Things were looking up for Fritzy too. The long bandstand exile ended when he secured the lease on a studio above a signwriter’s workshop on Marrickville Road. The location seemed auspicious. Marrickville, with its eclectic mix of Vietnamese fishmongers and Greek greengrocers, had a gritty charm, as well as a certain pugilistic pedigree as the home of Jeff Fenech. Fritzy was positively beaming as he skipped up the darkened staircase to show us the newly refurbished gym for the first time.
‘Tada,’ he yelled as he hit the light switch and stepped into the centre of the room. Our eyes adjusted to the light and we caught our own reflections on the mirrored walls.
‘Look, there are real heavy bags you can hit,’ Fritzy said, gripping one to show how well secured it was. ‘It’s a fuckin’ good spot isn’t it?’
Dave, Jake and I grunted enthusiastically, although in truth the studio was slightly underwhelming: a narrow room with a low ceiling and a floor covered with interlocking pink and blue foam mats too soft to comfortably jump rope on. By way of decoration, laminated posters for long-forgotten pay-per-views were crookedly blu-tacked to the walls. Down the back in semidarkness, four posts and a set of vinyl-sheathed ropes fenced off an area of floor the size of a large shower cubicle.
‘That’s right boys, a real ring,’ said Fritzy, leaning proprietorially on the corner post.
‘Now we can get some proper sparring going. That’s what ya need.’
A little jolt of adrenaline—a mix of fear and excitement—shot down my spine as I looked over at Dave and Jake. I had been waiting for this. The theory of punching people was all well and good, but I was about ready to explore the practice.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t to be. Fritzy had forgotten to tell us we would need mouthguards, so we had to settle for mercilessly belting each other’s torsos. The thrill of this ‘body sparring’ soon wore off—it’s easy to block the punches when you know your opponent isn’t going to hit you in the head, and your arms end up wretchedly bruised.
So after training I went and bought a cheap gumshield. Back in the kitchen at home I ripped open the plastic container and placed the device, a black and blue U-shape made of soft plastic, in a salad bowl. It seemed too flimsy to provide any meaningful protection, but I poured boiling water over it, as per the packet instructions, and waited for ninety seconds.
After gingerly retrieving the thing with my fingertips, I placed it in my mouth and bit down, the soft resin like toffee as it squelched and set around my teeth. I went into the bathroom, put my hands up and appreciated myself in the mirror.
‘You’re not really going to hit David in the face, are you?’ asked Mum, hovering nearby.
‘Yeah, course I am, Mum. And he’s going to hit me. But don’t worry, it’s not dangerous,’ I said, with no great effort to convince. It might have been the first time I’d ever done anything to worry a parent, and I was relishing it.
‘Oh, Alex, it’s bad for your brain. And what about your teeth? I wouldn’t have paid for the orthodontist if I’d known you were going to run off and get punched in the face. Promise me you’ll be careful!’
‘Well it’s not like I’m going to try to get hit,’ I said, rolling my eyes before returning them to my all-important reflection. God, I looked tough.
BLIND PENGUINS
IF MY MOTHER could have seen me in the ring later that week, she would have worried a lot less.
Only a suggestion of light penetrated the grimy frosted window high on the rear wall of the gym as Fritzy helped me pull on my gloves, softly dispensing an unending stream of last-minute advice. The assistance with the gloves wasn’t strictly necessary, since I had Velcro wrist straps rather than laces, but it added a ceremonial touch. I felt like a knight donning his armour before battle.
After doing the same for David, Fritzy separated the ropes and motioned with his head for me to enter.
The ring was neither raised nor covered in canvas. It was simply a cordoned-off section of the spongey foam that covered the rest of the gym’s floor. I moved around half-heartedly, testing the surface. It felt like shadow-boxing on a waterbed. David entered, and we stood beside each other facing inwards as Fritzy laced up our protective headgear, letting us know when he was done with a pat on the head. David’s features were squashed together and a wad of his hair stuck through the top of the headgear. He looked like a rooster. My own helmet felt equally uncomfortable. My hair was caught at the back, and the thick forehead pad kept sliding over my eyes.
Fritzy brandished the white kitchen timer, a survivor of the bandstand days, and rested his tattooed forearms on the top rope. You could tell he was savouring the moment; supervising sparring for the first time in his new gym, looking every inch the boxing trainer.
‘It’s ya first time so take it easy, all right?’ he said. ‘Just work your jab, keep your hands up, all right?’
I looked at Dave, anxious. Was he going to try to bash me? Until now, I hadn’t fully considered the risk that this could hurt. I didn’t want to hurt Dave and I doubted Dave really wanted to hurt me. But what if he did? Worse, what if Dave thought I wanted to hurt him and consequently felt like he had to try to hurt me so that he wasn’t at a disadvantage when I tried to hurt him? Across the ring, his face was inscrutable.
‘Time in,’ yelled Fritzy, waving his limp hands together as the timer beeped.
I felt my heartbeat in my ears as Dave shuffled towards me. I jiggled my gloves, trying to make those distracting little hand movements professional boxers do. I suspect it came off like I was playing a pair of tiny invisible maracas. Dave forced air between his teeth, making a noise like a blow-off valve as he pawed the air in front of me.
We paused. Neither of us was sure what to do next. Dave, reasoning that he had done his bit and it was my turn now, shuffled a few steps backwards. I shuffled forward and pawed the air in front of him. Then I shuffled back to let him have a go. We were like a pair of negatively charged particles, or maybe two blind penguins. I felt slightly relieved. For all my earlier excitement about sparring, I was glad I wouldn’t have to go through anything unpleasant.
This pantomime fight continued for a minute or two but eventually Fritzy, who was still draped over the ropes, grew exasperated and started yelling at us: ‘Stop trying to hit him and hit him!’
I caught David’s eye between his gloves and headgear. Well, it looked like we were going to have to give it a real go. Sorry mate. I shambled forward again and let loose a ramrod jab. At least it was meant to be a ramrod jab: it came out as more of a flaccid swat and bumped impotently against Dave’s gloves before falling away.
For all my study and preparation, I had no idea what to do. I was like a person who has researched his flat-pack wardrobe, painstakingly pored over the pictograms and even counted the little screws, only to find himself hopelessly lost once the allen key is in hand and the MDF sheets are spread across the floor. It’s one thing to hit a pad when your coach slaps it onto your glove; it’s quite another to hit a moving human who’s trying to hit you back.
David’s efforts, while hardly crushing blows, were more effective than mine. The anticipation of being hit in the face made me tense up, which rendered my guard brittle and easy to split, which in turn made it easier to hit me in the face. The headgear was still slipping down and obscuring my vision. I felt clumsy and slow and I was out of breath already.
‘Time!’ yelled Fritzy. It was not what you would call a promising start.
Sparring must have been part of boxing training from the very beginning. Punching bags are fine as far as they go, but have one notable and obvious deficiency when it comes to simulating combat: they don’t punch back.
Plato, that well-known ancient boxing writer, said much the same thing, comparing a city’s preparedness for war to a boxer’s training camp:
Surely, if we were boxers, we should have been learning to fight for many days before, and exercising ourselves in imitating all those blows and wards which we were intending to use in the hour of co
nf lict; and in order that we might come as near to reality as possible, instead of caestuses we should put on boxing gloves.
With roughly 2,100 years to go until the publication of the Queensberry Rules, the last point was crucial: boxing with bare knuckles or with caestuses was too savage to learn on the job. For most of history, sparring has been synonymous with gloves. The only known ancient pair was discovered in 2018 under the ruins of a Roman cavalry barracks in Northumberland. According to the archaeologists, these leather straps were too thick and soft to have been used in a real bout, and were probably worn by soldiers during sparring sessions. When you see the pictures of these shrivelled and blackened bands this mainly makes you think that in the world of gloves, as in the world of toilet paper, soft is a relative term.
By the time Georgian and Regency England went mad for prize fighting, sparring with gloves, or ‘mufflers’ as they were then known, was a well-established part of boxing training. For a period, attending the rooms of a boxing master was the Zumba or Pilates of its time, a fitness craze among the young and affluent.
One gushing enthusiast was the young Lord Byron. He trained with the popular instructor ‘Gentleman’ John Jackson, who had made his name by beating the great Jewish boxer Daniel Mendoza for the championship of England. (If that wasn’t enough to cement his mythic status, in an earlier bout he slipped and broke his leg but offered to continue, strapped to a chair.)
Byron referred to Jackson as ‘the emperor of pugilism’ and lined his bedroom with boxing prints. When not in said bedroom, the poet could often be found in Jackson’s Bond Street rooms, staying in shape and letting off steam. In March 1814 he wrote in his diary:
I have been sparring with Jackson for exercise this morning; and mean to continue and renew my acquaintance with the muffles. My chest, and arms, and wind are in very good plight, and I am not in flesh. I used to be a hard hitter, and my arms are very long for my height (5 feet 8½ inches). At any rate, exercise is good, and this the severest of all; fencing and the broad-sword never fatigued me half so much.
At the risk of exposing how unoriginal this whole project is, I’ll point out that Byron is hardly alone among literary types when it comes to getting in the ring. Jack London, who wrote several boxing stories, was known to challenge all comers in the gym, and sparred with his (presumably long-suffering) wife when no other partner could be found.
Others have even been brave enough to get in with professionals. When Paul Gallico, hoping for his first by-line, proposed to heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey that the pair spar for a New York Daily News article, the Manassa Mauler deadpanned: ‘Doesn’t your editor like you anymore?’
‘They told me the whole affair lasted just one minute thirty-seven seconds,’ wrote Gallico, when he came to.
Ernest Hemingway, who started sparring in his teens, continued to force friends and visitors to don gloves and go a few rounds well into his fifties. Like many inexperienced bullies who get in the ring, he didn’t know how to pull his punches, a failure that got him into serious trouble when he sparred Dempsey’s successor, Gene Tunney. After being convinced to put on the gloves, Tunney reluctantly humoured the author by feinting and lightly tapping away at him. Hemingway, however, thought the fight was the genuine article, and hit the Fighting Marine low and hard. The former champion, incensed, came back with a right hand that stopped millimetres from Hemingway’s nose and said, in what you can imagine was an extremely convincing tone, ‘Don’t you ever do that again.’ It was their last sparring session.
Not to be outdone by Hemingway, Norman Mailer sparred with light heavyweight champion Jose Torres many times, including once on TV to promote one of Torres’ books. But the most self-aware and likable of boxing boxing-writers was George Plimpton, from whom I pinched the Hemingway anecdote. The founder of the Paris Review’s trademark ‘participatory journalism’ went as far as sparring three rounds with light heavyweight champion Archie Moore, an experience that formed the basis of the memorable book Shadow Box: An Amateur in the Ring.
Though something of a jock, Plimpton cheerfully characterised himself as a ‘non-punching type’ and trained for his meeting with the Old Mongoose by reading books in the library of the New York Racquet Club on Park Avenue. He escaped with nothing more painful than a bloody nose, though that was mainly down to the good humour of Moore, who in his long career delivered more knockouts than anybody in history (a breathtaking 131) but opted to carry Plimpton, whispering ‘breathe, man, breathe’, to him in the clinch.
Even the short, bald and gouty A. J. Liebling was known to get in the ring from time to time. Yet his own experience didn’t stop him from writing that ‘sparring partners are the least bellicose of prize fighters’.
This was harsh. Top professionals have long paid for sparring partners—because it’s hard to find people willing to get beaten up for free. Often these boxers are amateurs or recent graduates to the pro ranks looking to gain experience and exposure, or journeymen looking for a regular paycheck. The attributes of a good sparring partner include the ability to imitate a variety of styles, the audacity to push your employer out of his or her comfort zone and, perhaps most importantly, a tolerance for pain. Liebling’s judgment notwithstanding, many sparring partners have gone on to become champions. A young George Foreman worked as a dance partner for Sonny Liston, an experience he later described as ‘the most dangerous thing I ever did in my entire life’. Larry Holmes was Muhammad Ali’s employee for four years and ‘a million rounds’ in the early 1970s. He captured the heavyweight crown from a faded Ali in 1980, badly beating his former boss over ten rounds. Afterwards, Holmes wept in the dressing room.
More recent examples include Jose Luis Castillo, who followed in the footsteps of his one-time employer Julio Cesar Chavez in becoming lightweight champ, and Terence Crawford, who did the same after his time with Tim Bradley. They were both promising youngsters, though. More inspirational is the case of Ray Beltran, a veteran with several losses on his record whose experience as a long-time sparring partner for Manny Pacquiao eventually served as a springboard to a lightweight title (less inspirationally, he tested positive for steroid use in 2015).
Maybe the most influential sparring session of all time took place in the Galveston County Jail in February 1901. It involved none other than Jack Johnson, at that stage an ex-stevedore with a modest record of 5-1-2 and two no-decisions. Before he ended up in the nick, Johnson was scheduled to fight Joe Choynski, a considerably more experienced Jewish San Franciscan who had fought world champions Jim Corbett, Jim Jeffries and Bob Fitzsimmons, at Galveston’s (misnamed) Harmony Hall.
‘Chrysanthemum’ Joe, who obviously didn’t go in for intimidating nicknames, had been in the fight game for thirteen years and was considered past his prime, making the bout, which was advertised as an ‘exhibition’ to get around the fact that professional boxing was illegal in Texas, something of a crossroads fight. It turned out to be more of a head-on collision.
After a couple of feeling-out rounds, Choynski hit Johnson with a right that turned the Galveston Giant into the Galveston Ragdoll. Like a leading man embracing his swooning lover, the veteran held Johnson for a moment, then he released him, face-first, onto the canvas.
The Texas Rangers were polite enough to wait for the referee to count Johnson out, then stormed the ring, guns drawn, and arrested both boxers. ‘If I hadn’t knocked out Johnson, there would have been no arrests,’ said Choynski later. ‘I should have had more sense than to hit him so hard, but when I saw the opening I just couldn’t resist the temptation.’
The pair were taken to the county jail and bail was set at $5,000, roughly $150,000 in today’s money, a sum neither man could afford. Choynski and Johnson ended up sharing a cell for nearly a month, eating the same diet of mouldy beans and stale bread. They apparently got on well: Choynski, perhaps because of his own experience as a Jew, was not as prejudiced as the top white heavyweights of the era, who drew the ‘colour bar’ and refused to face black cha
llengers. (Though nine years later he trained Jeffries in his role as the first ‘Great White Hope’.)
Fortuitously, the local sheriff was a cheerful sort who saw nothing hypocritical about providing the pair with boxing gloves so they could put on exhibitions for the amusement of the jailers, the other prisoners and members of the public. A sepia-toned photograph from the time shows the sheriff and his deputies, moustachioed, waistcoated, and brandishing their firearms, posing while the unimpressed boxers—Choynski with unruly black curls and Johnson with his trademark shaved head—stare at the camera from behind bars.
While a month in jail was doubtless a huge drag, the inexperienced Johnson benefited immensely from sparring with the veteran every day for weeks. ‘No man who moves like you should ever be getting hit clean,’ Choynski told Johnson.
After the grand jury failed to return an indictment and the pair were released, the defensive skills Johnson picked up from Choynski became his trademark. They took him to the heavyweight championship of the world, though they couldn’t protect him from the racism of Jim Crow America: in 1913 he was convicted on trumped-up charges of white slavery and forced to flee the country.
What Choynski and Johnson’s encounter in the Galveston lock-up underscores is that sparring’s purpose is to educate. It can be light, with punches pulled and a focus on one skill or another, or it can be hard, to teach toughness, fitness and what it feels like to take a punch. But either way, someone should be getting something out of it. Two boxers belting each other for the sake of it, or one boxer belting another, is not particularly edifying.
This point is surprisingly controversial. Some people see anything less than full-contact sparring as a waste of time, and there’s a long and celebrated history of ‘gym wars’—sparring sessions harder than actual fights. Philadelphia has been notorious for this sort of thing since the 1970s, while in the ’80s and ’90s the late Emanuel Steward presided over a ferocious sparring culture at the Kronk Gym in Detroit, where it was not uncommon for ribs to be broken and fighters to be knocked out cold. The results speak to the merits of this trial-by-fire approach: Kronk produced more than thirty world champions. But at what cost?
On the Chin Page 7