Fighter's Heart, A

by Sheridan, Sam

  “Like Tyson,” he continued. “People would train to get away from the punch, and convince themselves that they couldn’t handle the punch. They would do his work for him, and then Buster Douglas and Evander showed that you just had to have confidence in the fact you could handle his punch, and if you frustrate a puncher you got him beat—because he’s used to people disappearing when he hits them. He’s got no science to fall back on.”

  Boxing is full of great fights in which big punchers have been exposed. The most famous, classic example is the “Rumble in the Jungle,” Ali-Foreman in Zaire. Foreman was thought to be an unbeatable force of nature, the greatest puncher of all time. Ali took a horrendous pounding, absorbed it lying on the ropes, and as Foreman tired, Ali came dancing back in the eighth round and knocked him out. He beat Foreman’s mind as much as his body. Liebling had written, “Any fight in which one man can punch and the other must disarm him is exciting, like watching an attempt by a bomb squad to remove a fuse.”

  The Leonard-Duran fights are probably my favorite. In their first meeting, Leonard, the boxer, was a young, fresh kid out of the Olympics, and Duran (a shoeshine boy from Panama) was the most feared boxer-puncher in his weight class, maybe in history. Duran was called Manos de Piedra, “Hands of Stone.” Leonard stood in and brawled with Duran, instead of boxing, and although Duran won, he was frustrated because Leonard had taken his best shot and kept fighting. The second time they met, Leonard stood in the middle of the ring when the bell rang, Duran’s usual spot; and Leonard moved and danced and showboated and so confused and twisted Duran’s mind that he quit, with the now infamous “No más,” to the howling outrage of the boxing community. Leonard took Duran’s legend and wove it into his own. Making somebody quit—that’s domination.

  Virgil turned to me and said, “It’s like this: When I was a kid in Oakland, we used to collect those big wolf spiders. We used to fight those spiders, the kids would, because they would tear each other up. Especially females. Now, I knew that in my basement there was a black widow spider. I had seen her many times, and I would go and check on it and find it in the same place. So I got the spider and cleaned up the whole neighborhood.” That’s Virgil’s attitude: Think outside the problem, win with something overwhelming, leave nothing to chance.

  I was curious as to how Andre’s opponents were chosen. At this stage in a fighter’s career, I knew from reading, it was important to bring him up slowly. Andre had what Teddy Atlas loved to call the “amateur pedigree,” meaning he had more than 150 amateur fights, starting when he was ten years old, and he had the greatest amateur achievement—he won gold in the Olympics. Antonio had about 250 amateur fights, and some fighters will have more than that before they turn pro. It means that every week since they were ten or twelve years old they were jumping into the car, driving to a tournament, and fighting. Records aren’t kept, as your win-loss ratio isn’t so critical, but Andre hadn’t lost an amateur fight since 1997 (and he claims that that was a judging error and wants to avenge the loss). Professional fighting is something totally different. It’s scored differently, the rounds are longer and there’s more of them, and of course there is no headgear. You’re not looking to score points as much as to hurt the guy. To start a pro career, you might fight four or five four-rounders and then five or six six-rounders, then eights, and so on, depending on how you do. But the goal is title fights, and those are twelve rounds. As I heard T, one of Andre’s managers, say, “They don’t give away belts for nothing less than twelve-rounders.” And title shots are the only goal as far as money is concerned.

  There is a principle that Angelo Dundee (the legendary trainer of Ali and Leonard) referred to as “slow-teach,” which is slowly exposing your fighter to bigger challenges. Just enough to stretch him, not so that he is seriously challenged or even lose, but more to just expose him to something he might not have seen, to force him to adapt and grow as a fighter. For Andre, the guys he had fought so far knew they couldn’t come close to matching him in speed or skill, so they were forced to try to intimidate him, to rough him up and shake his confidence. It infuriated him. “They look at my baby face and say, ‘Oh, you have to rough up Olympic champs,’ and I’m like, ‘What makes you think you can rough me up? Now that I won, I’m pampered?’ I went and took that medal from a bunch of tough guys.”

  In Andre’s last fight, against a white kid from Louisiana, the kid had been hopelessly outclassed and had responded by fouling repeatedly, until he was disqualified. Andre smiled, his eyes soft, warm, pitiless brown pools. “He was looking for a way out. He knew he was going to be knocked out and didn’t want to go like that, so he just kept hitting after the break.”

  I had seen Andre’s fights so far, complete blowouts of much less talented individuals, nonthreats, called “opponents,” boxing lingo for someone brought in to lose to your prospect. There are, of course, varying degrees of opponent; your fighter might be 4–0 and the opponent might be 2–6, and there are infamous opponents whose records might run 4–16, guys who are used to losing and are just out looking for a payday, record padding for young hungry contenders with money and intelligence backing them. A contender in today’s world isn’t taken seriously unless he is 20–0; remaining undefeated is incredibly important, and two or three losses can be the end of a career. MMA is different. There are so many ways to lose that guys at the top level can have six or eight losses. It depends more on who they fought.

  In the gym, Virgil would have me shadowbox in front of the mirror, moving in super slow motion for five or six rounds, the slower the better. “Slow works the tendons, the sinews, and it hurts more; but it makes you stronger, gives you power. Speed will come when the mechanics are right.” I thought about tai chi. My arms and shoulders would be screaming, and when I finally went to the heavy bag next to Antonio, it was a huge relief to be able to hit fast. Antonio was like a snake, in and out, his punches snapping the bag.

  I had no idea that boxers did so much shadowboxing. Most days, Andre will do ten or twelve rounds of shadowboxing, working on his movement, sliding around the ring. Day in, day out, and you start to appreciate the extreme concentration needed to stay focused, the tremendous imagination required to envision an opponent in front of you for that long every day, to try out new things on him. Virgil said, and Bobby agreed, that shadowboxing was the biggest part of training, more than bag work or pad work. I had thought about shadowboxing as something like the katas that other martial artists do—rigid, structured, rehearsed movements done to train the body when no other training is available. And shadowboxing is like that, but it is kind of free-form kata, done endlessly (in front of the mirror at first). “You’ve got to fall in love with yourself in the mirror,” said Virgil, and boxers do spend inordinate amounts of time looking in the mirror, critiquing everything about their stances, looking for flaws or holes, correcting bad habits. It leads to the effortless beauty and motion of great fighters, supreme athletes who have devoted their lives to moving well and with economy of speed and energy.

  Virgil had me run the lake with Antonio at eight while he sat and had coffee. Andre was on vacation with his family. Antonio chattered a mile a minute, and we covered an immense range of topics. He was only twenty, from St. Paul, Minnesota, but he’d been fighting since he was eight or nine and had been one of the top amateurs in the country. He was filled with a supreme, unoffensive arrogance, a fully justified belief in his own powers, and was likeable. I managed to keep pace and conversation, but it took a lot more out of me than it did him. And then he took off, running at the proper speed, and left me gasping and pounding heavily along, deeper and deeper in his wake.

  I caught up with him back at Coffee with a Beat, where he had finished his run and was stretching, and I stretched next to him in the cool sun. He immediately leapt back into the conversation. His gaze was rarely fixed on me at first; he watched me with his peripheral vision. He spoke of his God-given talent, and it made sense to me; Antonio and Andre were so gifted physically,
so much faster and stronger than other men. Imagine that almost all your opponents are eight-, nine-, ten-year-old boys and you are a full-grown man, that’s the kind of physical advantages they have. The best way to make sense of these tremendous advantages is to say that God gave you those gifts for a reason. It’s a strategy to prevent arrogance and complacency, because in the end those gifts will not be enough. At the top level, in those title fights, you’ve got to have everything—now you’re fighting grown men, too. Antonio had also wrestled in high school, and played football, and his own opinion of his prowess was epic; he didn’t have to train or condition and he could make it to the nationals and take second, but of course that lack of discipline had kept him off the Olympic team. He knew that to take it to the next level, to win championships, his gifts wouldn’t be enough—he needed everything. Andre had everything.

  I sat down next to Virgil to eat some breakfast, and he looked at Antonio, who was still stretching, and said, “Antonio met Andre at camp and was really impressed by him, by his work ethic (Andre was the only kid consistently watching tape at night with the coaches in Olympic camp), and when he came to me, I saw a kid I could reach.

  “Antonio has had a tough story, he’s bounced from relative to relative, he’s been in the streets without a role model. He’s come so far since then, just in terms of self-discipline. I saw him just watching Dre, watching the way he carried himself, and he took it to heart.” Andre does carry himself like a professional, totally dedicated and immersed, with the maturity of a thirty-year-old man at twenty-two.

  Virgil changed the subject. “I watched your tape last night,” he said, “and I enjoyed it.” He was referring to the National Geographic tape of my muay Thai fight, five years earlier, in Thailand. I hemmed and hawed, always a little embarrassed in front of real fighters in case they should think I was putting myself in their category. I said, “Well, you can see how bad I was,” and laughed, and Virgil looked at me and quietly admonished me: “Sam, you got to stop telling yourself and the world that you are a bad fighter,” meaning not that I was a good fighter, but for my confidence’s sake, I needed to start thinking positive.

  We talked about muay Thai for a while, and Virgil said, “You said that when a boxer fights a muay Thai fighter, the Thai fighter will put the boxer in the hospital, and I disagree. I’ve seen the system and I know I can beat it.

  “Now, listen, of course I am going to think boxing is superior, but here’s the truth. I watched those fights and there isn’t any lateral movement, any circling or feinting; they just come forward at each other. We use our feet, too—but not to kick, to move. And all that knees and elbows on the inside is open to being hit through.”

  In my MMA fight, I had gotten a good muay Thai clinch on my opponent, and he had bombed me down the stretch with uppercuts. On the tape you could see my head snap back with the impact, so I had to agree.

  Virgil continued about my Thailand fight. I had rattled the guy with that good right hand. That had hurt him, that was a boxing punch. Then I kneed him, into the bone under the heart. “There’s a narrow little bone, about an inch wide, running underneath the heart,” he said. “We don’t know what they call it but we know it’s there, and it is a great target. When he’s bending a little, with his weight coming forward, it can be decisive.” It’s where my knee had caught him.

  We sat in silence, sipping and musing, and I thought that no one had ever talked to me about that fight with analysis.

  “I could beat it,” Virgil said, “with the right athlete. I would get them setting up, because you have to set to kick. They can’t hit while backing up, or moving, and we can. Also, their punching power isn’t there; they punch with the elbows behind the fist, similar to how they throw elbows, and we punch with the elbow and shoulder behind the fist.”

  He hit on a good point, one that most people don’t get, and that is how hard boxers can punch when they get to the pro level. MMA fighters and fans pooh-pooh boxers because they don’t realize how heavy some of those punches are, the result of ten years of constant training, endless repetition. Boxers are grown men who have spent their lives honing that punch, building its speed and power, and the difference between a boxer’s punch and a normal man’s punch is the difference between a baseball bat and a whiffle-ball bat. One punch can change your life: “One hit’ll quit ’em.” An uncle of Virgil’s was in a high school fight when a teacher laid hands on him, and he hit the teacher and knocked him out with one shot. World-altering power—the uncle went to jail, and the teacher was never the same again, had to quit teaching in a year. There is also the difference of being able to handle a punch—fighters get hit all the time, even amateurs—and knowing how to take a shot can be critical. Sometimes regular guys in bars can’t handle a punch and get hurt; one of Pat Miletich’s great fears was that one of his guys would hit somebody in a bar, someone who had never been hit before in his life, and the sheer shock would kill him.

  One of the things Virgil had me working on was pivoting my hips and shoulders when I punched, getting my whole body into the blow. You’ve got to be able to hit someone hard enough to make him respect you.

  I found a new place to stay. I rented out the top floor of a house on Picardy Drive in West Oakland, just a few blocks from the hood and a five-minute drive from Virgil’s house. The owners were actually next-door neighbors to a friend of Virgil’s, and I could hear him on the phone, describing me, “Yeah, he’s a writer, a white kid.”

  Sheila Glenn and Kevin Thomason were a white married couple in their late thirties with two pit bulls, Amos and Stitch, both rescued from the pound. I learned a lot about pits from being around those two. Sheila and Kevin were both great and helpful and friendly, and although the dogs were a handful, they were a tremendous comfort. I missed being around dogs.

  I moved in with my reduced wardrobe and then went to Virgil’s house to train.

  Virgil’s house, the “training house,” was a typical big Oakland house perched on a steep hill, and looked out over West Oakland all the way to the far-off shimmer of San Francisco. The air in Oakland was clean and much better than in L.A.—the clarity of long views was remarkable. Even the tap water in Oakland was clean, the cleanest water in the state. Nobody bought water in Oakland—I actually got harassed when I bought it in the supermarket.

  I joined Antonio and Virgil in the garage, with the door open and the brilliant sun streaming in, a sense of peace high above the hood, above the hustle and bustle. Antonio was on the treadmill with his wool hat on, and the radio was blaring into a feeling of clean air and space. I rode the exercise bike for ten minutes to warm up, stretched, wrapped up, and started to shadowbox, still working on those three steps Virgil had shown me. Then he had me start in on the heavy bag, in and out in a straight line. He was adamant and unwavering on the basic fundamentals, on twisting the jab all the way over. But his chief concern was telegraphing, giving a little visual cue before you punch or move.

  “You drop that left off your chin every time. I’m gonna see that—either keep it pinned or let it free, but don’t drop it when you are going to punch.”

  If you telegraph your punches, you add to your opponent’s reaction time, giving him more time to see the punch and slip or block it. He sees the punch before you throw it. The key to hitting is being totally unpredictable. If he can’t get any kind of read on you, you are putting him on the defensive. Virgil is the real deal; he doesn’t teach the same combinations that everyone knows and just go over them on the mitts again and again. He teaches fighting. Andre’s shadowboxing never looks like other boxers’; it doesn’t fall into that overly comfortable rehearsed sameness. It’s almost awkward at times, because real fighting is often awkward.

  Virgil was on the phone when Antonio finished his run on the treadmill and came over next to me and started talking about the jab, showing me what I was doing wrong, and Virgil instantly squawked at him, “Yo, T, we’re not teaching Sam how to be you, we’re teaching Sam how to be him!” a
nd Antonio got it. He laughed and said, “You right, you right,” and smiled and vanished upstairs.

  “Now shadowbox this next round, doing what we worked on. I want to check your concentration,” said Virgil. I shadowboxed carefully for the round, shuffling shoes, scraping the mats.

  “Now, Sam, you’re critiquing yourself, you’re thinking too much. You can’t worry so much what it looks like, you’ve got to just let it feel right.”

  I went another round, worrying less about Virgil’s concerned eye and trying to enjoy myself more, and got a tight-lipped nod. “Better. Now I want you to shadowbox the whole round and pick up your feet; I don’t want to hear them.” He demonstrated in his brilliant white shoes, gliding, dancing his elegant waltz, his feet hushed. “Focus on your feet.” And so another round went by, stepping and moving, listening to the tap and scrape.