The Best American Essays 2013 (34 page)

The older man grew visibly weary as we watched, and my brother said he’s got one last basket in him, and I said I bet a dollar it’s a shot from the corner, and my brother said no, he doesn’t even have the gas for that, he’ll snake the kid somehow, you watch, and just then the older man, who was bent over holding the hems of his shorts like he was exhausted, suddenly cut to the basket, caught a bounce pass, and scored, and the game ended, maybe because the park lights didn’t go on even though the streetlights did.

On the way home my brother and I passed the heron in the field of stubble again, and the heron stopped work again and glared at us until we turned the corner.

That is one
withering
glare, said my brother. That’s a ballplayer glare if ever I saw one. That’s the glare a guy gives another guy when the guy you were supposed to be covering scores on a backdoor cut and you thought your guy was ancient and near death but it turns out he snaked you good and you are an idiot.
I
know that glare. You owe me a dollar. We better go get my prescriptions. They are not going to do any good but we better get them anyway so they don’t go to waste. One less thing for my family to do afterward. That game was good but the heron was even better. I think the prescriptions are pointless now but we already paid for them so we might as well get them. They’ll just get thrown out if we don’t pick them up. That was a good last game, though. I’ll remember the old guy, sure, but the kid with the hat banging the boards, that was cool. You hardly ever see a guy with a porkpie hat hammering the boards.

There’s so much to love, my brother added. All the little things. Remember shooting baskets at night and the only way you could tell if the shot went in was the sound of the net? Remember the time we cut the fingertips off our gloves so we could shoot on icy days and Dad was so angry he lost his voice and he was supposed to give a speech and had to gargle and Mom laughed so hard we thought she was going to pee? Remember that? I remember that. What happens to what I remember? You remember it for me, okay? You remember the way that heron glared at us like he would kick our ass except he was working. And you remember that old man snaking that kid.
Stupid kid
, you could say, but that’s the obvious thing. The
beautiful
thing is the little thing that the old guy knew full well he wasn’t going to cut around picks and drift out into the corner again, that would burn his last gallon of gas, not to mention he would have to hoist up a shot from way out there, so he snakes the kid beautiful, he knows the kid thinks he’s old, and the guy with the hat sees him cut, and gets him the ball on a dime, that’s a beautiful thing because it’s little, and we saw it and we knew what it meant. You remember that for me. You owe me a dollar.

TOD GOLDBERG

FROM
Hobart

I
WAS ELEVEN
the first time I saw someone killed. A real someone, that is. Prior to that point, I’m certain I’d seen hundreds, probably thousands, maybe tens of thousands of fake people die on television or in the movies and usually in fairly grotesque fashion. This was the autumn of 1982, what I thought of for many years as the worst time of my life, though later on I’d change that assessment. What happens is that you stop making absolutes about such things as the best and worst days, weeks, months, or years of your life and you’re able to view things a bit more dispassionately, once you understand that most things that seem horrible in the moment can morph into something like experience or blind chance.

This is particularly true now that I think about how the person I saw killed wasn’t even someone I knew, that I was one of millions who saw him killed, that what haunts me still about his death is probably more about my own fears, about how the ultimate good fortune about that year is that I am still here, still remembering, still trying to make things right in my mind.

His name was Duk Koo Kim. He was a South Korean boxer, fighting Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini for the WBA lightweight title the old-school way: outdoors, under a blistering sun, behind Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. Kim was the most unlikely contender for the title—no one had really heard of him, but here he was fighting America’s real-life Rocky, an Italian kid from an industrial town, the son of a failed prizefighter. Two men who found great luck and that great luck brought them to a roped-off square in the middle of the desert to fight for a world title. Except, of course, just like all things you realize after a certain age, they weren’t really men. They were boys. Ray Mancini was twenty-one. Duk Koo Kim was twenty-three.

This was when boxing was still shown on television for free, back when fights went fifteen rounds, back when boxing was ruled by the likes of Larry Holmes, Sugar Ray Leonard, Marvin Hagler, and Wilfred Benitez, back when even eleven-year-old boys knew who all the contenders were for the major weight classes, back when they still let them bleed.

What I know is true: the heartbreak of one person’s bad childhood is not equal to the tragic death of a young man in a boxing ring. The danger of drawing parallels is that some things are always inequalities. And yet I can’t think of Duk Koo Kim without thinking about that year, about how I carried a pocketknife with me wherever I went, about how I used to press the point of it into my stomach until a bubble of blood appeared, how I ingested Afrin hourly because I liked the rush it gave me, about how the vision of Duk Koo Kim being carried out of that parking lot behind Caesers Palace on a stretcher, his body limp, stayed with me for years as the face of a real dead person, even when he was only in a coma and wouldn’t die for a few days. I can’t think of Duk Koo Kim, who weighed 135 pounds and was five foot six and was fighting for the lightweight championship of the world, without thinking about how at the same time I was eleven years old and stood just four foot eight and weighed 135 pounds, about how I would squeeze the layers of fat on my stomach against the frame of my shower and imagine slamming the door hard enough to just cleave the skin off, how it would solve so many problems, how lucky it would be just to melt into the crowd of students at my school, to be an invisible boy.

Duk Koo Kim wasn’t famous. He became famous for a few years after he died. Warren Zevon did a song about the fight. Several years later, a song by Sun Kil Moon called “Duk Koo Kim” came out. It was nearly fifteen minutes long. That’s approximately five rounds.

Whenever Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini fought after Kim died, someone on the television would say how he wasn’t the same fighter since that tragic day, and then they’d talk about Duk Koo Kim’s heart or how he’d supposedly left a message scrawled on a lampshade in his Las Vegas hotel room that said “Kill or be Killed” and how prophetic that turned out to be . . . before getting back to the carnage they were there to report on, hoping for an exciting fight, hopefully a ferocious brawl, hopefully a knockout. Because if there was one thing everyone said about Mancini after Duk Koo Kim died, it was that he lacked that killer instinct, that desire to really knock someone out. He was still a very fine boxer, he just didn’t have that drive to destroy someone, to put them on their back, to make them lay motionless on the canvas. Maybe, they’d say, this would be the fight where he showed that aggression again. Before the fight with Duk Koo Kim, Mancini was in twenty-five bouts. He went 24–1, with eighteen knockouts or technical knockouts. Afterward he went 4–4 and found himself TKOed twice.

What’s a knockout? Technically, it’s a stroke. A very small stroke, but a stroke no less. What happens is this: when you get hit with a left or right hook, like the thirty-nine straight punches Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini landed on Duk Koo Kim late in their fight, your head swivels at such a high rate of speed that it actually compresses and constricts your carotid arteries. This is not a good thing if you like having cardiac function or the ability to speak. An uppercut does just about the same thing, though instead of affecting your carotid, the whiplash from the blow compresses the circulation to the back of your brain.

Duk Koo Kim died from a blood clot on the brain caused by a right subdural hematoma. Dr. Lonnie Hammargren, the neurosurgeon who operated on Duk Koo Kim directly after the fight’s aftermath, said in the November 22, 1982, issue of
Sports Illustrated
that the trauma was caused by “one punch.”

My bedroom back then was covered in pictures from
Sports Illustrated
. I don’t remember when I began meticulously removing the covers of the magazines and pinning them to the wall, only that at some point I also began to frame entire issues on my wall, my sense being that one day the magazines would be valuable and that I’d want to keep them in better condition (I can only imagine that this belief stemmed from the start of the baseball card craze that took hold around then, since that’s also when I began not to touch my cards anymore, the result being that I have plenty of mint copies of Rusty Kuntz’s rookie card).

I received my subscription to
Sports Illustrated
as a gift from my father on my tenth birthday. At that point I hadn’t seen him in five years, hadn’t even heard from him—via post, phone, or messages sent over the Ouija board, where I sometimes tried to contact him, even though he wasn’t dead—in at least three. Yet a month or so after my birthday in January of 1981, my first issue arrived, along with a notice saying it was a gift subscription from my father. At first my mother refused to let me have the magazine, as if somehow the mere fact that my father had paid for it made it part of him. I can still see her, standing in my bedroom, trying to rip the magazine in half. It was the annual “Year in Sports” issue, so it was extra-thick, and thus she only managed to rip through the cover and the first few pages before she became frustrated and opted just to throw it away.

Later that night my sister Karen smuggled it back into my bedroom. “Keep this somewhere Mom won’t be able to find it,” she said. Karen was seventeen, and her main job then was to serve as a buffer between my sister Linda and me and our mother, who was insane. I don’t mean “insane” in a flip way. I mean eventually we’d have her institutionalized against her will. Though that wouldn’t happen for another twenty-five years and by that point it was too late.

The magazine was damp and covered with bits of coffee grounds and cigarette ash, but Karen had taped the torn pages for me. I kept it, and for the next few weeks, every single other issue of the magazine that arrived, underneath my bed during the day and only read it at night, after my mother went to sleep. And then one day I came home from soccer practice and all the issues were neatly stacked on top of my bed. My mother never said a word about it, which was unusual, since she tended to have a word about most things.

I can still see the boxing covers in my mind—the ones I remember best are those that prophesied greatness: Thomas Hearns glaring into the middle distance beside a headline that said,
BETTER PRAY, SUGAR RAY
; Joe Frazier and his son Marvis, years before Marvis would be destroyed by Larry Holmes and Mike Tyson, the words
A CHIP OFF THE OLD CHAMP
? stretched across their rippled chests; an ebullient Gerry Cooney being carried out of the ring, the banner an understated
THE CONTENDER
. And then, in August of 1982, there was the cover of Ray Mancini smacking the shit out of Ernesto España beneath a canopy of impossibly blue sky and the words
BOOM BOOM BOOMS!
Three months later, Mancini would appear on the cover of
Sports Illustrated
for the last time. It’s a photo of him smacking the shit out of Duk Koo Kim, a photo eerily similar to the one from August, except this time the headline said
TRAGEDY IN THE RING
.

I went and looked at the old covers online, to make sure I was remembering them correctly. I was. Five things stood out for me afterward:

1. That there’s an exclamation point at the end of
BOOM BOOM BOOMS!
but not
TRAGEDY IN THE RING
.

2. In the last decade, there’s been exactly one cover of
Sports Illustrated
featuring boxers.

3. Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini had two fights within just three months of each other.

4. After realizing that Mancini fought two huge fights in just three months’ time, I went and looked to see when his other fights were in 1982, because I recalled him fighting constantly that year. Between December 26, 1981, and November 13, 1982, the day of the Kim fight, Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini fought five times. Take it back further, and between March 1981 and that day in 1982, he fought a total of ten times.

5. The last active boxer to appear on the cover of
Sports Illustrated
, Floyd Mayweather Jr., has fought ten times since 2005.

Five things I remember about the days before Duk Koo Kim was killed:

1. This was the period of my life when my classmates began calling me by the names of Columbus’s ships.

2. A man named Don Olsen moved into our house. My mother met him when she was in the hospital after her hysterectomy and he came to visit the woman my mother was sharing a room with. I don’t know the exact algebra that led to this, but at some point during those visits to see his friend, somehow Don Olsen convinced my mother he should rent the room my brother vacated when he went to college. For the first month that Don lived in our house he mostly kept to himself, which meant he sat in his bedroom smoking cigarettes, eating TV dinners, and drinking beer. It wasn’t until the second month that Don Olsen finally decided I needed a male role model in my life. He would watch sports with me in the family room—by this point, he decided that our faux leather recliner was his—and when we watched boxing, he’d tell me how he learned to fight when he was in the service and how I could lose some of “that shit around your belt” if I learned to spar, maybe even kids at school would think I was less of a “fat pussy.”

“You got any man questions, you come ask me,” he said.