A Fighter's Heart: One Man's Journey Through the World of Fighting (29 page)

I was hitting the heavy bag later, and between rounds Virg said, “Sam, you’re always in a hurry. I’m starting to realize the kind of guy you are. I got to slow you down, make you deliberate. Nothing ever got to a hundred miles an hour without going through twenty.”

Andre was preparing for his next fight, in Memphis. He would be fighting on the Johnson-Tarver II undercard, which refers to the way the promoters put together a night of fighting. You have to have a draw, a main event, with names that people recognize and want to see. Promoting is about establishing a narrative. In this day and age, it is nearly always going to be a title fight, meaning for a world title, a belt. I won’t even get into the “alphabet soup” of ranking organizations because I don’t understand it and not many do. It comes down to this: There is no federal governing body in boxing, just state commissions, and pretty much anybody who wants to have a big fight and call it “for the whatever-weight championship of the world” can. There are three or four organizations that have some real meaning, and quite a few that don’t. When a fighter wins all the titles in his weight class, he “unifies” the belt, which means he really is the world champion—now it means something.

On the same card, or schedule, will be six to ten lesser bouts with up-and-coming fighters. Andre would be on the undercard, as this was going to be only his fifth professional fight. After he has fifteen or twenty fights, he’ll be the main event, contending for a title. How fast he gets there depends entirely on him, how strong he looks fighting these second-or third-tier guys, how many knockouts he gets, how popular he becomes. The boxing community has opinions about him, and they are waiting to see what happens. He won gold, a major achievement, and that means he can box. But is he strong enough? And can he take a punch? Andre was rocked early in his second fight but survived smoothly and came back and knocked the guy out. Was geting rocked indicative of growing pains—or was it a sign that he’s not powerful enough for the pros? The fight fans and writers, the boxing community, are always the smartest guys in the room. They are instant experts, and they form opinions based on misunderstandings and hearsay and “facts” heard from other writers and commentators. The truth is that they are easily swayed and misled by hype and flashiness, and the real core people who understand boxing are few and far between.

There is no better illustration of this than the example of Mike Tyson, Iron Mike. Most boxing fans you talk to still love Mike and would pay to see him fight, which is absurd when you think how long it’s been since he’s had a meaningful fight, ten years or more. Tyson has been a C-level fighter since he left prison, years and years ago, but for his rematch with Kevin McBride that ended so fittingly, there was more international press and pay-per-view than there was for a somewhat meaningful fight between Miguel Cotto and Mohamad Abdulaev that same night.

Boxing fans are still victims of the myth of Tyson’s invulnerability, his fearlessness, his monstrous power and rage. Tyson won the heavyweight title and unified the belt at nineteen, the youngest fighter in history to do so, and he obliterated everyone in one or two rounds, millions of dollars a fight for a minute’s work. Some people still consider him the greatest heavyweight of all time—because they
want
him to be, they want to believe in that mythical creature that no one can withstand.

Once Buster Douglas managed to survive six rounds and show that it could be done, Mike was doomed. Holyfield completed the revelation, and that’s why Mike bit Holyfield’s ear off—he wanted a way out. I love Mike Tyson, not so much for his youthful invulnerability but for his intelligence. He can be beautifully eloquent (and horrifically crass) when he speaks about himself, and his tragedy is our tragedy, because your heavyweight champ speaks to your generation. The heavyweight championship is not so much a title as a morality play, it’s been said. Look at Jack Johnson, or Muhammad Ali—look at what the world does to the heavyweight champ.

Tyson is no exception, and his mournful tale is about America at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first: money and corruption (in the corrosive sense), and Tyson’s inability to escape from his own nature despite his fervent desire to do so. He has tattoos of Arthur Ashe, Che Guevara, and Mao Tse-tung—he has always wanted to change.

Virgil was incensed by Tyson’s last fight, against the towering six-foot-six, 271-pound McBride. “People aren’t paying to see Mike Tyson fight,” he said angrily. “They are paying to see Mike Tyson destroy somebody. Don’t put a big man in there with him—he’s always had trouble with real tall guys. I saw that fight, and Tyson hit him with some good shots and he didn’t go nowhere. People want to see Mike destroy. You give them that, he gets four or five fights over the next two years against guys who can’t handle his punch and then a title shot and he’s through, but he’s made another thirty million.”

After the fight, Mike said that his ferocity was all gone, he couldn’t even kill the bugs in his house. He had completely lost the killer instinct in the sixth round. “At one point, I thought life was about acquiring things,” he said. “Life is totally about losing everything.”

I would meet Andre and Virgil for early morning runs at Lake Temescal, a small lake in a narrow fissure of the hills above Oakland. We would run, and then do sprints and shadowbox in the sand, and then jumping exercises and weighted skip rope and medicine ball work. Virgil’s disdain for weights was total, and he and Andre trained for explosiveness and flexibility and speed—Pilates and Acceleration and core strength. Virgil’s refrain to me was “Get strong doing what you’re doing,” meaning the way to get strong boxing is to box. You get strong fighting, hitting the heavy bag, not lifting weights. It’s all about functional strength, strength you can use. What matters is being strong in the fight, and hitting hard, with technique. Another favorite saying of Virgil’s is “Give me a two-hundred-pound man in condition and you’ve got something.” What he was saying was that any man that size is a danger if he’s in shape and has been taught how to punch. If he can crack a little bit, “You’ve got something.” I had high hopes for my right, as Virgil and Tommy Rawson both said it might be something. I would’ve loved to be “heavy-handed,” but I wasn’t. I started to think about accuracy, about hitting right on the button on the chin, the magic KO spot, like the spot on a dog’s belly that makes his legs spasm when you scratch it. If you hit a guy perfectly on the point of the chin, it snaps his head, which shuts off his brain. That’s the knockout.

Virgil took Andre to Texas, to Houston, to train there for the last week before his fight. James Prince, Andre’s manager, had a huge facility and several pros there. They wanted to get Andre used to the heat and humidity, get him in the same time zone.

James Prince had come out of Houston with the Rap-a-Lot crew, and he had made his money in music, as one of the founders of gangster rap. He and his guys were the real deal. They had come from the baddest part of Houston and were not kidding when they said they were gangsters. His group was called the Geto Boys, and I could remember listening to them in seventh grade and being stunned. Prince had a combination of business intelligence, street smarts, and street cred. You didn’t fuck around with James Prince.

I stayed behind in Oakland and worked. It was hard sometimes to know how my training was going; it’s a little like getting fatter or skinnier—you don’t see it, because you look in the mirror every day. You don’t always see yourself improving in boxing, but with hard work and, above all, concentration, you do.

Bobby had agreed to keep an eye on me. Virgil had said, “Now, learn from Bobby, but don’t let him change you.” Bobby was a tremendously charismatic guy, and just to be hanging out with him felt like a privilege. I enjoyed the way he talked, the cadence in his voice. He’d had a barbecue sauce business once and on his old business card it said, “Where the Sauce Is the Boss.” He was always laughing, smiling, and then scowling when things got serious.

“Sam, what’s a jab supposed to do?” he asked me.

“Set everything up, feel him out, open him up, keep him off you. Everything,” I answered.

“Yeah, well, a jab is supposed to push his nose through his face. Start with that. Then work on those other things.”

Classic fighter parlance speaks of a punch like a living thing—an
educated
jab, a jab with science. A fighter with an educated jab can do all kinds of things with that one punch—he can paw at you, disrupt your balance, he can crack it like a whip, thrust it like a spear, blast it to the body. Max Schmeling beat Joe Louis in their first meeting with his educated right hand, a punch that he said threw itself when the time was right.

So Bobby had me on one end of the double-end bag, just working that jab, just trying to build up power. My shoulder would still fatigue quickly, and after a few rounds my jab wouldn’t have busted a grape.

Bobby had me moving, bouncing in circles, and he differed from Virgil on the right cross. Bobby didn’t want the pivot off the rear foot; he wanted just the hips to move. It was interesting how they both wanted almost totally perpendicular stances; you stand with your body on edge to your opponent, whereas before I had been a little more squared up. Muay Thai, with the kicks and knees, is more frontal, and with boxing you want to minimize the target. Bobby wanted me to learn to move, to flow, to bounce. “They won’t even recognize you when they get back,” he laughed. He showed me how to bounce and move in tight circles, a seventy-five-year-old man, still strong.

Later, we would sit and watch the gym, an endless pastime. The gym was like that. It was open from noon until late at night, and often you would go for three or four hours, two of which would be spent working out and the rest of the time spent bullshitting and watching. Bobby was often critical of certain trainers.

“It’s dangerous, because a trainer holds a fighter’s mind in his hands. The fighter depends on him for the truth, and if the trainer don’t got it, the fighter is going to get hurt.”

A week later, I flew to Memphis to meet Virgil, Andre, and company. I took a bus to the hotel, which was about a thirty-second ride. The good hotel in town was full, and we were all staying at the Airport Ramada, the shittiest expensive hotel I’d ever been in; I had roaches in my room on the second floor. But the staff was all sweet black ladies who whispered softly and courteously, southern and polite, and in the end they took such special care of Andre and all of us that we were happy to be there, even with the runway about five hundred feet away and planes landing all night.

That night we worked out briefly, just to get a good sweat on Andre. Virgil knew Andre’s body as well as Andre did, and knew that if Andre had to make 160 at the weigh-in, he could be 162 the night before and the night’s sleep and the nerves in the morning would take those pounds off him. We often walked at night, after dinner, on the brilliant grass under the epic southern sky with planes and pink and red clouds in the twilight, to keep the weight off.

Andre was promoted by a company called Goossen Tutor, run by two experienced brothers who had been in the training and promoting business for some twenty years and were eyeing the coming gap provided by the decline of Bob Arum and Don King. Dan Goossen was the promoter and Joe Goossen was the trainer, and they had some big names and some titles, most recently James Toney. In this particular fight they had Glencoffe Johnson.

Glen Johnson and Antonio Tarver were light-heavyweights, 175 pounds, who had both knocked out the seemingly invincible Roy Jones Jr. Antonio Tarver was an Olympic bronze medalist who was considered to be a very talented boxer, while Glen Johnson was always described as a journeyman. A journeyman fighter is a professional, perhaps without the great physical gifts necessary to win titles, but who has the skills and heart and determination to make it to title fights time and again—only to lose to more gifted fighters. Glen had lost a bunch of tough decisions—some of them considered unfair, “robberies”—and was admired more for his grit, drive, and resilience than for his skill. He was skilled but didn’t have the natural speed or athleticism that Tarver had. A journeyman is supposed to lose to a great fighter. But when Tarver and Johnson fought for the first time, Glen won a split decision by banging to the body and coming after Tarver and pushing him all over the ring. This fight in Memphis was going to be their rematch. Since Goossen had the guy with the belt, the top draw, he could put all his people on the undercard, and Andre, with his Olympic gold and reputation as a future champ, was starting to be a draw of his own.

I had spoken briefly on the phone to Dan Goossen about Andre. He was friendly and voluble, and willing to chat even though he was not quite convinced that I was for real. Goossen was big time, not as big as Don King or Bob Arum, but pretty big.

“Andre wants to be one of the greatest fighters of all time,” he said.

“That’s not a reputation you receive by winning a gold medal or even becoming champ. He’s a special athlete. I compare him to Lebron James, a young man way beyond his years, tremendous maturity.

“We’ve been challenging him since his first pro fight, and sometimes it’s hard for young fighters to understand, he sees his friends fight guys that you tap on the chin and they’re knocked out, or guys that start bleeding during the national anthem. But until you’ve had a few tough fights, the jury’s always out. When Lebron went pro at eighteen they put him in hard, in the starting five, and look at him now. With Andre, we want to give him that competition—a little bit less, so he’s always got an edge—but always someone who is helping prepare him for his future fighting the stars of the industry. We’ll put him in with left-handers, tall guys, punchers, runners, holders, every style you can think of. His greatness will be measured in the fights he has down the road, not the ten or twenty fights he needs to get there.”