Protect Yourself at All Times

by Hauser, Thomas

  In an introduction to The Bittersweet Science, Rotella and Ezra write, “The more you know about boxing, the more you discover that you never truly know what’s going on. No matter how many layers of meaning you peel away, there will always be others beneath them.”

  In that regard, the essays go beyond what the editors call “the usual sports-page concern with winners, losers, and athletic drama.” They cover a wide swath of boxing territory, from the opinionated Charles Farrell writing unapologetically about fixing fights to Brin-Jonathan Butler’s in-depth exploration of Roy Jones Jr’s psyche. There are dramatic accounts of ring action at the professional and amateur levels and a look at long-ago ring history.

  The book also serves the purpose of introducing boxing fans to some good writers they might not know. One of these scribes is Rafael Garcia.

  “The truth is,” Garcia writes, “there’s no purity in boxing. Not all we see is real, and we’ll never see it all.”

  “Seen from a distance,” Garcia continues “boxing is a deceptively simple spectacle: two men beating on each other until cunning, physical prowess, or a combination thereof produces a winner. Many who watch boxing never move past their romantic notion of the sport, constantly framing what they see in terms of concepts such as courage, valor, honor, and pride. Yet these same notions are hammered into irrelevance by forces significantly more pressing to the fighters and the suits promoting and managing them; namely money, power, and influence.”

  Viewing boxing through the prism of the first fight between Miguel Cotto and Antonio Margarito, Garcia observes, “You can’t just jump to the end of a fight and skip everything that happens in between. To do that would be to miss everything that makes boxing boxing. More than in any other sport, how and why one fighter wins and the other loses is of the utmost importance and can have massive consequences for each one’s future.”

  Garcia’s description of round seven of Margarito’s now-tarnished victory over Cotto is particularly good writing:

  It was either brutal or thrilling to watch, depending on whom you were rooting for or what side of your brain was calling the shots. It was at this moment that what had been billed as a fight became a rite as there was little question from that point on as to who was the stronger fighter causing the damage and who was the one getting hurt. Cotto kept fighting, of course, after the turn of the tide in round seven. But for the rest of the night, Margarito’s most significant enemy was no longer Miguel Cotto but the timekeeper. The contest was decided in that brutal round. As Margarito walked back to his corner at the end of the seventh, his face and torso and back splattered with Cotto’s fresh blood, he nodded to the fans celebrating at ringside. It was clear that thereafter all Margarito had to do was keep hacking and chopping away at Cotto, keep grinding him down and keep hammering him with those heavy fists until Cotto couldn’t take it anymore. Then, at some point, Cotto would stop fighting and that would be it. That’s exactly the path the contest took. Cotto went from sharpshooter to prey, just as Margarito went from lumbering target to heartless hitman.

  Garcia then asks the question, “What does it say about us that we’re willing participants—and paying customers—in this sort of blood spectacle in which someone as hurt and helpless as Cotto was for a large part of the contest had to endure so much physical punishment from a man who was obviously going to defeat him that night. The question is not novel in any way, but that doesn’t take away from its sting. Fans of boxing have tried to deal with it for a long time, and all of us who enjoy the sport have learned that a corollary of our love for it is that we have to make peace with more than a few ugly truths.”

  Finally, Garcia notes, “There are times when boxing matches resemble more a bullfight than they do a sports contest, when only a deus ex machina will do in changing the outcome. Bullfights are all about the journey and not the destination. The inevitable outcome is that of a bull lying dead even though there are many ways to arrive at that outcome.”

  Charles Farrell, a former fight manager, also sees boxing as a hard sport.

  In “Why I Fixed Fights,” Farrell begins with the premise that “no sport is romanticized more than boxing.” But the truth of the matter as he sees it is, “Boxers are born poor and they usually die poor. For their short spell in the business, they inhabit a place in its professional hierarchy that all but guarantees they’ll remain poor even during their active careers.”

  Getting to the heart of his subject, Farrell writes, “Why did I fix fights? I fixed fights because it was the smart thing to do.” He then recounts setting up a fight for Leon Spinks in the dying years of Neon Leon’s ring career against a novice named John Carlo, who was making his pro debut. Farrell engaged in all manner of chicanery, including the creation of a fictitious 13-and-2 record for Carlo. But he ruefully acknowledges, “I failed to take the one step needed to guarantee the result. I didn’t fix the fight.”

  Carlo knocked Spinks out in the first round.

  “In the real world,” Farrell concludes, “boxers and their managers prearranging the outcome of fights, working collusively against a hostile system, makes sense. Fixing fights, even at the expense of the public, isn’t just good business. It’s a survival strategy for the disenfranchised class in boxing: the fighters themselves.”

  Sam Sheridan, another largely unknown voice, weighs in with an essay entitled “What Boxing Is For.” Among the thoughts Sheridan shares are:

  • “Not all men are created equal in boxing, and we know it.”

  • “Professional boxing is about money. If it’s about anything else, you probably shouldn’t be doing it.”

  • “Fighting is a little like losing your virginity. Before you do it, there is a lot of speculation, a lot of anxiety, some wild flights of imagination. Then you start doing it and you find, ’Oh, this is fighting. I’m still me.’ You aren’t transformed into something else. It’s not some dark door you pass through. The world is still the world.”

  • “[Watching a fight] has to be live. Tape it and watch it later, and it’s like reading about a fine wine versus drinking it. It has to be happening in the moment. We’re all discovering it together, the tick of seconds, the real-time surge of real wonder in the crowd.”

  A sampling of other worthwhile thoughts in The Bittersweet Science include:

  • Gordon Marino: “It’s as though the crowd gets its red badge of courage with the fighter’s blood.”

  • Donovan Craig: “Usually a street fight is over so quickly that you don’t have time to appreciate it. In a boxing match, you have time to appreciate what’s going on.”

  • Brin-Jonathan Butler: “If you’re looking for happy endings for your heroes, boxing remains one of the worst places in America to look.”

  The Bittersweet Science is a good book.

  The Leather Pushers

  H. C. Witwer viewed the boxing world with a jaundiced eye. Many of its denizens, he wrote, were “shy the intelligence to be a first-class crook.”

  Eight years ago, my good friend Dave Wolf died. Dave was known to boxing fans as the manager of Ray Mancini and Donny Lalonde. Basketball fans knew him as the author of Foul: The Connie Hawkins Story, one of the best books ever written about the city game. Soon after Dave’s death, his daughter and brother invited me to his apartment and told me to take as many books about boxing from Dave’s collection as I’d like. Otherwise, they’d be sold for pennies on the dollar to The Strand.

  Many of the rooms in my apartment are lined with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. I have 4,500 books arranged by subject matter and author. Almost five hundred of them are about boxing. I took forty or so of Dave’s books and added them to my collection. Since then, I’ve read some for pleasure and others for reference purposes. Recently, I took Dave’s copy of The Leather Pushers by H. C. Witwer off the shelf.

  Witwer was born in 1890 and died of liver failure at the much-too-young age of thirty-nine. He wrote novels, short stories, and film shorts. The Leather Pushers was published i
n 1920. Putting that date in perspective, Jack Dempsey had been heavyweight champion of the world for one year. Joe Louis was six years old. Rocky Marciano had yet to be born.

  Dave told me once that The Leather Pushers was among his favorite books when he was a teenager. Reading it, I understood why. The story is told in the first person by an unnamed narrator, a likable rogue who manages a young heavyweight prospect named Kane Halliday a. k. a. Kid Roberts. It’s pulp fiction with a plot and ring action that are melodramatic to the point of being unbelievable. But Witwer had a wonderful way with words and conveyed the essence of boxing in a manner that encouraged the reader to suspend disbelief.

  The Leather Pushers loses some of its luster in the second half but is still an entertaining read. Boxing is referenced as “the manly art of aggravated assault.” After a hard first round, a fighter comes out of his corner for round two “as fresh as a daisy but not as good looking.” A conniving fight manager named Dummy Carney “could dive into a haystack and emerge with ten dollars worth of needles.”

  A boxer’s ring assault is likened to “a billion tons of coal going down a tin chute into an empty cellar.” A left to the pit of a fighter’s stomach doubles him up “like a match stick in its last glow.” A manager tells his fighter, “I don’t blame you for wanting to make money. There’s a certain time in our lives when all of us get that feeling, usually during the first seventy-five years.”

  Witwer’s narrator observes that boxing is “a game which packs more tricks than Houdini ever seen.” Talking about one of his fighters, he acknowledges, “Sending Bearcat Reed into a ring with this rough Loughlin person was like entering an armless wonder in a bowling tourney. If Loughlin was trying, my battler wouldn’t have a chance if they let him climb through the ropes with an ax in each hand. But for a guarantee of a thousand fish, I would let Bearcat Reed box five starving lions and a couple of irritated wildcats in the middle of the jungle.”

  He also notes, “The nearest I ever been to college was the time I went up to New Haven to go behind Young Evans when he fought K. O. Hines. I passed Yale on the way to the clubhouse.”

  Recounting a walk down the aisle to the ring for a fight, Witwer’s narrator recalls, “They had a rule against smoking; and the smoke on that trip to the battleground was so thick, we got all the sensations of a fireman. The yell which went up from them lunatics all around us was one continuous roar in which it was impossible to pick out any words. Nothing but plain sound, that’s all. This here demonstration wasn’t [for either fighter]. It was caused by the same thing which makes lions in the zoo bellow when the keepers start in with the meat.”

  And there are grim moments: “McCabe fell with a crash, his face hitting first. He was still there at ‘ten.’ He was still there half an hour later when the crowd had milled out of the clubhouse. He was still there two hours after that when another kind of boxer—the undertaker—come to take him and his broken neck away. It was an unfortunate accident, pure and simple. The same kind of an accident as sunrise is.”

  And there are thoughts that are as true today as when Witwer wrote them a century ago:

  • “Oughta be able and can do is different in boxing.”

  • “It’s a real treat to watch the master ring artist at work. He can do with a pair of four-ounce gloves what the average guy might accomplish with a baseball bat and an ax.”

  • “Ring records all the way down from the time Battlin’ David knocked out One Round Goliath is studded with the names of gluttons for punishment. Their favorite punch is delivered with some part of their battered face to the point of the other guy’s glove, and they seldom if ever miss. They’ll always be in demand because the difference between the modern prize-fight fan and the cuckoos which used to sit around Nero and holler for the gladiators to quit stalling and knife each other has stopped at the matter of dress.”

  • “No matter how nifty he is with his hands, a fighter without absolute confidence in his ability to weather whatever unexpected hurricane of smashing wallops he may run into is a fighter with no good reason for remaining in a tough game. The faint-hearted bird is no good when he’s hurt. The real fighter is no good till he’s hurt. The clever but weak-spirited boxer is usually a world beater among the tramps and a tramp among the world beaters. But confidence is a heady drink. Too much is as dangerous to success as too little. You want to dilute it a bit with a little respect for the other guy’s chances. Allow leeway for the unreckoned break, the bolt from the blue, the chance that you might slip on the banana peel Fate or be flattened by the thunderbolt Chance.”

  • “There’s probably no other competition in the world, sporting or otherwise, which draws a human gathering as miscellaneous and interesting as a prize-fight crowd. While waiting for the gladiators to enter the bull pen the next time you go to a mill, sit back and look around at the customers. You’ll find every trade, art, gift, science, business, profession, sex, and color represented. Bankers and bricklayers, doctors and dock hands, millionaires and mechanics, accountants and actors, jostle, kid, and argue each other purple in the face over the merits of their respective favorites.”

  • “Pan the fight game all you want. Call it brutal, disgusting, crooked, sordid, anything you please. But don’t say you can’t get a kick out of it.”

  As a writer, I love the idea that, a hundred years from now, someone might come across a book I wrote and spend a day with it. If they do, I hope they enjoy it.

  Meanwhile, thank you, H. C. Witwer; and thank you, Dave.

  Literary Notes

  More on boxing’s literary tradition.

  Arthur Conan Doyle is known throughout the world as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, the most famous detective of all time. Less known is the fact that Doyle, a doctor by trade, was a boxing enthusiast.

  Holmes first appeared in print in 1887, when Doyle was twenty-eight years old. A decade later, Doyle authored a fifteen-thousand-word novella entitled The Croxley Master: A Great Tale of the Prize Ring.

  The Croxley Master tells the story of Robert Montgomery, a young medical student with a background in amateur boxing, who enters the prize ring out of desperation to compete for a 100-pound purse that he needs to finance the final year of his medical education. Montgomery’s opponent is a miner from the Croxley pit and a seasoned veteran of ring wars known as The Master of Croxley.

  Doyle describes Montgomery’s first sighting of his opponent on the day of the fight as follows:

  The prize-fighter had come out from his curtain, a squat formidable figure, monstrous in chest and arms, limping slightly on his distorted leg. His skin had none of the freshness and clearness of Montgomery’s, but was dusky and mottled with one huge mole amid the mat of tangled black hair which thatched his mighty breast. His huge shoulders and great arms with brown sledge-hammer fists would have fitted the heaviest man that ever threw his cap into a ring. But his loins and legs were slight in proportion. Montgomery, on the other hand, was as symmetrical as a Greek statue. It would be an encounter between a man who was specially fitted for one sport and one who was equally capable of any.

  The fight, scheduled for twenty three-minute rounds, is dramatically told.

  Doyle’s hero fights through adversity of the worst kind:

  “Montgomery,” the narrative reads, “sprang wildly forward and, the next instant, was lying half senseless with his neck nearly broken. The whole round had been a long conspiracy to tempt him within reach of one of those terrible right-hand uppercuts for which the Master was famous. When Montgomery sprang in so hotly, he had exposed himself to such a blow as neither flesh nor blood could stand. Whizzing up from below with a rigid arm which put the Master’s eleven stone into its force, it struck him under the jaw. He whirled half round and fell, a helpless and half-paralyzed mass. A vague groan and murmur, too excited for words, rose from the great audience. With open mouths and staring eyes, they gazed at the twitching and quivering figure. The timekeeper called the seconds. If ten of them passed before Montgo
mery rose to his feet, the fight was ended. As if in a dream—a terrible nightmare—the student could hear the voice of the timekeeper. ‘Three-four-five.’ He got up on his hand. ‘Six-seven.’ He was on his knee, sick, swimming, faint, but resolute to rise. ‘Eight.’ He was up, and the Master was on him like a tiger, lashing savagely at him with both hands.”

  But Montgomery rallies to turn the tide.

  “It was a magnificent blow, straight, clean, crisp, with the force of the loins and the back behind it. And it landed where he had meant it to—upon the exact point of that blue-grained chin. Flesh and blood could not stand such a blow in such a place. Neither valour nor hardihood can save the man to whom it comes. The Master fell backwards, flat, prostrate, striking the ground with so simultaneous a clap that it was like a shutter falling from a wall. A yell broke from the crowded benches as the giant went down. He lay upon his back, his knees a little drawn up, his huge chest panting. He twitched and shook, but could not move. His feet pawed convulsively once or twice. It was no use. He was done. ‘Eight—nine—ten!’ said the timekeeper. And the roar of a thousand voices with a deafening clap like the broadside of a ship told that the Master of Croxley was the Master no more. Montgomery stood half dazed, looking down at the huge, prostrate figure. He could hardly realize that it was indeed all over.”

  Doyle wrote those words more than a century ago. As I read them recently, I was struck by the fact that they could have been written about a boxing match contested today. That shows how little the essence of boxing has changed over the ages.