The Fallow Season of Hugo Hunter

by Craig Lancaster

  “There it is,” Hugo said in Aurelia’s front room. “See how he lets his right drop below his chin as he throws that left? I saw that. And I knew he’d do it again.”

  At the commercial break, Frank turned to him and said, “Do you remember what I was saying to you?”

  “Huh?”

  “It’s between the first and second round. Do you remember what I said?”

  “Yeah . . . I . . . something about slowing down.”

  “That’s it. Slow down and take him. That’s what I said. He was all ours. You can see that. He was right there for the taking.”

  They looked at each other, and then they looked at me, and I could see that this was how our shared experience would be. We were identical images of stomach sickness. It’s unseemly, perhaps, to complain about your lot when you’re an Olympic silver medalist, but Frank and Hugo knew something, and as the chronicler of their deeds, I was privy to it. The things the kid had done to get ready for that moment—the solitary miles and the time on the bag and the gut-busters and all the rest. A loss under any circumstance is unsatisfying. To lose the way Hugo did that day in Barcelona . . . it’s now been nearly half my life, and I don’t think I’ve ever found the words.

  At the start of the second round, Hugo was off the stool and across the ring before Juan Domingo left his corner. The Ugandan ref pushed him back, and the Barcelonans again grumbled their discontent. It was no matter. Hugo had gone into the zone, that place where, as he described it to me later, the noise stops and the clarity begins and every target—Juan Domingo’s nose and forehead and chin and liver and gut—looks three times bigger than it is. Hugo had him lined up for the fall, and as we watched Juan Domingo’s eyes on Aurelia’s ancient Zenith, we could see it. As I watched in my living room, alone, all these years later, I could see it.

  Juan Domingo threw a left hand—a little sharper than before, but nothing Hugo didn’t see coming. Hugo gave a little deke left and dug a short hook into the Spaniard’s rib cage. It’s the punch I’ve always considered the most crucial, aside from the infamous one. Juan Domingo’s spittle flew halfway across the mat. That’s the moment he knew he couldn’t win, I think.

  Next came the hunt. Juan Domingo got on his bicycle and started moving—back, back, back, left, left, left. Hugo came forward, a shark. It was all pressure now, all closing the distance and figuring out the trajectories. Hugo’s right hand batted down another weak left from Juan Domingo, while the kid’s left popped Ascencion in the nose. Off-balance, Juan Domingo threw an awkward right hand that whiffed, and Hugo brought two quick hooks—one to the ribs and one that glanced off the top of the head. An inch or two down, on the temple, and it would have been over.

  When Juan Domingo danced away from that danger, Hugo committed his one truly stupid error of the entire tournament, a fact he lamented to me off and on in the years that followed. He got anxious, because he knew he’d taken Ascencion’s will. “It’s something you can feel,” Hugo told me once. “When another fighter doesn’t want to be in the ring anymore, you know it sure as you know anything.” Hugo lunged with a right that Aurelia could have seen coming. Juan Domingo bailed out of there, but as he did, he caught Hugo dead-on in the face with a right hand that was maybe at 70 percent of his power.

  Frank, in Aurelia’s house, said, “That was dumb.”

  “I’m in no danger, but I’m stung,” Hugo conceded. “But look at me—I’m pissed.” I remember being amused at how clinically he broke it down. We were barely seventy-two hours clear of his life’s biggest disappointment, and still he could talk about himself as if he stood outside his own experience. He was seventeen years old. Invincible.

  This one sign of life from Juan Domingo set the crowd off, and he moved in and started unloading wild shots, the vast majority of which hit Hugo’s gloves and arms. Hugo grabbed the Spaniard’s arms and put his head in his chest, forcing the referee to come in and extricate them.

  Next came the fateful moment, as the NBC guy repeatedly said during the interminable replays and mounting dismay of the aftermath. I’ve seen this play out three times: on the scene, with certainty, until all hope was lost that Hugo was taking the gold; on Aurelia’s couch three days later, the injustice of it all leaving us steeped in anger; and in my own house, a generation later, holding on to the fantasy that somehow the outcome will change, that if we can alter this one little thing, everything else will be spun out different and better, too.

  After separating Hugo and Juan Domingo, the ref did his little karate chop to the air to tell them to get back at it. Hugo waded in, watching that languid right hand as it drifted down, down, down just as Juan Domingo started unrolling his lazy left. Hugo’s shoulders dipped, the launching pad for the prettiest left hook he ever threw. It was bang-bang-bang: Hugo’s gloved fist, flush against Juan Domingo’s jaw, the buzzer to end the round, and Juan Domingo’s body crumpling to the canvas.

  It was over for Juan Domingo. He was out, eyes closed, for a full fifteen seconds. His trainer leapt into the ring, screaming in frantic Spanish, rushing here and there. Frank was in there, too, his arms around Hugo. The ringside doctor was at Juan Domingo’s side, and I remember the black dread of that moment. Until I saw the Spaniard’s eyes flicker open, I was sick with worry that he might be badly hurt. Flashbulbs went off at 360 degrees, leaving traces of burned-out air.

  Then came the chaos. The referee told the judges that Hugo hit Juan Domingo after the buzzer and it was a disqualification. It took a while for this message to come to us, given the necessary translations, and when it did, Frank just about lost it. He went at the Ugandan ref, face red and neck veins bulging, and was held back by a cadre of Olympic officials. On the tape, Hugo wanders around, his gloves already cut off, holding out his gauze-wrapped hands with a searching look, as if he wanted someone to sit him down and explain what just happened.

  No one ever did. Not really. The audio on the replays was conclusive, remains conclusive. First came the pure tonal bliss of leather against skin, then the buzzer, then Juan Domingo’s imitation of a potato sack. Bang-bang-bang. The NBC guy frothed on the telecast, and Juan Domingo’s hand was raised even as he sat on a bench, unable to stand on his own. Frank and the US delegation put in the inevitable protest, which was summarily dismissed, the TV evidence no match for glad-handing between the International Olympic Committee and the host city, and Hugo ended up on the medal stand with Juan Domingo and the German guy, Dorfschmedder, whom he’d beaten in the semis. Frank talked for a while about staying away from the ceremony out of protest, like the ’72 US basketball team that got jobbed, but in the end nobody—not even Frank—saw poor sportsmanship as a satisfying response to flagrantly bad judgment.

  To this day, it’s surreal, remembering that scene from the medal stand, with Juan Domingo inexplicably standing on the tallest riser. I recall Hugo leaning over and saying something to Ascencion, and back home in Billings, as the smell of chile verde wafted in from his grandmother’s kitchen, I asked him what he’d uttered.

  “I told him, ‘La próxima vez, te llevaré a cabo rápida,’ ” he said.

  “Which means?”

  “Next time, I’ll take you out quick.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He didn’t say anything. He couldn’t even look at me.”

  “Wow.”

  “Yeah,” Hugo said. “It was pretty rad. Those two years of Spanish are turning out to be worthwhile after all.”

  6

  The newspaper thumped against the screen door just after four a.m. I stood in front of the bathroom mirror in a T-shirt and sweatpants, brushing my teeth in preparation for sleep that wasn’t likely to take hold. It’s always been this way for me—not insomnia, exactly, but nothing more than a flirtation with REM sleep. Marlene used to tell me that I lived too far inside my own head and couldn’t shut off my thoughts long enough to sleep. There might be something to that. The career I c
hose certainly did me no favors in that regard. The cityside reporters all go home at five o’clock, but for me, most nights, dusk is when I’m just getting started, my life aligned to the schedule of nighttime sports. That used to piss Marlene off something fierce, that I’d rarely be able to find my way home for the dinners she eventually gave up making, and I’d end up coming through the door after midnight with a sack of tacos, the leavings of which she’d find in the garbage the next morning. We expended so much energy fighting about things like that; it seems particularly cruel that it was all nearly ten years in the rearview and still I spend an inordinate amount of time cataloging my regrets.

  I fetched the paper from the stoop and brought it into the house, spreading the four sections across the kitchen table like an oversize deck of playing cards.

  Hugo’s fight dominated the front-page skybox, running six columns across where, in any other Wednesday paper, we might promote some local story about the latest schoolkid to build a dancing robot and some outdoors piece about a yutz who backpacked naked through the Beartooths. The teaser headline—“End of the Line?”—wasn’t especially original, but it brought the most salient question to the fore. That day in the newsroom, I’d collared Larry Grubbs, our chief photographer, and told him that he couldn’t send David Mayer to the Babcock unless he wanted to see only a single, out-of-focus shot of Hugo in the paper the next morning. Larry didn’t have to chew on that long to know I was right, and he penciled out Mayer and put himself down for the duty. I was happy to see he got the right image for the skybox, a head-and-shoulders shot of Hugo from behind, cast in a half-light, as he walked up the ramp alone, beaten.

  Over on the front of the sports section, I noted with a tinge of melancholy that we weren’t even entertaining questions anymore. The six-column horizontal photo of Hugo on his hands and knees, sweat beading on a face that had been pounded into hamburger, rode over the top of a headline that was flatly declarative: “Over and Out.” I sent up a silent wish that Hugo wouldn’t see it and fixate on that last word, lest he come after me and force me into a tedious explanation of the difference between a newspaper reporter and a headline writer.

  Then I saw the byline, and I resolved to piss in Gene Trimear’s coffee mug. I hadn’t asked for a credit line when I’d scooted back to the office to help Bobby Olden with his story, didn’t want one, didn’t want any part of this sad denouement, and yet there I was, first billing in the morning paper.

  By MARK WESTERLY and ROBERT OLDEN

  Herald-Gleaner Staff

  He’s been on magazine covers and cereal boxes, TV talk shows and pay-per-view megafights. But Tuesday night, Billings boxing star Hugo Hunter was on his back on the Babcock Theatre canvas, knocked out in the second round by Cody Schronert, and there’s considerable doubt that his once-sterling career can or should continue.

  It’s a good lede, and I’m glad Bobby kept it after I pecked it onto his computer screen while he was in the can taking a squirt. He’d started with Schronert and his “shocking” victory—it was the who-what-when-where-why thing that is mandatory equipment when you’re in J-school but has little currency in a story that requires nuance and institutional knowledge.

  If this is indeed the end, it came at 2:14 of the second round, compliments of a right hand by Schronert, a former Billings Senior football standout, that put the former Olympian down for the count.

  Nobody’s a former Olympian. An Olympian is an Olympian is an Olympian. It’s like being a lawyer or an alcoholic; once the tag is affixed, it’s there to stay. Dumb mistake for Olden to have made. Dumber still that Trimear didn’t catch it.

  Afterward, Hunter repeatedly said “the kid got lucky,” suggesting that he would be back in the ring when the Tuesday night fight series returns for its final installment of the season in two weeks. But Trevor Feeney, the promoter and organizer of the series, suggested that wouldn’t happen.

  “Our rules stipulate that any knocked-out fighter spend a minimum of a month out of action,” he said. “It’s a sad end to a wonderful career, but we should be grateful to have had so many memorable years of watching Hugo Hunter in action.”

  With your more inarticulate sources, you sometimes have to help them say what they mean. Squeaky, when I called him from the office to get an official comment, didn’t say precisely what I put into the story. The actual squeak was something more like this: “Goddamnit, Westerly, I just fucking told you an hour and a half ago that it’s over, he was out, he’s done. I’m not being goddamn arbitrary here. It’s in the frappin’ rule book, you thickheaded bastard. I know you just love Hugo and think he’s the queen’s tits, but it’s over, OK?”

  After Bizarro Trevor Feeney’s quote, I mostly skimmed the remainder of the article. I’d dumped all the background stuff into an e-mail for Olden, the dates and the places and the people branded into me like computer memory, and just as accessible. Once we all came back from Barcelona in ’92, my life changed. I was on the Hugo Hunter beat, and I saw it all, the good, the banal, and the horrifying. That night, after I’d left Feeney’s, I spilled the distillation of all that into a message and sent it off to Olden. After I went home, I tried to make sense of it all, everything, twenty-some years of Hugo Hunter. I’ve had better nights.

  7

  I showed up at Hugo’s at ten a.m. with a cup of coffee and a sausage-and-egg bagel, all the better to wrangle an invitation inside if he balked. I never really knew with him.

  Outside, among people in town, Hugo had a thirst for attention I’d never seen from other people with notoriety, who tended to shy away from it or even greet it with hostility. Long after Hugo had surely met everyone who wanted to meet him, and certainly after his greatest wave of fame, he yearned to be recognized, to be praised, to be approached. I used to think it was a manifestation of the way Aurelia and Hugo’s mother, Helene—when she was still alive—had fawned over him, and the absence of a known father. Later, I discounted that. It’s not a role that Frank necessarily wanted, but he became the de facto daddy the day Hugo was put in his charge. Hugo had a funny way of making you family, and your own desires weren’t much of a determinant. My standing on his doorstep with a food offering proved that. I’d long since concluded that Hugo believed he had only one contribution, one thing he could do that no one else could match, and no amount of attention could slake his desire for recognition.

  At home, however, he turned inward. We saw it that day we came off the plane from Barcelona, the way he receded into the haven Aurelia maintained for him. After the four dozen fights that followed, home always pulled him back in, safe from a world that wanted a piece of him, Aurelia’s love at the ready to patch his wounds and fill his cup again. He might have been OK if Aurelia could have lived forever, but that’s not happening, not for any of us. I looked over at the spot where Hugo had found his grandmother four years earlier, slumped forward into the soil that held her perennials. Like Aurelia, they were gone.

  “Hey, Mark.” The muffled voice came from the other side of the door.

  “Hugo. You up?”

  “Never went down for good. Been upstairs. Dark up there.”

  I stepped back and looked up at his bedroom window. A sun-bleached blanket blotted out the light.

  “Can I come in?”

  “Maybe some other time. I’m a mess.”

  I held the bag up to the peephole. “I brought breakfast.”

  A few pregnant seconds passed before the dead bolt withdrew and the door fell open. I let myself in and followed Hugo into the living room.

  I hadn’t been in the place since the potluck on the day we put Aurelia into the ground. Save for a robust layer of dust, nothing much had changed.

  Hugo lowered himself into a recliner. His robe, open to the navel, sprang a flabby leak, and he looked back at me through sunglasses. Squeaky’s half-assed stitching job had come partly undone, and a trail of dried blood slipped off Hugo’s brow and made swi
tchbacks down his temple.

  I stepped over and handed him the coffee and the sandwich, and Hugo motioned for me to take the adjacent couch.

  “Thanks for this,” he said.

  “Not a problem. Wanted to see how you were feeling.”

  He chased his first bite with a swig of Colombian. “Been better. I think that kid had silver bars in his glove.” He cupped his jaw in his right hand and slid it back and forth, Tin Man–style.

  I sat forward and ground my palms together. I hadn’t given much thought to how I’d open things with Hugo, and I found that I was stuck. I decided to let him eat.

  “I dreamed last night,” he said at last.

  “Most people do.”

  “Yeah, but this was different. It was like I saw things as they actually were. It wasn’t all bits and pieces of random stuff that doesn’t make sense when you wake up. When I had my problem, I used to dream about talking frogs and flying cakes and stuff like that—just way out there kind of stuff. It wasn’t like that, either. I recognized this.”

  “You want to tell me about it?”

  Hugo folded the foil around the uneaten half of his sandwich and set it aside. Off came the sunglasses. He greeted the scant light in the room with a scowl, and I took grim inventory of the rotting-meat array of purples and greens around his pummeled eye.