Fighter's Heart, A

by Sheridan, Sam

  Virgil muttered, “His corner should be arrested,” for letting the kid fight. José not being able to knock him out looked bad for him, because the opponent was so god awful, and José’s father was promoting him as the number one featherweight prospect in the country. We could hear a group of Mexicans behind us complaining that José wasn’t what they thought he was.

  The main event was next, with local favorite José Celaya, from Salinas, against James “Spider” Webb. Celaya was about 26–2 and had been knocked out, and Webb was 17–0, but Webb was here to lose to Celaya. That was the plan; Celaya was the heavy favorite and rising superstar, while Webb was a decent but surmountable opponent. Of course, no one had told Webb that.

  Webb looked like a tattooed redneck from Tennessee, and he came out and danced around in camouflage in his corner, a shorter, muscle-bound bodybuilder. Celaya was smaller but had the crowd behind him, cheering like mad for anything he did. As the fight started, Celaya was the better boxer, but Webb was much bigger and stronger, and he kept coming, punching straight, firing and firing. He was in shape. I looked over at Bobby and said, “Whaddya think?” and he snorted. “If I said ‘grape,’ you would know what I mean,” he said. I laughed. Bobby meant neither one could punch hard enough to bust a grape. He was disgusted by almost all modern boxing. You could almost hear him start in with “Man, what Sugar Ray Robinson would have done to either of these cats . . .”

  Webb was flat-footed, and Virgil said that was because he was taught hands before feet—“The feet will never catch up . . . you got to teach feet first.” But Celaya was outgunned, he wasn’t strong enough to hurt Webb. Celaya bobbed and weaved, ran backward and had superior hand speed, but he couldn’t hurt the much bigger, better-conditioned Webb. In the fourth, right at the end, Celaya was knocked down. In the later rounds, it turned into a war, both fighters bleeding from head butts, and though Celaya rallied, he wasn’t hitting hard enough to take it to Webb, who ate his shots on his arms and played possum. “He’s beating on him, but he ain’t really hurting him,” said Virgil in my ear. Celaya went down twice in the eighth and that was it.

  The promoter Don Clark walked by us, cursing and swearing through the roar in a good-natured way, and Bobby and Virgil burst out laughing, because Celaya was Don’s big draw and “ain’t nobody going to pay to see him now—he’s through.”

  Don yelled over the thundering crowd that he had picked Webb up from the airport and he had said to him, “I throw a hundred punches a round—I hope your boy is ready for that.”

  Bobby said, “He knows who he is, and there are two people in the ring, anything can happen.”

  “It’s a cold game,” said Virgil. “Celaya just got retired in front of his home crowd.” As we walked out of the arena, Andre was on the phone to Diego Corrales, who had just won a knock-down, drag-out war of a fight against Luis Castillo in a giant pay-per-view title fight. It had been the fight of the year, maybe the fight of the decade, with Corrales coming back from getting knocked down twice to win by knockout. Diego had been the better boxer (at least Virgil thought so) but had gone to war, had been sucked into trading with Castillo—and it had made for an electrifying fight. Virgil wasn’t impressed, as he felt that Diego could have won without getting all beat up, but the fight had shaken up the boxing world. I could hear Andre telling Diego, “You are getting these guys knocked out,” meaning that Celaya had seen the fight and tried to do the same thing, win a crowd-pleasing war instead of outboxing and outthinking his opponent.

  Carlo Rotella wrote in Cut Time:

  The warrior syndrome: . . . the tendency of some dead-game fighters with sound boxing skills to abandon technique, shape-shifting lycanthropically into brawlers who win exciting fights and inspire the fans’ love by accepting several doozies on the kisser in order to deliver one of their own. In the long run, those fighters lose more then they gain: . . . they begin to lose bouts that they could have won by boxing rather than slugging; they suffer extended beatings, cheered on by crowds expecting their pulp-faced hero to pull out one more one-punch comeback; they survive in the business too long on guts and will; they get punchy.

  The fighter loses sight of his own identity; he wants to show he’s just as tough as his opponent, so he brawls. Andre’s opinion on the Corrales fight was similar, even though that fight was grabbing boxing headlines. He murmured: “It was a great fight, no doubt. Promoters, managers, fans—jumping up and down, it’s a big party. But at some point that night, both those fighters go to their rooms and look at themselves in the mirror; they both are going to have to lay on that bed and look at the ceiling. You don’t know what kind of damage you may have taken in that fight. After all the hoopla and cameras and lights, and everyone has gone home, the fighter is sitting there by himself, and eventually he’s going to have to look his kids in the eye. And if something’s not right with the man, then nobody’s going to be there with him.”

  After the fight, we fell back into the routine of training, and the days flowed together. This is what boxers do, they work. Road work, bag work, plain “work” (sparring), an endless compilation of hours of training. It’s a journey that never ends. A forty-year-old fighter works as hard on his skills as a ten-year-old does. I could see fighters progress. I saw Heather come along, and also a young amateur named Karim, whom Virgil had been working with at King’s. But Karim’s commitment was often questioned, and to his face.

  “Did you run today, Karim?” Virg would drawl, and Karim would reply with an emphatic yes. Karim was short, muscular, and leonine, a coiled spring of power, an awkward fighter but tremendously quick and strong, something that had intrigued Virgil into training him. Virgil saw the potential. But Karim had a wife and kids, and a job, and sometimes his commitment wasn’t there. That’s the other thing pro boxers need, the commitment. It is easy to become enthusiastic and fall in love with fighting for six months, or a year; but to stay in love, to force yourself into the engine of pain every day for three years, then five—that’s where the pros separate themselves.

  Karim walked off and Virgil muttered, “A fighter will break his own heart, and then the trainer’s heart.” What he meant was that a fighter will put in the time, the work, for years—and then suddenly become derailed, allow himself to be derailed, by a woman, or a situation, and will lose the ability to focus in the gym. He breaks his own heart, and of course the heart of the trainer, who has invested so much of his life and his future with the fighter. The trainer and the fighter have as deep a codependency as there is in sports, totally reliant on and tied to each other. The trainer has nothing without the talent and will of the fighter. He literally has nothing—he makes money only from the fighter. A trainer is defined by his fighters. He pours a tremendous amount of time, money, and emotion into the vessel of the fighter. Virgil has always had his job with the county and so has been able to train patiently and not rush his fighters for a payday. But he did mutter to me about Andre, “This kid is taking me places I would never have got to.” There is always the danger of the fighter leaving the trainer, going to another trainer, and in fact there are rules in the gym (along with “No spitting on the floor”) that prevent a trainer from talking to another trainer’s fighter. Stealing fighters is universally despised but an ever-present threat, especially when a fighter starts making money.

  I kept working, with Virgil and on my own, trying to concentrate, trying to stay focused. Virg worked me with the mitts, telling me not to raise up as I jabbed. I was coming up onto the tips of my toes, floating. “Don’t raise up,” he said, nearly every time. He finally put one mitt on top of my head and held me down. “Don’t raise up, because you’ll get hit.” It was frustrating because my body wanted to do it a certain way, and I was fighting it. I kept raising up, just a little.

  We stopped. “It’s not about getting it right or wrong,” Virgil said. “There is no right or wrong. It’s about not getting hit. We know getting hit is bad for you, so we avoid it. That’s what we’re working on here, not g
etting something ‘right.’ Don’t critique yourself.” I was reminded of a skipper I’d worked for on a yacht, who’d told me, “Nobody laughs if it works,” when we tried doing things in unorthodox ways.

  Then he had me throwing rights, the right cross, anchored on the front foot and pivoting on the rear, for power, and he stood on my left foot to pin it in place, stood on it hard. It was a little embarrassing to be a grown man and be treated like a child, but Virgil was trying to get me right, trying to get me to punch with balance, something that should have been done when I was eleven years old.

  I was hitting the heavy bag later, and between rounds Virg said, “Sam, you’re always in a hurry. I’m starting to realize the kind of guy you are. I got to slow you down, make you deliberate. Nothing ever got to a hundred miles an hour without going through twenty.”

  Andre was preparing for his next fight, in Memphis. He would be fighting on the Johnson-Tarver II undercard, which refers to the way the promoters put together a night of fighting. You have to have a draw, a main event, with names that people recognize and want to see. Promoting is about establishing a narrative. In this day and age, it is nearly always going to be a title fight, meaning for a world title, a belt. I won’t even get into the “alphabet soup” of ranking organizations because I don’t understand it and not many do. It comes down to this: There is no federal governing body in boxing, just state commissions, and pretty much anybody who wants to have a big fight and call it “for the whatever-weight championship of the world” can. There are three or four organizations that have some real meaning, and quite a few that don’t. When a fighter wins all the titles in his weight class, he “unifies” the belt, which means he really is the world champion—now it means something.

  On the same card, or schedule, will be six to ten lesser bouts with up-and-coming fighters. Andre would be on the undercard, as this was going to be only his fifth professional fight. After he has fifteen or twenty fights, he’ll be the main event, contending for a title. How fast he gets there depends entirely on him, how strong he looks fighting these second- or third-tier guys, how many knockouts he gets, how popular he becomes. The boxing community has opinions about him, and they are waiting to see what happens. He won gold, a major achievement, and that means he can box. But is he strong enough? And can he take a punch? Andre was rocked early in his second fight but survived smoothly and came back and knocked the guy out. Was geting rocked indicative of growing pains—or was it a sign that he’s not powerful enough for the pros? The fight fans and writers, the boxing community, are always the smartest guys in the room. They are instant experts, and they form opinions based on misunderstandings and hearsay and “facts” heard from other writers and commentators. The truth is that they are easily swayed and misled by hype and flashi-ness, and the real core people who understand boxing are few and far between.

  There is no better illustration of this than the example of Mike Tyson, Iron Mike. Most boxing fans you talk to still love Mike and would pay to see him fight, which is absurd when you think how long it’s been since he’s had a meaningful fight, ten years or more. Tyson has been a C-level fighter since he left prison, years and years ago, but for his rematch with Kevin McBride that ended so fittingly, there was more international press and pay-per-view than there was for a somewhat meaningful fight between Miguel Cotto and Mohamad Abdulaev that same night.

  Boxing fans are still victims of the myth of Tyson’s invulnerability, his fearlessness, his monstrous power and rage. Tyson won the heavyweight title and unified the belt at nineteen, the youngest fighter in history to do so, and he obliterated everyone in one or two rounds, millions of dollars a fight for a minute’s work. Some people still consider him the greatest heavyweight of all time—because they want him to be, they want to believe in that mythical creature that no one can withstand.

  Once Buster Douglas managed to survive six rounds and show that it could be done, Mike was doomed. Holyfield completed the revelation, and that’s why Mike bit Holyfield’s ear off—he wanted a way out. I love Mike Tyson, not so much for his youthful invulnerability but for his intelligence. He can be beautifully eloquent (and horrifically crass) when he speaks about himself, and his tragedy is our tragedy, because your heavyweight champ speaks to your generation. The heavyweight championship is not so much a title as a morality play, it’s been said. Look at Jack Johnson, or Muhammad Ali—look at what the world does to the heavyweight champ.

  Tyson is no exception, and his mournful tale is about America at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first: money and corruption (in the corrosive sense), and Tyson’s inability to escape from his own nature despite his fervent desire to do so. He has tattoos of Arthur Ashe, Che Guevara, and Mao Tse-tung—he has always wanted to change.

  Virgil was incensed by Tyson’s last fight, against the towering six-foot-six, 271-pound McBride. “People aren’t paying to see Mike Tyson fight,” he said angrily. “They are paying to see Mike Tyson destroy somebody. Don’t put a big man in there with him—he’s always had trouble with real tall guys. I saw that fight, and Tyson hit him with some good shots and he didn’t go nowhere. People want to see Mike destroy. You give them that, he gets four or five fights over the next two years against guys who can’t handle his punch and then a title shot and he’s through, but he’s made another thirty million.”

  After the fight, Mike said that his ferocity was all gone, he couldn’t even kill the bugs in his house. He had completely lost the killer instinct in the sixth round. “At one point, I thought life was about acquiring things,” he said. “Life is totally about losing everything.”

  I would meet Andre and Virgil for early morning runs at Lake Temescal, a small lake in a narrow fissure of the hills above Oakland. We would run, and then do sprints and shadowbox in the sand, and then jumping exercises and weighted skip rope and medicine ball work. Virgil’s disdain for weights was total, and he and Andre trained for explosive-ness and flexibility and speed—Pilates and Acceleration and core strength. Virgil’s refrain to me was “Get strong doing what you’re doing,” meaning the way to get strong boxing is to box. You get strong fighting, hitting the heavy bag, not lifting weights. It’s all about functional strength, strength you can use. What matters is being strong in the fight, and hitting hard, with technique. Another favorite saying of Virgil’s is “Give me a two-hundred-pound man in condition and you’ve got something.” What he was saying was that any man that size is a danger if he’s in shape and has been taught how to punch. If he can crack a little bit, “You’ve got something.” I had high hopes for my right, as Virgil and Tommy Rawson both said it might be something. I would’ve loved to be “heavy-handed,” but I wasn’t. I started to think about accuracy, about hitting right on the button on the chin, the magic KO spot, like the spot on a dog’s belly that makes his legs spasm when you scratch it. If you hit a guy perfectly on the point of the chin, it snaps his head, which shuts off his brain. That’s the knockout.

  Virgil took Andre to Texas, to Houston, to train there for the last week before his fight. James Prince, Andre’s manager, had a huge facility and several pros there. They wanted to get Andre used to the heat and humidity, get him in the same time zone.

  James Prince had come out of Houston with the Rap-a-Lot crew, and he had made his money in music, as one of the founders of gangster rap. He and his guys were the real deal. They had come from the baddest part of Houston and were not kidding when they said they were gangsters. His group was called the Geto Boys, and I could remember listening to them in seventh grade and being stunned. Prince had a combination of business intelligence, street smarts, and street cred. You didn’t fuck around with James Prince.

  I stayed behind in Oakland and worked. It was hard sometimes to know how my training was going; it’s a little like getting fatter or skinnier—you don’t see it, because you look in the mirror every day. You don’t always see yourself improving in boxing, but with hard work and, above all, concentration, you
do.

  Bobby had agreed to keep an eye on me. Virgil had said, “Now, learn from Bobby, but don’t let him change you.” Bobby was a tremendously charismatic guy, and just to be hanging out with him felt like a privilege. I enjoyed the way he talked, the cadence in his voice. He’d had a barbecue sauce business once and on his old business card it said, “Where the Sauce Is the Boss.” He was always laughing, smiling, and then scowling when things got serious.

  “Sam, what’s a jab supposed to do?” he asked me.

  “Set everything up, feel him out, open him up, keep him off you. Everything,” I answered.

  “Yeah, well, a jab is supposed to push his nose through his face. Start with that. Then work on those other things.”

  Classic fighter parlance speaks of a punch like a living thing—an educated jab, a jab with science. A fighter with an educated jab can do all kinds of things with that one punch—he can paw at you, disrupt your balance, he can crack it like a whip, thrust it like a spear, blast it to the body. Max Schmeling beat Joe Louis in their first meeting with his educated right hand, a punch that he said threw itself when the time was right.

  So Bobby had me on one end of the double-end bag, just working that jab, just trying to build up power. My shoulder would still fatigue quickly, and after a few rounds my jab wouldn’t have busted a grape.

  Bobby had me moving, bouncing in circles, and he differed from Virgil on the right cross. Bobby didn’t want the pivot off the rear foot; he wanted just the hips to move. It was interesting how they both wanted almost totally perpendicular stances; you stand with your body on edge to your opponent, whereas before I had been a little more squared up. Muay Thai, with the kicks and knees, is more frontal, and with boxing you want to minimize the target. Bobby wanted me to learn to move, to flow, to bounce. “They won’t even recognize you when they get back,” he laughed. He showed me how to bounce and move in tight circles, a seventy-five-year-old man, still strong.