Fighter's Heart, A

by Sheridan, Sam

  We began to move through the short form, and Master Chen was a pleasure to watch move. The form was a set of movements, fifty-some steps in all (there are many variations; some short forms are thirty or forty steps). There was a palpable tension about his body, an elegance of movement born of unimaginable repetition and study. He had been practicing tai chi for more than fifty years; how many hundreds of thousands of times had he been through this form, one that he himself designed?

  That first day, I took his short book home to read: “During actual fighting, a master of Tai Chi Chuan could make his body soft as cotton, but at the instant of delivering a punch, suddenly become as hard as steel. One moment he was motionless as a mountain, the next as swift as ocean tides.” Sounded good to me.

  What became clear over the next month of studying with Master Chen was that he was an antimystic. He laughed about the farfetched claims of some tai chi masters, about moving people without touching them, throwing them over rivers. “I never seen it, maybe it’s true,” he would say, smiling and laughing in his passable English. He wasn’t debunking anything; he was just sticking to what he had seen and felt himself.

  He was also a minor celebrity in the martial arts world; he’d been on the cover of Kung-Fu magazine, he’d taken a Chuck Norris punch to the stomach to show “how to take the shots.” I realized that Robert Smith had studied and written a book with Master Chen’s teacher, Cheng Man-ch’ing. With Chen, I was studying with a piece of history, a direct descendant of great tradition. And all he wanted to talk about was fighting.

  His two children, Max and Tiffany (both in their twenties), were rising stars in the san shou world. San shou is an emerging Chinese kickboxing style, similar to muay Thai, except that it allows takedowns, but no ground fighting after the takedown. Master Chen was often the tai chi representative at martial arts seminars, and he traveled nearly every weekend, around the country and throughout the world.

  Seminars are a big part of the martial arts business; they are traveling classes, put on by famous masters and fighters. For three hundred dollars you might get two classes with a well-known master, four hours each. Everyone does them, from the guys at Top Team (that’s why Murilo was traveling to Europe all the time) to tai chi and ninjutsu fighters. They are a way for professional martial artists to support themselves.

  Seminars offer a valuable opportunity to see and learn from great fighters and martial artists, and Tony Fryklund, my friend from Pat’s place, had essentially educated himself in MMA in his twenties by chasing seminars. “I was a seminar rat,” he told me, meaning he would drive from Boston to New York or Maryland or wherever for a two- or three-day seminar by a fighter or instructor he wanted to learn from, and then come home and train on his own.

  The seminar business is also full of hacks, martial artists who make money on gullibility and the myths that surround the field. Tony had a great story about a seminar he went to where the instructor was demonstrating a nerve strike. There they were, in a room of thirty people, and the guy called up a volunteer. The instructor talked about how he was going to hit the nerve in the neck and it would instantly KO his man. Then he had the volunteer stand next to him and cock his head away so that his neck was exposed and he couldn’t see what was coming. The instructor hit the volunteer with a “nerve strike” with his thumb, full force to the side of the neck, and the man collapsed. Everyone applauded, but Tony was incensed. “Dude, the guy’s just standing there and you blast him? Of course he’s going down. You stand there and let me blast you with a hook and we’ll see what happens.” Tony was eventually kicked out of the seminar.

  I quickly learned the short form and tried to focus on the precepts that Master Chen talked about extensively in every class.

  Tai chi, like all martial arts, is an organic fighting process that is shaped by the temperament and experiences of the teacher. Master Chen had been a fighter in mainland China and Taiwan and had been training and thinking about fighting for fifty years. It showed; he had evolved several concepts into deep insights about how he saw striking.

  Master Chen was all about body mechanics, the tiniest details in throwing a punch, the generation of power—what chi really is. In this context, tai chi’s slowness suddenly made sense. People sometimes make fun of tai chi for its slowness: “That can’t be a fighting art.” But of course it is, and when you start to think about perfecting your mechanics, you need to move slower and slower, to really break down what your body is doing.

  Master Chen’s tai chi short form was all about “going to sleep” and “waking up”—he would keep harping on that. The body goes to sleep on the exhale and wakes up on the inhale, a coiling and uncoiling of the body around the hips; once again he was talking about generating power.

  He spoke often about the “three nails,” an important concept of his—in the big toe, on the ball of the foot, and on the inside edge of the heel. They are the places that your foot is rooted to the ground. It is as if your energy could drive nails into the floor to hold you; they are the basis from which you generate power.

  Master Chen said, “When I start doing tai chi, I realize that power isn’t in arms, it comes from the hips. And then, I start to think maybe ten years later and I realize it is coming from the legs. And then, after twenty years, I saw that it was actually coming from the toe.” He reiterated this point continually: that you must feel power coming off the toe; driving energy down through your toes is what is sometimes referred to as “rooting,” and it is what drives all your movements. F. X. Toole tells the story of a trainer who “taught her how to stay on the balls of her feet, how to generate momentum off her right toe; how to keep her weight over her left knee”—all things that could have been lifted from Master Chen’s class.

  What endeared Master Chen to me was his constant talk of fighters. He always used the reference of a fighter to illustrate his points, and when I told him I was a sometime fighter, he was delighted—I wasn’t just there for the health benefits. I could understand a lot more of what he was talking about than most of the Manhattanites.

  The common conception of throwing a punch is that the arm should be loose for speed but the hands strong in a fist. Master Chen described it as “hollow arms,” meaning that the arms are empty except for the energy that activates them, and the hand should be open, curling into a fist as it hits. His hands were always in the shape of hands inside boxing gloves—never fists, the gloves won’t allow it. You strike with two knuckles; Chen quoted Jack Dempsey about hitting with just those top two knuckles. In his book, Chen had detailed diagrams of bullets, showing how more powder and cartridge width increased velocity. He talked about generating speed from pressure changes and generating power from speed in a speech that made me think of Virgil Hunter. Chen was practical to the tips of his fingers. In the short form, one’s movements should be led by the fingers (activated off the toe), and punches were the same. It’s all about velocity, sinking down and rising—not up, but into a shape. And as all hard artists, like boxers and karate disciples, should study tai chi, so should tai chi practitioners study the hard arts, so that both supplement yang with yin.

  Chen’s most interesting concept was that of compression. He had this argument with many martial artists. When you’re learning about strikes, you’re taught to exhale on the strike. But it’s not just exhalation; it’s also compression. When a boxer hisses as he punches it’s a form of compression. This is one of those obvious, head-slapping truths: An exhalation, an open-mouthed “whoo” of air, has no power. But when you control the air, when the karate guy shouts “Kiai” as he punches, that compression is what generates force. It’s like a grunt when you pick up something heavy; you have to make an internal compression to generate power. Boxers hiss or grunt; the Thais yell.

  “They say tai chi is about ‘relax,’ but really they mean ‘relax with compression.’ When you lying in bed, you are relaxed, but little compression. It’s like a sick person in the hospital; they are walking around like a skeleton
.” Chen would demonstrate walking without compression, a perfect facsimile of a very old sick man, frail, scarcely moving. It was great because it wasn’t acting; he was demonstrating a different way of being.

  Chen continued, “When they say a boxer is ‘out of gas,’ they not mean tired, they mean cannot make compression,” and I thought about my fight. He was dead right. It wasn’t that radical an idea, but I had never heard it before.

  “When you walk around with compression, you are thinking: How cool I am. The compression is filling you up.”

  Master Chen had an open-minded approach to his art, which gave him great strength. He was always thinking about it and refining ideas. I was extremely lucky to have walked into his studio. For him, tai chi wasn’t about doing tai chi every day, running through the form (although that had to be done). You couldn’t just run through the form blindly every day and think that in ten years you would get all the health benefits, become spiritual. It’s work. Every time you went through it, it had to be done as close to perfect as possible. He tried to do tai chi as it was intended to be done, not necessarily as he had been taught it, or others had shown him.

  He had other ideas he was working on, concepts he’d been pondering for the past five or ten years. Ideas about the hydraulics inside the body, ideas about why tai chi was good in the context of Western medicine—the internal organs are suspended and massaged, and circulation is vastly improved. His latest thoughts were about a punch: The impact is absorbed by the muscles; that is all the muscles are there for. Certainly, boxers have shown that big muscles don’t equal heavy punches, although overall weight is a good indicator.

  Chen said that great boxers learn to do all this naturally. I noticed right away that some of the postures in the short form looked very much like old-school boxing pictures of Joe Louis, coiled in on himself. I remembered Pat Miletich pointing to a picture he had on the wall of the gym and saying, “You see that picture? All the old-time boxers would pose that way, coiled up for an uppercut, because if you posed that way, it showed you knew what you were doing, you had been educated in the science.”

  Chen taught the short and long forms, and his attitude was that students should learn the short form all the way through, and then perfect it—instead of trying to get every posture perfect before moving on to the next. That way, you could start to derive the benefits of the form more quickly. Everything came from the short form; everything could be learned by learning the short form, although Chen laughed and said, “For fighting, you have to hit the bag and lift the weights, too.”

  When I talked to Master Chen’s son, Max, who was preparing for the Golden Gloves, he said he just used the short form as a type of relaxation, of moving meditation. I was reminded of the ram muay and wai khru, the traditional, slow-moving dances that we had done before muay Thai fights. These had been moments of relaxation and could be considered moving meditation. But Max and his sister,Tiffany, didn’t think that tai chi had given them a big advantage in boxing or san shou; they thought it was just “good for you.” Master Chen said his own children didn’t have the maturity to understand what he was talking about, but they would learn it. They were pretty good, tough kids, although I never got a chance to work with them. Tiffany loved boxing and was training at Gleason’s, the most storied boxing gym in the world, while Max was more interested in the san shou and, someday, K-1.

  On some nights, there was “form application,” applying the moves of the short form to actual self-defense and fighting, and on those nights Master Chen had everybody put on boxing gloves and punch the wall, again focusing on mechanics, on slamming and retraction.

  He did hit hard as hell, I have to admit. His hips and body coiled and uncoiled, and he had a kind of snarling yell, shockingly loud, as he punched the wall. It was all about mechanics, pivoting, winding up, punching through, and impact. I almost never got it quite right, but he smiled and laughed and showed everyone again the differences. They were subtle, but they existed, and they allowed the seventy-year-old man who weighed about 140 pounds to hit the wall like a much heavier person. The fingers activating, the toe, the compression, the sinking and exploding, all the myriad details flowed together.

  In the end, the sum is greater than the whole. Tai chi is about the generation of power, hitting terribly hard and moving smoothly and uncoiling perfectly. But there is something more, something greater.

  Master Chen had been a student of Cheng Man-ch’ing’s, a man Robert Smith called the “Master of the Five Excellences” and one of the most legendary tai chi practitioners in history. According to Smith, Cheng had been dying of tuberculosis when he met Yang Cheng-fu, the greatest tai chi practitioner in the world. Tai chi reversed the tuberculosis and completely healed him. It’s not quite levitation, but I wouldn’t turn it down.

  I was with Chen for only a few months, just long enough to learn the short form and get a sense of what it was about, but on the last day I had a minor breakthrough.

  Master Chen was always repeating things, telling the same stories over and over, not because he was forgetful but because you needed to keep hearing them. You might have understood what he was saying, but you didn’t quite get it. And then, one day, suddenly something would slot into place and you would understand what he had been talking about all that time.

  Tai chi has an entire vocabulary in Chinese about varying forms of energy and tantien, the place below the belly where chi builds up. Master Chen almost never used those words, as they smacked of mysticism to him, and he avoided that. Instead, he would use the analogy of tires inflating with air.

  On my last day, there were only a few people in class, and we were refining the form. Master Chen kept talking about shrinking and growing, sagging and waking up, and a certain tenseness in the tantien. Suddenly, I started waking up with the inhalation in my lower stomach; it would fill and tense, and a concept that had been eluding me fell into place. I could feel my tantien.

  Master Chen smiled and shook my hand and I thanked him, and he said, “I think you have enough to work on your own now. It will help you.”

  5

  A COLD GAME

  Virgil Hunter and Andre Ward, Oakland, March 2005.

  Kings Gym, Oakland

  It takes constant effort to keep the slippery, naked, near-formless fact of hitting swaddled in layers of sense and form. Because hitting wants to shake off all encumbering import and just be hitting, because boxing incompletely frames elemental chaos, the capacity of the fights to mean is rivaled by their incapacity to mean anything at all.

  —Carlo Rotella, Cut Time

  I drove cross-country to Oakland in the spring. I was going to see Virgil Hunter and Andre Ward. Andre had won a gold medal at the Olympics in Athens and was 3–0 as a pro.

  My shoulder was feeling better. The endless pulling on rubber bands seemed to have had some effect. I had talked Virgil into taking me on as a student. “Just imagine I’m a cruiserweight prospect,” I said to him. He laughed. Virgil would never be able to pretend I was anything other than what I was. It’s part of what made him a great trainer. I told him I wanted an amateur fight—having a fight focuses the training and clarifies the mind; it gives you a sense of urgency that helps you learn. I wanted a different kind of relationship with a teacher, more than I’d had in Rio or even Iowa. I wanted the one-on-one attention. If I was going to fight bare-fisted in Myanmar or MMA again anywhere, I better do it right. If my true love was hitting and getting hit, I figured I should have the best instruction available, at least for a while. And I was fascinated by Andre’s story, the life of a red-hot young prospect with all the advantages, being groomed for greatness. Finally, I thought it would be good for my understanding to take a look into the big-time world of professional boxing, from the inside.

  The amount of literary material on boxing is staggering. World-class writers have fallen in love with “the sweet science,” from Hemingway and Mailer to Joyce Carol Oates; far, far better writers than I have addressed the issue. In
general, they fall into all kinds of hyperbole, all kinds of difficult and complicated constructions and emphatic descriptions, in attempts to describe the visceral. Boxing writing often veers from the sublime to the ridiculous.

  So I was going to get some one-on-one attention with a world-class trainer and fight an amateur fight. It almost seemed a step backward, to fight an amateur fight at this point (four two-minute rounds, headgear—are you kidding me?), but the fight was just an excuse to train hard. And I wanted to see Andre in depth, close up. People didn’t realize that although Andre had won gold at light-heavyweight, 175 pounds, he’d fought most of those fights weighing under 170 pounds. He beat a European champion and a huge (six-five) Russian world champion and gave up seven pounds. The critics were sniping at him for turning pro at middleweight (“Didn’t he have the power for light-heavy?”), or 160—but he had never been a proper light-heavyweight.

  I arrived in Oakland without a place to stay, and through a friend of a friend ended up crashing on the floor of an unfurnished apartment in East Oakland. The neighborhood was bad, in the process of gentrifying but not there yet. Rough open streets, old factories, and rundown buildings: the West Coast urban wasteland.

  The next morning I was up to meet Virgil in the pearly gray dawn, and as I headed toward my car, I could see a rat’s nest of papers and litter on the front seat. I walked slowly around the car in the warm morning light, with the ocean coloring the sky. One of the rear triangular windows had been neatly mashed in—the rock that had been used as a tool was still by the rear tire—all the doors had been unlocked, and the trunk had been popped. For some reason, I had thought things would be safe in the trunk. Of course, the trunk only keeps things safe from prying eyes; once you’re in the car, you just pop the trunk with that little latch on the floor. All my sparring and workout gear, plus a backpack filled with street clothes, was gone. Ah, well, at least I’d brought my camera and laptop inside. Who needs street clothes anyway?