Get Her Off the Pitch! (2 page)

Compromise always wins over integrity in this eternal tragedy. In these movies, fighters never get the bouts they deserve, despite begging for shots at the title, because it serves no one else's skulduggery to set them up. They are often obliged to take strategic dives - and sometimes they boo-hoo afterwards at the ignominy of it, like Jake LaMotta (Robert De Niro) in
Raging Bull
, whom it is still incredibly hard to feel sorry for, incidentally, because he's such a git. Finally, but most important of all, these traditional movie boxers are completely dumb about money - as confirmed by their regular, fruitless cry, ‘Give me my money.' ‘I didn't fight for under a thousand for five years,' boasts a boxer in the original play of
Golden Boy
. ‘I got a thousand bucks tonight, don't I?' His manager, reading a paper, looks up and says no, actually tonight he got twelve hundred. The fighter jumps to his feet, livid. ‘What? I oughta bust your nose. How many times do I have to say I don't fight for under one thousand bucks?' The manager shrugs. ‘Okay, you'll get your thousand,' he agrees.

What the movies don't tend to deal with (because it's so boring) is boxing's system of administration, which is so byzantine and preposterous that no one outside has a clue how to penetrate it, let alone challenge or dismantle it. But if you already have a suspicious nature and a sceptical attitude to boxing based on prolonged movie-watching, you can't hear about the
WBO, IBO, IBF, WBU
, et cetera
without narrowing your eyes and making ironical harrumphing noises. The World Boxing Council, you see, has nothing to do with the World Boxing Association besides two shared initials; meanwhile there's the International Boxing Federation, the World Boxing Organisation, the World Boxing Union, the International Boxing Organisation, the World Boxing Federation, the International Boxing Council, and the International Boxing Association. In other words, if you can ingeniously contrive any original three-word combination of this limited range of nouns and adjectives, and can afford a big round bit of metal with some leather attached, you can set up your own legitimate boxing organisation in your downstairs lavatory for the price of a packet of stamps. All of these organisations are in the belt business, and at the time of the Holyfield-Lewis fight in 1999, Holyfield was ibf and wba champion; Lewis was wbc. Or, quite honestly, it might have been the other way round.

Either way, the one thing I understood about this fight from the moment I arrived in New York was that toilers in the foetid world of boxing were hoping for a breath of fresh air to blow through the whole sport this coming weekend. Boxing's reputation was as low as it could get, and commentators had long since run out of synonyms for ‘stink'. A recent fight arranged for Lewis had been against the American Oliver McCall - a man who may have looked, on paper, like a worthy opponent, since he had once knocked Lewis out at the Wembley Arena (in September 1994), but who was in such a bad mental state on the night of the second fight (in January 1997) that he was in tears in the ring. It was ghastly, apparently. All the
commentators who saw this fight quickly ran out of synonyms for ‘sickened'. A recovering crack addict, McCall wandered around the ring avoiding Lewis, crying, talking to himself, and having a public nervous breakdown. Lewis held back, cautiously offering the occasional jab, like a cat testing a dead mouse. It was a confusing situation for a boxer trained to put himself on the line. To adapt the famous line from
Raging Bull
(‘I didn't know whether to fuck him or fight him'), on this occasion, Lewis didn't know whether to fight McCall or offer him a nice cup of cocoa.

But now, come Saturday night, by a Herculean effort, a diverted river was going to gush through the Garden and wash all the blood off the ropes. Holyfield-Lewis was a very big deal. In fact, I was beginning to realise that nothing in the world - certainly not Bosnia - was as important as this contrived fight, for eight-figure money, between two men who (as yet) I didn't even know very much about. As I sat in my tiny hotel room in the evenings - listening to the exciting parp-parp of the wintry midtown traffic; leafing avidly through boxing magazines; pondering Norman Mailer's theory that boxing, like chess, is all about ‘control of the centre' (how true); and occasionally jumping up to practise a combination of right to the kidney, followed by uppercut and left hook (quite difficult without falling over) - I started to share the palpable sense of destiny.

My first sight of Evander Holyfield was at a grim gym in lower Manhattan. It was a raw, freezing day, and I shared a cab with the chap from the
Telegraph
, who was staying
at the same mid-town hotel (The Paramount). The coincidence of our staying at the same hotel had really bucked me up, incidentally, because it seemed to me, during my four years in the business, that I was forever comparing travel arrangements with this particular chap, and coming out the loser by a knockout in the first round. ‘Where are you staying, Lynne?' he would ask, when we met (say) at one of the earlier matches of the World Cup in Paris in 1998, and I would attempt to make light of the appalling truth. ‘Well, it's quite interesting,' I'd say. ‘They've put me in a hotel that costs a mere £24 a night - which must have taken quite some doing, don't you think? My room stinks of drains, doesn't have a television or a lavatory, and the phone has a big dial on it and is bolted to the wall, so I can't plug in my laptop. But heigh ho, what can you do? It's incredibly handy for the Musée d'Orsay, and I honestly haven't been attacked yet walking back up that dark street from the Metro dragging my big heavy laptop after midnight.' Then, with a huge generosity of spirit, I would ask, ‘Where are you staying, then, Paul?' And it would always be somewhere stylish, bright, central, fully equipped, expensive, modem-friendly and (all-importantly) served door-to-door by media buses, that would make me want to saw my own head off.

Discovering that Paul and I were on the same flight to New York from Heathrow, therefore, we had gone through the usual routine on the plane - except, for once, I asked first. ‘Oh, I'm staying at that Philippe Starck place off Times Square with all the funky furniture and the low lighting,' he said. ‘Oh really?' I squeaked, trying not to betray my despair. ‘I'm at some dump called The Paramount.'
And for heaven's sake, for once we were in the same place. It was a miracle. For once in my life, I was probably going to get a room with some basic bathroom fittings. Of course, when we arrived, Paul got himself upgraded to a better class of room immediately, while I had to argue for a couple of hours at check-in because the
Times
travel people had failed to confirm the reservation (this always happened). But still, to be in the same hotel in New York as the chap from the
Telegraph
for a whole week was really, really something, and I still feel quite proud.

Back at Holyfield's gym, I was keen to get a sight of a real boxer by now - which was a shame, because when we arrived (at the appointed time) real boxers were nowhere to be seen. It was a bleak spot, this gym: a high-ceilinged, whitewashed-brick kind of underground space filled with punch-bags and stale air, not to mention huddles of impatient hacks sipping take-out coffees. There were a couple of large murals of famous boxers on the side wall - they turned out to be Joe Louis and Jack Dempsey, so I'm glad I didn't guess. And as we all hung about, waiting to be summoned through a small door in the wall (like something from
Alice
) to an inner, warren-like place where Holyfield was said to be sparring in private, I think I had a bit of an epiphany. Making a puny fist, I tapped a punch-bag (which didn't move), and someone told me the interesting fact that Mike Tyson filled his punchbags with water, so that hitting them was more like hitting the human body. I quipped, ‘Does he cover them in human skin, too?' and then felt ashamed for being so flippant - especially as no one laughed.

Later, we would watch Lennox sparring in a much nicer
space at the Garden, but hanging about in that dank, unlovely gym brought things home to me in an important way, and at an important moment. Sometimes people come into my office and say, politely, ‘So this is where it all happens?' and I get all uncomfortable, because, obviously, nothing happens here at all except a lot of impressive teadrinking, and I assume they're just trying to avoid saying, ‘Oh my God, what a mess' in any case. But anyway, my point is, you go into an old, battered, smelly Skid Row gym like that, and suddenly this upcoming fight is nothing to do with the
HBO
pay-per-view millions, or the international diplomacy success of the promoter, or the trading of hollow physical threats by besuited fighters on podiums with fireworks in the background. Because this is where it all happens. This is where men build defences, and learn by getting hurt. This is where they sweat and learn and concentrate, and - in Holyfield's case - acquire neck muscles like anchor chains. Of course, I knew that Holyfield didn't use this scuzzy gym every day of his life: a multimillionaire, he lived in considerable luxury in Texas, with a swimming pool shaped like a championship belt, and had fathered nine children by twelve women (or something like that), while also being strenuously devout, which some people saw as not quite adding up. Holyfield once said in an interview that all men had to get out of their trousers from time to time, and the interviewer said, ‘But not as often as you.' But that's not the point. By the time I got my chance to go through the little door and see the sweating, shaven-headed and massively muscular Evander Holyfield - sparring energetically in a darker, smaller, and even sweatier space - I was so sensitised to the idea of
boxing's sheer physicality that I almost fainted at the sight of him.

I hadn't been prepared for this sudden powerful interest in these two men's bodies. It came as a shock after three years in the trade. Every week of my life, I routinely heard about injuries of one sort or another - footballers with fractured metatarsals; tennis players with strained hamstrings - and the information didn't impinge very much. The chaps' bodies were just the tools of their trade. One of my treasured football press conference questions was, on the subject of a chronically injured star player, ‘Anything new on the groin?' (My next favourite was golfer Justin Leonard saying that he'd taken his bogeys with a pinch of salt.) I admit that casual mention of footballers, in multiples, ‘on the treatment tables' conjured a too-vivid image sometimes, because I pictured them naked and at rest, face up, expectant, lightly oiled, under sheets describing suggestive contours; and I also remember with great clarity a moment when the then fabulously dreadlocked - and very beautiful - Henrik Larsson, playing for Celtic, celebrated a goal with his shirt off and took me completely by surprise with what was underneath. But by and large, I regarded sportsmen as hairy-kneed yeomen whose flesh, skin and muscle were their own affair, and certainly nothing to do with me.

It helped to be reading Joyce Carol Oates at this juncture - and there's a sentence I never thought I'd write. But her book
On Boxing
is a small masterpiece. A great fan of boxing, she is in love with the plain fact that it's not a metaphor for anything else. While organised games are metaphors for war, and tennis (say) is a metaphor for
hand-to-hand combat, boxing isn't. ‘I can entertain the proposition that life is a metaphor for boxing,' is as far as she'll go (and is as funny as she gets, by the way). ‘Boxing is only like boxing.' Boxers, she says, ‘are there to establish an absolute experience, a public accounting of the outermost limits of their beings'. People who attend fights because they like seeing blood spray about probably don't think about it this deeply, perhaps; but that doesn't make it untrue. A fight is a culmination of training, a moment of truth, a supreme form of reckoning, and the bottom line is that most of us will never experience anything remotely as testing as a public accounting of the outermost limits of our being. I once went the full twelve rounds with John Lewis Online customer services, and I won't say I wasn't bruised by it, but I would never claim it was the real thing.

For these two men to measure up to one another in a ring on Saturday night was not just a contrivance for the sake of entertainment; it was a magnificent, if still horrifying, necessity. Their job, I now saw, was not so much to hurt each other as to protect themselves and emerge with honour. I didn't want to see it happen, but at the same time I couldn't miss it. If they were going to risk so much, the least I could do was watch. Oates makes one outstanding claim for boxing: ‘It is the most tragic of all sports because, more than any human activity, it consumes the very excellence it displays - its drama is this very consumption.' Or, as everyone kept saying in relation to Holyfield (aged 37) in the week before the fight, ‘Sometimes you see a boxer age in the ring, right there in front of you.'

However, at this point, Holyfield himself was not anticipating such a transfiguration. He was predicting he would knock out Lewis in the third round. He said it at the gym, and he said it later. The American press were very grateful for this uncharacteristic prediction, as it supported their rather simplistic sales pitch on Holyfield, which was that he had tons of ‘heart'. We heard an awful lot about Holyfield's heart in the week before the fight. I started to think we should demand to see an x-ray, or at least have it weighed in separately. Lewis, meanwhile, was characterised as a kind of cowardly lion because - by contrast to Holyfield - he made no bones about preferring not to be hit. The American press were very unfair to Lewis, but you could see why he confused them, with his languid, sleep-walking manner, his unblemished good looks, and his unhurried, unemotional common sense. Lewis said that everyone asked him, all the time, about his supposed inferiority in the ‘heart' department; meanwhile, he never saw a picture of himself in the American press that didn't have a question mark next to it.