The undercard held the worst mismatches I had ever seen anywhere. No one else was too amazed; it must be a pretty common occurrence. There was a spate of quick stoppages, and Virgil joined me to watch, as Dre didn’t need to be ready for a while yet. A trainer who knew Virgil, and whose fighter had just KO’d some slob, muttered as he went by, “I wish he’d put up a fight.”
The worst case was that of Anthony Peterson (maybe 14–0), a muscular black kid in against a short, hairy-backed, white balding dude without skills or grace, a guy from Arizona who was supposedly 3–0. It looked like a complete mismatch, and it was. In the first round Anthony moved around him and then caught him with his first punch, a deep swinging hook to the chin and the guy went down and flipped over like a sack of rice. There was a lot of razzing and catcalls, and he took a long time to get up, with the paramedics helping him out, but finally he did stand, smile shakily, and wave. Fans were taunting him, but Virgil called, “You awright, man” as the guy walked in front of us, and I looked at V and saw him purse his lips and shake his head.
Ann Wolfe was fighting a Canadian named Marsha Valley, whom she’d fought a few times before, and Ann was clobbering her, but Marsha was pretty game. Marsha was no threat to Ann; she was nearly part of Ann’s retinue (Pops, Ann’s trainer, had clapped for Marsha when she came out).
A famous promoter was sitting behind me, and I heard him say loudly, “If I put on this mismatch with men, the commission would have me in a lot of trouble,” and I thought, Did you see the earlier fights? Marsha couldn’t fight a lick and had no idea how to punch, but she moved around and had plenty of spirit and made Ann work and stalk her for six rounds in a contained, workmanlike fashion. Ann fought like a man and hit like a man; she started digging monster shots to the body and put Marsha down in the sixth. When Marsha got up, Ann came after her with another body shot in the exact same place and that ended it. Ann made seventy-five grand and Marsha made six. None of these undercard executions were on TV, and most people never get to see this stuff.
The crowd would mutter and chat, and the place wasn’t even close to full yet. The cheers would come when big shots landed, for displays of animosity or rage, and for showboating. I suddenly realized, The crowd cheers the punch, not the fighter. For the most part, they don’t really know who the guy is, or the narrative drive behind each and every fighter. They don’t care, but when they see a big punch, a great shot, there is a collective yell that escapes everyone’s lips. It’s the visceral thrill of impact—you know that one hurt—that charges the audience. It’s why pro wrestling is popular, it’s the spectacle of the big hit, the massive pile driver off the top ropes. A big punch does something to the crowd. It connects the crowd and turns it briefly into a single animal, reveling in awe and rejoicing in the physical power.
Eight o’clock and finally it is Andre’s fight. The ring announcer, Bruce Buffer, calls out “Ann-draayyy Ess-Oh-Gee Waaard,” and Andre enters to gospel music by Kirk Franklin.
There is tension out there for us in his entourage—anything can happen, this is a fight. We all know that Aragon shouldn’t be a challenege for Andre, but everyone also knows that he better not have any trouble, he better not screw up. The fights only get bigger from here out.
Andre is the bigger man at 160 and obviously enjoying it. Aragon is hopelessly outclassed from the opening bell. Andre is tight and under control—he doesn’t come out looking to kill, he just moves and pops crisp jabs through Aragon’s guard, knocking his head back each time. Tap. Tap. By the second round, it is obvious that Andre is in no danger; his control of the distance is complete, and Aragon has no way of addressing the issue, no tool that might allow him to mix things up.
Andre takes his time, and Aragon stops punching and starts trying to survive. Early in the third, Andre switches briefly, he steps into southpaw and catches Aragon moving with a straight left that rattles him, and the ref, looking for an excuse, jumps in and stops the fight. Aragon reveals how hurt he is when he takes a huge stumble and wobble on drunkard’s legs. It feels a little anticlimactic, but Aragon has nowhere to go, no chance of anything.
Andre took a few bows and thanked Aragon, and there was a sense of relief among us all at ringside: Andre had performed; he was on track and still anchored to his destiny.
Among the retinue backstage, the release from prefight tension had people talking nonstop. Virgil was going on about Andre’s need to be ruthless, though my sense of the fight was that Andre was so unchallenged that he had not been feeling too aggressive—he was so safe and secure that he could take his time and get the other guy out when he wanted. There was a very professional, old-school feel to what Dre had done; he had felt his opponent out, allowed him his two rounds, and then pressured him just slightly, just enough to get him to crack. It was beautiful in its restraint and control, the safety of his fight. Andre could have gone ten more rounds, just like that. The caliber of opponent that will bring out his best is going to be world class. He won’t come out guns blazing, swinging at trees and knocking down walls; it’s not his style. He had said to me, “I’m not fighting for nobody but God, my family, and myself. I hear people talk about me—oh, he can’t do this, he can’t hit, however it is—I know how to win. I’ve been winning a long time. If I can get out of a fight unscathed, without getting hit, and that displeases you, then so be it. I ain’t fighting for you. The brain wasn’t made to get hit.”
He’ll come out fast and tight and under complete control, and destroy you with speed and poise. “Not a superstar but a guy who consistently beats superstars—a shining star,” Virgil said.
Right after the fight, I stood with Andre in the hallway while he waited to take his piss test. He mentioned how, during the Olympics, he had been nervous about it because he had been taking multivitamins.
We all stood in a circle and held hands and prayed, thankful, and for the safety of Aragon and everyone else in the ring that night. Dre was still wired, praying, “Praise God for this team, and protect this team, vindicate yourself and us, make believers out of these commentators and not just in me but in you, oh Lord, love to all and thank you.”
While waiting, Andre could barely contain himself, leaping and pacing about, the Vaseline still gleaming on his face. He talked about how he could hear the ring commentators, Jim Lampley and Larry Merchant, clearly throughout the fight and how their disparaging comments (they thought he was matched too easy) had motivated him. I asked about the fight.
“He was on queer street,” Andre said. “I’m glad they stopped it because I was coming with another big left. I don’t believe that God’s blessings will take me anywhere that his grace won’t sustain me. You got to be ready for anything in this business, it’s an ice-cold business.” He laughed. “I’m telling you it is.”
The main event had packed the place to the rafters and charged the air. Virgil muttered to me that he thought Tarver might knock old Glencoffe out. Both fighters were versions of the truth, they both had their own stories—but only one version would survive the meeting.
“Tarver looks more composed than last time,” said Virgil. The fight started off going Tarver’s way and stayed there. Tarver had made the adjustment; he had the better game plan. He went high and low, he made Glen pay, he changed up the rhythms and threw Glen off. By round four, Virgil raised his eyebrows at me and said, “Tarver’s fighting a real smart fight.”
Tarver would step back and counter, even potshotting and having fun sometimes, tip-tap-boom! But Glen had a great chin, and he kept coming with his quick steps and his face shining with determination. His face gleamed like a ship at sea, and he was throwing big body shots that Tarver was rolling with. Glen was very hardheaded—he had a real set of whiskers, a steel chin—but that wasn’t going to be enough. Tarver outfought him, especially early—he confused him and kept him off balance with a series of pitty-pat punches and then a hard one in there, pit-pat-pit-pat-bam. He kept Glen out of his rhythm. Tarver tired, and in the last few rounds he did barely
enough to survive and win, and Glen was still coming hard, but it was too late. Tarver won a unanimous decision, but I had the feeling that if the fight had been fifteen rounds, Glen would have had his lunch.
Memphis was done, and we all packed up and filtered out, back to Oakland. Just a day later, and I was back at King’s, hitting the heavy bag like we had never left, and Virgil was watching me with a mildly disgusted look on his face. He shook his head.
“We’re going to have to throw that right hand a lot, because that jab isn’t enough to keep him off, that pat-pat double jab ain’t nothing. I know it’s your shoulder and it hasn’t come on like it should have, but you are going to have to make him respect the right hand.” I tried to make that double jab stick and flung myself at the bag with everything, but the jab was still weak, a mincing love tap.
“I’ll be honest with you,” Virgil said. “If you were still hitting like this after a year, then boxing ain’t for you. For three months, you are doing good.”
After the workout, Virgil looked weary and said to me, “We have to focus on your fight now. Straight punches, keep everything in front of you. We’re going to utilize what we’ve got, and I’ve seen that right hand, so that’s going to be the main weapon. Make him respect the right, let him know that you can hurt him with that hand, and then win the fight from there. Three things. One: straight punches. Two: good defense, hands up and under control. Three: conditioning. And we’ll beat him.”
We fell back into our seamless, timeless routine, training and running. I would meet with Heather and work on my defense, and I would meet Virgil for coffee and walk or run the lake.
One typical sunny afternoon, Virgil and I were walking the lake, stepping carefully around goose shit and talking. I asked him about his family, his brothers, and how he was led into fighting. “When I was six or seven, I was the best slap-fighter in elementary school,” he said, and I thought back to my childhood memories of slap-fighting with my dad, his face serious (not that the blows were) and his hands as big as my head, knifing through the air. No one at my school would slap-fight with me. Virgil told stories of his uncles and their street-fighting days. How his grandfather had such fearsome hands that he used to keep them in his back pockets, to show peaceful intentions.
“The closer we get to your fight,” he said, “the narrower our focus becomes. Training gets easier. We try to do just a few things right, and if you show you can do them, we’ll advance a segment for your next fight, until you string ten or twelve segments together, and you get to be complete, and then we start volume two.”
I finally got to start sparring again, and it was as if I had been asleep. I had forgotten how much fun it is. It’s the point of everything. I sparred a couple of guys at Joe’s who were smaller than me, and not very good, but I had a great time.
Back at Virgil’s house, Andre had come to work out a little bit. He couldn’t stay away; he just had too much youth in him to rest for more than a few days. He and I went downstairs and opened up the garage door on a dry, cool, sunny Oakland day, the city stretching away below us, down the steep driveway to the sea. We started stretching and warming up, and then Andre said, “You want to hear something that will really fire you up?” and he dashed upstairs like a kid. He came back with a CD and threw it in, and he looked at me and said, “Here’s the white boy in me,” and he played his favorite song. It was the Rocky IV soundtrack, and the song was “No Easy Way Out,” which is maybe the silliest, cheesiest song ever recorded. He blasted it as we shadowboxed, and Antonio stuck his head down and looked disgusted and left. The clear blue sky was shimmering outside, and the sun was warm, and the shade was cool.
I shadowboxed while Andre worked the heavy bag, and I focused on not telegraphing, being ready with the right. Andre worked his conventional and southpaw stances. We played through “Eye of the Tiger” twice, and as that guitar started, that nearly funk hard crunch, Dre yelled, “Here we go!”
Virgil popped his head in once, looked around, and withdrew. The sun and wind through the open door felt good.
We put some reggae on and stretched and talked quietly. Andre was developing a theme that he thought about often, how boxing is perceived.
“There’s a stigma attached to boxing, some of which is warranted and some isn’t. The other day, I shook this guy’s hand, and he asked me how my day was, and I said, ‘I woke up this morning, so it’s a good day.’ And then he said, joking around, ‘You didn’t have to use those hands this morning, did you?’ Implying that I didn’t have to beat nobody up.” Dre gave me a look that said, C’mon, man.
“I understand that they don’t understand. Slowly, we’ll change all that, with what comes out of my mouth, how I carry myself, and what happens outside the ring. We’re going to change the game, and by ‘we’ I mean myself and Antonio and my little brother, Shimone, and whoever else God puts in our circle, they’re going to change the game.” He gave me a little look—God had put me in his circle, however briefly, and he was aware of me as a writer and how I could help him change the game.
“Why do team sports hold all the attention today? In boxing, you have a man putting his life on the line, and in basketball you can ride the bench and still make millions. It’s up to the fighters, too, though—why should I be on TV if everything that comes out of my mouth is ‘m-f’ this and ‘f’ that? We’re role models, like it or not. In the public eye, you got to carry yourself a certain way. A lot of guys don’t know better. If they knew better, they’d do better.”
We went upstairs, where Virgil had cooked eggs and veal and Antonio was already chowing down. I ate a plateful too, and afterward talked to Virgil a little bit, just the two of us. He was a little disappointed that Antonio hadn’t gone downstairs to work with us.
“I knew you guys were good down there—you were better just working out with Dre. You don’t need me every workout yelling at you; sometimes you just got to work on the things I yelled at you for last time.” He was absolutely right; sometimes you need to be left alone as a fighter to focus on your interior world, to let your concentration become total and to live in that imaginary fight and try those things again and again that you need to get right.
We talked about getting older, how being a fighter is not something that happens in a few months—it means years of study and toil, mindless conditioning and mindful practice. It is never finished. As soon as you let it slide, you are not a fighter but an ex-fighter, still dangerous but inhabiting a different plane, the regular-person plane.
Virgil said, musing, “When you retire from fighting, you become the best fighter you could have been,” and he meant that your understanding of the game reaches its deepest level.
I had one more day of sparring at King’s before I would start resting for my fight. There was a trainer at the gym who disliked Virgil, who envied his success and always wanted to fight any of his guys with anybody he could find. The trainers’ egos came out and dueled each other through their fighters. Virgil sort of ignored the guy, as Virgil had much bigger fish to fry; but the other trainer would go around the gym looking for people my size. He wanted to spar with us. He had a kid, a tall, thin, light-skinned black kid, who could hit a little, especially if you stood in front of him—I’d seen him do it. He hit hard. The kid was only nineteen and 175 pounds, but he could hit if you let him get set. He was athletic, confident, with smooth, shelling punches like artillery. He was better than me and had a few years in the gym, and his trainer badly wanted me to spar him, because he thought he could beat me up. I had thought I could spar with him when I watched him earlier, if I kept moving.
Virgil surprised me when he asked me if I wanted to spar the kid, as a few weeks earlier the trainer had suggested it, and Virg had quickly said, “But Sam doesn’t have any fights and your boy has fights.” The trainer had said, “C’mon, my guy’s only nineteen. Sam is thirty—he has man-strength. He’s a man.” Virg had replied, “But in the gym, we measure age in boxing time, and Sam only has a couple of mont
hs in the gym,” and so on. Virgil had obviously liked what he saw in my last sparring session, and he wanted me to work with the kid.
I had run that morning and done hill sprints the day before, so my legs weren’t fresh, but I thought that I could get through three rounds. The kid and his trainer were in back, and I knew that the trainer was telling him to kick my ass, to light me up.
Virgil was talking quietly to me. “Just use that jab, and move, move in and out, don’t stop. His trainer is telling him all sorts of stuff, but you just move and use your jab.”
The first round went pretty well. I moved constantly and hit him and even caught him once with the right. He caught me but not bad at all. His punches to the head were nothing, and I found myself scrambling all over the ring, but it was working beautifully. I even had him bleeding a little, although he wasn’t hurt.
But for some reason, I wasn’t breathing right through my mouthpiece, because when the round ended, I was way out of breath. This had happened when I sparred those kids in Hayward, too; I just wasn’t breathing right or was moving too much and I got winded.
The second round, he came out leaping, on the attack, and he started to hit me a little bit, but the head shots were fine, nothing at all. He didn’t even give me a bloody nose. I felt a little cowardly always moving away from him, letting him chase me all over the ring, and I started to slow down. I wasn’t moving as fast or as crisply, and he leapt in and dug a good right hand to the body.
Do you even need to hear what happened next? The shot landed right on that same sweet spot on the crest of my left rib cage—the same spot I had busted at Pat’s, and it felt like lightning came out of his punch, like he was driving a boiling-hot dagger through me. I cried out and almost doubled up, and from then on he clubbed me around. My mind cried out against the injustice of it all as I recognized the fact of what had happened, the shooting pains all through my body from that spot. He even went back to the body a couple of times, but nothing like that first one. Then Virgil said between rounds, “Go back to what you were doing. You got to trust in your conditioning—you were beating him.” Virgil was confused. None of the kid’s shots had been that good—why was I suddenly struggling? I tried in the third round, but the kid knew he had me. I heard his corner saying, “Go back to the body,” and I waved it over. I said no más. If I took another good body shot on the same spot, I would probably have died.
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