights would still be pay-per-view. So ESPN had fights on Tuesday and Friday, and Showtime and FSN had fights, but not the best quality, as boxing was still hamstrung by its greed. Instead of pushing the sport onto free TV—like the Super Bowl—and increasing the long-range popularity, boxing promoters were still stuck on the short-term profit. If the Super Bowl or World Series had been pay-per-view all these years, would they be the cash cows they are today?

On the night of the fight, Andre was outside the training house talking on his BlackBerry, resplendent in a silk suit, with cuff links and alligator shoes, hair cut neatly and mustache trimmed and chocolate skin smooth and glowing with health. He was all smiles. He had just found out that I had gone to Harvard, and he said, “You keep a lot under your hat.” Virgil had talked to me about the way fighters dress, and Andre had echoed it. Other fighters often dressed with sideways ball caps and bling, all street—looking like rappers or street thugs—but Andre and Virg were trying to “take the game over.” Bob Arum and Don King, the dominant promoters, were aging and wouldn’t last forever, and Andre was “punching to make money without punching. It’s business; you got to look respectable to get respect. You got to give yourself the best chance to make the most money with the least risk, because one bad fight can do it.”

Andre knew that if he wanted to be taken seriously as a businessman, not just as a fighter, he had to dress the part. Of course, the really beautiful thing about fighting is that nothing matters unless you win. In the ring, the truth will out.

I went inside, as he was deep in conversation and Virgil was showering, and leafed through a press pamphlet from his latest fight. The interviewer had asked him to pick one word to describe himself, and he said, “Chameleon.”

I sat there and thought about that, and about what Norman Mailer had written: “Of course, trying to learn from boxers was a quintessentially comic quest. Boxers were liars. Once you knew what they thought, you could hit them. So their personalities became masterpieces of concealment.”

There is something about great fighters that is hidden in plain sight; in one sense, they are the most open people in the world, willing to tell you everything; but in another, they mislead, or allow you to mislead yourself. They stand up in the ring exposed, practically naked; and yet their strategy, their reality, is a secret. Fighting professionally is about illusion, deception, and it becomes woven into the fighters’ lives. When I first started talking to professional fighters, like Tony in Iowa, I thought he was open and forthcoming, but now I realized much had to be hidden. Look strong when you are weak, Virgil would counsel. Catch your breath but look like you are about to attack, so that he doesn’t realize you are catching your breath. Force him backward while you recover.

Virgil emerged in a brilliant vintage Everlast Sugar Ray Leonard sweat suit, and Bobby showed up, and we piled into two cars. I rode with Don and Will, Don’s son. Don was a short and slender, dark black man with long tight braids and glasses, wearing a batik shirt. He was in his late forties or early fifties, but his hair was still dark and his arms dense with muscle; he gave the impression of wiry power. He dressed and carried himself like a jazz musician. He was a trainer and a novice cut man and had known Virgil for a long time and was his assistant trainer, wrapping Andre’s hands, and developing as a professional cut man. The cut man is in the corner to look after the fighter’s bruises and cuts so that they don’t become a reason the fight gets stopped. If a fighter gets cut from a punch or, more likely, a head butt on the eyebrow, and the blood is interfering with his vision, the referee or doctor will stop the fight. If there are millions of dollars on the line, a cut man who can stop that bleeding in thirty seconds (or keep a bruise from swelling an eye shut) between rounds becomes a valuable asset. “I could always do shit with my hands,” Don said, “and I never been afraid of pressure. I don’t have no stage fright and I’m not afraid to work cuts, even though I don’t have a lot of experience.”

We arrived in San Jose, parked, and walked to the venue, Andre in his shimmering suit and everyone else dressed well. Bobby was with us, and he had just had eye surgery, so he was wearing thick massive black glasses and looked like Ray Charles in his white Kangol hat.