In the end, we did the millennial thing and ghosted him. We just stopped turning up at the gym in Marrickville, stopped texting and moved over to HK Ward. I could tell you we were scared he’d make a big scene if we told him to his face, but if I’m completely honest, I think the idea of an ‘It’s not you, it’s me…I’ve found someone else’ conversation about boxing was simply too awkward to contemplate.
I told myself Fritzy was too tough to care, but deep down I knew he would have been hurt. The boxing fraternity isn’t very large, and he would quickly have found out where we’d moved. I imagined him spitting out the word ‘dogs’ when he talked about us in front of the other boys.
But as guilty as the offending party might feel in a bad breakup, at least they have the new romance to make them feel better. And so it was with me, Dave and Paul. HK, which Paul affectionately described as ‘deadset the strangest gym in Australia’, became our home, its fighters became our brothers, and its trainers our weird uncles. It was like the camaraderie of the bandstand on steroids.
Johnny Lewis, who took Jeff Fenech, Kostya Tszyu and Jeff Harding to world titles, was often in attendance, his head and face covered with thin white stubble. One afternoon he suggested my ring name should be the Poison Pen on account of my journalism degree. Then there was Moffo, a tiny, bald man in his seventies who shadow-boxed arthritically and would do pads with anyone who asked. Fred was a barrel-chested, beak-nosed, barking heavyweight still fighting as an amateur in his forties. Pardeep grinned, chatted and brought his children with him on weekends. Igor wore a rolled-up beanie on top of his head and played Can’t Be Touched, Roy Jones Junior’s foray into the world of rap, every time he got into the ring to do pads. And there was Dean who, before he became a trainer, had lost to a guy who lost to Manny Pacquiao. That historic link gave me the same feeling of connectedness I felt surfing Boxrec. It made me think of A. J. Liebling, who, after a sparring session with the great turn-of-the-century light heavyweight Philadelphia Jack O’Brien, wrote about what a thrill it is ‘to feel that all that separates you from the early Victorians is a series of punches on the nose’.
Then there were the fighters. Matt, whose grimly set jaw, drawling speech and tattoo of a pissed-off boxing kangaroo made me nervous, but who ended up as a great mate; Tom, the very handy redhead who went on to fight in the national titles and claimed to have taught himself boxing by watching James Toney videos on YouTube; Mo, a thoughtful IT guy who loved to mix it up in sparring; and Alex II, a Russian exchange student built like a tree trunk.
At the centre of it all was Paul, with his yellow focus mitts, his flashing smile and easy, high-pitched laugh. He had time for everyone and could talk to anyone, from quiet hopeful fighters starting down the professional road to the noisy inter-college country boys; from the academics who came in for cardio-boxing classes to the old-school trainers who used HK only because so many other gyms had closed.
With Paul every day was an education. He slowly told us more about himself: his amateur fights against guys who went on to become top contenders and titleholders and his pro career, which ended in disappointment—he was hampered by injuries and got headbutted by fighters he should have knocked out. He told us how incredible the Sydney Olympics had been, and how wild the nightclubs were after the competition was done. He told us about getting attacked by two men while wearing a ‘fruity shirt’ in Bondi and knocking one of them out. The other one just turned and ran, he said.
Between training assignments, Paul was pursuing dreams of writing and acting, so we talked about books and movies a lot. I told him when I was having relationship trouble and David talked about his strict parents. We talked about girls and sex and partying. We talked about whatever fights had been on TV over the weekend, and whether this guy would beat that guy, or whether so-and-so was as good as he was cracked up to be. With Paul and David the gym was a sanctuary, a place where I could talk about things I didn’t talk about anywhere else, and a place where I didn’t have to talk at all if I didn’t want to.
When it came to boxing, Paul’s approach was scientific, especially compared to Fritzy’s bang, bang, bang. Straight away, he got me and David to stop loading up on our punches and had us concentrate on speed, footwork and defence. He’d hold the heavy bag as I pounded it, shaking his head, telling me I could be faster, lighter, better. Holding the pads, he’d tilt his head and say, ‘Let’s just try something,’ before gently grabbing my left arm and teaching me some new variation on the jab.
He had a drill for everything. To work on defence and counterpunching he’d make me stand in the corner as David wailed on me, telling me I could only throw ten punches per round, so I better make them count. To work on head movement, he’d tie our wraps to the corner posts, forming an intricate, shoulder-height starburst we’d navigate by bobbing and weaving, slipping and ducking. To work on fitness and punch volume he’d stand beside the heavy bag with a mechanical counter, making sure we threw at least a punch a second for the three-minute duration of each round. To work on in-fighting we’d wrestle over a medicine ball and practise holding in ways a referee wouldn’t penalise.
Though we sparred just as often as we had with Fritzy, the emphasis was now on learning rather than getting the better of each other. ‘Don’t try to take his head off, it’s about skill,’ Paul would shout, standing outside the ropes with his arms crossed.
Here is an incident that took place one Wednesday night at HK Ward, not long after we joined up with Paul.
The gym was lit like a hospital corridor and full to bursting with college students. Paul had David and me drilling on the heavy bags, switching every thirty seconds between working up close and controlling the bag from afar.
‘You can be faster than that, Alex. Switch it up, Dave.’
I huffed and puffed away, hoping to impress Paul with a speedy punch or a slick move, so absorbed in my own work that I didn’t notice when his patter of advice and encouragement stopped mid-stream. I might have continued on in my own little world for some time if hitting the heavy bag wasn’t so taxing. But since it was, and the more-intense-than-usual burning in my lungs and shoulders suggested that Paul had forgotten to call time on the round, I turned to look at him.
He was sitting on a wooden crate, his brow furrowed in a look of deep concern, gazing over my shoulder. Just as I was about to open my mouth and offer a polite query about his timekeeping, Paul sprang off the box and strode purposefully towards the ring, cutting through a thicket of whirring skipping ropes as he went.
I looked at Dave, who spread his gloved hands and shrugged.
We turned back just as Paul screamed, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ into the ring. Dave and I jumped. The rest of the gym did too. In my memory the music playing on the stereo actually stopped, like in a western. At any rate, a hush certainly descended as the assembled masses left off their shadow-boxing and bag-hitting to get a look at what was going on. Paul Miller shouting was like a Buddhist monk headbutting you: all the more horrible for its unexpectedness.
Fred, the middle-aged heavyweight-turned-coach, had been directing sparring between a pair of hopeless-looking college boys, both of them blood-spattered and bereft of headgear. Apparently they had been teeing off on each other’s unprotected heads with monster roundhouse shots. By the time I looked over, however, both the boxers and their coach were standing stock still, staring at the sandy-haired missile bearing down on them.
Paul slid between the ropes like a seal diving off a rock and popped up inside the ring to stick a finger in Fred’s chest.
‘What are you trying to do here, mate? These guys don’t have any idea what they’re doing. They’re hurting each other.’
He turned apologetically to the two goggle-eyed novices: ‘No offence, guys.’
Then he swivelled back to Fred: ‘People are here to learn how to box, not to get their fucking heads punched in. What are you teaching them? Nothing. You’re not a boxing coach. You’re a joke.’
Fred blinked and emitted a sucking
noise like a blocked drain. He opened his mouth as if to say something, closed it, then opened it again, before thinking better of whatever he was going to say and closing it for good. Paul quietly guided the college boys out of the ring. Shamefaced, Fred collected his bags, climbed the stairs and left without saying another word.
If there had been a piano, it would have suddenly struck up a new tune as everyone returned to training, a little more hesitant than before. Dave and I stood gaping by the heavy bags as Paul returned.
‘Maybe I shouldn’t have done that,’ he said to himself as much as to us. ‘But what a dribbler. Those kids had no idea. No idea. What’s the point of getting belted like that if you’re not learning anything?
‘It’d be different if they had fights coming up. You need hard sparring to get ready for a fight. You need to know how to deal with getting hit. It gets you in great shape too. But that’s just unnecessary. That’s what it is. Unnecessary damage.’
Some in the boxing world would probably consider Paul a bleeding heart, but I’d call him a realist. He wasn’t soft with us—he bruised my face more than once while we were doing pads—and he wasn’t against fighting hard or being brave. But he did try to strip away the macho posturing. Get hit in the head, sure—that’s boxing. But make sure it serves a purpose, because getting hit in the head isn’t very good for you.
If I had any doubts about the decision to move over to HK Ward and train under Paul, that dispelled them. Before long, I wanted to box like Paul, talk like Paul, be like Paul. He was that kind of guy. He shared his knowledge freely, and we soaked it up. He took me seriously and built me up, even though he must have known I was not much of a prospect. In that sense, at least, he was a great trainer.
Larry Holmes once said, ‘Fighters make trainers, trainers don’t make fighters.’ But Larry Holmes never saw Paul training me.
TWO POINTS FOR KISSING
‘YOU’RE ABOUT READY to have a fight, you know.’
A bead of sweat ran off the tip of my nose and landed with a plop on the dirty canvas. It was a midweek afternoon, six months after we had moved to HK Ward, and I was doubled over in the middle of the ring trying to get my breath. Paul, who had just put me through an intense six rounds of pads, was standing in the corner, dressed as usual in a tattered grey T-shirt, navy trackpants and white sneakers. We were the only two people in the gym. He put his still-mitted hands on his hips and raised an eyebrow.
‘Do you think so?’ I asked, gulping in air and trying not to sound too pleased with myself. I couldn’t help but be flattered, though: Paul thought that I was good enough to contest, and perhaps even win, a fight against another randomly assigned novice. I still told everyone, myself included, that I was learning to box to lose weight and because I enjoyed the training. But of course I had thought about putting myself to the test. Why spend so much time training otherwise? You don’t amass a scrapbook full of recipes so you can eat out every night.
‘Only if you want to,’ said Paul. ‘But you’ve got a great jab, you’ve got good defence, you can pile up points. And if you lose, who cares? That’s what the amateurs are for. It’s a learning experience.’
‘Yeah, but I don’t want to lose,’ I said, dumbly. Despite my excitement, the terrible and concrete reality of the proposal was beginning to dawn on me. Paul must have seen the uncertain look on my face.
‘Did I ever tell you about my first fight? It was in Goondiwindi,’ he said.
To me, Goondiwindi is one of those Australian placenames you hear now and then, and always greet with a knowing nod, despite having no idea where it actually is. I nodded.
‘I was fourteen. Me and my coach, we drove six hours, and when we arrived there were no other kids my size. They matched me with a full-grown man. A tiny full-grown man, but still, you can imagine what it looked like to a fourteen-year-old. He had wrinkles and a mullet. They couldn’t legally sanction a match between a senior and a junior, so they called it an exhibition. There was a crowd, they were all drunk and they were loud. I was so nervous.
‘But my coach, he said, let’s do it. You need to get the first one out of the way. So we took the fight and he said to me in the corner: “Paul, you can do this. There’s no need to be scared, the crowd doesn’t matter, only you matter. Do what we do in the gym and everything will be OK.”’
‘And was it?’
‘When the bell went, the little gremlin just ran out of the corner straight at me, throwing punches. I freaked out and swung right back. When I opened my eyes, he was on the floor. The ref gave him a count and it went on: I hurt him a couple more times. Was easy. I would have got the win, but it was a no-decision ’cos it was technically an exhibition.’ Paul chuckled.
I wondered what the moral of the story was. Fighting is terrifying? People do get hurt, even if it’s a ‘learning experience?’ You don’t have to listen to your coach?
‘The point is, how many people can say they’ve conquered their fear, stepped between those ropes and fought another man? That’s something you’ll always have, win or lose. You’ll learn a lot about yourself.’
‘Maybe I already know enough about myself,’ I said, half-joking. ‘What about my weight?’
‘What do you weigh today?’
‘About eighty-three.’ I had lost nearly twenty kilos in the six months since our first visit to the bandstand and now considered myself quite trim.
‘You could fight at eighty-one if you want, but they’re starting to be pretty big boys. Seventy-five is better, you’ll be bigger than everyone you face.’
‘But how am I going to get down to seventy-five?’
Paul laughed his wind-chime laugh. ‘Easily. You’ve got weight still to lose, it’s not even going to be that hard. I lost ten kilos going into the Olympics.’
I had my doubts, but what I said was: ‘When?’ It was the only question that mattered.
‘There’s a fight night at Souths Juniors the first Tuesday of every month. We could aim for the one in seven weeks?’
‘Sure,’ I said, feeling not very sure at all.
‘I’ll speak to the guy who runs it. You’ll need to register with Boxing New South Wales, I’ll take care of the rest.’
I nodded. My head was spinning, bursting with contradictory thoughts and emotions. Paul’s confidence filled me with delight—even as I was certain it was misplaced. I was chuffed with myself for agreeing to something so bold—even as I knew it was a terrible mistake. I wanted to fight tomorrow; I wanted never to fight.
Paul interrupted the reverie, clapping his mitts together, throwing them on the floor and holding the ropes open for me to climb out of the ring.
‘Right, I think you better do some floor work, don’t you?’
I circled the date in red pen on the kitchen calendar. The cat was out of the bag and spraying all over the furniture. Suddenly everything we did reeked of seriousness. A harsh tone crept into Paul’s voice. He would say things like, ‘You can’t pull straight back like that’ or ‘You’ll need to be much faster than that.’
I completed each sentence in my head: ‘…in a real fight, or a nightclub bouncer with a neck tattoo will design you a new nose.’
I don’t want to give you the impression I was gearing up for the Thrilla in Manila. It was an amateur bout at a leagues club: three rounds; headgear and singlets; fifty people in the crowd if you’re lucky. You’ll appreciate, however, that the stakes seemed high to me. ‘The worst that could happen’ was not merely a loss, but a knockout. Paul insisted that such a disaster was improbable thanks to the cautious refereeing and general lack of skills at the novice level, but I found this about as effective as statistics usually are in countering a phobia.
Even if I didn’t get knocked out, I could get hurt, a black eye or a broken nose. Worse still, there could be humiliation. I didn’t want to let Paul down. I didn’t want to let myself down. And after telling everyone who would listen that I was going to fight, I didn’t want to return with my tail between my legs, batter
ed and bettered, confirming I had never been cut out for this boxing caper in the first place.
Paul could say what he wanted about life experiences and scoring points, but I was going to get in a ring with somebody who wanted to hurt me. Somebody who would be wearing harder, smaller gloves than the padded sixteen ouncers we wore in sparring. Somebody who would not obey the polite conventions of sparring and ease off if he caught me with a hard shot. Somebody who might be bigger than me, somebody who would almost certainly be tougher than me. Somebody I had never met but was already scared of.
So while it might have been a low-level bout, I did my best to train like a high-level athlete. Partly, this was a response to the weight issue: I wasn’t sure I had eight kilograms left to lose. I upped my roadwork to seven kilometres every morning. It’s amazing how easy it is to get out of bed in the cold when you’re in a more-or-less constant state of panic and know that pain and humiliation could result from staying under the covers. Paul began offering tips for further weight loss, such as skipping carbs at night and running on an empty stomach.
‘Someone once told me a hungry lion is a dangerous lion. That might sound silly but it’s true,’ he said, waxing lyrical about the artificially sweetened low-calorie pudding he’d devoured at the Australian Institute of Sport. As time wore on, I started to understand how he felt about that pudding. Every morning I’d wake up, go to the bathroom and stand on the scales to check my weight. I trawled online forums for tips (you feel less hungry if you have a glass of hot water) and obsessed over what I was eating: was two pieces of toast with breakfast too much? Should I start taking the yolks out of my scrambled eggs? I craved pizza, Big Macs, deep-fried anything.
But some part of me took pleasure in the deprivation too. The hunger gave me a sense of purpose. The burning emptiness in the pit of my stomach was a constant reminder of the task I had set myself. I had never felt so single-minded before, and I haven’t since. Dr Margaret Goodman, a neurologist and the former chairman of the Medical Advisory Board of the Nevada State Athletic Commission, has spoken about how the purgatory boxers experience making weight can leave them with eating disorders after they retire. Having experienced it for a short time, I get it.
On the Chin Page 10