On the Chin

by Alex McClintock

  I sat against the cool, painted bricks of the corridor with my eyes closed, trying to visualise the fight to come. At some point, Paul called me out into the auditorium to watch a wild brawl between two other middleweights. My eyes struggled to adjust to the contrast between the bright lights of the ring and the shadows of the arena. A tall African-Australian guy with rippling muscles and dreadlocks chopped down to spinifex windmilled away at a pale, doughy kid.

  ‘I’d love you to be matched with him,’ said Paul.

  I looked up sceptically as the taller boxer battered his opponent with thudding punches, the impact echoing around the room.

  ‘You mean the white kid, right?’ said David, who had joined us in the corridor.

  ‘No, the big guy. Alex could get under his shots. I think he’d stop him.’

  I appreciated the vote of confidence, but was now very glad to be facing Jake. Maybe that was the idea. I went back into the corridor and started skipping. Same warm-up. Same shadowboxing. Same pads. Same nervous bladder. Same South African accent over the loudspeaker. Same walk to the ring. They might have been the same sweaty gloves, one month smellier.

  ‘You have got this,’ said Paul once more as he put my mouthguard in.

  I looked down. The canvas was so covered in stains you could have hung it in a gallery and called it abstract expressionism. Shades of maroon, traces of blue and green. The blood of dozens of boys and girls, men and women. Years’ worth of blood.

  The referee beckoned Jake and me towards centre ring and gave us the usual spiel. Jake stared me down. I tried to hold his gaze, but couldn’t. He held both gloves out, palms in, and pounded them down on mine, hard. No doubt about it, he was trying to psych me out. I thought of Mike Tyson’s menacing lisp: ‘I walk around the ring but I never take my eyes off my opponent…I keep my eyes on him. I keep my eyes on him. Then once I see a chink in his armour, boom, one of his eyes may move, and then I know I have him.’

  Did Jake have me? It didn’t feel like it. Maybe it was Paul’s confidence, or maybe it was because I knew what Jake was really like, but I didn’t feel intimidated. If anything, beneath the car-alarm adrenaline, I felt a bit peeved he would try the tough-guy routine on me. If we were going to have to fight, couldn’t we at least be grown-ups about it?

  The bell rang. We were going to have to fight. This time, I didn’t offer a second handshake. I went for a jab instead. It slid away off Jake’s shoulder as he rotated his torso clockwise. The second one connected though. It hit the top of his headgear. Not hard—he was leaning away and it bumped his shoulder on the way through—but enough to move the judges’ thumbs on their counters. His eyes widened in surprise.

  He stepped back and threw a flicking, rangy jab from his waist. I flexed my high guard and it thudded into the back of my gloves. Not a scoring shot. He stepped away again and looked down his nose at me, which to be fair was the only way he could look at me with his head tilted so far back.

  I moved to close the distance and he threw a single right, a swatting motion that cuffed me around the gloves. I double-jabbed again, to the belly then the head. Neither blow made much of an impact. He replied with a left-hook, right-hand combination. He had an eye-catching way of throwing punches, only locking his wrist at the last second, a flourish that lent him the air of a magician pulling the tablecloth out from under the crockery.

  I saw these punches—they were hard to miss—but I didn’t feel a thing. Not even the dull sonic impact that had registered when Alex Aaty hit me. It was like being fully anaesthetised: not just an absence of pain, but a lack of any sensation at all. I didn’t feel my head move or my neck snap. After the fight I was convinced he hadn’t laid a finger on me, though as my face bruised up it became obvious I was wrong.

  My conscious mind was not floating high above the ring, as it had the first time around. Behind the automatic process of boxing, I had time to think about tactics, how I wanted to lash Jake with the left hook as he pulled back. I was even able to consider his expression and recognise in his face the same things I had felt in my first fight: shock that a single round could feel so long, the realisation that he was alone with me in time and space.

  ‘Be first, Jake. He’s got nothin’ on ya,’ yelled Fritzy.

  I willed myself to keep punching. Jake put his shoulder up and twisted away. Jab, jab, left hook, straight right hand. Nothing landed cleanly, but maybe there were some points in there. He fired back. The bell rang and I heard him sigh in relief.

  Again, I stood up in the corner. Across the ring, Fritzy’s bulk blocked my view of Jake. Paul, calm, rested his fingertips on my chest and told me to breathe deeply.

  ‘How do you feel?’

  ‘Good.’ It was closer to the truth than last time.

  ‘You are doing fantastic. He cannot cope with your double jab. I want you to start tripling it up, OK?’

  I nodded, still gulping down air.

  ‘He’s only coming back with ones and twos. Just do what we’ve practised. Punch, step back, and then second attack.’

  He sprayed water into my mouth and held the bucket for me to spit in. ‘Seconds out,’ came over the loudspeaker and Paul patted me on the shoulder, slipping between the ropes.

  Right away, I could tell what Fritzy had told Jake: plant your feet and throw more punches. He started the round rattling off flashy combos. His family was going crazy in the crowd, screaming and clapping at a volume way out of sync with what was actually taking place.

  ‘Come on Alex!’ David’s voice.

  It sounded lonely in comparison to Jake’s cheer squad, but it helped. As soon as I started throwing back, the fight resumed its previous pattern. Jake was sagging from the weight of adrenaline; he couldn’t keep up the pace and ended up in retreat again.

  The fight had found its rhythm. I was the aggressor, Jake the counterpuncher. I stalked forward behind the jab, hitting his body with hooks and right hands when he made his head too difficult a target. In return he whipped me with flashy roundhouse shots, still one at a time. I started to imagine myself as Joe Frazier, advancing all the time, bobbing and weaving, picking off punches like some steam-powered infernal machine. Despite the stress and fatigue, Jake, I think, imagined himself as Mayweather or maybe even Muhammad Ali, sublimely skilled and haughty in defence, ready to punish any mistake.

  At this point I’m going to hit the pause button.

  It may not surprise you to learn that the fight as I imagined it bore only a passing resemblance to the fight that actually took place. I have seen the tape, and unfortunately it proves that what seemed like a tactical skirmish between Jake’s slippery defence and my stubborn attack was in fact a total mess. Me shoving and slapping, him twisting and twitching like a fish on a line.

  Looking at the video, more than anything it’s the shape of the fight that gives us away as rank novices (though there are plenty of other clues). It resembled nothing so much as a game of ring o’ rosie, with me chasing Jake around in circles, always moving parallel with the ropes.

  True ringcraft is all about geometry: angles and concentric circles. A high-level fight can be like a duel between two draftsmen armed with protractors. How can I hit you from a place where you can’t hit me? How can I make you reach? How can I escape? A few degrees can be the difference between a raised fist and an unplanned nap.

  Experienced fighters understand and control this geometry. Beginners chase each other around, throwing punches. Though I was pushing Jake around, I hadn’t learnt how to guide him where I wanted or how to move perpendicular to the ropes, trapping him in place. I didn’t even know enough to know what I wasn’t doing. For his part, Jake had no idea how to claim the centre of the ring, to stick and move, so he was doomed to keep going in the same direction: straight back.

  By the time the third frame began we were both exhausted from the game of chasey. Despite the shrill pleas from his family in the crowd, he was still punching in ones and twos, still backing away. His mouth was hanging open as he tried
to suck in air. I could see the resentment in his almond-shaped eyes. He had thought this would be easy. In the moment, I felt more determined, more Frazieresque than ever.

  Most boxers will tell you that they don’t think about hurting their opponents. Some even say that ‘boxing is a sport like any other’. I think this is true, at least to the extent that the relationship between combatants during a fight is usually impersonal (with obvious exceptions when fighters goad or enrage each other). In my own experience of sparring and fights, at times you’re only vaguely aware that there is even another person in the ring with you. You’re fighting yourself: trying to vanquish your own limitations, your exhaustion, your fear, your clumsiness.

  When you do think about hitting your foe, there is no emotion involved. You feel neither animosity nor empathy. You do not think about the pain you will cause; your adversary is not a person, they are an object upon which you can demonstrate your abilities. In this way, hitting a human is not all that different from hitting a heavy bag.

  I think this is why the sight of two boxers embracing after they’ve just belted the stuffing out of each other is so affecting. Each is seeing the other as an individual for the first time and acknowledging the strange intimacy they’ve created. But perhaps part of the delusion persists, because it often seems as though boxers are celebrating in solidarity. As if, rather than being the cause of each other’s pain, they are relieved to have made it through together.

  All that is true…and yet. I’d be lying if I said there was no enjoyment in hitting people. There is the technical satisfaction of putting your training into practice, yes, but there is also a deeper, darker pleasure. This is what I had begun to feel against Jake.

  By the middle of the third round I was in control, driving my right hand into his body and ripping at his head with my left as he leaned away. He wore an expression of dismay. I could do anything I wanted to him. He was at my mercy, or that’s how it felt (again, the video shows something clumsier).

  I felt a thrill very different from the pre-fight rush: a deep, nasty urge to demonstrate my authority. That I actually quite liked Jake didn’t factor into it. I thought I was dismantling him, perhaps hurting him, and it felt good. It wasn’t even about the pain or the punches. His helplessness was intoxicating.

  I guess you’d call that sadism. I’ve felt it hitting guys in sparring, and it’s probably how bullies feel when they smack the nerds around behind the bins. Unpleasant to admit when you’ve always considered yourself a nice guy, but impossible to deny.

  The crowd noise increased as the seconds ticked away.

  ‘Come on Jake, let those hands go,’ screamed Fritzy hoarsely from the corner.

  ‘Finish strong, red!’ yelled a Pacific Island accent somewhere in the auditorium.

  I bit my mouthguard and pushed forward one final time with one last double jab: one low, one high. Not much in the way of impact. No way to know if they scored.

  The bell rang and we both sagged, letting out whatever tiny amount of air we still had stored up. Then we hugged, him patting the top of my head with his gloved hand. ‘Good fight,’ he said stiffly, flashing his mouthguard in a forced smile. There was no real feeling behind the embrace. We both knew someone was going to lose, and it would be personal.

  We parted, and I walked towards Paul. He was beaming. ‘You’ve got it, easy,’ he said, as he slipped my headgear and gloves off, sending me back out to the middle of the ring with a pat on the shoulder. Fritzy scowled at me from the other corner as the referee grabbed my wrist.

  I held my breath. I looked at Jake. He was holding his too. Now his headgear was off, a brown curl had flopped onto his forehead, making him appear boyish again. I looked around for my friends but saw nothing in the darkness beyond the ring ropes. Finally, the PA crackled. Paul Toweel’s voice came through on the microphone: ‘And we have a split decision…’

  My heart skipped a beat, but only one. There was no drawn-out pause to read the scores.

  ‘To the red corner…’

  The referee raised my hand. The adrenaline slowly flowed backwards down my neck and out my fingertips. There was cheering in the crowd, but Jake’s crew was booing and shouting. I shook his hand, trying not to look too pleased with myself. He smiled, but didn’t quite meet my eye.

  ‘A round of applause for both boys.’

  I went over to Fritzy in the blue corner, and he shook my hand, still in its black wrapping. Another bone-crusher. His expression was sour. ‘Good to see you remember some of what I taught ya,’ he said.

  This time the choice of trophies was a boxer on a dais or a bronze-look boxing glove about the size of a toddler’s fist. I went for the glove. It’s the coolest trophy I’ve ever won.

  PICKETED BY EQUITY

  IT’S ONLY TWO words. Four syllables. But few things can make a boxing fan’s heart drop like the phrase ‘split decision’. To comprehend why, you need to understand two things: how a fight is scored, and boxing’s long and enthusiastic history of corruption.

  The scoring part is relatively simple, while somehow also being, in a manner entirely typical of the sport, needlessly complicated. Boxing might be one of the world’s oldest pastimes, but the idea of judges deciding the winner of a fight is a relatively recent innovation. The ancient Greeks and Romans fought until one of them fell over and couldn’t get up, as did boxers in the bare-knuckle era. The introduction of the Queensberry Rules themselves didn’t change the idea that a boxing match finished when one man could no longer continue, and ‘finish fights’ were still taking place around the world into the first decade of the twentieth century.

  As time wore on these were increasingly substituted for limited-duration bouts, which for spectators had the obvious advantage of not taking all night. For boxers, however, the benefits were not as clear as you might think. While finish fights were often bloody, gruelling affairs, the introduction, and gradual lowering, of round limits forced them to rely less on Smith and Kelly-style endurance and more on aggression, paradoxically exposing them to more damage over a shorter time.

  Under pressure from anti-boxing campaigns, various jurisdictions attempted to ban or regulate boxing during this period, a push that promoters treated more as an inconvenience than a threat. Edicts against fights in public places saw bouts increasingly move to ‘private clubs’, where the criterion for membership was showing up at the door. Worries about corrupt judges led to a stretch when bouts that did not end with a knockout were considered no-decisions, with neither a winner nor a loser. This proved to be a major drawback when it came to gambling, so members of the press began to be appointed as unofficial judges, rendering ‘newspaper decisions’ to the boxers they thought deserving, which at least kept the bookies in business—and moved the corruption from the judging table to press row. Something approaching the modern system of judging first came into being in the 1920s, when prize fighting was finally fully legalised and regulated in the state of New York. The process of change was more piecemeal than my summary suggests, though, and differed from country to country, city to city and even venue to venue. Differences continue to this day: in Britain it’s still the referee who decides the winner of any fight below the British title level.

  Elsewhere, most professional fights are scored by three judges using what’s known as the 10-Point Must system. Under this regime, ten points are awarded to the winner of each round, and nine or fewer to the loser. A fighter who is knocked down or loses a round badly incurs a penalty of a point, and the referee can take points away for fouls. Theoretically, the judges determine the winner of each round based on four criteria: clean punches, effective aggression, ring generalship and defence. In practice, however, scoring is totally subjective. It’s all about the vibe, man.

  But how do you score a round in which one boxer lands a few hard punches, while the other lands many lighter ones? What’s the magic ratio in such a case? And how much should it factor in when one boxer is moving forward and the other back?

 
Two people, or three in the case of a group of judges, can look at the same fight and see two very different outcomes, especially when it’s broken into discrete chunks rather than judged as a whole. That’s how you end up with split decisions, when the judges split two-to-one in favour of the winner; majority decisions, when two judges choose one fighter and the other scores a draw; and majority draws, in which two judges score a draw and one picks a winner.

  The idea of taking subjectivity and human error out of boxing scoring is appealing, but attempted cures have generally proven worse than the disease. In 1989, for example, amateur boxing introduced a system that awarded one point for each clean blow landed. At an elite level, this was calculated via a computer-driven arrangement in which three out of five judges had to simultaneously press their scoring buttons for a blow to register. If a fight ended in a draw, then the tallies of the highest and lowest scoring judges were discarded and the scores of the three other judges recounted, with only two judges needing to agree on a punch landing for it to score. If that sounds complicated, it was.

  The problem is that no matter how you organise it, punch counting has major disadvantages, the most glaring of which is that it counts the lightest jab the same as the hardest hook or uppercut, which encourages a low-risk style of fighting akin to fencing. Besides, it never solved the perennial problem of poor judging, since counting dozens of punches thrown at lightning speed by elite athletes is actually quite difficult. Apparently it’s challenging even when the competitors, like yours truly, are not elite—are indeed hardly even athletes—hence the split decision in my fight with Jake. And it’s not even incorruptible: after multiple controversies at the 2012 London Olympics, including a bout in which a Japanese bantamweight knocked down his Azerbaijani foe six times but lost a decision by five points, amateur boxing’s governing body gave up and brought back round-by-round scoring.

  I don’t have a problem with the subjective nature of scoring fights—it’s unavoidable. But I do think the system is confusing. Why should an eight-rounds-to-four victory be represented as 116-112? I often drag my friends to dingy pubs to watch fights in the vain hope of converting them to the church of boxing. The enterprise hasn’t been nearly as successful as I would like, but it has made me conscious of how confusing the 10-Point Must system is to the uninitiated.