On the Chin

  To paraphrase Floyd Mayweather’s uncle Roger, compared to Steward I don’t know shit about boxing. But I know too much hard sparring has human consequences. Maybe not for the macho weekend warriors who buy the ‘Anti-Light Sparring Sparring Club’ T-shirts produced by one boxing-clothing company, but certainly for professional fighters who spend their lives in the gym. The impact of a fist in a sparring glove with sixteen ounces of padding isn’t any less forceful than the impact of a fist in a fight glove with eight ounces of padding, it’s just less bruising. Fighters spar far more often than they fight, and there are no mandatory, commission-enforced suspensions after concussions sustained in the gym.

  It’s hard to know for sure, but damage accrued in gym wars is generally suspected of having contributed to the cognitive decline of quite a few high-profile fighters, among them world champions Meldrick Taylor, Terry Norris and James Toney. The great trainer Eddie Futch even thought Muhammad Ali’s Parkinson’s had its genesis in the gym. ‘It wasn’t so much the fights—it was the training,’ he said. ‘He would stand there and let his sparring partners bang on him.’

  For those that don’t believe in no-mercy dogfighting all the time, there’s an etiquette to sparring. If you haven’t talked about it beforehand, it’s probably good manners to match your opponent’s level of commitment, especially if they’re bigger and better. It’s hard not to take offence and retaliate when you’re whacked hard in the face by someone you’re going easy on. It feels like a conversation that has swung suddenly from light-hearted banter into deeply personal territory, and it’s just as hard to back out of. As Ernest Hemingway would tell you, light sparring sessions can get heavy in a hurry if proper respect isn’t paid.

  The first few times Dave hit me cleanly I was shocked and indignant, but I soon realised getting hit in the face by him didn’t hurt that much. It was unpleasant and confusing, yes. But painful, no. I had too much adrenaline in my system to properly feel anything (an illusion of invincibility that lasts until the exact moment you’re hit by somebody who knows what they’re doing). Dave must have felt the same way about my punches, and we gradually learned to move around the ring in a manner that almost resembled a boxing match. It’s true what they say: practice makes perfect, or at least somewhat passable.

  More daunting was getting in with Jake, who had professional-style headgear with a bar across the nose and expensive red Winning gloves from Japan. He boxed in the ‘Philly shell’ stance favoured by his hero Floyd Mayweather and I thought he looked impossibly cool. Our sparring mostly involved me walking straight towards Jake while being whipped in the face with his long jab. Occasionally he would pop me with a right hand, just for a change of pace. He never hit me very hard, though: he was too nice a guy for that.

  Despite the lack of success, I had discovered the joy of fighting. It might be difficult for those who haven’t experienced it to understand, but even when you’re just messing about in the gym, the combination of endorphins from the strenuous exercise and adrenaline from the fear leaves you with a high that lingers for hours. Outside the gym door the colours are brighter, the smells richer. You turn up the volume on the car stereo on the way home because music sounds so good. In the months and years ahead, I learned that this blissful aftermath happens even when sparring leads to bloody noses and bruises. In fact, if anything, the harder and longer the sparring, the more intense the high (so long as you don’t get pulverised).

  I don’t know if all fighters experience the rush to quite the same extent, but for most that little squirt of adrenaline, thrilling but manageable, makes sparring their favourite part of training. It certainly became that for me. ‘Are we sparring today?’ were usually the first words out of my mouth after arriving in the gym.

  My first taste of a solid punch came from an unlikely source: skinny little Wally. Dave and I often sparred with him and Dan. We were so unskilled the size and weight difference hardly mattered, and mostly they were the ones who held back. Still, when someone weighs thirty kilos more than you, you’re going to feel their punches, no matter how raw they are.

  One afternoon my jab connected with Wally’s nose. More by accident than design, I’d broken with protocol and hit him way harder than he’d been hitting me. A dark shadow passed over his face. I knew right away I was in for it.

  Fritzy’s training was always heavier on the bang bang than it was on defence, so the only response I knew when Wally started winging away with hard combinations was to hunch forward and cover my head with my arms. I was like a child of the 1950s doing a duck-and-cover drill and, fittingly, it was about as effective as hiding under a desk in the event of a nuclear strike. It also set me up for an uppercut, which Wally delivered with gusto. I felt like a hiker walking into a branch.

  ‘Awooooooo,’ howled Fritzy, who was leaning over the ropes, smiling. ‘Time!’

  Wally and I touched gloves. I blinked. There was something in my right eye. I got out of the ring, looked in the mirror and realised it was my cheek, which was beginning to swell. Wally had given me my first black eye. There was a bright pink crow’s foot in the corner of the socket, and the half-moon of pale skin beneath was already beginning to darken. Up close, the bruised area was flecked with fine red dots and resembled decomposing deli meat.

  Wally came and clapped me on the back, offering a sheepish smile as I peered into the mirror, pulling my eyelid around and making faces.

  ‘Sorry about that, bro, it’s just hard when you’re out there jabbing on me and I can’t get inside.’

  He needn’t have apologised. I was chuffed.

  Getting hit and taking it without complaint was part of the back and forth of training together, of being a member of the squad, of belonging. Sure, as shiners go this one was fairly modest, but it was my first and I was proud of it. I’d passed some sort of test. As it purpled, then yellowed and faded over the following month, I shamelessly enjoyed the surprised reactions of family, friends and random strangers when I told them I’d got it boxing. Of course, I neglected to add: from a featherweight.

  Sparring wasn’t all fun, though. Not long after the final traces of that black eye disappeared, David and I arrived at the gym to find Fritzy standing by the window, which looked over a pigeon-shit-covered awning, locked in conversation with a guy sitting on the foam floor. The second man, who was arched over to stretch his hamstrings, was dressed in black from his baseball cap to his shorts. Only his blindingly white trainers and the thin gold chain visible on the nape of his neck broke from the theme.

  ‘G’daaaaay boys,’ said Fritzy, spreading his arms wide in welcome as he saw us. ‘This is my son James. James, these are the boys I was telling you about, Alex and Dave.’

  James didn’t stand up. He reached up for an unenthusiastic handshake while he surveyed us from under a heavy brow. He was squat like his father but without the gut, and had the same dark green slick of ink on his forearms. The slow hyena smile, too, was inherited, but without Fritzy’s jowls to soften the impact it came off as openly menacing.

  We’d heard about James back in the grandstand days when Fritzy would speak proudly about his son’s professional career, and ruefully about his personal problems, as we warmed up in the dappled sun. James was undefeated. James would be ready to fight for an Australian title as soon as he got his life together. James was gonna beat ’em all. James put a man in hospital when he tried to intervene in an argument James was having with his fiancée outside a pub. Fritzy must have seen the horrified look on my face because even he allowed, ‘Yeah, it’s no good, but you gotta be careful when you stick your nose in other people’s business, you know?’

  And now here was James, sitting in front of us, stretching. Compared to his dad, he was a coiled spring. Fritzy began speaking again about his achievements, how it was time for him to get back in the ring, how it was a waste for him to not be fighting. James didn’t say a word. He regarded me and Dave as a crocodile might regard two particularly gormless water buffalo.

  I felt
deeply uncomfortable, intimidated and unsure how to act in the face of such deliberate aloofness. The energy in the gym, playful when Jake, Wally and Dan were present, was now very serious.

  ‘You boys up for some sparring?’ asked Fritzy. ‘Just light stuff, James needs to get some work in. Just move and box, box and move.’

  I looked sideways at Dave. His fixed grin made it clear he felt the same way I did: scared.

  I briefly considered lying and saying I’d forgotten my mouthguard but realised that would leave Dave in the shit. There was no way to say no without losing face in front of Fritzy, the very person I was most keen to impress my seriousness upon. So I shrugged an unconvincing ‘Why not?’ and started to warm up.

  It’s not uncommon for fighters of different ability levels to spar with one another. It’s one of the advantages of being part of a good gym. Everyone learns from each other. Nor is it particularly rare for beginners to be thrown in the deep end with much better boxers soon after they start boxing. Some old school coaches think taking a beating and showing up at the gym the next day is a sign that you’ve got what it takes to be a fighter. These stories are a dime a dozen, and not many people in the boxing world would bat an eyelid at the methodical beating James doled out to Dave and me that day. Three rounds each, bloody noses and nasty bruises: hardly a big deal.

  It was still frightening and miserable, though.

  Inside the ropes, James was shorter than me but much stronger. He stood wide-legged in his Nikes and pushed me around the ring, belting me like a dirty carpet. There was nothing in my limited toolbox that could help. If I ran, he pursued. If I offered a weak jab, he sent a jarring right straight back down the pipe. If I cowered on the ropes, he beat me mercilessly with uppercuts and hooks.

  Up to that point, the hardest punches I had taken felt like what they were: blows delivered by balled-up human hands. James’ felt like somebody had put a boxing glove on the end of a fencepost. Before long the inside of my top lip, crushed against my mouthguard, was oozing blood. So was my nose. My eyes were watering. I felt like I was drowning, unable to catch my breath; fleeing, unable to escape. The glowing red numbers on the timer above the ring seemed to be frozen. I tasted blood on my tongue and sour vomit in the back of my throat.

  And what was the point? James could have got better ‘work’ on the heavy bag. In fact, the heavy bag would have moved around a lot more than I did.

  Still, I knew I couldn’t quit. It would have broken the unwritten rules of how boxers are supposed to behave. They are meant to continue, no matter what. The standards are strict. To give just one recent example, multi-weight world champion Mikey Garcia was widely criticised by fans for ‘looking for a way out’ in his 2013 decision win over Orlando Salido. His failing? Not insisting he could continue when his corner appealed to the doctor, who ruled that he couldn’t—because a headbutt had broken his nose.

  It might sound silly to apply that to Fritzy’s gym, but what happens in the high-stakes world of the pros filters down to the no-stakes world of sparring, even among noobs and rookies. Junior soccer players celebrate goals like Premier League stars and young boxers take their licks. Giving up would have been a sign of weakness. Fritzy would have judged me, and I was too much of a teacher’s pet to disappoint him. So I shut up and took my beating, dutifully climbed out of the ring when the timer dictated, watched James do the same thing to Dave, then climbed back in.

  All the while Fritzy hung over the ropes, alternating between ineffectually telling James to take it easy and laughing at what was taking place. Clearly, he had no control over his son and no inclination to protect us from him. I felt so alone in that tiny ring I could have cried. And he thought it was funny.

  TRAINING HERE DAILY

  ALL THE TRAINING fighters must do makes the gym the centre of the boxing universe. It’s more than just a place to train: it’s a home base, a community, and the closest thing to a team in the most individual of sports. At a good gym, the fighters function as a squad, lifting each other up and working together while they learn from their coaches.

  No gym looms larger in boxing history than Stillman’s, the New York institution dubbed ‘the university of Eighth Avenue’ by A. J. Liebling. Run by Lou Stillman (originally Lou Ingber; he took his name from the gym and not the other way around), it hosted virtually every major American boxer from the 1920s through to the late ’50s.

  According to the trainer Ray Arcel, Grupp’s Gym on 116th Street was most fighters’ first choice until World War I, when its owner accidentally drove his best customers out the door. ‘Billy Grupp kept getting drunk, and he went around berating the Jews,’ said Arcel. ‘He said, “The Jews are responsible for this war. All the German people got killed because of the Jews.” Well, who was training in the gymnasium? Benny Leonard, Benny Valgar, Abe Goldstein, Willy Jackson, Marty Cross, Sammy Good: all these great Jewish fighters.’

  The Jews decamped en masse to Stillman’s and established the gym’s reputation. Ingber was only too happy to have them, and to be called Stillman, especially once he realised he could charge the dozens of fans who turned up to watch them train each day fifteen cents admission.

  The entrance to Stillman’s, a staircase, sat underneath a sign reading TRAINING HERE DAILY, BOXING INSTRUCTIONS see JACK CURLEY. Curley, the doorman, sat at the top of the stairs behind a turnstile. By the 1950s, admission had risen to the huge sum of fifty cents. The gym itself spread across two levels, with a pair of boxing rings on the lower floor and space for bag work and skipping on top.

  The place was famously filthy: the air was thick with cigarette smoke, the floor caked with spit, the plaster falling off the ceiling. The smell of sweat, tobacco, mould and liniment must have been overwhelming. Nevertheless, heavyweight champion Gene Tunney’s demand that Stillman clean the place up was met with horror by fighters and managers alike. ‘Fresh air? Why that stuff is likely to kill us,’ said Johnny Dundee.

  Stillman née Ingber was said to carry a .38 pistol at all times and was famously abusive: ‘Big or small, champ or bum, I treat ’em all the same way: bad!’

  He was only one of an incredible cast of characters catalogued by Liebling and other writers of the period. One regular, Izzy Grove, was famous for spitting ball bearings at unsuspecting patrons from between his teeth. Another, Battling Norfolk, was the patsy for constant practical jokes, up to and including exploding telephones. The rest of the crowd was made up of contenders, champions, fight fans, has-beens, never-weres, mobsters and managers. These last two were not mutually exclusive, and many of them treated Stillman’s as their office, congregating in the viewing gallery behind the ring, which was known as the New York Stock Exchange for all the deals done there. ‘A million dollars’ worth of business goes on there, and most of the guys look like they couldn’t buy themselves a nickel cigar,’ said Stillman.

  Finally, there were the trainers. Legendary sages like Ray Arcel, Freddie Brown, Whitey Bimstein, Chickie Ferrara and a young Angelo Dundee. More than anything, it was their knowledge that made Stillman’s what it was. In Corner Men, his oral history of boxing training, Ronald K. Fried describes Stillman’s as not just a gym but ‘a kind of boxing think tank’, an appropriate description.

  In the 1950s, the rise of TV and the decline in the number of local boxing shows hit Stillman’s hard. It began opening in the evening for the first time, to cater for the fighters who now had to support themselves with regular jobs, but in the end even this wasn’t enough. ‘There’s no more tough guys around, not enough slums,’ Stillman told the papers when he sold the place in 1959. It was demolished to make room for a block of apartments and today there isn’t so much as a plaque to mark the spot where it stood.

  No gym will ever surpass Stillman’s in boxing mythology, but many others have become famous in their own right. As mentioned in the last chapter, Emanuel Steward’s Kronk Gym produced more than thirty world champions from the late 1970s on. The signature gold trunks worn by Kronk fighters were a hallmark: whe
n you saw them you knew you were going to get a good fight. Kronk was located in the dank basement of Detroit recreation centre, where the thermostat was always turned up to thirty-five degrees. Patrons had to take care not to burn their hands on the doorknob when they entered during the bleak Michigan winter. ‘The fights were harder in the gym than the real fights,’ said Milton McRory, a welterweight titlist in the 1980s.

  Sadly, Steward died in 2012, and the original Kronk building was shuttered and ravaged by vandals before it burned down in a suspicious fire in 2017. A new gym bearing the Kronk name opened in 2015, but it will take time for the reputation and the smell of sweat to return, if it ever does.

  British boxing has its own pantheon of famed gyms, including the Ingle Gym in Sheffield and the Repton Boxing Club and the Peacock in London’s East End. Japanese boxing runs on a system where fighters sign to gyms that also function as promoters and managers—somewhat like a league. Japanese boxers rarely fight their gym-mates. In Thailand, fighters are so closely associated with their gyms they sometimes change their names to match them: Poonsawat Kratingdaenggym was a titleholder at junior featherweight and Terdsak Kokietgym a contender at featherweight. Personally, I’d rather take a gym’s name than a sponsor’s, also a common practice in Thailand. Just ask Fahsan 3K Battery or Knockout CP Freshmart.

  Often gyms rise to prominence on the back of a single fighter or trainer. Los Angeles’ Wild Card is famous because of the success of its owner and principle trainer, Freddie Roach. Up the road in Oxnard, Robert Garcia, a gregarious former junior lightweight, has a stable of pro fighters at his eponymous gym. In Sydney there’s the Mundine Gym, where Anthony Mundine trained under the auspices of his father Tony.