There wasn’t much else to say. We sat in silence, comfortable in the sense that we were at peace in each other’s company, if not at peace with the knowledge that a moment of truth was fast approaching. Paul occasionally punctured the stillness with a piece of advice or two, mostly variations on the jabbing theme, but these interjections grew shorter and fewer the closer we got to our destination, before they eventually petered out.
We turned onto Anzac Parade amid flashing brake lights and a setting sun. Flying foxes were taking off from Centennial Park in their hundreds, filling the posterised sky as they wheeled and turned. There was a hot lump in my stomach. As in a nightmare, time was passing both too quickly and too slowly, the consequences of past decisions inevitable but taking forever to arrive.
Obeying the warped dream logic, the traffic spat us out and we shot towards Souths Juniors. The club itself was a concrete and glass monolith on the road to Maroubra Beach. When we arrived, the car park was empty. We walked inside, treading on worn patterned carpet that smelled of beer and gravy. The escalators cut slow cross-sections through floors furnished with poker machines and plastic pot plants. At the top we walked through a double door into the auditorium.
A ring was set up in the dim light. Behind it was a stage, the teal curtain down. Plastic tables and vinyl-covered seats surrounded it on three sides, with a staircase leading to more seating on a balcony.
I joined a line of three gaunt young men waiting to see the fight doctor. We didn’t speak. Paul shook hands with a few of the officials and other trainers.
There was hardly space in the brightly lit weigh-in room for Paul, the silver-haired doctor and me. The doctor poked and prodded, asked a few questions and ordered me to mount a set of well-used bathroom scales. I took a deep breath and stepped on board. Much to my alarm, the needle swung up towards one hundred kilos before easing back past seventy-five and settling on seventy-two. I breathed a sigh of relief. The scale at the gym must have been out. I was three kilos underweight, which, in retrospect, was utterly consonant with my general tendency towards over-preparation.
The doctor asked Paul and me to sign different sections of a hair-raising legal release—‘to the best of my knowledge I am fairly matched’; ‘I am aware that I could be injured or receive an infection during or as a result of the contest’—and sent us on our way.
With the formalities done, we walked out into the auditorium. A man was standing over a trestle table, a crumpled green linen shirt stretched tight over his ample belly. Paul Toweel. He had thick dark hair, a push-broom moustache and an air of casual authority. We shook hands and he eyed me mistrustfully. I blushed, but before long he and Paul Miller were absorbed in shoptalk and he had forgotten I existed.
‘Righto, come back in an hour for the draw,’ he said eventually, bustling off. I took his friendliness to my coach as a sign that he didn’t bear me too much of a grudge over the phone calls, and that my paranoia regarding the matchmaking was unfounded.
With time to kill, we headed back down the escalators, past the old ladies on the pokies and the fake palm trees, out the door and across the road to a tiled take-away pizza shop. Paul ordered a supreme and a can of Coke while I got stuck into my bananas and my thermos of lukewarm porridge. It wasn’t exactly haute cuisine, but it did quieten my stomach, which had been grinding away like a rusty cog. Scraping the bottom of the container with my spoon, I felt somewhat restored. Paul, meanwhile, was back to dispensing advice.
‘Remember, in-out-in. Don’t stand around. Show those variations on the jab, that up-jab, that power-jab.’
It must have been the twentieth time he had told to stick to my jab and remember my defence. Suddenly it dawned on me: he was as nervous as me. And the symptoms seemed to be worsening. After finishing the pizza and returning to the auditorium, Paul practically ran to the judges’ table to grab the bout sheet, which he put down on the table in front of us with a flourish.
It was an A4 piece of paper with a long three-column table: one column for the weight division, one for the boxer in the red corner and one for the boxer in the blue corner. Beneath the name of each boxer was the name of their gym and trainer. My eyes scanned down the page. There I was, right at the end, in the red corner—second last out of a dozen fights. My opponent finally had a name: Alex Aaty, from Wollongong PCYC. Paul told me later he was Iraqi and it was his first fight too. I don’t know how he found this out. I never asked. Maybe Paul Toweel told him. In any case, that was all the information I got.
Amateur boxing matches, especially at the lower levels, are almost totally anonymised. You know nothing about your opponent, who is picked on the basis that he weighs the same as you and has a similar level of experience. You are simply blue or red, your individuality stripped away by the mandatory uniform, your head and face obscured by the mandatory headgear. You certainly don’t get walk-out music, which is probably for the best.
Professional fights, on the other hand, are all about personality. Fighters select their walk-out music, design their own shorts, choose their own gloves and are generally given free rein to express themselves however they see fit. Personality can be as important as athletic ability when it comes to making money, so it’s hardly a surprise that some fighters aim for the outrageous.
I’ve seen boxers emerge from the dressing room disguised as demons, luchadores, lions, gorillas, escaped felons, executioners, aliens, obese versions of themselves, mental patients, Greek hoplites, Roman centurions, Indian chiefs and more. Mexico’s Jorge Paez, a one-time circus clown known for his acrobatics and eccentric haircuts, once came to the ring dressed as a nun.
But the undisputed king of pre-fight histrionics was the Yemeni-British featherweight world champion of the 1990s, Prince Naseem Hamed, whose elfin presence belied dangerous speed and punching power, not to mention flamboyance. His most memorable ring walks included being borne into the arena on a palanquin held aloft by half a dozen shirtless, oiled men in tight silver pants; a ride in an electric blue 1960 Cadillac convertible; a trip on a hydraulic magic carpet; a choreographed dance through a specially constructed, smoke-filled graveyard set to the tune of Michael Jackson’s Thriller; and a flight above the heads of the crowd on a trapeze twenty minutes after his opponent, the no-nonsense Mexican maestro Marco Antonio Barrera, was ready to start their fight.
Of course, there’s only so far showmanship will get you, and deliberately keeping a man with a nickname like ‘The Baby Faced Assassin’ waiting for such a long time is rarely a good idea. Over twelve rounds, a very unimpressed Barrera taught Hamed an important lesson about the relationship between pride and a fall, at one point pinning the Brit’s arms behind his back and frogmarching him headfirst into the turnbuckle. Hamed was so demoralised he retired soon after, aged twenty-seven.
One of the other key differences between the pros and the ams, aside from what a video gamer might call the difficulty setting, is the matchmaking. While at lower levels amateur matchmaking is governed by the principle that all matches should be competitive, and at the higher levels by the idea of finding the best boxer at a given weight, thing are much murkier in the professional ranks.
Because there is no one international body that governs boxing, fighters cannot be told who to fight in the same way that football teams are told who they will play next week. Instead, it’s up to a boxer and his or her management, with input from a promoter, to reach an agreement with another boxer. In these discussions, virtually every aspect of a bout beyond the Queensberry Rules themselves is up for negotiation, from how the money will be split to the kind of gloves that will be worn. All this manoeuvring at least gives fight fans something to do. In the absence of regular fixtures, we spend as much time analysing negotiations and following the theatre of the boxing business as we do watching boxing itself.
Various competing considerations go into matchmaking and opponent selection. Often the guiding principle is to aim for the highest possible reward—either in terms of bank balance or reputation—at
the lowest possible risk. This might sound cynical, but given the life-altering damage a fighter can sustain in a boxing match, it’s hard to fault the logic.
Promoters, whose job is to sell broadcast rights and tickets, have a different set of priorities. At least in theory, they must strike a balance between putting on an entertaining fight and building a fighter into a box-office attraction so they can make more money down the line. To this end, they employ matchmakers, boxing’s equivalent of soothsayers, who use their highly developed knowledge of boxing dynamics and fighter attributes to suggest match-ups that will advance the promoter’s agenda. If the goal is to make a young boxer a TV star, the matchmaker can suggest an opponent who will offer some resistance before yielding to a spectacular knockout. If the idea is to see whether a prospect is as good as hoped, the matchmaker can suggest a cagey veteran who will test his mettle. If the objective is simply to keep the crowd entertained, the matchmaker can suggest two determined local bruisers who put little stock in the sweeter points of the science.
Teddy Brenner, Madison Square Garden’s legendary matchmaker during the television heyday of the 1950s, said there were three rules for good matchmaking: the fighters’ styles should mesh, a fight should lead somewhere for one or both of the fighters, and you shouldn’t make a fight that you wouldn’t pay to see. That’s the ideal. But the sad reality is that professional boxing runs on mismatches. Watch any card, from a local club show to the supporting bouts of a Las Vegas pay-per-view, and you will see one or two fights, if not the majority, in which clearly overmatched fighters get knocked out or beaten up.
Why is this? Partly it’s that up-and-coming fighters have to learn their trade and have always done so by beating lesser opponents before stepping up to more competitive match-ups with more dangerous veterans or fellow prospects. These early fights are meant to be educational. Theoretically, the opponents are chosen because they can teach a novice fighter to deal with something they haven’t seen before—a big puncher, say, or a southpaw.
These days, however, promoters and managers are often loath to match their best prospects too hard. TV networks and fans love boxers with undefeated records, and the best way to ensure a steady supply of undefeated fighters is to match them softly. Some blame Floyd Mayweather, whose entire brand was built around never having lost. But while matchmaking might have reached a nadir in the ‘Money’ era, it has been getting less competitive for decades.
As a result, a lot of early-career bouts are now designed to ‘build confidence’ in a fighter rather than to educate him or her, and often resemble public executions. I’ve watched hundreds of fights like that. Some are more gruesome than others, but in every single one I knew the outcome before it started.
Does anyone like to see a mismatch? They’re cruel and ugly. And watching an overmatched boxer get picked apart is infinitely more distressing than seeing Serena Williams beat a wildcard in straight sets, or even the All Blacks thrash Namibia at the Rugby World Cup, because you know the boxer is sustaining physical, potentially life-changing, damage.
Often it’s plain to read on the grim, lonely face of an opponent that they will endure as much pain as is necessary to maintain the fiction that the fight is a true contest, in order to ensure that the local athletic commission doesn’t withhold their pay for taking a dive.
Other times, there’s more to a mismatch than meets the eye. Boxing has a class of professional losers, sometimes called journeymen, whose records belie their ability. Taking fights as regularly as once a week, often at short notice across several weight categories, they use their underrated skills to avoid taking punishment (so as to be able to fight again as soon as possible) rather than to go for the win.
The ultimate example was Englishman Kristian Laight, known as ‘Mr Reliable’: he lost 279 of 300 bouts in a career that lasted fifteen years, but was only stopped five times. Then there’s Johnny Greaves, who retired after a hundred bouts with a 4-96 record. ‘We sometimes take fights at an hour’s notice,’ he told journalist Mark Turley in Turley’s eye-opening book Journeymen. ‘I’ve been on the sofa having a couple of beers and a cigarette and the phone’s gone and it’s someone asking me to come down to the York Hall.’
Fights against no-hopers and professional losers aren’t fixed per se, but one participant is being paid for their presence, not their effort. That’s just how boxing works.
In boxing, everything has its price: it’s not called prize fighting for nothing. Leaving aside the amateurs, boxing has always been about people fighting for money. But where does it all come from?
The fight game’s first source of funds was gambling. In its simplicity, a boxing match almost cries out to be bet on. History does not relate whether the Sumerians were throwing down a few clay tokens on their favourite fighters, but I’d wager they were. What’s certain is that gambling was present at the start of boxing’s modern history in eighteenth-century London. In fact, it’s not all that much of a stretch to suggest that fist fighting was codified as a sport because the workers who flooded into the English capital from the countryside didn’t have space for traditional rural amusements and needed something new to bet on.
In the bare-knuckle era boxers needed to acquire wealthy patrons to front the stakes for their winner-takes-all fights, and keep them in beef and beer during training. Consequently, it was the patrons who reaped the majority of the rewards for victory. When Tom Cribb defeated Tom Molineaux in their 1811 rematch, his patron Captain Barclay won £10,000, of which he gave Cribb £400—which was considered generous. Molineaux, the loser, had to make do with ‘the nobbings’, a collection from the crowd totalling £50. Not one of the twenty thousand spectators paid for a ticket, which was fairly typical for the era, though during the nineteenth century in Australia it was quite common for bare-knuckle fights to be staged in semi-remote parts of Sydney Harbour, so that anyone who wished to attend would have to pay to be transported via chartered boat. This ‘steamer money’ would be part of the prize.
Some boxers developed alternative income streams. In England, many retired fighters owned pubs, which in turn became places boxers and their patrons could eat, drink and get involved in ‘turn ups’ that might lead to more official ‘mills’. Active pugilists often went on tour, appearing at boxing booths and sparring with each other or members of the public, a practice that continued into the gloved era. For the fighters, these tours were often more lucrative than the fights themselves, and took them as far afield as Australia and the United States.
In the financial, as in the physical, side of the sport, John L. Sullivan, the first gloved champion, was a bridge from the bare-knuckle era to something that more closely resembles modern boxing. ‘The Boston Strong Boy’, one of America’s first true celebrities, pioneered moneymaking strategies still familiar today, including endorsements—Sullivan backed everything from beef stock to boxing gloves—and acting. Even more significantly, he helped move the sport out of the literal backwoods and into the electrically lit arenas of modern cities, close to its natural fan base, the industrial working class.
This was crucial, as it allowed promoters to more easily charge for entry. Tickets for Sullivan’s 1892 fight with ‘Gentleman Jim’ Corbett at a specially-built auditorium in New Orleans were priced between five and fifteen dollars, and ten thousand punters paid for the privilege of seeing the heavyweight championship change hands for the first time. Within a few short years, the revenue from ticket sales had supplanted the need for fighters to put up their own stakes. When Jack Johnson fought Jim Jeffries in their 1910 fight of the century, the process of negotiation was quite similar to that of a modern world title match. Prior to the fight, both camps agreed to split the takings from the gate 60–40 in favour of the victor (today the percentages tend to be calculated without reference to the outcome). Johnson and Jeffries also made a tidy profit by selling the rights to film the bout. When Johnson won, the film sparked race riots and lynchings across the country, and was promptly banned in many stat
es.
The Johnson-Jeffries Fight was by no means the first movie made of a boxing match. By the time the pair met in Reno, boxing films were already a thriving industry. In fact, in Boxing, A Cultural History, Kasia Boddy contends that boxing was a key driver of the development of motion pictures as a medium. Boxing, with its confined action, was a perfect subject for film pioneers, whose cameras were large and immobile. It was also a guaranteed success at the box office.
Though there were earlier fight films, including the first-ever projected movie, which starred Young Griffo, the first boxing blockbuster was Jim Corbett’s heavyweight title fight with Bob Fitzsimmons in 1897. The filmmaker and businessman Enoch Rector bought the exclusive rights to film the bout, and used nearly two miles of film doing so. The ring was painted with ‘Copyright the Veriscope Company’ so that viewers would know they were getting the real deal. This was a legitimate concern, as there was a large and growing trade in knock-offs. Indeed, a movie called Reproduction of the Corbett and Fitzsimmons Fight, featuring a pair of Philadelphia freight handlers playing the principals, came out a week before Rector’s version.
When it did premiere, the genuine article, shown at New York’s Academy of Music and London’s Imperial Theatre, was a critical and commercial smash. It made between $600,000 and $700,000, and changed the way the fight business worked forever. The combination of film, ticket sales and the rise of mass media combined to turn boxing into a truly enormous business. But boxing, with its huge popularity, also shaped the modern media landscape.
The next ‘fight of the century’ (there would be many), Jack Dempsey’s 1921 clash with the French war hero Georges Carpentier at Boyle’s Forty Acres outside Jersey City, is best known for being the first ever million-dollar gate, with $1.7 million in tickets sold. But perhaps more significantly, it was the first major sporting event ever broadcast live to a mass audience. With Dempsey on the cover looking too large for both his suit and the headphones he is wearing, The Wireless Age explained the novel process:
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