Fighter's Heart, A

by Sheridan, Sam

  The first round is pretty good, both guys swinging and hitting, and Nick surprising everyone with his boxing and stand-up fighting. Before this, he had been known as a submission specialist who would be better off if the fight went to the ground. He pursues Robbie with confidence and even starts talking shit, taunting. Robbie looks furious, and they both seem to hurt each other some. It’s not decisive, but I would have given the first round to Robbie.

  Just seconds into the next round, the unthinkable: Robbie swings and misses and Nick, with his slight reach advantage, throws a light, crisp hook that catches Robbie right behind the ear, and Robbie is out. He goes down like a poleaxed steer, his body stiffening in the air, out on his feet. The ref leaps in and Robbie tries to get up and stumbles back against the cage and goes drunkenly down again. The crowd erupts and Nick can scarcely believe it. He’s KO’d Robbie Lawler, the guy who was going to kill him.

  One of the big things that separates MMA from boxing is there is no standing eight count or ten count. In MMA, if you cannot “intelligently defend” yourself—if you are stunned or badly shaken, even for a few seconds—the referee will stop the fight.

  Robbie begins to recover and realizes what has happened, and his face is agonized. He can’t believe it, his emotion is running riot all over him. The fight is over. I can see him silently screaming at himself, at the world, tearing around the cage, which is filling with people.

  I got up, annoying the real journalists again, and beat Robbie backstage. He was desperately unhappy. He yelled “Fuck” a few times but was already subsiding when Matt, the six-time UFC champion, said to him, in a quiet, controlled voice, “Listen, we all lose. Pat’s lost, Jeremy’s lost, I’ve lost twice to the same guy, once in seventeen seconds,” and Robbie seemed to hear him. Pat finished it with, “Now we move on. It’s water under the bridge now.” Robbie’s eyes were dark and wounded, his distress all over him, but I could see him gathering strength from his teammates.

  I went back out toward the ring and watched the rest of the fights. There were some good ones, especially Chris Lytle dominating Tiki Ghosn through the force of his will. The main event was a much hyped bout between Tito Ortiz and Chuck Liddell (light heavyweights at 205), and Chuck, the underdog, won by KO in the second round, which delighted the crowd. There was a tremendous amount of tension during the first round as they both felt each other out, but in the second round, you could see Chuck suddenly realize, “Hey, I can hit this guy,” and he relaxed his shoulders a fraction and started letting his hands go and pretty soon he knocked Tito out.

  There was a lot of postfight discussion and analysis from the journalists, but it sounded a little false and tinny to me. I felt slightly superior to them; at least I tried to do this stuff, as opposed to just watching. I waited to talk to Pat and Tony and Tim to venture my opinions. “Tito’s always been a little scared to stand up with Chuck, but he did, and I give him credit for it,” said Tony. He thought that the UFC protected its special fighters, like Tito, too much for his liking. Even though he lost, Tito made more than twice what Chuck made for that fight. “Tito’s chin,” he said with finality, “is suspect.”

  It was raining hard the next morning; one of the three days it rains all year in Vegas. Pat and I were flying out together, and Pat said to me in the cab over the squeak of the wipers, “Every time I come here it takes a year off my life. I hate going through all this and then having one of my boys get knocked out.”

  I asked what he was going to work on with Robbie, and he smiled.

  “He’s got to keep his hands up. He’s learned he’s not invincible; it happens to every fighter at some point in their career. They run into somebody they can’t steamroll through, they take a shot that hurts them. Robbie got caught—it happens to everybody. He’s got to keep his hands up.”

  Pretty simple.

  * * *

  Another editor from Men’s Journal had been developing a piece for the 2004 summer Olympics in Athens, a sort of “workout” piece involving three different Olympic athletes: a swimmer, a decathlete, and a boxer. He wanted me to work out with one of them, and no, it wasn’t the swimmer.

  So I flew out of the Moline, Illinois, airport (one of the world’s great airports; you just park and walk, like going to the mall) to San Francisco and drove across the filigree of bridges into Oakland. I was there to cover Andre Ward, one of the U.S. Boxing Team captains, a much hyped “speed merchant” who was blitzing his way through tournaments without getting a single point scored on him. He was going four rounds with other top amateurs and they weren’t hitting him once.

  A twenty-year-old amateur light-heavyweight (178 pounds), Ward hadn’t lost a fight since 1997. A rattlesnake strikes at eight feet per second; a decent pro boxer throws a jab at eighty feet per second. I didn’t bring a radar gun, but I can tell you that Andre was fast. While some of his speed was natural, some of it had to do with his trainer, and godfather, Virgil Hunter, who had been with him since he was nine years old. Andre had lived with Virgil in Oakland since his early teens.

  I met Virgil on a beautiful Oakland morning at a coffee shop by a park. At first glance he seemed young, in his thirties, but eventually he told me he was fifty.

  Virgil Hunter had been involved with boxing and training fighters since 1966, when he was taught the sweet science by his uncles in the kitchen. “I’d been training fighters for twenty-some years, but with Andre I decided to reassess the whole thing. I could develop him from the ground up, from the root to the fruit.” Virgil incorporated Pilates and Acceleration and tailored Andre’s workouts on a day-by-day basis. “It varies depending on what he needs,” said Virgil in his quiet drawl, resplendent in a Team USA Boxing jumpsuit. “What did Andre look like yesterday? What does he need to work on? There will always be shadowboxing and mirror work, but sometimes he’ll spar three rounds and go straight home, and other times he won’t spar at all. It depends on him, really.”

  Virgil’s watchful eye was Andre’s greatest asset. Virgil was calm and quiet and observant, and never haranguing. I rarely saw him give instruction to Andre at all; it seemed as if Andre could sense him watching and knew what he wanted. In two days, he muttered into Andre’s ear once, for a few seconds, or maybe twice; nonetheless, he was always watching, a reassuring presence. “Sometimes as a trainer you won’t say anything for days, just watch, just so you can be sure you’ve seen something. You [the fighter] are lying in bed at night, thinking about what kind of fighter you want to be, and you begin to apply it, without discussion, in training. You show me what you can do and I see it, you teach me to teach you.” The feel of professionalism is so different here than in Iowa, a more weary, workman feel. These guys are in it for the money and because they were born into it. But they still love fighting—don’t get that wrong. Boxers may be a lot of things, but the good ones love to box.

  Virgil, a probation counselor in Alameda County, was also a juvenile hall counselor, and he remarked how it was always harder to restrain the smaller, more wiry, and slippery kids than the big kids with muscles. Virgil was not interested in free weights and big muscles, he was interested in speed and power and core stability. Power, the grail of boxing, comes from speed, not muscles.

  “In boxing, speed throws you—it makes you so vulnerable you lose your ability to fight. You need to stay lean to generate velocity, and I train Andre from the inside out. He’s powerful in his movements. You get a big muscular guy in there, you make him work, and all those muscles suck up the oxygen in his blood. You fight to keep him from doing what he wants to do, and then you are whupping his ass.” Virgil laughed softly.

  “In the later rounds, you let him try and do what he wants to do, but now you know what he’s trying and you’re fresh and you can destroy him—because he’s finally got you where he wants you, but now it’s better for you.”

  Andre’s training breathed this philosophy throughout. At the NovaCare rehab center in Castro Valley we did the Acceleration program, which was a lot of sprinting
on a frighteningly steep treadmill. Amateur boxing goes for four two-minute rounds, so it’s very quick and explosive; a two-minute round can go by in a heartbeat. Sprinting builds up that short-term endurance and, most important, quick recovery time, that oxygen-debt relief between rounds. Afterward we did some medicine ball throwing for core strength and explosiveness, and shoulder stability drills. We didn’t even look at free weights, although Andre has done them in the past to build strength.

  On alternate days there was Pilates in a clean, upscale gym on pretty wooden machines, again focusing on the core and shoulder strength and stability. Virgil discovered Pilates himself when he was rehabbing an injury, did some research, and found out that its creator had been a boxer. I was slightly skeptical, but Andre had been at it for eight weeks, and he said it had made a big difference in his strength and flexibility.

  After lunch and siesta (Andre swears by the afternoon nap, and I am a fervid supporter myself) we met again at King’s Boxing Gym, on Thirty-fifth Avenue in downtown Oakland. This was a real boxing gym, clean and well worn and crowded with fighters and bags, the walls covered with fight posters and pictures of boxers, the feel of old sweat and blood. It’s quite a contrast to the Pilates and Acceleration places. Old school. Real fighters eyed me in a way that is not hostile or even curious but just appraising.

  No one in the world is a better judge of a man than an experienced old boxing trainer; he can judge deep into a fighter’s flesh just by watching him move, watching him do a few things. Old fight trainers are like horse-racing trainers in their appraisal of flesh, teeth, and bone, with the added advantage of having been the horse, knowing the horse from the inside out.

  I felt vulnerable in front of those watchful eyes. My weaknesses were going to be exposed for all to see. Andre was stopped for handshakes and smiles and conversation. Virgil was going to take him out of here to Texas soon, away from all these distractions.

  I watched Andre shadowbox and there was an inkling of his capabilities; every now and again, in his relaxed shuffle, there was a jab that was faster than thought and crisper than a brand-new hundred-dollar bill. He was light and graceful, and his hands gently knifed the air, carving through hooks and uppercuts, effortless. His face was smooth and open and guileless, and he looked young; but when he spoke, he seemed mature, unflappable.

  I asked him if he’d ever been hurt in the ring.

  “Naaw, not really,” he said. “It’s been a couple of years since anybody’s landed a clean shot on me. My older brother and I used to get into wars during sparring, but he’s taking a few years off boxing right now. Nobody’s ever hit me as hard as he did.”

  Andre sparred a young welterweight before me, a kid who made it to the nationals in 2000 and now fights pro, and Andre handled him with an ease that could be called contemptuous if there was any contempt in him, which there wasn’t. To me, what shone were his feet and his explosive quickness, the springiness in his bouncing; his body was under the total control of his mind. If he wanted to bounce one way and then flash back the other, bobbing and weaving and then—bing-bing-bing—flashing through three long punches with his glowing white gloves, he did it, and so fast it was very hard to understand what had happened.

  Finally, it was my turn and I climbed through the ropes clumsily, no longer conscious of the other eyes in the gym. We began sparring and I was hesitant and awkward, and Virgil yelled, “Hold on a second. Sam, get over here.” He was laughing a little. I ran over to the corner.

  “Sam, would you hit him? He can protect himself. Now, hit him!” Virgil’s voice was high and amused. I nodded and turned around. For the next two rounds, I went after Andre and tried to tear his head off.

  It was instantly apparent how good he was, and how great the difference between us in skill and speed was. Andre zipped me twice and then basically stopped throwing punches; instead, he worked on his defense and his movement, and I went after him and missed by miles. I threw hooks that started off aimed at his head and ended up faltering in the air feet from where he was. I got him in the corner and threw a barrage, a dozen punches, and he blocked and bobbed and shifted and not one punch got through, and then he dipped and spun away. He didn’t punch me because if he had, I wouldn’t have been able to do anything. He jabbed me once or twice and I was hit before I saw him move. If he wanted to knock me out, he could have done it in seconds.

  I heard the guys in the gym yelling, “Let your hands go” (meaning start throwing more punches) at me and “Don’t let him hit you” to Andre. He blocked punches before I even threw them, checking me as I started to move, waiting patiently for my hands to get going.

  In all, I threw, I don’t know, maybe sixty punches and I caught him once, my pathetic little triumph, a glancing hook as he danced away. He threw three light jabs before he stopped punching entirely, and they all were on the money. My mouth guard had a little blood in it, nothing new there. He thanked me for the workout, and I thanked him for not murdering me.

  Both Andre and Virgil were really nice guys. You got the sense almost immediately that there’s no bullshit, no overt ego, just confidence and competence and a game plan for Andre’s career. They were looking far past the Olympics. Andre knew his style would work well in the pros, with more and longer rounds and less focus on points. He knew how dirty boxing could be; he’d had friends go pro with the wrong trainers, get thrown in with pro fighters with fifty fights and get beaten badly. Andre wanted to be out of boxing and rich by thirty—with his brain intact. He had a wife and two children, so I asked him if his wife worries about him, and he smiled. “She used to, but then she started watching me fight and she sees I don’t get hit much and now she doesn’t worry.”

  After sparring, Andre and I stood around the ring, covered in sweat but relaxed in the easy camaraderie of men who had just fought and now could be friendly again. We talked about the routine, and the dangers of boredom with training, and I said something silly and clichéd like “You gotta stay hungry.”

  Andre laughed. “Hungry? You gotta be starving, man.”

  I had an extra day, so I ate lunch with Virgil, and we walked around one of his old haunts in Oakland. He took a little interest in me as a fighter when I told him about what I was doing.

  “That’s just brawling, that stuff,” he said of the UFC, and he was right, to a point. The stand-up fighting is often brawling. He told me that if I spent a year working out in a boxing gym, I could be a bad-ass and make money as a sparring partner, which was very flattering, if unappealing. Life as a punching bag.

  Virgil was a “gunslinger,” something he doesn’t talk about much. He fought in unsanctioned bouts coming up because the money was often better. I started pestering him for advice. I asked him which school he belonged to, look at your man’s eyes or his body. Virgil is of the latter. “He ain’t going to hit you with his eyes,” he said with a chuckle. “In the ring, I can make you look at what I want you to look at.”

  He was very unhappy that I didn’t know anything about my opponent; that was just foolish. How can you prepare for something you don’t know? He told me to make a quick assessment of the opponent and to watch the enemy trainer. Is he calm? Is he talking to his fighter all the time, making him nervous? Does the trainer have no confidence in his man?

  “Truth in observation, that’ll win a fight,” he said.

  Back in Iowa, summer was on its way, and I had about a month of hard training left without interruptions. I started doing “the circuit,” an exercise routine Pat lifted from a women’s magazine, in which you do two exercises for each body part and then run hard for eight minutes (increasing the speed every two minutes), and you do this whole thing three times, before practice.

  I started to feel strong. I had friends. I played chess with Sam Hoger, the “Alaskan Assassin,” a twenty-two-year-old pro heavyweight, from Alaska by way of Panama and Germany. Sam was getting his MBA and was dead set on Harvard Law; luckily, I beat him at chess, because he could have surely kicked my ass. He w
ore flashy suits and was an environmental lobbyist as well as a student. He was a big, dusky, well-coiffed fellow, a little larger than life, jolly and loud and intelligent and calling out, “Hey, girl,” to nearly every girl we walked past in a friendly, nonaggressive way, half self-mocking and half curious. That was something Tony did, as well: “Hey, baby . . . Then, sotto voce: “Your name is Baby, isn’t it?”

  There was a little bit of Fight Club when hanging out with these guys. You’d walk into a restaurant with four or five muscular bald guys with black eyes and scarred eyebrows, and sometimes people got a little nervous. These guys had a lot of fun, and they did what they wanted. Sam was fond of quoting the film to me: “When you start fighting, the volume on everything else in your life just gets turned down.”

  Fighters have a lot of downtime. They train hard, but they still have to rest quite a bit to recover, and you can’t really train more than six or seven hours a day. Drinking will kill you, especially when you are trying to pyramid up to fighting shape, so either you go to bars and drink OJ and water, which Tony and Tim did, or you stay home.

  I remember in Thailand, when I had been gearing up for my fight, I took a weekend in Bangkok, just to get out of the camp after a few months, and I had three beers one night. Those three beers set me back about three weeks in my training (easily measured by the pad rounds). That’s the fine knife’s edge of fitness you walk; that’s what they mean by “fighting shape.” So for their downtime, fighters don’t drink and are often forced into cleaner pursuits like watching movies and surfing the Internet.

  It is slightly comical, all these fighters combing the Internet for references to themselves, and often feuds will start. Someone will say something in an online interview and someone else will respond, and suddenly everyone is enraged and calling one another out. It has a tinge of junior high school, parading gossip. No one is more sensitive to insult than “tough guys.”