I drove through the morning calm to Coffee with a Beat, the coffee shop that Virgil called his office, on the park next to Lake Merritt in downtown Oakland. The sun came up warm, but it was cold in the shade, and through the trees I could see the glimmer of the lake. I walked up and saw Virgil, looking the same, regal and smiling. We shook hands warmly; he seemed genuinely happy to see me. He was instantly recognizable, tall, broad-shouldered, and lean, with his head shaved bald and a black mustache, an Everlast ball cap, and sunglasses. He dressed in trainer chic, crisp athletic gear that was clean and sharp. When his sunglasses were off, you could see his eyes were intense, probing; he wore the glasses almost like a poker player does, to help him conceal his thoughts and where his eyes were, so you couldn’t read him.
We drank coffee and talked, moving one of the little outdoor tables into the sun. We caught up. I asked after Andre, and Virgil mentioned the cage-fighting article, which had been published in Men’s Journal with maximum gore. “I hate to see you like that,” he said lightly, and I laughed, because the editors had gone with pictures that made it look as bad as possible, despite my protestations and the photographer’s wishes. I told him the whole story, about the weight mix-up and everything.
He shook his head. “You aren’t fighting to take punishment,” he said. “A true fighter learns how to say no if the fight is unfair. You don’t have to fight; it’s not a million-dollar title shot on the line.”
He chuckled to himself quietly, mulling over his words. He looked at me through his sunglasses and said, smiling, “It’s prizefighting, not pride-fighting.”
We talked about what I wanted to accomplish, and what he was doing with Andre and Antonio Johnson, a fighter who had recently come to him. Antonio was another kid with a gigantic amateur background, and he could have made the Olympic team but didn’t make weight—a sign that his discipline was a mess.
We made plans to meet up later at King’s Boxing Gym, and as we stood up, Virgil said in his dry voice, “It’s all about figuring out who you are.” It’s something you hear again and again in boxing: Boxing is about knowing your identity. If you are a boxer, someone with skill and technical virtuosity but perhaps without power, then box; use your science, move and hit and defend. If you are a puncher, with power to hurt with just one punch, then get yourself in a position to let your hands go and punch. “Let your hands go” is the refrain everywhere for “Start throwing punches.” Your hands are trained to punch in combinations, just let them go and do what they want. Trainers and bystanders will implore fighters who seem oddly frozen, who could win the fight if they would only land a few combinations. Of course, everything is different for the man in the ring.
I drove back through Oakland, hot and dusty with those wide, hard-scrabble streets. East Oakland was a picture of neglect and emptiness—though here and there old warehouses were being turned into fancy apartments because it was an easy commute to San Francisco, just a few blocks from the Bay Bridge. The sun beat down through a perfect blue sky, and the ocean was a presence I could feel and know, but not see or hear.
I remembered King’s Boxing Gym from the last time I had been there, and it was essentially unchanged, sandwiched between the highway and the train tracks, between chop shops and massive concrete walls. A simple sign and a narrow metal door in an accordion garage door led the way inside.
King’s was long and dark, sweaty and well worn, cavernous. I noticed some changes—some new equipment and more college-looking kids, a tiny bit of upscale. There was a refrigerator with protein drinks for sale. The price of membership was still right, thirty bucks a month to work out, fifty with a trainer. There were more hacks, more white guys with running shoes, and maybe fewer professionals. But it was still a serious place, a pure boxing gym, and the walls were covered in posters and flyers for fights, history peeling and aging on the walls everywhere you looked.
It was good to see Andre again—he smiled and we shook hands with genuine good feeling. I instantly noticed the subtle differences that age, maturity, and the crucible of the Olympics had brought him—he was a man now, and he knew it. In the year and a half since I’d seen him, his eyes had acquired a layered wisdom. The gym had pictures of him and a huge banner congratulating him on his Olympics win, and I muttered to him with a smile, “So this is your gym now?” and he grinned back and replied, “Something like that.”
I met Antonio Johnson, a light-skinned black kid with a handsome, boyish face and a feathery mustache, almost Latino-looking. He had just turned pro at 140. He was as verbose as Andre was quiet, filling the air with a stream of street banter, discussing a fighter they knew on the TV show The Contender, a fighter Virgil had trained. “Babyface, he can crack a little bit though,” Antonio said with finality. “He can crack” means he can punch hard, something every boxer lusts after, knockout power in each hand.
Andre said, “If they had me on that show, they would have to do it without my family.” He was referring to the way the TV show always built up to the fights by having the fighter’s wife and kids in the dressing room for tearful good-byes and good lucks, a sort of relentless, smarmy tear-jerking. Andre kept his wife and kids at a distance when he was fighting; he actually left the house and “went to camp” at Virgil’s training house down the road weeks or months before the fight, to focus himself.
Andre had a fight coming up in just a few days, so I didn’t talk to him, as I didn’t want to mess with his focus. A critical element for a fighter is focus, something Virg started drumming into me on the first day. On the wall was a poster saying “The Three C’s for Fighters: Conditioning, Coachability, and Concentration.” More than any athletic ability, any natural speed or strength, those three C’s make real professional fighters.
Virg looked at me with pursed lips and said, “I need to see what I got. Why don’t you get up in the ring and shadowbox.” I went through the ropes, feeling on display, and shadowboxed fast for a round or two, trying to look good. Sidelined by my shoulder, I hadn’t really done anything since the Miletich camp, almost a year ago, and felt awkward and ungainly. But not too bad, I thought.
Virg stopped me after two rounds and climbed into the ring with me. “Now, real slow, I want you to step and jab, step across with a jab, then step back with a jab-right-jab,” and he demonstrated for me, elegant and tall and graceful, almost balletic. I frowned and concentrated and tried to block out the watchful gaze of Antonio and Andre. I danced like Virgil had just shown me. I was very aware of how tight I was, everything seized up and bunched. Step, step, step back with the left-right.
At the end of the round, Virgil came off the ropes and told me, “Sam, your concentration was terrible. Twenty-six times you did that, and every time you ended on a straight right. Now, if I know you are throwing the right and then just standing there, I’m going to make you throw it and then come back on top of it.”
“So never end on the right cross,” I said dumbly. They call it “posing,” or “taking a picture”—a fighter throws a punch and finishes frozen, contemplating the beauty of his last punch, there to be hit by a counterpunch. Keep moving, move your head and body after you punch.
“Come back with the jab, so that even if I’m countering, the jab is there to disrupt me. And jab as you move away.”
I quickly came to understand one of Virgil’s governing precepts, which is fight when it’s good for you. Don’t stand and fight when your opponent wants to. Move around—fight only when it’s better for you. Muhammad Ali’s first fight with Floyd Patterson is a perfect example. Ali just kept moving and moving and moving, and every now and again paused to hit Floyd, and then moved some more. Boxing critics hated him for it, the “cowardice” of it, but it was unbeatable. Floyd didn’t have an answer.
I felt like a fool in the ring doing these slow, basic beginner moves, after I had been shadowboxing fast and well (in my mind, anyway). There were maybe four or five other complete beginners in the gym, just like me, college kids in running shoes with iPods, fa
t girls, a tiny Asian girl.
But I got over the embarrassment. I moved beyond those feelings—if what Virgil wanted me to do was slow and basic and endlessly repetitive, I reasoned, then I’d do it. I knew who I was—I was a writer trying to learn something. Virgil had told me that he was going to give me a straight right and a straight left, and with those two punches you could beat almost anybody in the amateurs, until you started getting along—and by then you would know how to improvise a hook, an uppercut. To be fair, I was somewhat discouraged—all this time and now I had to go back to the two most basic punches? But it’s better to do a few things perfectly than a whole bunch of things badly in boxing. Championships have been won with great jabs. If I fought MMA again, having good straight punches would be a big help.
Afterward, as I was taking off my wraps, Virgil said, “Fundamentals, Sam, fundamentals. If you don’t have them, you will run into somebody else’s.”
The next day, I went back to King’s by myself, acutely self-conscious. Andre, Virg, and Antonio had all gone to Southern California to fight. I skipped rope for fifteen minutes, the bell dinging away like some kind of call to prayer. It divided the hours of the universe into three-minute rounds (with a green light) and one-minute rest periods (with red). For the last thirty seconds of the round, the light would go yellow and ding a certain tone, meaning “Hurry up, the round is almost done, the end is in sight, give it everything you’ve got now.” I read all the signs fading on the walls as I jumped, and jumping rope was about the only thing I could do competently. I shadowboxed in front of the mirror for three rounds and then wrapped up and hit the heavy bag. My first thought was Damn, that thing is hard, as my hands and heart shuddered at the impact. The bag seemed like concrete, and by the end of each round I could barely keep my hands up. My punches would not have bruised a fly. My shoulders burned, and my left was shockingly weak. I had always prided myself on a decent jab, but right now it wasn’t anything more than a love tap to the bag. I forced myself through four rounds. Virgil had introduced me to Bobby, an older trainer who was a good friend of his, a big ancient black man with a beautiful, creased face, like a cartoon of the sun. Bobby was seventy-five and healthy and happy. He had a huge smile, and Virgil called him “Blackburn,” after Joe Louis’s legendary trainer. Bobby was old school to the highest degree and convinced that the Brown Bomber would have beaten Ali because (of course) Ali pulled straight back. I stood next to Bobby and chatted companionably as one of his fighters was shadowboxing. There were already a few women in the gym, but another good-looking woman poked her head in, and Bobby said, “Million-dollar baby,” with a huge smile, and we laughed. He told me about boxing in the army and being stationed in Germany in the fifties and going on leave to Paris with cigarettes to trade on the black market. He is a living reminder of the decline of the sport.
Boxing has been in decline since the twenties, arguably, but still had massive popularity in the fifties and even seventies. It is an oddity, a curio of old Anglo-Saxon values that arose with the decline of the duel in Victorian England. Its popularity grew with the growth of all athletics in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. In his book Manhood in America, Michael Kimmel points at boxing’s rise to prominence at the turn of the last century, along with the popularity of sports in general, as a counter to industrialization and the effeminacy of modern society. Boxing was about the return of the true craftsman, the “artisan.” Kimmel talks about the artisanal vocabulary instantly adapted by boxing, which persists to this day. Boxing was a “profession,” and boxers were “trained” in various “schools.” Combatants “went to work” and “plied their trades” in the “manly art.”
Before the rise of prizefighting you have to go back to ancient Greece and the early Olympics to find men fighting with fists or gloves for entertainment or defense (at least in the Western world; obviously, the East was different). Gladiators used weapons.
Prizefighting became popular alongside bull- and bearbaiting and their “dark sister,” public hangings. Bare-fisted fighting favored the careful, conditioned man, as fights went on for hours with two to three punches thrown a minute. “The fancy” refers to the men who were fans and connoisseurs, of both dogfights and prizefighting, and as the fancy began to participate, the use of gloves evolved. Pressure from political antifight groups culminated in the London Prize Ring Rules in 1838, prohibiting striking below the belt, kicking, and butting. Later, the more famous 1867 Marquess of Queensberry rules solidified the use of gloves and the three-minute rounds with a one-minute rest, plus a ten count for a knockout. These rules in fact were a tremendous boon to prizefighting, legitimizing it, reducing the sky-high rate of fatalities, and bringing it into respectability.
Jack Johnson, the first black heavyweight champion, in 1910, chased the white champions all over the world before he got someone who would fight him for the title. His story is incredible. This was back when the heavyweight champion of the world was the be-all and end-all of manhood, the paragon of virtue, and the fact that a black man had the title was an almost impossible cross for white sportswriters to bear. Johnson didn’t give a damn, either; he was doing Muhammad Ali in 1910. They pulled Jim Jeffries, the former unbeaten white champ, out of retirement, and Johnson beat the shit out of him, laughing all the time. The outcome sparked race riots and led to many deaths—mostly of black men, of course. Virgil’s comment was, “Jeffries was exploited, man”—his sympathy lies with boxers, not color. And Virgil, although he was born in Berkeley, has roots in Texas; and the uncles who taught him to box had a direct stylistic link to Jack Johnson, who fought out of Galveston. Johnson was one of the first defensive fighters to be hugely successful, with a slippery, elusive style that confounded opponents. Virgil calls his own personal style, descended from what Jack Johnson did, “Texas slip ’n’ slide.” Over the decades, the game evolved from an Anglo-Saxon “stand-in-front-of-him-and-hit” brawl to the modern strategic and tactical masterpieces that were enacted throughout the twentieth century.
Just look at the numbers: In 1939, Sugar Ray Robinson won the Twelfth Annual Intercity (amateur) title, the Golden Gloves, at Chicago Stadium, in front of 20,000 people. You can’t get 15,000 fans to come to a professional title fight these days. Dempsey-Tunney, in Philadelphia in 1926, had a live gate of 126,000. Pay-per-view extends the live gate at forty bucks a pop but is perhaps promotionally shortsighted, as it limits the audience.
Television runs the show, and there has been much hue and cry about how it has killed boxing, with A. J. Liebling leading the charge in the thirties and forties. Local gyms and fighting venues dropped off precipitously—because you could see good fights on TV—and a strict boxing gym today has a sense of decay to it, the feeling that twenty years earlier there were three rings and two hundred guys in there working every day, but now there is one and it is empty. The bottom line is financial. Good athletes can make so much more money playing other sports without the risk and damage of boxing that it would be silly to fight. Football and other sports gained in popularity and took the best athletes at all levels; and the corruption of the “alphabet soup” organizations, and mandatory title defenses, muddied the waters.
I think the source of boxing’s decline lies deeper in American society. Kids used to fight more; violence wasn’t so frowned upon and didn’t escalate as it does today with the prevalence of firearms. The penalties are severe today—getting in a few bar fights can lead to weeks or months in jail, heavy fines, and tremendous hassle. The cops will invariably arrive. Everybody in the early part of the century, through the Depression, would be in fistfights, especially as young kids. You would know who was the toughest kid on your block, and how you compared to him, and then you would know how he compared to the toughest fighter in the neighborhood, the city, the state; and you would see how the best fighter in the state got his clock cleaned by Sugar Ray Robinson or Jack Dempsey, and you would have a direct relation to and understanding of that controlled violence.
Even among fig
ht fans boxing has been in decline—because of bad decisions and rampant corruption, fighters owned by the Mafia throwing fights, and scandals. Still, fight fans will pay to see big fights, and boxing remains big business, albeit for only a few top fighters. The huge purses of the eighties and nineties, riding on Tyson’s mythic status, have likewise faded into legend. When Holyfield fought Tyson in the rematch in ’97, they both made thirty million dollars.
Boxing is also filled with nostalgia, as Liebling noticed, and sometimes it’s nostalgia for its own sake: He saw, even in his day, that everyone contended that boxing used to be better. The old fighters thought it was better back in the days when they were still fighting; and the writers thought it was better back in the old days when they first fell in love with the sport. Liebling calls the boxing writers (who last longer) “the most persistent howlers after antiquity.”
Virgil, Andre, and Antonio returned, triumphant and easy, and Virgil gave the boys some time off. I met him often in the early mornings at Coffee with a Beat and got to know Nate, the owner, a little bit and even bought some T-shirts from him; he was a childhood friend of Virgil’s. Virgil pretty much frequented only black-owned businesses. His mother had been politically active in the civil rights movement, and being in Oakland, near Berkeley, Virg retained some of that militant outlook, heavily seasoned with a street education.
We would sit and talk for hours, meeting people, carrying on conversations through multiple interruptions and digressions. Virgil had derived some of his philosophy from Miyamoto Musashi’s The Book of Five Rings—a samurai treatise on fighting strategy—and when he saw that the Olympic symbol was five linked rings, he knew Andre was going to win gold: “His style, his philosophy is too much for anyone to get a handle on in four two-minute rounds.” Virgil had intentionally kept Andre out of international competition, because that way it was harder for the much more experienced, older European fighters with eight years of amateur experience to get tape on Andre, to come up with a plan for him. They couldn’t figure him out in the short sprints that make up amateur boxing. Virgil mentioned Bruce Lee and jeet kune do. “Bruce Lee nearly got his ass whupped by a man off the street, a big, strong, tough man, and only because of his conditioning was he able to win. So he changed his system. He realized he was too locked in place by tradition. In a fight, I’m free. If I’m locked in a system . . . Here’s Andre in the Olympics, and the first fight he wins, the thing the other fighters are thinking about is his speed. Once I got speed on your mind, I got you thinking and halfway beat. So you’re wondering if you can hit me, and then I keep you from hitting me for the first round, and now you’re convinced you can’t hit me.
Fighter's Heart, A Page 20