On the Chin

by Alex McClintock

  Going back to the days of ancient Greece, sex has been verboten for boxers in preparation for bouts. It weakens the legs, or so they say. Numerous tales are offered in support of this dubious claim. Ray Arcel laid the blame for Joe Louis’ 1936 loss to Max Schmeling at the feet of his wife Marva, who shocked old boxing hands by spending time at Louis’ camp. (Louis’ trainer, Jack Blackburn, reportedly had to chase other female admirers away with a stick.) ‘I did it once, and I got the hell whipped out of me,’ said lightweight champ Ike Williams.

  More recently, super middleweight Carl Froch abstained from intimacy with his wife, page-three girl Rachael Cordingley, for three months before his 2014 rematch with George Groves at Wembley Stadium. It worked for them both: Froch knocked out Groves in the eighth round, and Cordingley got a splash in British tabloid the Sun under the headline: ‘The sex ban is so hard for me.’

  The cruel irony of the sex prohibition is that boxers are never more physically attractive than when they’re in fighting shape. I’m sure the Greeks, degenerates that they were, noticed this, and it may have had something to do with Lord Byron’s fighting fixation. Certainly by the time the Queensberry Rules were adopted boxers were becoming sex symbols in earnest. Of course, it didn’t hurt that for a long time the boxing ring was one of the few places you could enjoy the sight of semi-naked men.

  One of the early idols was ‘Gentleman Jim’ Corbett, who is remembered for his top hats and tails, but pioneered more revealing ring wear: the kind of shorts that would today be called hot pants. He knew his audience. By the time Jack Dempsey met Georges Carpentier in a 1921 battle of the hunks, the secret was out: ‘It’s no longer enough to have speed and a good right arm to be the favourite. You have to be good looking too, now that ladies go to the fights,’ said Dempsey.

  There have been many examples of the boxer as sex object since. Muhammad Ali was one of the sexiest men of the 1960s—even Norman Mailer couldn’t help noticing how beautiful he was. Oscar De La Hoya wasn’t lacking in the looks department either, and during the ’90s seemed to appeal as much to Los Angeles’ teenage girls as its Latino boxing fans. In 1997 he gave one of these groups what they wanted and posed for Playgirl under the headline ‘Boxing’s champ of romance’. Today, lightweight prospect Ryan Garcia offers a modern twist, with a Disney Channel aesthetic and millions of Instagram followers who lap up his pouty selfies and moody captions.

  To the viewer, boxing’s sexual symbolism isn’t exactly subtle. ‘No sport appears more powerfully homoerotic,’ writes Joyce Carol Oates.

  The confrontation in the ring—the disrobing—the sweaty heated combat that is part dance, courtship, coupling—the frequent urgent pursuit by one boxer of the other in the fight’s natural and violent movement toward the ‘knockout’: surely boxing derives much of its appeal from this mimicry of a species of erotic love in which one man overcomes the other in an exhibition of superior strength of will.

  If I had a dollar for every joke friends have made about me watching sweaty, shirtless men on the internet, I wouldn’t have to dip into my savings for the next big pay-per-view.

  Do boxers themselves think about these signs and signifiers? For the most part, I think not. Some male boxers might acknowledge the way the sport allows them to enjoy caring relationships and physical contact that might otherwise be taboo among straight men, but I suspect few would put it exactly like that.

  There are instances where fighters have acknowledged and even revelled in the homoerotic, though, usually as a form of showmanship or a crude display of dominance. Interrupting a stare-down to kiss your opponent on the lips, as British heavyweights Tyson Fury and Dereck Chisora have done to separate foes in recent years, is probably the former, while pelvically thrusting at your opponent’s bottom during a clinch, as Adrien Broner did to Marcos Maidana during their 2013 welterweight title fight, is certainly the latter. (Though as a tactic it proved unsuccessful—Maidana knocked Broner down, returned the gesture and won by unanimous decision.)

  How you would categorise the case of the immaculately named junior welterweight Trenton Titsworth—who in 2008 was docked two points for tenderly kissing Jesse Vargas on the neck—I’m not sure. You could certainly take it as a comment on prevailing attitudes in the sport, given the referee only took one point from Lopez for clocking Titsworth in retaliation.

  There have been gay boxers, of course. Emile Griffith, the hat maker turned welterweight and middleweight champion of the 1960s and ’70s, was quite open about his sexuality, at least for the times. American journalists were sensitive on the subject (probably because homosexuality was not something you could discuss in newspapers back then), but their British counterparts were a little surprised when they walked in on Griffith French-kissing one of his cornermen after he beat Brian Curvis in London. Puerto Rican featherweight Orlando Cruz made headlines when he came out in 2012, still a very brave thing to do in the macho world of boxing. He hoped to dedicate a world title win to Griffith, but was stopped in his two attempts to win one. For whatever reason, homosexuality seems less of a taboo among the women of the sport, and top female boxers who identify as LGBTQ have included Christy Martin, Lucia Rijker, Ann Wolfe and Nicola Adams.

  Perhaps unsurprisingly, given boxing’s macho culture, nobody seems to have given much thought to whether abstinence is necessary for these men and women, or indeed anyone outside the straight male ‘norm’. The mechanism by which sex might affect a boxer’s legs has never really been explained, either. There seem to be three schools of thought among those who support the policy of pre-fight abstinence. First, and perhaps least plausible, is the age-old idea that a man is weakened in some fundamental way by giving away his, ahem, essential essence.

  Second, and more credible, is the proposition that it’s not sex itself that has a deleterious effect on a boxer, but the late nights spent trying to secure it. In the words of 1950s welterweight and middleweight champ Carmen Basilio: ‘It’s all right for the married guys cause they’re at home. They’re in bed early, and they get their sleep and get up and do their roadwork. It’s those young guys who are single. They go out all night trying to pick up some bimbo and they’re not going to get up and do their roadwork.’

  The case of Muhammad Ali is of interest here. Despite his latter-day elevation to secular sainthood, ‘The Greatest’ left a trail of ruined relationships in his wake, chiefly due to his almost pathological quest for female affection. Ali’s second wife, Khalilah Ali, went so far as to label him a sex addict. Which means that one of the toughest and most graceful heavyweights of all time, a man who moved in ways that people thought heavyweights were not supposed to move, was an infamous pants man. Crucially, however, Ali was never a drinker. He might have stayed up late, but he didn’t stay out late. Maybe old Carmen was right.

  The third theory, which is the most credible to my mind, is that sex has no particular negative effects, but that abstinence has a positive one. Namely, it makes you frustrated, aggressive and mean. Kind of like Paul’s ‘hungry lion’ theory of dieting. You could call it ‘horny lion’.

  Of course, there’s little scientific evidence for any of these claims. Very few studies have been done on the impact of sex on athletic performance, and to my knowledge none have studied boxers specifically. The small studies that have been done on other athletes all conclude that abstinence has little to no impact. And, like the rest of the discussion, the research that has been done has focused almost entirely on men.

  There’s an obvious flavour of sexism about the whole thing: blaming Marva Louis for her husband’s failure to bring his left hand back to his chin, or ‘some bimbo’ for a boxer’s lack of discipline. This seems particularly unfair because the partners of fighters must be some of the most patient people on Earth. They put up with grouchy, frustrated and absent lovers, wearisome dietary requirements, cut eyes and bruised lips. When times are good they’re usually left at home while their sweethearts luxuriate in the affections of others, and when times are bad they’r
e the ones left holding the ice packs and whipping up dinner in the blender.

  And it’s the wives of fighters who are forced to deal with boxing’s long-term consequences, since often they’re the only ones left to look after their bumbling, punchy husbands after the money, the fame and the admirers have disappeared. You could write a whole other book on that topic.

  •

  At the risk of revealing too much information, I can say that neither staying up nor staying out was high on my list of pre-fight concerns. I was simply too tired after running all morning and training all afternoon to be very interested in either. The only thing I was chasing was my registration booklet, and I was doing that with fanatical zeal. Which is what led me, two weeks before the fight, to the Amateur Boxing Association’s head office, located in a low-slung outer-suburban recreation centre, itself located in a flat expanse of brittle yellow grass. Typically, I had budgeted two hours to get there, just to be safe, and arrived an hour early.

  There was nothing and nobody around. Despite it being the end of autumn, the sun was beating down mercilessly, and seemed to have bleached everything, from the footpaths to the trees, shades of grey and blonde. I felt vaguely uneasy in an unknown and empty neighbourhood, so I stayed in the car with air-conditioning on and the doors locked.

  When I got out of the car and approached the centre’s glass entrance, a loping shadow appeared behind me. I turned skittishly, then held the door as a skinny tattooed Filipino man with a splayed nose and twin rat tails (clearly a fighter) walked through in front of me.

  ‘Do you know where I can find Polly?’ I asked.

  He pointed to a closed door, then turned and walked into the bowels of the building. The sounds of children shouting and shoes squeaking on a timber basketball court echoed down the corridor as I watched him go. How much did he weigh? I couldn’t be fighting him, could I? What if Paul Toweel matched me with someone out of my league to teach me a lesson about phone etiquette?

  These paranoid thoughts were interrupted by the appearance of a Pacific Islander woman wearing trackpants and a huge head of curls. ‘You must be Alex,’ she said, with a hint of motherly indulgence. I had the impression Paul Toweel had told her about his stalker. She opened the locked door of a small office, its walls covered in engraved plaques and signed certificates, every flat surface supporting gold trophies and stacks of paperwork.

  She sat down behind a small desk but did not invite me to sit. In a businesslike but not unfriendly fashion she took my envelope of cash, made out a receipt, stuck down my passport photo with a glue stick and, finally, handed me my ring record book.

  In my hand at last. A pleasingly retro document, a relic from the pre-digital era, like an international driver’s permit or the papers an Eastern European refugee might hand to a border guard. It had a thin blue cardboard cover, the unlaminated passport photo in the front and dozens of lined pages to record my future results.

  Trying to sound casual, I asked if she knew how many fighters had signed up for the fights at Souths in two weeks. She said she didn’t, offering the insinuation of a smile without actually moving her mouth. She must have seen a few nervous nellies in her time. I thanked her, said I had a doctor’s appointment and left. The whole meeting had taken less than five minutes. Australia Post probably could have handled that, I reflected as I drove back to the city.

  The bit about the doctor’s appointment was no lie. The back of the blue book contained space for five years’ worth of annual medical assessments. I needed to get a clean bill of health before I would be allowed to box. Rather than going to my family GP, a lovely man whose great passion is the theory that Sir Francis Bacon wrote the plays now attributed to William Shakespeare and who might have refused to sign the book, I rocked up at a bulk-billing medical centre. After half an hour with New Idea, I was called into a small consultation room by a spiky-haired young doctor with freckles. He turned on a lamp and beckoned me to sit down on an examination table upholstered in synthetic leather. He didn’t seem much older than I was.

  ‘What can I do for you?’ he said brightly.

  ‘I’m going to have my first boxing match and I need a checkup to make sure I’m medically fit to fight,’ I said.

  ‘Really?’ he said, unable to hide his curiosity.

  ‘Really,’ I said, producing the blue book from my back pocket.

  ‘I need you to check all this stuff,’ I pointed at the grid of medical requirements, ‘and order some blood tests if that’s OK.’

  ‘There’s a first time for everything,’ he marvelled. ‘Let me get this straight: I need to certify you healthy enough to be punched in the face?’

  ‘Yep, that’s about the speed of it,’ I replied breezily, as my attempt to avoid the medical profession’s censure crashed and burned.

  ‘Do you know how bad that is for your brain? Would you let somebody hit you in the head with a cricket bat?’

  ‘No, but…I’m not planning on getting hit.’

  He raised a sceptical eyebrow. ‘Really, though, why do you want to do this? You could get hurt. You could hurt somebody else.’

  This caught me f latfooted. I didn’t have an answer. I stammered something about it being the ultimate test of fitness. He looked me in the eye and shrugged, perhaps feeling he’d gone as far as was appropriate. Then he produced a magnifying glass shaped like a sparrow’s head on a stick and proceeded with the usual investigation of the eyes, ears, nose and throat.

  When he told me to take my shirt off and pressed the cool metal of his stethoscope against the bones of my ribcage, another possibility dawned on me. What if I was not fit to fight? What if I had undiagnosed hepatitis or a heart murmur or some exotic disease I’d never even heard of? What if I was fit but the young doctor falsely certified I wasn’t because he didn’t want me to get hit in the head? (Surely that last one would be a breach of medical ethics.)

  I felt simultaneously that such an outcome would be both monstrously unfair after all my hard work and an incredible relief. In some ways, I wouldn’t mind taking my chances with disease; I’d heard that hepatitis was manageable these days. Like my fantasy postal strike, it would provide an excuse to skip the fight without admitting I didn’t want to go through with it. ‘Mate, I really wanted to fight but they won’t let me,’ I’d tell the guys at the gym. ‘I have African trypanosomiasis, so unfair.’

  The doctor sat me down again, consulted the blue book, which was lying open on the desk, and produced a syringe. As I felt its dull impact in my arm, I ran over the possibility of failing the medical again and again in my mind, trying to understand how I really felt.

  ‘Well, those results will come back in a few days, but from my point of view you’re a very fit and healthy individual. I still don’t understand why you’re doing this, though.’

  I hadn’t noticed him taking the needle out. He signed the book, bundled me out and shook my hand in the waiting room, wishing me a cheerful ‘good luck’ despite his disapproval. The receptionist called the following Friday. It was good news, depending on the way you looked at it. I was HIV negative, free of hepatitis B and C, and medically cleared to box in the great state of New South Wales.

  THE FIGHT(S) OF THE CENTURY

  THE AFTERNOON OF the fight, George dropped me in the HK Ward car park. The plan was for Paul to give me a ride to Souths Juniors, where I would weigh in at around 6 p.m., a few hours before the event itself. My brother and a small group of friends would come back in time to watch the fight.

  I arrived an hour early to HK, of course. My arrangement with Paul allowed for significant leeway in case either one of us was delayed by a traffic jam, tropical cyclone or major terrorist incident. I stood outside the gym in the weak afternoon sun, silently watching George circle the gravel and head back down the long driveway between the ovals. The Gothic piles of the university proper loomed in the background as he flicked the indicator, turned out onto the road and disappeared. I was alone, and I have rarely felt it like I did that afternoon
.

  As I walked into HK Ward my knees were weak and my stomach was a churning pit. Paranoid about making weight, I had hardly eaten anything. I was jumpy and overwhelmed, as if I had drunk too much coffee. Come to think of it, I probably had drunk too much coffee.

  The gym was deserted, and I passed the agonising minutes waiting for Paul by walking in concentric circles, shadow-boxing half-heartedly and climbing on and off the scales. Much to my relief, they showed that I weighed seventy-five kilograms, a number that remained constant no matter how many times I checked it.

  Mercifully, Paul was early too. He breezed in with a big grin and a pat on the shoulder. His own fighting days were so recently behind him that this seemed more a gesture of solidarity than a coach’s pick-me-up. He collected a spit bucket from one of the gym’s storage cages, and we climbed into his faded green RAV4. As we set off south-east I checked and re-checked the contents of my gym bag: hand wraps (two pairs), mouthpiece, gloves, groin protector, shorts, red singlet, blue singlet, red headgear (borrowed from the gym), blue headgear (same), boots, socks, Boxing NSW blue book, water, Vaseline, several bananas, a tube of Deep Heat, a thermos full of porridge (to carb-up post weigh-in), phone, wallet, keys. Nobody could accuse me of going into this fight ill-prepared.

  Being in Paul’s car with the windows up against the evening cold felt more intimate than standing around in the gym, and I felt a wave of affection for him. He had been here before. He would protect me.

  He asked me how I felt, and I laughed. ‘Hungry,’ I said.

  What I meant was ‘terrified’. But I didn’t need to say it. He knew.

  ‘Just stick to your jab and remember your defence. You’ve got such a good jab. I’d be happy if you didn’t even throw a right hand the whole fight.’