Amateur

by Thomas Page McBee

  I did.

  “Cross.”

  I did.

  “Great. Feel all right?”

  I nodded. I had never been more scared in my life.

  “It’s just sparring,” Danny said, like No big deal, holding the ropes open for me. From door to ring it had been less than five minutes, but I already trusted him, and so I climbed through.

  • • •

  “Thomas has balls,” I heard Danny say to Chris at the ropes, after I knocked gloves with the smaller, bulldog guy Danny had been sparring with a few minutes before, another Haymakers trainee, a quant fund manager with an expensive haircut named Stephen Cash. Any unease I felt about the compliment was eclipsed by my focus on Stephen, who bared his teeth at me from across the ring.

  Waiting for the starting bell, he hopped on his feet and tapped out a few combinations on the ropes, breathing through his nose like a bull. The drama was meant to intimidate me, and it worked. I straightened my spine, then promptly short-circuited as the bell rang and he charged me with an impersonal fury.

  Who was this guy? He was merciless, and a little crazy, pouring on so much pressure that I had trouble moving off the ropes. He muscled in close and hit until he exhausted himself and then, alarmingly, attempted a few light uppercuts, clearly practicing for a fight where the goal would be to wear his opponent down and then knock him out. Because we were sparring and not fighting, I could feel him ease off after each flurry, letting me catch my breath, but I was paralyzed with indecision, my mind blank.

  “Hit him, Tommy!” Danny said helpfully, so I jabbed away, in a dumb and predictable rhythm, while Stephen easily rolled beneath each attempt. Sometime into the second round, I disassociated, and came to in the defensive posture Errol had taught me: my guard up, my elbows close to my ribs.

  I didn’t yet realize that fighting was mostly about what you did when you were overpowered. This man, backed into a corner, learning how to fight—this was a glimpse of who I was under the rubble of trauma and expectation and loss. It would take me a long time to understand that this first walloping wasn’t the failure it appeared to be—it was, in fact, the whole point.

  What I was still convinced of, then, was one of the hardest remnants of masculinity to shake: that I lacked some essential wiring, from boyhood or biology, that I would need to find a way to approximate, and fast.

  “Yeah, Tommy, you got balls!” Danny said again, a striking perspective to maintain, not only because Chris and I both knew that I did not, in fact, have balls, but also because I thought I was losing. Stephen had me cornered again and was hitting me repeatedly in the head. “Keep moving, Tommy!” Danny said calmly but firmly. I had frozen, yet again, and this time I’d dropped my guard and was just letting Stephen hit me in the face. Danny’s voice woke me up, and I moved out of the way. “Yeah, baby!” Danny said. “There you go.”

  Danny, sensing that I was getting tired, had us switch to round robins. Me vs. Danny; Danny vs. Stephen; Stephen vs. Ricky, a reedy, would-be Olympian who kept his guard down as if he didn’t need it and played with us both carefully, like prey. I was bad, but something about the ease of the group orbiting around Danny made me feel settled: the glimmer of kindness in the way Stephen hit my gloves after that last round, the grin plastered on Chris’s face, even the grudging laugh of the serious Ricky, who clearly got a kick out of Stephen, who he’d just given a bloody nose. Stephen, for his part, stopped, grinned, and took a selfie.

  I had never met anyone else like him.

  Stephen was about my age, and I’d later learn that he was a triathlete and former open-water swimmer, a straight guy who smiled a perfect white-teeth smile and wore pointy boots and tight pants into a gnarly boxing gym. His masculinity was more peacock than brute, which I appreciated, though to see him, it was hard to not think, unfairly, of Patrick Bateman, the main character from American Psycho. Which is to say, I expected to not like Stephen, with his wolf grin and fancy shorts, but jumping rope next to the ring as I sparred with other boxers that first night, Stephen surprised me by shouting encouragements. He did not know me, but he already believed in me.

  It was remarkable, I thought, watching him between rounds. When he removed his headgear, it was as if he were stripping off a mask. I saw the person behind the man who’d charged me so viciously only moments before. If I could learn to see Stephen for who he was and not whom he pretended to be, I decided, I wouldn’t be afraid of anybody.

  We sparred for ninety minutes straight, until the reception guys kicked us out.

  “You have to make the other guy respect you,” Danny said in the stairwell, everyone else up ahead of us. I asked him if he thought I had a shot at actually fighting in Madison Square Garden in two months. He looked at me bug-eyed, reminding me briefly of Errol. But I was done passing as a type of guy I wasn’t, I thought with a kick that must have contorted my face, because Danny stopped short on the stairs and seemed to genuinely consider the question.

  “I’m not going to lie,” he said. “It’s not going to be pretty. You need ring experience. But I’ll have you sparring every day this week, and anyway, what matters isn’t how you do sparring this guy, what matters is where your head is at after you spar that guy.” I didn’t know what he meant exactly, but I grasped that the sparring was a different sort of test than I’d first thought.

  “You have a strong chin,” he told me, my first real boxing compliment, “and good speed. But I’ll know we’re ready when you show me that you can be aggressive.”

  Freeze, flight. He was right. I didn’t know how to look at a man who had done nothing to me and punch him in the face. How do you do that?

  “You’ve got to believe in your punches,” Danny said simply, with his big, sunny grin. “And when you spar next week, you’re going to put on a good show.”

  • • •

  As we prepared for the qualifying spar, I studied Stephen and the other fighters in the gym who seemed to have no trouble beating the hell out of any random man in front of them, even as I found it so disturbing: the ruthless whack to the kidneys, the precise hope to cause a man’s brain to slam against his skull. Feeling my fist’s impact on another person’s tender body parts, bruising and bleeding and concussing, was not enlivening, it was distressing.

  If aggression was genuinely innate to being a man, what caused it? How would I learn it? And if I did learn it, what sort of man would I become?

  The assumption that being a man was entwined with assertiveness, if not an all-out propensity for violence, wasn’t just limited to boxing coaches. It was taken for granted in any line of questioning I pursued about men. No matter how nuanced their responses, once I drilled down far enough, I inevitably found the same exasperated refrain as to why men fight: they’re just made that way.

  The most noticeable mysticism about the innateness of masculinity concerned the sorcery of the substance I injected weekly into my thighs: the synthetic hormone that had, indeed, stripped me of my baby fat, redistributed my muscle mass, turned on my genes for facial hair, and made me look, for all the world, like a man—testosterone.

  I couldn’t argue with its power. In my first few months on it, my body broadened like a comic-book hero, and I found within myself a sparkling edge, like sunlight on water. It was easy to attribute every change to the oily potion I injected weekly into my thigh: the clarity of color, the shortness of my temper, the increase in my sex drive, the charley horses in my quads, the calming of my nerves, the steadiness of my stride. It was stunning, and disconcerting, to become a caricature of a man so easily.

  But it wasn’t so simple. When I began my transition, was I more energetic because my decades-long depression was lifting, or because I got my entire week’s worth of hormone production in one shot, or because testosterone made me that way? Was I more easily agitated because I was hormonally out of balance, or was it the hormone itself? My body, my doctor back then described vaguely, was attempting to find homeostasis. By the time it did, we wouldn’t ever know f
or sure what was hormonal, what was social, and what was the potent mix of both.

  Years later, at Church’s, I still didn’t.

  Outside the gym, I knew that the short jump from testosterone to virility, aggression, and power was widely accepted as fact. In the years leading up to my training, there’d been an uptick in marketing campaigns directed to men with “low testosterone,” and a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found evidence that the number of men prescribed it tripled between 2001 and 2011. A black market had emerged specifically for guys in their fifties and older who cited its “antiaging” properties, despite the dangerous irony that taking testosterone you don’t need can leave you deficient in it by switching off your own production. Bodybuilders have been busted for injecting it, women athletes have been accused of having an “unfair advantage” for naturally producing too much of it, and rarely does anyone question testosterone as the immovable biological force in everything from violence to hypersexuality.

  I thought about what my doctor had said about homeostasis every night that week before sparring. Along with learning a truly sloppy approximation of a left hook and a few easy combinations, I worked on a much harder skill, the one Danny immediately identified as a core weakness: my difficulty “coming forward.”

  When Danny told me to be aggressive, he said it as if that impulse should come naturally to me. “Touch gloves like you mean it,” he’d say when we’d practice the customary greeting at the start of the fight. “Hit them hard, throw him off.”

  But it didn’t come easily. So as Stephen focused on intimidation, I had to come up with an alternative. What did I want to do after I went back to my corner, while we waited for the bell to ring to start the round? Would I look right at my opponent or be relaxed and nonchalant, leaning against the ropes? Would I practice some combinations to get loose? Whatever I did, Danny said, it needed to not involve what I was currently doing—looking scared as hell.

  So, I settled on jumping on my toes, being a ball of energy. If it wasn’t intimidating, exactly, it discharged some of my anxiety and made me “look busy,” per Danny’s constant suggestion.

  “That’s good,” Danny said charitably. “It looks like you’re not going to get tired.”

  Once I opened myself up to learning what I didn’t know, I found the men I trained with to be generous teachers. When I fought Stephen, I practiced weathering his storms and hitting back. When I sparred with Ricky, who was as fast as a panther, boxing with his guard down and in a garbage bag, I practiced launching an offense and then preparing for his rapid countering, not letting him back me into the ropes. With Chris, who muscled me around but played slow and dumb, I practiced seeing what he was actually doing. And when I fought Danny, he focused each sparring round on a lesson I needed to learn, almost all of them psychological: how not to burn out, how to hit back, and, always, how to come forward.

  I recognized the process from my time teaching writing. He was scaffolding, cramming a year’s worth of training into a week. Charity fights weren’t about making beautiful boxers, he told me. They were about getting guys with no experience emotionally and physically prepared to whale on each other for three two-minute rounds. Defense, which was almost all I focused on with Errol, was secondary. This wasn’t the time to be shy. Taking the risk of putting your body on the line was the point, even if you got clobbered. Whatever was blocking me from that, in Danny’s view, was a problem that needed fixing.

  “You’re not terrible,” Danny said the third night, which was basically a compliment. “Ask me questions,” he said, drawing me out. “You can ask me anything.”

  I was hitting the mitts with him while Stephen warmed up, getting ready to spar somebody new Danny had lined up for me, an amateur with a fight coming up, looking to work on his defense.

  “I don’t understand how to not feel like I’m losing when Stephen is kicking the shit out of me,” I mumbled.

  “That’s a fight. It’s anybody’s fight, you never know. He punches you, he has you against the ropes, and then bam!” Danny hit me gently on the side of the head. “You’re counterpunching, you’re using his own energy against him.” Danny showed me how to slip a punch and use the motion to hit back. “These charity fights, nobody gets knocked out, really. You win on points. Bunches of punches. You need to hit him more than he hits you. Don’t think about winning or losing, think about punching.” Danny looked at me, like, Get it? I nodded.

  What I didn’t say: It wasn’t that I was afraid to hit Stephen, or anyone else. My deeper fear—thinking of my stepfather, who wanted to annihilate me in ways worse than death—was that I wouldn’t know how to stop.

  • • •

  Long before I learned to box, as I was preparing to begin my transition, I didn’t want to do too much research into what testosterone actually did, afraid of what I might find. The heat in my fists during that near fight on Orchard Street, juxtaposed against my initial failure to be truly aggressive when it counted during sparring, had only confused me further. Did I want to believe that the medical intervention that kept me sane also conscripted my body to a primal, reactive violence? If it didn’t, why men were disproportionately prone to violence became an even more disturbing question.

  “A lot of people think that males have testosterone, females have estrogen, and therefore males are more aggressive than females,” Barry Starr, a geneticist at Stanford, told me. But such a simple, if popular, argument is reductive; ultimately, he said “that’s an overemphasis of biology and an underemphasis of nurture.”

  In fact, neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky, also of Stanford, told me that the single biggest misconception people have about testosterone is “that it ‘causes’ aggression.”

  The classic view, he said, is that high testosterone and social dominance are connected. But, as his studies of primates show, it’s not always true that high testosterone and high rank go together. In fact, “you find the highest T in jerky adolescent males who are starting fights that they can’t finish.”

  In humans, if testosterone is raised to an artificial level, as in steroid abuse, aggression levels rise. But for men with testosterone in the normal range, Sapolsky told me, “there is remarkably little evidence” that knowing which man has the highest testosterone levels predicts which is the most aggressive.

  “Testosterone doesn’t ‘cause’ neurons that mediate aggression to suddenly start firing from out of nowhere,” he said. “It makes them more sensitive to inputs that stimulate them.”

  So why do so many of us misunderstand the relationship between testosterone and aggression? Sapolsky pointed to an oft-overlooked nuance in the work of American researcher John Wingfield. Wingfield showed that testosterone increases not aggression, exactly, but the likelihood that men would do whatever they needed to maintain their status if it was challenged.

  Sapolsky said that most hierarchal species respond with aggression to status challenges, “but in humans, you see how powerfully the ‘whatever’ of ‘whatever is needed to maintain status’ can dissociate from aggression.” He pointed to studies rooted in economic games where winning requires being more cooperative and pro-social. “Testosterone makes people more generous in that realm.”

  But studies demonstrate that the myths about testosterone impact those games too. Men who were actually given more testosterone became more generous, but men who merely thought they were operating with elevated T became less effective and more competitive.

  “If our world is riddled with male violence, the core problem isn’t that testosterone can often increase levels of aggression,” Sapolsky added. “The problem is the frequency with which we reward aggression.”

  • • •

  Danny was a big fan of shadowboxing, and that I never quite got the hang of it almost feels like too obvious of a metaphor. Stephen, on the other hand, was fantastic. When we sparred, I had the uncanny feeling that if anyone was my shadow in the Jungian, rejected-part-of-the-self sense, it was him. H
e was unbridled id, both in the ring and outside it.

  “I’ve always been a fairly aggressive person,” Stephen told me one night, not exactly boasting. “I got into fights as a kid, I’ve been in bar fights. I wouldn’t call myself violent, but I certainly didn’t have an aversion to mixing it up.”

  I would learn, and not be shocked, that Stephen’s reasons for taking up boxing, at least consciously, were less complex than my own. “I found so many parallels in my life to fighting in the ring,” Stephen said. “Life in New York City is tough. I mean, everything is a fight, from getting a seat on the subway to a drink at the bar, or finding an apartment. And managing a hedge fund can be a real dogfight too.”

  Stephen’s wild, self-taught style, the subject of much talk among some in the gym, felt too vulnerable to me for such a pat explanation. He recorded and watched his own matches with the zeal of a world-class athlete, not a rich guy fighting for charity.

  He was fascinated with Mike Tyson, whose high voice and soft lisp belied a notoriously brutal boxing style and a surprising level of macabre self-awareness. Tyson is still a powerful proxy for a certain kind of American masculinity, a Shakespearean figure whose epic downfall—a rape conviction, a failed “comeback” featuring the notorious ear-biting of Evander Holyfield, and an increasingly pathetic series of fights that ended in cocaine abuse, bankruptcy, and a payday “exhibition tour”—highlighted our collective expectations of the most visceral, primal kind of masculinity, as well as his own. “I am a violent person, almost an animal,” he yelled hysterically at a 2000 press conference. “And they only want me to be an animal in the ring.”

  Stephen, like Tyson, twinned violence with winning, and winning with scrappiness. As I got to know Stephen, his story became more complicated and less clear to me. For instance, I’d assumed he came from money, but he told me later that his mom was from a “shanty village with nothing” in the Philippines, and his father escaped a rural town in western Kentucky that “nobody gets out of.”