A Fighter's Heart: One Man's Journey Through the World of Fighting (28 page)

I got my media pass, and we went in and sat ringside. The preliminary bouts were under way, and the ESPN TV crew was running around setting up; they would only televise a few fights. Nonito Donaire was fighting Paulino Villalobos, and Nonito (or Nito) was an old-time friend of Virgil’s and Andre’s—he trained out of Joe’s in Hayward. Villalobos had lost his last six fights and was an opponent, and he came straight after Nito, tough and moving forward. Nito could do what he wanted—he moved, took potshots, and stayed elusive—and suddenly Virgil was galvanized and began yelling to him in a clear voice that I could tell Nito could hear, “Use your jab, Nito, it’s working, use your jab, and then go underneath—there you go, there you
go
!” Virgil was tense and committed. ESPN was a big deal to these up-and-comers, they had to make an impression, they had to look good. If you are fighting on TV, you have to look good, make an exciting fight, because that’s where it all starts. A ringside official whom Virgil knew turned around and said, “He can’t hear you,” and Virgil responded with a short laugh. “I bet he do. Uppercut to the body, Nito!”

I heard a woman in the crowd behind me scream, “He’s dropping his left!” but none of this really made much difference. Nito looked terrific and was having his way with the guy. His opponent suddenly seemed old, a working-class Mexican in his late thirties, chasing a payday. Mexican fighters are the current face of boxing, looking for a way out, a combination of the economics of their country and machismo; as a friend of mine said: “The Romantic period came late to Spain.” The Mexican fan base is huge and loyal, like the U.S. fans of fifty years ago.

This was my first live boxing match, and I was ringside with a media pass and instantly struck by how different it was from boxing on TV. Boxing on TV is clean, detached, almost sterile and two dimensional compared to boxing from ringside. There’s a reason ringside seats are so expensive—you can understand the punching and the meat intuitively, you can feel the weight and power, things that TV conceals.

Often the judges at ringside will score the match differently from people at home watching on TV, which generates controversy, but it is easy to understand, because the fight feels so different, so much more savage and desperate, from ringside. At the fights, I realized boxing is
more
brutal than MMA. Its arcane rules force the combatants to stand and fight. No matter how much they might want to do other things—like clinch and wrestle, or fight without trading blows—they have to trade. Boxing gloves, those grotesque lobster claws, keep you from getting cut, and they certainly protect your hands so you can punch, but they don’t dissipate the force with which you get hit. The concussive blow is still there, despite the padding, rattling your brains around in your skull. You just don’t cut.

Andre was being gracious and working—this was part of his job—tirelessly shaking hands, posing, and signing photos that I was carrying in my satchel. He’d brought a thick stack of hundreds of photos, and they were all signed and given out by the end of the night. Little kids flocked to and followed him, play-acted for him, and I thought,
They’re always drawn to great boxers, aren’t they?
There’s something of a Pied Piper in certain boxers. Bundini Brown, Muhammad Ali’s manager, companion, and the man who coined “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee,” once said of Ali, “He turned around and cared for other people, like little babies and poor people and drunks and dope addicts, and was interested in riding subways and walking in the slums—I had to stop and wonder why is he doing this?” There is a connection between fighters and those outside of society’s rules, like children and drunks and the homeless, who need a protector and a source of ultimate strength and safety. Fighters step in and out of society; society’s rules (don’t cut in line, don’t punch people in bars) have a looser hold, because society asks them to cast those rules away on certain strict occasions.

The next fight was José “the Punisher” Perez against some absolute opponent, a kid without any semblance of ability who didn’t belong in the ring at all—and José could box, he had some science. It was sickening. I watched him trying to break this kid down, to dominate him, to physically ruin him, and I felt disgusted with myself, and with fighting. How have I been able to watch this and be involved in this without really getting what it is about, which is destroying someone? It’s about killing someone without killing him. You are supposed to try to kill someone up until the point when the referee and the rules step in to save his life, at which point you must instantly revert to a normal human being.

Maybe it was the crowd, screaming for a knockout, that bugged me. The kid was so outclassed, so terrible with his flailing jab. He kept fighting, he was game, and somewhere in his mind he thought he had a chance. There was none. He thought he was being brave, but he was just taking a beating. The crowd wanted clean hits and a KO, and suddenly I was casting around for something positive about this whole scene. The Punisher couldn’t put his man away, and the kid took his bow at the end, but the whole thing looked absurd. Sure, he was courageous, but he never even had a chance. In boxing, all men are not created equal.

Virgil muttered, “His corner should be arrested,” for letting the kid fight. José not being able to knock him out looked bad for him, because the opponent was so god awful, and José’s father was promoting him as the number one featherweight prospect in the country. We could hear a group of Mexicans behind us complaining that José wasn’t what they thought he was.

The main event was next, with local favorite José Celaya, from Salinas, against James “Spider” Webb. Celaya was about 26–2 and had been knocked out, and Webb was 17–0, but Webb was here to lose to Celaya. That was the plan; Celaya was the heavy favorite and rising superstar, while Webb was a decent but surmountable opponent. Of course, no one had told Webb that.

Webb looked like a tattooed redneck from Tennessee, and he came out and danced around in camouflage in his corner, a shorter, muscle-bound bodybuilder. Celaya was smaller but had the crowd behind him, cheering like mad for anything he did. As the fight started, Celaya was the better boxer, but Webb was much bigger and stronger, and he kept coming, punching straight, firing and firing. He was in shape. I looked over at Bobby and said, “Whaddya think?” and he snorted. “If I said ‘grape,’ you would know what I mean,” he said. I laughed. Bobby meant neither one could punch hard enough to bust a grape. He was disgusted by almost all modern boxing. You could almost hear him start in with “Man, what Sugar Ray Robinson would have done to either of these cats…”

Webb was flat-footed, and Virgil said that was because he was taught hands before feet—“The feet will never catch up…you got to teach feet first.” But Celaya was outgunned, he wasn’t strong enough to hurt Webb. Celaya bobbed and weaved, ran backward and had superior hand speed, but he couldn’t hurt the much bigger, better-conditioned Webb. In the fourth, right at the end, Celaya was knocked down. In the later rounds, it turned into a war, both fighters bleeding from head butts, and though Celaya rallied, he wasn’t hitting hard enough to take it to Webb, who ate his shots on his arms and played possum. “He’s beating on him, but he ain’t really hurting him,” said Virgil in my ear. Celaya went down twice in the eighth and that was it.

The promoter Don Clark walked by us, cursing and swearing through the roar in a good-natured way, and Bobby and Virgil burst out laughing, because Celaya was Don’s big draw and “ain’t nobody going to pay to see him now—he’s through.”

Don yelled over the thundering crowd that he had picked Webb up from the airport and he had said to him, “I throw a hundred punches a round—I hope your boy is ready for that.”

Bobby said, “He knows who he is, and there are two people in the ring, anything can happen.”

“It’s a cold game,” said Virgil. “Celaya just got retired in front of his home crowd.” As we walked out of the arena, Andre was on the phone to Diego Corrales, who had just won a knock-down, drag-out war of a fight against Luis Castillo in a giant pay-per-view title fight. It had been the fight of the year, maybe the fight of the decade, with Corrales coming back from getting knocked down twice to win by knockout. Diego had been the better boxer (at least Virgil thought so) but had gone to war, had been sucked into trading with Castillo—and it had made for an electrifying fight. Virgil wasn’t impressed, as he felt that Diego could have won without getting all beat up, but the fight had shaken up the boxing world. I could hear Andre telling Diego, “You are getting these guys knocked out,” meaning that Celaya had seen the fight and tried to do the same thing, win a crowd-pleasing war instead of outboxing and outthinking his opponent.

Carlo Rotella wrote in
Cut Time
:

 

The warrior syndrome:…the tendency of some dead-game fighters with sound boxing skills to abandon technique, shape-shifting lycanthropically into brawlers who win exciting fights and inspire the fans’ love by accepting several doozies on the kisser in order to deliver one of their own. In the long run, those fighters lose more then they gain:…they begin to lose bouts that they could have won by boxing rather than slugging; they suffer extended beatings, cheered on by crowds expecting their pulp-faced hero to pull out one more one-punch comeback; they survive in the business too long on guts and will; they get punchy.

 

The fighter loses sight of his own identity; he wants to show he’s just as tough as his opponent, so he brawls. Andre’s opinion on the Corrales fight was similar, even though that fight was grabbing boxing headlines. He murmured: “It was a great fight, no doubt. Promoters, managers, fans—jumping up and down, it’s a big party. But at some point that night, both those fighters go to their rooms and look at themselves in the mirror; they both are going to have to lay on that bed and look at the ceiling. You don’t know what kind of damage you may have taken in that fight. After all the hoopla and cameras and lights, and everyone has gone home, the fighter is sitting there by himself, and eventually he’s going to have to look his kids in the eye. And if something’s not right with the man, then nobody’s going to be there with him.”

After the fight, we fell back into the routine of training, and the days flowed together. This is what boxers do, they work. Road work, bag work, plain “work” (sparring), an endless compilation of hours of training. It’s a journey that never ends. A forty-year-old fighter works as hard on his skills as a ten-year-old does. I could see fighters progress. I saw Heather come along, and also a young amateur named Karim, whom Virgil had been working with at King’s. But Karim’s commitment was often questioned, and to his face.

“Did you run today, Karim?” Virg would drawl, and Karim would reply with an emphatic yes. Karim was short, muscular, and leonine, a coiled spring of power, an awkward fighter but tremendously quick and strong, something that had intrigued Virgil into training him. Virgil saw the potential. But Karim had a wife and kids, and a job, and sometimes his commitment wasn’t there. That’s the other thing pro boxers need, the commitment. It is easy to become enthusiastic and fall in love with fighting for six months, or a year; but to stay in love, to force yourself into the engine of pain every day for three years, then five—that’s where the pros separate themselves.

Karim walked off and Virgil muttered, “A fighter will break his own heart, and then the trainer’s heart.” What he meant was that a fighter will put in the time, the work, for years—and then suddenly become derailed, allow himself to be derailed, by a woman, or a situation, and will lose the ability to focus in the gym. He breaks his own heart, and of course the heart of the trainer, who has invested so much of his life and his future with the fighter. The trainer and the fighter have as deep a codependency as there is in sports, totally reliant on and tied to each other. The trainer has nothing without the talent and will of the fighter. He literally has nothing—he makes money only from the fighter. A trainer is defined by his fighters. He pours a tremendous amount of time, money, and emotion into the vessel of the fighter. Virgil has always had his job with the county and so has been able to train patiently and not rush his fighters for a payday. But he did mutter to me about Andre, “This kid is taking me places I would never have got to.” There is always the danger of the fighter leaving the trainer, going to another trainer, and in fact there are rules in the gym (along with “No spitting on the floor”) that prevent a trainer from talking to another trainer’s fighter. Stealing fighters is universally despised but an ever-present threat, especially when a fighter starts making money.

I kept working, with Virgil and on my own, trying to concentrate, trying to stay focused. Virg worked me with the mitts, telling me not to raise up as I jabbed. I was coming up onto the tips of my toes, floating. “Don’t raise up,” he said, nearly every time. He finally put one mitt on top of my head and held me down. “Don’t raise up, because you’ll get hit.” It was frustrating because my body wanted to do it a certain way, and I was fighting it. I kept raising up, just a little.

We stopped. “It’s not about getting it right or wrong,” Virgil said. “There is no right or wrong. It’s about not getting hit. We know getting hit is bad for you, so we avoid it. That’s what we’re working on here, not getting something ‘right.’ Don’t critique yourself.” I was reminded of a skipper I’d worked for on a yacht, who’d told me, “Nobody laughs if it works,” when we tried doing things in unorthodox ways.

Then he had me throwing rights, the right cross, anchored on the front foot and pivoting on the rear, for power, and he stood on my left foot to pin it in place, stood on it hard. It was a little embarrassing to be a grown man and be treated like a child, but Virgil was trying to get me right, trying to get me to punch with balance, something that should have been done when I was eleven years old.