On the Chin

by Alex McClintock

  Upon his return he was greeted as a conquering hero by a crowd of more than a hundred thousand in Melbourne. When Rose saw the throng, he asked the flight attendant whether the Beatles were in the front of the plane. It’s not hard to see why he couldn’t believe his new celebrity: it had been less than a year since the country had voted to count Indigenous Australians in the census. Suddenly, the schoolboyish nineteen-year-old was a huge star, the most famous Indigenous person in Australia, perhaps the most famous Australian athlete in the world, and the first Indigenous person to be named Australian of the Year. He even released a country album, with the single ‘I Thank You’ climbing to number five in the Australian charts. Like most boxers-turned-singers, Rose was better at hitting people than notes, but the track is kind of charming and its lyrics about becoming a man and standing upright doubtless had special resonance for many Indigenous Australians.

  In the year and a half after defeating Harada, Rose defended his title three times against high-level opposition. He might have held onto it for longer if he hadn’t been unlucky enough to be boxing at the same time as Olivares. After that knockout loss he fought into the mid-1970s, but never returned to serious contendership. Retirement wasn’t always happy for Rose—like Olivares he struggled with the things that suddenly superannuated young men with cash to burn tend to struggle with—but he was supported by his family, admirers and former coach’s family. After he died in 2011, the singer Archie Roach spoke at his funeral about the excitement of listening to him fight on the radio and being told by a foster carer, ‘This man who’s fighting, he’s your people.’

  Indigenous leader Warren Mundine wrote in his 2017 biography that he and his family ‘screamed and yelled and danced around the room’ when Rose beat Harada. No doubt many Indigenous Australians of a certain age can recall sitting down to listen to his fights and feeling a similar sense of pride. In that sense, if Rose is reminiscent of anyone, it’s less Ruben Olivares than Joe Louis. Like the Brown Bomber, he may not have been as outspoken, as charismatic, or as political as those who followed him, but he may have meant the most to his people.

  Today, Aboriginal boxing culture is alive and well. Anthony Mundine has successfully maintained a high profile for nearly two decades, despite dwindling relevance as a contender. Robbie Peden, once a top junior lightweight, remains a YouTube sensation for his first fight with Nate ‘The Galaxxy Warrior’ Campbell, in which Campbell engaged in an ill-advised bit of showboating, asking Peden to hit him on the chin. Peden was only too happy to oblige—and that was the end of the fight. There’s also the aforementioned Daniel Geale, who managed to capture a middleweight world title and fought a series of high-profile bouts against top names, while current Aboriginal contenders include welterweight Cameron Hammond and featherweight Nathaniel May.

  The typical disadvantaged background of boxers has led a lot of people to say that boxing is poverty porn, or even that by selling their bodies, boxers are the male equivalents of prostitutes. The writer Julie Bindel, arguing for a ban on the sport in the Guardian in 2015, said: ‘Whether we enjoy watching it or not, boxing exploits working-class people.’ Fight folk themselves have sometimes reinforced this, though usually with tongue firmly in cheek, blaming the decline of boxing on improved economic circumstances. The New Yorker’s A. J. Liebling once quoted the trainer Charlie Goldman as saying the fight game’s ills were caused by compulsory education.

  As a self-proclaimed fight fan and a member of the middle class, my take on this subject probably falls somewhere between self-serving and irrelevant, but it would be a strange omission if I didn’t at least bring it up, so here goes.

  Does the fight game sometimes exploit the men and women of what we might call the world’s second-oldest profession? Without a doubt. There are too many tales of boxers bled dry by managers, promoters, ‘friends’ and business associates before being left, shambling and confused, in penury, to try to deny it. And that’s only the minority of fighters who make serious money: it’s easy to forget that there are legions more who never make a payday bigger than a few thousand bucks, yet face all the same risks.

  That doesn’t mean every fighter is taken advantage of. Even those that are—and to varying degrees Rose, Olivares and Louis lived through sad third acts brought on by boxing—have agency. Leaving aside the question of money, what other path would have allowed them to become what they became? To give the world, their countrymen and their communities what they gave them? Unquestionably it was a hard life—harder than most of us can imagine—but being a fighter allowed each to express himself in ways he never could have otherwise. We can celebrate these men’s improbable lives and the determination that allowed them to escape their circumstances without celebrating those circumstances.

  Besides, when you actually talk to fighters, which most abolitionists don’t, you find almost universally that boxing is part of how they define themselves: that it plays a huge role in their lives. It’s a little patronising, surely, to assume they can’t decide for themselves whether they want to take part in the sport. They love it. They wouldn’t be involved if they didn’t.

  BANG BANG BANG

  THE FIRST THING that impressed me about Fritzy was his collection of boxing maxims, which he deployed continuously and without regard to their relevance: ‘Ya don’t play boxing’, ‘Don’t hook with a hooker’, ‘Kill the body and the head’ll die’, ‘Move ya fuckin’ head or the other guy’ll move it for ya.’

  Fritzy was Jake’s trainer. I had got his mobile number from Jake, but put off dialling it for two days, afraid my voice would betray me as soft, privileged and generally unsuitable for instruction. When I did finally work up the nerve to call, I half-hoped nobody would pick up. But on the fifth ring, a voice, broad and rasping, answered: ‘Fritzy here.’ (His full name turned out to be Frank Fritz, but no one ever called him anything but Fritzy.)

  ‘G’day,’ I said, affecting the same kind of matey, flat-vowelled intonation my dad uses when talking to his mechanic. ‘I was calling about getting some boxing lessons for me and a mate?’

  ‘Jake told me about yaz,’ said Fritzy. His speech was rapid and loud, but not unfriendly. ‘Never boxed before? No worries. Let’s meet on Tuesday; we’ll teach you how to move. Bring gloves and wraps. You got wraps?’

  I told him no. Hardly pausing to take a breath, he went through a list of places I could buy some, before delivering a monologue on various brands of gloves, their relative merits and availability.

  ‘How much do you weigh?’ he asked.

  About a hundred kilos, I told him.

  ‘Hoo-eee, we’ve got a heavyweight on our hands,’ he whooped, and explained that any boxer weighing over ninety was a heavyweight. I hadn’t known this, and felt a vague sense of pride in my own chunkiness.

  The call lasted ten minutes. Fritzy did ninety per cent of the talking, which suited me just fine. I was still afraid of saying something that would expose me for a wimp.

  He finished by asking whether I knew his gym.

  ‘It’s down near the fish factory behind Sydenham Station, you would’ve seen the sign, big fuckin’ thing, ya can’t miss it.’

  I hated to tell him that I had, in fact, missed it. It wasn’t really my neck of the woods.

  ‘Ah well, I’m not there anymore anyway,’ admitted Fritzy. ‘Really I’m between gyms. It’s a long story.’

  ‘No worries,’ I said, matily.

  I could tell you that I fell in love with boxing the first time I walked into a gym, but the first boxing gym I ever went to was, in point of fact, an Edwardian bandstand.

  Because of the ‘between gyms’ situation, Fritzy was going to train us at a local park; an elegant cricket ground ringed by bowing fig trees. I wasn’t entirely sure how this would work, but I arrived half an hour early, a move I would later recognise as a classic symptom of nerves. I was still worried Fritzy would find me wanting in some fundamental way; that he’d somehow know I hadn’t been in a fight since I was seven and that my
mum still gave me a kiss on the cheek on my way out the door each morning.

  It was six in the evening, early spring and not yet warm. Behind me, down a small hill, the sun set over the fig trees while games of touch football ebbed and flowed on the field. I waited in the rotunda, elaborately casual as I leaned on the rail and surveyed the street for a guy who looked like a boxing trainer. It felt like the lead-up to a blind date.

  Soon David arrived. Fritzy, driving a compact SUV, wasn’t far behind. I would have known it was him even if he hadn’t been lugging an enormous duffel bag overflowing with gloves and headgear. Compared to the clean-cut Jake, our new coach was much closer to what I had pictured: despite his age and height—he was in his fifties and a good six inches shorter than me—Fritzy’s physical presence was intimidating. Broad across the shoulders, he was dressed in athletic shorts, runners and a dark T-shirt that hung over a modest paunch. His boyish face was pugnacious but not battered-looking, with a lantern jaw, a slight underbite and narrow, heavy-lidded eyes.

  He sauntered up to the bandstand, yelled a greeting and flashed a wolfish smile as he slapped his hand into mine. His grip, unsurprisingly, was firm. Waves of dark green ink washed down his forearms, lapping at his wrists.

  ‘How are yaz? Ready to learn to fight? Don’t you worry. We’ll teach you how to throw punches. BANG. BANG. BANG.’

  Fritzy mimed throwing a left-jab, right-cross, left-hook combination as he spat out the sounds. I had to hand it to the guy: he was a master of onomatopoeia.

  I was a little taken aback by the enthusiasm, but there was no time to be awkward. With his bandsaw voice and rapid-fire delivery, Fritzy hardly let us get a word in edgeways. Before David and I knew it, he had set a small rectangular kitchen timer with a digital screen—the same type that hung on the door of my mum’s oven—for ten minutes and we were jumping rope, right there in the rotunda.

  ‘I like my boys to skip for ten minutes, sometimes twenty, before every training session,’ he said over the sound of our ropes clicking on the tiles. Given my level of fitness, this seemed about as feasible as running the New York Marathon. In the years since primary school—the last time I had done it—I had forgotten how much coordination jumping rope required. Not only that, but back at Drummoyne Public we did a little half-jump between rotations of the rope, which had the effect of slowing things right down.

  Apparently this wasn’t the done thing for boxers. ‘Stop skipping like a fuckin’ girl,’ barked Fritzy.

  It turns out leaping once per revolution is a lot more taxing. Skipping is fairly technique-based too, so your unfit beginner jumping five or ten centimetres over the rope is actually working much harder than an experienced boxer who’s scuffing over it by a couple of millimetres. This seems kind of perverse and unfair, especially when you’re the beginner in question. After a few minutes, despite the breaks I took every few rotations to untangle myself, my calves, shins, shoulders, lungs and lower back were radiating pain.

  I kept whipping myself on the back and triceps, which left the skin criss-crossed with painful red stripes. I looked more like a galley slave than a boxer. I was ready for the session to end before it had properly started and Fritzy, who must have realised what he was dealing with, called time early.

  He asked if we’d brought wraps. I nodded and retrieved the black cotton rolls from my bag. He gestured for me to hand them over, undid the Velcro and threw them towards the ground, watching them unfurl across the bandstand like streamers. Then he rolled them back the other way, so that the fasteners were at the end.

  ‘Put your hand out. Spread your fingers,’ he ordered. I obeyed.

  He grabbed my wrist from below and turned my hand over, his grip firm but gentle. A loop went over the thumb of my right hand, and he began to unroll the fabric. I looked down into the coach’s face as he wound the wrap first around my wrist, then my hand. He was standing close to me and speaking, quietly narrating his work. I could feel his breath.

  ‘Now around the knuckles. And back under. Now make a fist. That’s it. Let go. And back around here. Not too tight.’

  Perhaps it was the circular motion of the wrapping, or maybe it was Fritzy’s quiet, mantra-like explanation of what he was doing, but my field of vision was slowly narrowing to exclude everything but my hands.

  ‘And now we come around the thumb like this. And back over…and you’re done.’

  I had zoned out so completely that I jumped when Fritzy slapped my knuckles, confirming the bandaging was complete and breaking the trance. It didn’t take long after that first session for me to learn to wrap my own hands, but I’ve always found having someone else do it intimate and therapeutic, like the state of deep relaxation some people achieve getting a haircut or a pedicure.

  The idea of bandaging hands has been around almost as long as boxing itself. The ancients knew that when an unsupported human fist hits something hard, like, let’s say, a human head, the force of the impact can cause the hand to collapse and the wrist to bend. It can even snap the metacarpal bones that run through the palm, an injury I am told emergency room doctors refer to as ‘the dickhead fracture’, so common is it on Friday and Saturday nights.

  The Greeks worked out a way to protect boxers from these ignoble injuries, using strips of cloth to lock the wrist in place and compress the tissues of the hand. In turn, and as they were wont to do, the Romans took hand-wrapping to a degenerate extreme by having gladiators wear caestuses, leather, wood and metal straps that were basically giant brass knuckles and could kill with a single blow.

  That sort of thing is frowned upon these days. Still, when Fritzy asked how my hands felt, and I said ‘good’, what I meant was that it felt like he had transformed them from everyday implements into deadly weapons. I ground my right fist into my upright left palm like a cartoon bully, rotating it, enjoying the power flowing from my knuckles.

  While Fritzy performed the same operation on David, I stood and compulsively flexed my hands, like a kid who just got his braces off and can’t stop licking his smooth new teeth. I hadn’t expected to encounter such a thrill before even pulling on my gloves, nor such a sense of transformation.

  Fritzy instructed us to ‘shape up’—get in a boxing stance—with our legs shoulder width apart, our right feet back and our hands up. We did so to the best of our ability, which, Fritzy made clear, was not all that well. He walked between us, inspecting our postures and making small adjustments by grabbing and manipulating our hands and shoulders, as if he were posing two giant action figures in a strange suburban diorama.

  Once we were arranged to his satisfaction, Fritzy delivered a lecture about the importance of keeping our hands up. He illustrated this by lunging at me and slapping me on the right fist. I blinked.

  ‘And what happens if ya don’t keep ya hands up?’

  Ever the teacher’s pet, I started to answer before I realised the question was rhetorical: ‘Well you’d get hi…’

  Fritzy slapped my hand again, knocking it into my chin and shutting me up. Fair enough.

  He paused and continued with the presentation, sticking out his chin and slapping it hard, crossing his eyes and wobbling his knees in a comic imitation of a hurt fighter. ‘Nighty fuckin’ night!’

  Next up was the left jab. ‘That’s ya stick,’ said Fritzy, thrusting his left hand into the air before our faces. ‘A guy gets too close…boom.’ ‘Ya wanna come in…boom. Ya wanna see where he is…boom.’ With every boom he poleaxed an imaginary opponent.

  Now he waved us on to follow him. Feebly, we began to shadow-box, tottering around like a pair of newborn giraffes. All the while Fritzy yelled pointers and feigned punches at us. Despite the animated tuition and my own best efforts, Fritzy’s defiant spearing motion emerged from my body as a gentle pawing. If this was shadow-boxing, there was a real possibility my shadow might win.

  The root of the problem was the fact that in boxing, a right-handed (orthodox) fighter uses his left hand to do the hard work of jabbing and hooking whil
e his dominant hand lounges about, waiting to be used for heavier right crosses. The same process applies in reverse to left handers, although because southpaws have always been considered a bit freaky and suspect (despite the natural advantage of being rare and difficult to get used to) some are taught to box in the orthodox stance. For obvious reasons, these ‘converted southpaws’, a cohort that includes Joe Frazier, Oscar De La Hoya and the recent Puerto Rican star Miguel Cotto (who, like me, started boxing because he had got a bit fat), tend to possess more power than usual in their lead hand. Anyway, the point is that I’m not the most coordinated person at the best of times and having to rely on my non-dominant hand seemed not only counterintuitive, but cruel.

  Fritzy soon progressed to right hands, and we followed suit, stumbling around like drunks trying to pass a field sobriety test. Every new instruction was accompanied by miming, swearing and exuberant onomatopoeic outbursts: bang for crashing single punches, bing bang for one-twos, even bada bing bang bong for combinations.

  Perhaps it was the sound effects, but the sense of invincibility the wraps had engendered was wearing off. I was starting to feel self-conscious, a sensation that our position on a raised platform in the middle of a quiet park did nothing to alleviate. Even worse was the stream of haughty labradoodles and French bulldogs walking their owners past the rotunda—owners who, I was horrified to note, would occasionally stop and crane their necks to get better look at whatever was going on inside.

  Even if I had possessed the grace of a master boxer, the whole thing would have been too public for my liking. As it was, a wrought-iron bandstand ringed by flowerbeds and cut through with the light of a spring sunset did not seem like the appropriate place to learn a scientific system of violence. Maybe the unacknowledged truth that we were in the kind of suburb that had once represented the heartland of Australian boxing but had now come to represent the heartland of French bulldog ownership contributed to this sense of shame. Not to mention my suspicion that I had more in common with the designer dog owners than with Fritzy.