On the Chin

  In any case, I was not given the chance to wallow in my discomfort. Fritzy reached into his duffel bag and removed a pair of black focus mitts, then helped us to pull on our gloves. My new Everlasts were made of black vinyl and had synthetic red webbing around the wrists. I thought they looked quite tough. Fritzy took one look and judged them ‘cheap and nasty’. Then he stood in the centre of the rotunda with David and me facing inward towards him on opposite sides. He fiddled with the buttons of his kitchen timer and again placed it on the tiles. Then he called for me to start punching: thirty seconds of uppercuts, aiming for the white circles in the middle of his mitts.

  ‘One, two, three, four, one, two, three, four. That’s it,’ he cooed. ‘A little bit harder now. A little bit faster now. Thaaat’s it. Come on.’ When the thirty seconds was up, he’d rotate 180 degrees and put David through the same process. For some this might have been unsatisfyingly brief, but at this point thirty seconds was about the most cardiovascular stimulation I could handle at any one time.

  Fritzy was right about the gloves: they started shedding stuffing as soon as they made contact with the pads. But the thrilling sensation of impact overwhelmed everything: the disappointment about my crappy gear, my embarrassment about the whole bandstand situation, my fatigue. Hitting the pads, I felt the expression of the potential in my wrapped hands. The crack of leather on pleather echoed around the rotunda. Each collision with the pad ran down the back of my clenched fist and up my arm like electricity. I felt surprisingly competent, even dangerous, as we moved to jabbing and then combinations. Of course, Fritzy was doing almost all the work, bringing the pads crashing down onto my fists. But I didn’t know that at the time. All I knew was I felt like Mike Tyson. And to be fair, Fritzy didn’t do much to disabuse me of this notion. Not only did he offer an encouraging oof whenever I even came close to hitting the centre of the pad, he kept shaking out his hands, as if my badly placed and mistimed blows were too powerful to absorb. (As an aside, that even a noob like me could make such a convincing racket on the pads goes some way to explaining why pad work, which was rarely seen before the 1980s, has become so popular among boxers and trainers. It makes everyone feel good. Just as importantly, it looks badass.)

  Eventually, the little kitchen timer beeped. I looked around. It was dark. My first boxing lesson was over. Exhausted, David and I shook hands with Fritzy and walked down the steps of the bandstand, past the f lower beds to our parents’ cars. My T-shirt and shorts had long ago soaked through and sweat was running down my legs into my shoes. It looked—and felt—as if I’d jumped into a heated swimming pool in my gym clothes. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to drive home.

  ‘Boom, bang, crash. That was fun,’ said Dave. ‘Want to do it again?’

  BARSTOOL PHILOSOPHER

  AS SPRING WORE on and the days lengthened, David and I became afternoon regulars at the bandstand gym. We were joined there by three other ‘boys’, actually men in their early twenties, all loyalists who had stuck by Fritzy when he left his bricks and mortar premises. The reason for his departure and the gym’s subsequent closure was never made entirely clear. I judged from Fritzy’s aggrieved tone and more-obscene-than-usual language whenever it was raised that it was a touchy subject.

  Our fellow trainees were Jake, the lanky, bright-eyed dude from the gym front desk, Wally, a taciturn little council worker with short, sandy hair and dark circles under his eyes, and a stocky, hyperactive redhead named Dan. Dan worked as a garbage man and drove a Mini Cooper, into which he and Wally would pile after training. The two of them formed something of a group within the group, separated by their air of worldliness—they had both fought competitively—and their stature, which topped out at five foot six.

  I was a little intimidated by the new group dynamic. It was hard not to notice, given what we were all there for, that everyone including the little guys could have beaten the shit out of me had they wanted to. Moreover, Wally’s silence suggested disapproval, and Dan’s barking laugh was occasionally off-putting. Even Jake, who had been so open when he invited us to start training, assumed a more laconic, masculine energy in the presence of the other blokes.

  With too many boys to fit under the rotunda at once, Fritzy would devote himself to doing pads with one pupil at a time, sending the rest of us out to run laps around the oval or sprints up the stairs of the small concrete grandstand on the opposite side of the park.

  The ratio of instruction to jogging wasn’t ideal, but as we plodded away in a group, down the clover-covered hill and onto the turf inside the wooden boundary fence, I had the chance to listen in on Jake, Wally and Dan’s conversations about boxing. Slightly breathless as they ran, they would hold forth on why Mike Tyson was better than Muhammad Ali, or why the decision in the past weekend’s big fight was bullshit.

  ‘At the end of the day, you can’t leave it in the hands of the judges,’ one would say, prompting the others to grunt in knowing agreement.

  One evening not long after our first session as a group, with the machine-gun noise of David and Fritzy doing pads echoing over the oval, I was introduced to the most debated topic of all: the looming fight between Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao. (It continued to loom for six more years, but that’s another story.)

  These were names even I knew. Indeed, aside from Anthony Mundine and Danny Green, whose first fight had raised temperatures when I was at high school, they were probably the only active boxers I could name. ‘The boys’ were in furious agreement as they padded along abreast of me, economically scuffing the clover: Floyd was the best fighter in the world. He was a bigger star than Pacquiao, and when the two men fought he would come away victorious. I gleaned that I was in the presence of three Mayweather devotees.

  Maybe it was the lack of oxygen to the brain as I struggled to keep up with the rest of the group, but I wasn’t convinced. If all this was so incontrovertible, why bother having the fight at all? I didn’t know Wally and Dan, but I knew Jake was friendly, so I felt confident enough to ask: ‘Why do people’ (breath) ‘think he should’ (gasp) ‘fight Pacquiao then?’

  Dan slowed and let out a wild little laugh: ‘Oh my God, did you see Pac KO Hatton? Boom! I thought he was dead!’

  Clearly his staunch belief in Mayweather’s superiority didn’t rule out giving credit to Pacquiao. But Jake, a Mayweather diehard, wouldn’t hear of it.

  ‘So what? Floyd already knocked Hatton out, like, two years ago. Pacquiao’s eating Floyd’s leftovers.’

  Dan took it up, terrier-like. I got the sense he liked to argue. ‘But it took Floyd ten rounds and Pac did it in two! I’m just saying you’ve got to respect the guy, he’s an animal.’

  The fact that I had no opinion to contribute to the debate was more or less academic, since I could not have summoned the oxygen to vocalise it. Still, I was proud of myself for not saying anything stupid. Maybe I was starting to be accepted into the brotherhood of boxers, I thought, as the others left me in their dust.

  When I arrived back at the rotunda, dead last and sodden with sweat, the other boys were already sitting on the steps, shirts off. Wally had the word Walgett—his home town—tattooed across his pale, narrow chest in cursive. The muscles in Dan’s freckled stomach rippled as he wrung the moisture out of his clothes.

  The discussion we had started on the field continued back in the open-air gym, now an open-air locker room. Jake leaned on the rail, pursing his lips and shadow-boxing, his left arm wrapped around his waist like a man caught between a spicy meal and a bathroom. Seeing this, Fritzy stood in the middle of the tiles, arched his back like a Las Vegas ring announcer and shouted ‘Floooyd “Mooooney” Mayweathaaaaa’ at the roof.

  David, who had not been party to the earlier chat, arched an eyebrow at me from across the bandstand in a way that implied he had concerns about our coach’s sanity.

  ‘It’s about hitting and not getting hit, and Floyd doesn’t get hit,’ Fritzy explained.

  ‘Styles makes fights, and Pac is tailor-made.
Too aggressive, see? Floyd’ll make him miss and then boom’—Fritzy smashed his fist into the meat of his palm—‘make him pay.’

  That, it seemed, was the final word on the subject. Fritzy began stuffing pads and gloves back into his duffel bag. Jake undid his wraps and rotated his wrists, watching as the bandages cascaded to the f loor in tight spirals. Dan and Wally said their goodbyes and headed for the Mini.

  As I trudged back to the car I referred to as mine, but which in the strict legal sense, as well as in every other sense, belonged to my mum, my mind was whirring into gear. I needed to do some research.

  Propped up on the couch, bathed in the blue light of my laptop screen, I searched YouTube for the first bout the guys had mentioned, Manny Pacquiao’s knockout of Ricky Hatton. Mum was in bed. A low rumble of explosions and muted gunshots filtered up the stairs from the basement, where George was playing Call of Duty.

  The whole thing felt clandestine, as if I were about to watch some particularly depraved genre of pornography. If they’d been able to see what I was doing, I suspect my family would have agreed. Not because it featured two semi-naked men glistening in sweat, but because, if they thought about it at all, they didn’t think boxing was very nice. Which, come to think of it, was probably why I had waited until late at night to start my investigation.

  The only things I knew about Pacquiao and Hatton were what I had learnt in the park earlier. Pacquiao was ‘an animal’ and Hatton was about to be rendered unconscious so violently that Dan, seemingly no shrinking violet, thought he was dead. I quickly learned that Hatton was a sandy-haired Brit with a face like a brick, while Pacquiao went by the cute nickname ‘Pacman’ and had a dapper little moustache and a Lego man haircut. He stood five foot five, smiled constantly and did not seem remotely intimidating.

  Though I could have cut to the action, I sat through the palaver of musical ring walks and smooth-voiced introductions that preceded the bout in an attempt to glean what extra information I could. Most of what the ring announcer said was wreathed in three-letter acronyms and impossible to decipher, though it did sound impressive. By the time Hatton and Pacquiao met in the middle of the ring, the elaborate ceremony had done its job. I was pumped.

  Still, that was nothing to how I felt once the bell rang and the fight began. My jaw dropped. My first impression of Pacquiao as harmless could not have been more wrong. He broke the laws I had previously assumed governed the movement of the human body. He darted and hit like a cartoon character. My eyes could barely track the movement of his feet, let alone his hands. He pot-shotted Hatton seemingly at will, wheeling and darting, firing uncountable combinations and lightning single blows.

  Then, six minutes in, he detonated a lone left hand on Hatton’s chin. Though no sound registers on the recording (I’ve gone back and checked), I swear that lying there on the couch, I could hear the crack and echo of impact. Hatton fell on his back and lay there glassy-eyed, breathing raggedly. He stayed there almost as long as the bout had lasted. I could see why Dan had been worried.

  Unbidden, my hand rose to my mouth and stayed there. I listened to make sure George was still happily killing people on the internet and not about to come upstairs. Deep down, some small part of me felt that something like this couldn’t possibly be allowed. It was just too much. But the rest of me, the conscious part currently adrenalised up to my eyeballs, thought it was about the most exciting thing I’d ever seen, even watching on a tiny screen from my mum’s blue paisley couch five months after it had actually happened.

  I watched the whole fight again, which didn’t take very long. Then I watched it again. And again. It didn’t get any easier to believe. I needed to see more.

  Next up was a highlights package created by HBO: Manny Pacquiao’s Greatest Hits. It began in a darkened, empty boxing arena, with a handsome middle-aged man dressed in a dinner suit sitting at a desk, an old-fashioned stick microphone in his hand.

  ‘Hello, I’m Jim Lampley,’ he said, in a clipped American accent reminiscent of a 1940s newsreel. ‘Manny Pacquiao’s status as the number one pound-for-pound fighter in boxing may be open to intelligent dispute, but what’s hardly worth arguing about is his identity as the most exciting fighter in the sport…’

  And then it cut to clip after clip of Pacquiao just fucking annihilating everyone and everything in his path. Nothing could have been more perfectly conceived to spur my interest. I’m certain that in the YouTube era these high-production-value highlights packages have been responsible for the creation of more boxing fans than anything else, but it wasn’t just Pacquiao’s rapid-fire ferocity that appealed.

  Lampley, in his dinner jacket and bow tie, harked back to a glamorous black-and-white age of cigarette smoke and whiskey cocktails. Right away, I was seduced by the air of nostalgia and faded grandeur (which everybody knows is the best kind of grandeur) that pervades boxing. Maybe it’s a millennial thing, like lumberjack shirts and beards. Whatever it was, watching boxing made me feel the same way as wrapping my hands: like a bit of a badass. This was new for me, and I liked it.

  I suppose I could have gotten into mixed martial arts and the UFC, whose popularity had exploded with younger fight fans over the previous decade, leading many commentators to predict the end was nigh for boxing. People from school had become devotees, and posters for cage fights were a common sight at Sydney pubs. But MMA never did it for me. On a theoretical level I understood that it was just as technical and exciting a sport as boxing, and that despite appearances it was no more dangerous.

  My objection was totally aesthetic. MMA lacked boxing’s long history and cultural significance. It was difficult to imagine Jim Lampley having anything to do with it. All the pounding of stunned opponents into the f loor seemed unsporting, and cage fighters rolling around on the ground looked too much like seven-year-olds for my liking. Even worse, they wore bike shorts.

  And unlike MMA, boxing had a literary pedigree. For someone doing a journalism degree and with vague ideas about becoming a writer, the association with heavy hitters like Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer (who I hadn’t got around to reading yet, but who were definitely on the list) was a further lure. It was only enhanced in the coming weeks as I devoured documentaries like When We Were Kings and HBO’s Legendary Nights series, which featured major names in literature and sports writing. Eventually I even got around to reading some of their work.

  That would come later, though. The final thing I watched that night was the other fight Jake, Wally and Dan had talked about hours earlier: Floyd Mayweather’s own win over Hatton, a year and a half before Pacquiao. Knowing the result ahead of time as I did, my first thought was one of pity for the unfortunate Brit, who didn’t seem to be able to catch a break. This quickly faded. In fact, in the early rounds my impression was that Hatton was winning the fight by pressing forward. I couldn’t see why Jake kept going on about Floyd.

  But as I sat there with my laptop on my knees and the rounds went on, Mayweather took over. I began to glimpse what Jake and Fritzy saw. Mayweather’s brilliance was not as obvious as Pacquiao’s blazing aggression. Rather than overwhelming Hatton, he was toying with him.

  When Hatton attacked, Mayweather simply leaned away, then watched as the punches sailed past his nose. When Hatton threw body punches, Mayweather casually blocked them with his elbows. When Hatton tried to roughhouse, Mayweather gripped him, snakelike and unconcerned, until the referee was forced to separate them. Only when Mayweather was certain there was no risk of return fire would he throw a punch, a laser beam that sent Hatton’s head snapping backwards, the sweat flying from his brow.

  With his haughtiness, sangfroid and casual cruelty, Mayweather seemed like nothing so much as a bullfighter, twisting his opponent inside out on his way to an inevitable and grisly end. This came in the tenth round, after a confused Hatton charged blindly forward to find a left hook where Mayweather should have been. Hatton’s forward momentum carried him headfirst into the turnbuckle before he hit the f loor. The America
n may as well have been holding a cape. (I would learn later that the bullfighting metaphor is about as used up as Hatton’s eyebrows, but since I doubt it has ever summed up a fight so well, I’m sticking with it.)

  Watching Mayweather was different from seeing Pacquiao for the first time. It didn’t provoke the same kind of disbelief. Floyd, at least, seemed to obey the laws of physics. What he was doing was artful: grace enabled by absolute technical mastery, stunning not because it was supernatural, but because it was so human. Each perfect motion carried the implied weight of a lifetime of dedication. I would never have guessed something as violent as boxing could be so beautiful.

  Later, I would learn Floyd is what you might charitably call a piece of work. He has beaten up and terrorised multiple women, including his partner in front of their children, and has never shown any remorse for this. Such conduct would be despicable and cowardly for any man, but is even more so for one trained to use his fists. Less importantly, he’s a fragile egomaniac and a poor sport who never cared about the fans who made him the best-paid athlete in the world. Pacquiao benefits from the comparison to Floyd, but that’s not saying very much. A serious God-botherer, he has compared homosexuals to animals, and in his role as a Filipino senator is allied with Rodrigo Duterte’s murderous regime.

  But I had no idea of any of this when I first marvelled at the pair, just as I had no idea who was better, or who I would favour in the fight my training buddies were talking about. All I knew was I was going to have trouble getting to sleep.

  Ten years later, I haven’t found my way out of the YouTube roll I started on that night. And in a sense, those first videos set the pattern for a decade to come. Not just because I’ve spent more time than I care to admit thinking about Manny and Floyd, but because they hinted at the different elements that would define my love for the sport—an ambition to understand the craft, an attraction to its semi-mythic past and a surprising but undeniable hunger to see people hit each other in the face. And, lurking in the background, the moral compromises everyone who watches boxing must make.