Playing in Time: Essays, Profiles, and Other True Stories

by Carlo Rotella

  Butler turned himself in three days after Kellerman’s body was discovered. His alibi sounds flimsy, and of course he can’t make bail. If convicted, he’s looking at 25 years to life. Unless the public defender assigned to Butler’s case can prove he’s mentally incompetent, they’re going to put him under the jail, as my high-school social studies teacher used to say.

  The story’s not even recent news. Kellerman was murdered in October of 2004; Butler has been in jail for the past year. Jury selection in the case begins next week. That’s the occasion for the long, well-written story in the Times. (Yes, “grimy” shows up in the opening sentence, so that’s one beer you have to chug right there, but you’re going to be disappointed if you’re counting on this story to get you and your friends drunk.) And yet the story’s not at all stale; in fact, if I reread it in six weeks or six months or six years it will still be fresher than the previous day’s nonboxing sports news.

  Why? Certainly not because of the story’s novelty. It’s a familiar #3-type story: hard-knocks guy trying to find his way to a better life meets well-insulated guy attracted to lowlife, hard knocks lead to harder knocks, things end badly. Of course, Butler’s not typical, since most fighters don’t suffer from psychiatric disorders, or kill people. Most of them just have an appetite for hitting, and that appetite finds expression even if they are raised by middle-class sweethearts far from the street life. The lurid freakishness of stories like Butler’s helps attract the attention of editors and reporters, but it’s a mistake to regard that freakishness as pervading the fight world. Nor is freakishness the secret ingredient that keeps a boxing story fresh. To the contrary, the freakish aspect of a boxing story can go stale, just as Mike Tyson’s volatility or Oscar De La Hoya’s cuteness can go stale. Tyson and De La Hoya are boxers (I use the term loosely in Tyson’s case, at this point) so famous that, as commentators like to say, they “transcend boxing,” which means that they’re sort of like other famous athletes: news about them seems very fresh, then not so fresh, and the change happens fast.

  No, what’s eternally fresh about the story of James Butler lies in the nakedness of its encounter with ultimacy, with what religious people sometimes call “first things.” Here’s Butler’s mother, for instance, talking about raising him: “Maybe I was too strict with him, too stern, I don’t know. I wanted my sons to be strong because the world is cruel, it is chaos. If you are weak, you fall. I believe James fell.” She sees right through the muscles, the toughness, the punching power, to the cracks in her son’s foundation. The brutal penetration of her insight seems all the more potent because it comes from the guy’s mother, for God’s sake, and not from, say, an opponent’s trainer. This kind of thing happens all the time in boxing stories. They’re going along describing who did what, and then suddenly somebody’s mom is explaining the underlying cruelty of creation, the chaos at the heart of the world.

  And Butler’s mother does not shirk her own responsibility for his fate. She allows that maybe she was too rough on him, and she knows she hurt him by often choosing nightlife over motherhood. “Ma was hanging out, know what I mean? I don’t think James liked that, Ma out partying.” Alexander Newbold, the trainer who tried to build camaraderie among his stable of fighters by getting them together outside the gym, also accepts blame. “This is my fault. If it wasn’t for me, James would have never met Sam and all of this never would have happened.” He’s not taking responsibility for a blown defensive assignment or something like that, as upstanding characters in the sports section will occasionally do; he’s taking responsibility for life and death.

  Compare all this to what’s going on in the rest of the sports section. For instance: “Guillermo Ramirez, a reserve player for the Los Angeles Galaxy, entered the M.L.S. cup on Sunday fresh off the most inaccurate shooting season in league history. But with the championship on the line, he did what no one else on the field could do—score.” That’s sort of dramatic, and there may in fact be a lesson about the subtle clockwork order of the universe hiding in there somewhere, but that lesson isn’t in play in the story. The lesson remains so latent that it may not be there at all. Or, to turn from a news story to a profile, here’s the father of professional football star Carson Palmer and college football star Jordan Palmer talking about how well things have turned out for Jordan at the University of Texas–El Paso. “Oh my God, my wife and I talk about that all the time. This isn’t a place Carson would have wanted to come, but we’re so thrilled for Jordan. It was the right place, time, and circumstance.” This story might potentially offer a mirror image of the story of James Butler, a fatherless man who was in the wrong place and circumstance at the wrong time, but who cares? Happy quarterbacks, like unhappy receivers, are all the same.

  Fight people, a tribe of heroic talkers, are not all the same, but they share a willingness to touch and articulate the ultimacy in their stories in ways that other sports figures usually can’t. Reporters expect no less of fight people, and they put those lines in the story. It could be that Guillermo Ramirez sat around the locker room after the MLS championship game talking about his theory of cosmic retribution and karmic balance, but nobody thought it belonged in a story about the Galaxy’s victory. But a reporter writing a boxing story, especially a #3-type, would regard as essential a quote from a fighter’s mother arguing for the fundamental chaos and cruelty of the universe. So it’s not just that fight people can touch the ultimacy in their own stories; the genre demands that they do.

  Boxing stories can make every other kind of sports story begin to seem like a mayfly in comparison—insubstantial, weak, and short-lived. Here’s Don Turner, a boxing trainer, doing an Alexander Hamilton turn: “I know there’s a lot of bad people in boxing. Boxing is like society, and the American public is basically bad people.” When was the last time you heard a football coach say anything like that? Turner goes on: “When I was a kid growing up, I never dreamed that this society would come to what it has today. I know that there’s always people out there who will try to steal Mike from me”—Michael Grant, an impressive physical specimen who eventually failed to pan out as a heavyweight prospect—“and try to steal from both of us when we stay together. And those people should know what kind of person I am. I live an honorable life. When I’m wrong, I admit it and apologize for what I did. But I’ll get in your face if I think you’re wrong. And I’ll come at you with a baseball bat if you try to take what’s mine.”

  Okay, Turner’s speech appeared in a magazine, not a newspaper’s sports section, but the point is: that speech will never go stale. I’ve had it tacked to a bulletin board over my desk for years. Every once in a while I reread it and am reminded that boxing stories, perhaps alone among sports stories, are built to last.

  In March 2006, James Butler pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter and arson in the death of Sam Kellerman. He was sentenced to twenty-nine years and four months in prison.

  * * *

  Original publication: Epicenters, May 2007.

  Mirror, Mirror

  LARRY HOLMES, UNRETIRED ONCE more, had returned to the gym in earnest. Word that he was sparring again went around Easton, Pennsylvania, his hometown and headquarters. He was preparing to fight Brian Nielsen in Denmark for the near-meaningless IBO title; after that, perhaps Holmes and George Foreman would finally settle things between them in the ring. It was October 1996; Holmes, who had been heavyweight champion from 1978 to 1985, would soon be 47 years old.

  The watchers were back in the gym, too. Holmes had a crew of paid cornermen and helpers, but a looser circle of informal observers hung around the Larry Holmes Training Center just to see what he was up to. They—we—had been on hiatus during his most recent retirement, but now it was time for the watchers to reconvene.

  Cliff, a thick-built, patient man who served as one of Holmes’s seconds, was sitting on one of the folding chairs at ringside, waiting for the boss to come out of his locker room. Alan, who dropped in from time to time to videotape sparring sessions
for his private collection, was also sitting in a ringside chair, waiting for Holmes. Seemingly engrossed in fiddling with his video camera, Alan said to nobody in particular, “I wonder if this Nielsen is the stiff everybody says he is.” After a pause, Cliff looked over at him and said, “Well, he’s big, and even if he is European, he is undefeated.” Having enticed Cliff into a conversation, Alan put down his camera, turned to face him, and covetously complimented him on his ball cap, which bore a Larry Holmes logo. Cliff looked over at me, jerked his head at Alan, and said, “If he wants something you got. . . .” Cliff broke off, shaking his head, but he placated Alan by promising to see if he could get him a cap, then explained how to keep it clean: “You just put your caps in the dishwasher, on top with the glasses? Come out beautiful.”

  Alan and Cliff fell to commiserating about how hard it was to make a living. Alan had to drive all over the state to assemble bagel ovens for ten dollars an hour. Holmes would not provide make-work day jobs for his crew, so Cliff hired out to other fighters, too. Cliff needed to make some extra money to hire a lawyer for a young man in his family who had gotten into trouble. “It was self-defense and all,” Cliff said. “He took a boxcutter away from the other guy, one of those big ones, took it away and hurt him. I mean really hurt him.” Alan murmured, “Good, good,” not getting the point. Cliff gave him a flat, disgusted look. Their conversation petered out.

  They turned to watch two gloved-up middleweights, a novice named Russell and a more experienced southpaw, who had climbed into the ring and were walking about with studied aimlessness, waiting for the bell. When it chimed, they began sparring. Russell, a student at a nearby college, poked out his left as a sort of pro forma gesture to set up a heavy straight right, his best punch. His opponent, the southpaw, moved with greater purpose and snapped his jab more decisively than Russell’s. They quickly fell into a pattern of sparring: Russell took a jab or two in the face as he came in to throw his one-two, then they fought in close for a while, during which time he forced the southpaw to retreat but took another shot or two for his trouble. Infighting, Russell had a beginner’s tendency to duck his head and throw his punches blind. Effort, punishment, and mounting frustration turned Russell’s pale face a dark, uneven red.

  In the second round, warming to the encounter, they whacked each other more forcefully. A bright worm of blood crawled out of Russell’s nose and into his mouth. He followed the southpaw as before, bored in to throw the pawing jab and the hard right as before, took his lumps as before. At one point, wishing to employ his superior strength but unable to land enough punches, Russell jammed both of his forearms in the southpaw’s face and drove with his legs, just pushing. The southpaw, his head bent back sharply over the top strand of the ropes, made a high snort of surprise and pain. After that, they traded with increasing wildness, oversize gloves and headgear accentuating the sound of the blows. The third round offered more of the same, with Russell taking three punches to give one. He looked mad, blood smeared over the middle of his face. The southpaw looked mad, too, and embarrassed to have made that odd sound when Russell forced his head back over the top strand.

  Just as the bell sounded to end the third round, Holmes and his cornermen came out of his locker room and moved toward the ring. One of them, Charlie, a bald man with broad forearms, made a shooing-away gesture with both hands and called out, “That’s enough.” The middleweights climbed out through the ropes on the other side. They had wanted to go another round, although there probably would not have been much value in it. They were not really sparring anymore; they were just fighting.

  Cliff got up and went over to work the corner of Holmes’s sparring partner. Alan got up to film the proceedings. Holmes, hands wrapped, wearing blue sweats and a blue T-shirt with the sleeves cut off to give his thick arms and shoulders room to work, was putting cotton balls in his ears and smearing his face with petroleum jelly. One of his cornermen approached with the gloves. Time to get down to business.

  The watchers, too, got down to business. Charlie settled himself outside one corner of the raised ring, Cliff outside another. Saoul Mamby, Holmes’s chief second and trainer of record, a resourceful little guy who had held the WBC super lightweight title back when Holmes was heavyweight champion, took a third corner. A dapper fellow named Ben, whose official job title was “driver” and whose duties included playing an endless checkers tournament with Holmes during downtime, took the fourth. They all struck intent poses—arms crossed and frowning, or one foot up on the ring steps, elbow on raised knee, chin on palm—as their boss circled in the ring, jabbing from time to time and smothering his sparring partner’s hooks. The cornermen had spent cumulative weeks, months of their lives watching Holmes hit and not get hit; they were as good at watching him do it as he was at doing it.

  Wherever fighters train, watchers gather, observing in silence the familiar, repetitive routines of the gym. Some just hang out on their own time, like dissolute railbirds in a pool hall, but watching in the gym is also an important element of what cornermen, matchmakers, gamblers, and reporters do. It can be a profession, not just a form of idling.

  Holmes, famously thrifty, only needed his cornermen for a couple of hours a day, so he did not pay them a living wage. But he did pay them something for their time, and there was not much for them to do other than watch. Their gym duties were minimal: wrap his hands, give him water or Vaseline or the bucket when he needed it, hold the mitts while he banged them, rub down his shoulders and arms to keep him loose. It made Holmes feel good, of course, to have attendants, competent men alert to his welfare and demands, an articulate living shell that smoothed his passage through the world and reminded him of his importance. But he did not need much encouragement—an occasional “That’s it, champ” or “Be first!” would do—and he certainly did not need their advice on how to box. He had been fighting for most of his life, often against the most potent big men in the world, and his style was not going to change. No matter who the other guy was, Holmes would jab and throw looping rights off the jab, blocking and slipping return punches or scuttling them with well-timed jabs. He did not need anybody to remind him to stick and move and entangle incoming punches in his long arms, banging his opponent’s biceps with his elbows when he did.

  It had been a long time since Holmes heeded the independent opinion of a cornerman. When he fought Gerry Cooney, for instance, on a hot June night in Las Vegas back in 1982, he had made it clear to his distinguished corner that all he wanted was basic service. “Just keep me cool,” he told Eddie Futch and Ray Arcel, two of the wisest and most respected trainers around. Holmes was 32 then, and he already had a long fighting history: scrapping informally in his teens until he learned the fundamentals of boxing from a gentle retired fighter; absorbing more advanced lessons in craft while serving as sparring partner for Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier, and Earnie Shavers; fighting up through an especially deep and dangerous division during the heavyweight golden age of the 1970s; beating Shavers, Ken Norton, Ali, and everybody else in his way; defending his title eleven times. When he fought Cooney, in a bout that stirred popular passions and was then the most lucrative of all time, he ignored Futch’s tactical advice between rounds. When Arcel tried to give him smelling salts, Holmes ordered Futch to keep that crazy old man away from him. What Holmes wanted from the pair of sages in his corner—who between them had 152 years of exquisitely tempered experience on this violent planet—was ice, water, damage control (although Holmes rarely suffered cuts), and to stay the hell out of his way while he fought his fight.

  That’s all he wanted from his corner now. At 46 and counting, Holmes had grown old in ring-time. Having saved and invested his purses, he was financially independent of any promoter or backer, and he saw no reason to shell out for a big-name trainer. He had Saoul Mamby, but, tricky as Mamby had been as a boxer, he was no professional trainer. Holmes had Cliff and Charlie, too, and Ben, but in essence he trained himself. Mostly, they watched him do it. What, besides an employee�
�s expression of fealty to his employer, was that good for? What practical utility was there in Holmes’s cornermen watching him train?

  The answer, I think, is that they served as projections of Holmes, whose classical boxing style and sheer working drive suffused the gym and anybody who spent time in it. Watching him day after day over the years, his intimates had absorbed his moves, his priorities, his instincts; they had learned to know boxing as he knew it, to see it as he saw it. So if Cliff or Charlie told the boss that he was spending too much time with his back to the ropes in a sparring session, the cornerman served as the vehicle by which Holmes, in effect, reminded himself to stay in the middle of the ring to take best advantage of his long jab and elegant footwork. The cornerman was not really offering his own opinion—rather, his eyes were Holmes’s, extended from the fighter’s body on invisible stalks so that Holmes could observe himself, comparing his own performance on any given day to a composite ideal he had assembled over the years by watching himself train and fight through his cornermen’s eyes. As instruments of Holmes’s vigilant attention to himself, the cornermen were, in that sense, like the mirrors that line one wall of Holmes’s gym, reflecting back to him not only his technical acumen but also the more intangible qualities of will and resolve that add up to a fighting self. In addition to running, hitting the bags, and sparring, Holmes readied himself for a fight by looking in the mirror provided by his corner.

  Even the gym’s greenest novices, to the extent they absorbed and reflected back Holmesian principles, could help the master prepare himself. Once, at the end of an afternoon training session, as the last fighters packed up and left, Russell found himself standing next to Holmes, who turned to him and said, “How’s my jab look to you? Still strong? I still got it?” The short answer was Yes. The long answer was Yes, your form is still perfect and it’s still an all-time great jab, but you don’t throw it with the speed you once had, and you throw it many fewer times per round than you used to, and sometimes you don’t react in time to an opportunity to throw it. Russell gave him the short answer.