On the Chin

  A first step towards world domination presented itself a month later, when Paul suggested I enter the state titles. The idea was music to my ears, especially once he explained there was a tournament bracket for beginners with fewer than ten fights, which would crown the impressive-sounding NSW Middleweight Champion (Novice). I could take the first step on my road to glory without facing the best middleweights in the state, a prospect that, for all my delusions of grandeur, seemed pretty daunting.

  The preparation was the same as ever—demanding and tedious—but the idea of winning a title put an extra spring in my step. The pre-fight jitters were nowhere near as bad this time; I suppose I was getting used to it. Short of a freak accident, I knew that getting slapped around was the worst that could happen, and that had happened already.

  I wasted no time in letting Claire and Steph, as well as anybody else who would listen, know that despite the setback at Norths, I was about to fight for ‘the’ state title (no mention of the novice bit). If they were impressed, they didn’t show it.

  The idea of champions and titles has been around since the Olympics, but why is boxing so big on them? And why is it a championship belt, and not, say, championship earrings or a championship brooch?

  Belts probably evolved from the coloured sashes bare-knuckle boxers pinned to their corners and took as trophies. One oft-repeated story goes that the first belt was presented to Tom Cribb by King George III after Cribb defeated Tom Molineaux in 1810. There is no evidence for this having happened, and in truth Cribb probably received the belt, a fetching lion-skin number, from admirers at a pub in 1821. That’s a pity, because it would have been entirely fitting for the mad king to have started the belt-related lunacy that now envelops boxing.

  To give you a quick sketch of the championship landscape of the intervening two hundred years: the bare-knuckle ‘championship’ of England was a generally recognised title; from the 1820s belts were awarded intermittently. These had an unfortunate habit of going missing between fights, at least until a number of ‘patrons of the ring’ had the bright idea of making a really fancy one and requiring a security deposit. John L. Sullivan took the heavyweight championship over to the gloved side of the street in the 1890s, while new champions established themselves in lower weight classes. The picture was less than clear, though, and often several boxers at a time claimed to be the champion of a given division. The championship situation was at its most intelligible between the 1920s and the 1960s, though there were still disagreements between the two major bodies of the time, the National/World Boxing Association and the New York State Athletic Commission.

  But things really went to hell in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s as the number of ‘sanctioning bodies’ multiplied. Today the biggest are the WBC, WBA, WBO and IBF—I’m sure you can puzzle your own way through the initials—but there are plenty of other less reputable outfits, which is really saying something, believe me. Known to wags as the Alphabet Gang, these organisations are not international governing bodies of the type seen in other, better regulated sports. (Granted, not all such bodies are renowned for their probity, but the Alphabet Gang make FIFA and the IOC look like the Little Sisters of the Poor.)

  Sadly, the proliferation of these organisations is not evidence of widespread concern for boxers’ welfare or a desire to regulate a difficult sport. It’s a sign that someone worked out one hell of a grift and now everyone wants in.

  Though it’s surrounded by a web of ersatz regulation, legalistic jargon and official-looking documentation, the scam is elegant in its simplicity: sanctioning bodies charge boxers money for titles. Not only that, boxers pay to get in line for titles through arbitrary rankings and regional belts. These payments and the jockeying for position that surrounds them take place far from the prying eyes of journalists and the public, so it’s almost impossible to know exactly how any given fighter comes to be ranked by these bodies, though it doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to deduce that unmarked envelopes may be involved.

  The structure of the scheme means that it’s in these organisations’ interest for there to be as many world title bouts, and therefore as many titlists, as possible. The fact that logically there can be only one meaningful ‘champion’ in each division might present a problem to a person or organisation with a sense of shame, but it’s never been an issue for the Alphabet Gang. Already have someone fighting for a title? No problem, make up an ‘interim’ version. Somebody’s already got the interim one? That’s fine, make the first guy the ‘super champion’ and bump the next guy up to ‘regular’. All three spots are filled? How about a diamond belt? Or an emerald belt? At this point they’re basically working their way through the list of traditional wedding-anniversary gifts, and we should get to the WBC paper belt by 2043.

  And what gives these bodies the right to hand out world titles anyway? Why, only absolutely nothing at all. I could start a sanctioning body tomorrow and begin charging boxers to fight for the AMcC heavyweight title. It’s doubtful that any of them would take me up on it, but it might be worth a try. After all, the last few decades have seen the International Boxing Organisation (IBO), the Universal Boxing Organisation (UBO), the Global Boxing Union (GBU), and the World Boxing Federation (WBF) try to get in on the act.

  The whole system has led to one of boxing’s strangest contradictions: although the total number of active professional boxers has shrunk over the last half century, there are more world titles than ever before. In fact, there are now ten times the number there were in the 1950s. If it seems like every fight you ever see is for a world title…that’s because it is. The whole mess makes the sport impossible for an outsider to understand.

  Yet there are those who defend the belts and the bodies that promulgate them. They argue that belts are good because fighters love to win them, which is a bit like saying tobacco companies are good because smokers love cigarettes. There is also the notion that the sanctioning bodies’ rankings and system of mandatory challenges to belt holders provide some level of structure in an otherwise deregulated sport. This would be a lot more convincing if they didn’t just make up the rules as they went along, allowing favoured fighters to put off challengers while stripping others for minor infractions.

  If this all sounds awfully confusing, there is an alternative. Boxing aficionados and an organisation called the Transnational Boxing Rankings Board (TBRB, if you fancy adding another initialism to your collection), made up of boxing journalists from around the world, keep track of who the ‘lineal’ champs of each division are. (Disclaimer: I’m a member.) These are the true champions, the guys who beat the previous champion, who beat the previous champion, who beat the previous champion, and so forth, back to the beginning of time (the 1880s).

  Under this system, when a champion retires or moves weight classes, the vacancy can only be filled by a fight between the number one and number two contenders. Occasionally there are disagreements among those keeping track about who the top contenders are, or what constitutes a renunciation of the championship, but for the most part the system works well.

  Unfortunately for boxing and boxers, the sanctioning bodies aren’t going to disappear, so perhaps any argument about their merits is academic. There does seem to have been an upswing in respect for the lineal titles in recent years, though, and they’re increasingly mentioned in the same breath as the alphabet titles by broadcasters.

  Thankfully, in the amateurs the landscape is a little less complicated. The sport has one governing body, AIBA, which recognises affiliates in each country and province. There are occasional intra-country schisms with rival organisations attempting to regulate the grassroots of the sport, and there have been plenty of corruption allegations over the years, but it has generally appeared to be a slightly shallower cesspool than its professional analogue.

  At least until recently, when the head of AIBA, Wu Chingkuo, was ousted over alleged financial irregularities and replaced by Gafur Rakhimov, a highly respected chap the US Treasury Department describes a
s ‘one of Uzbekistan’s leading criminals’. Consequently, at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, for the first time in history, there may be no boxing.

  All of which is rather worrying; but I assure you that the NSW Middleweight Title (Novice) was on the level.

  The NSW State Titles were to take place across a September weekend, starting on the Friday evening and finishing on the Sunday afternoon. As at all amateur tournaments, boxers would have to make weight not only on the first day, but every day they boxed. We would also need to fight several times in a short period, carrying the bruises and soreness of earlier encounters.

  It was the weight question that stimulated my over-developed worry gland. I woke up hungry on the first day of the competition, leaped out of bed and went straight to the bathroom. The scales, made of fading beige plastic and dating to some time before I was born, showed I was half a kilogram overweight, possibly. It was hard to tell on the tiny meter, and I had my doubts about the accuracy of the scale anyway, but it was enough to convince me to go without breakfast, or even a drink of water, and head straight to the weigh-in.

  Alone in the car, I stewed. What if I was over? Would I have to put on garbage bags and sweat out the last few grams? Did they even let you do that in an amateur tournament? If they did, would it leave me dehydrated and weak for the fights? How could I get rid of some extra weight right now?

  I’m not sure anyone would have cared if a boxer going for the least important prize in an already humble competition was 500 grams too heavy, but to a career overthinker it seemed like a crisis. I needed to get rid of water weight and I didn’t need to pee. What other bodily fluids were there? Not many that you can legally jettison while driving—the only one I could think of was saliva. Was it possible to dribble out half a kilo?

  I’ve never been much good at maths, but I did a quick back of the napkin calculation. Maybe two teaspoons of liquid per gob. Five millilitres per teaspoon, which would be five grams if spit had roughly the same volume as water, which seemed like a fair assumption. So ten grams per discharge. I’d be on weight with a mere fifty loogies!

  Much to the dismay of the commuters packed tightly around me in the peak-hour traffic, I wound down the window and set about my task with grim determination. Spit. A few grams down. Spit. And so on.

  Soon, however, the law of diminishing returns began to make itself known in the most powerful way. The sluice gates were no longer opening on command, and what little drool I could scrape from the arid surface of my cheeks was thick and congealed, like the water at the bottom of a dam.

  I was on the brink of despair. About to arrive, I was overweight and I’d run out of slobber. But then I had another genius idea. I could use my own hunger to get my mouth watering.

  I closed my eyes and pictured a barbecue chicken pizza (perversely, because I’ve always thought chicken on pizza is a crime against nature). Immediately, a jet of saliva like the Bellagio Fountain shot onto my tongue, from whence I sent it onto the road. Then I imagined a still life in oil: mountains of chips and gravy, piles of calamari rings, Big Macs, chicken nuggets and pink-iced donuts.

  By the time I got to the southern Sydney suburb of Brighton Le Sands ten minutes later, my salivary glands had nothing left to give, but I was at peace. I could hold my head high and meet my fate on the scales knowing I had given it my best shot.

  The weigh-in was at Kostya Tszyu’s gym, a brick box between two yellowed fields across from Muddy Creek—actually a stormwater drain—and predictably, I was the first one to arrive. There was no line for the scales, which were guarded by a tall, hard-faced Russian man who turned out to be Tszyu’s brother in law, Igor Goloubev, who runs the gym. He was supervising the weigh-in for the boxing association.

  ‘Am I, err, in the right place? To weigh in.’

  He looked at me silently.

  ‘For middle weight…novice middleweight. Alex McClintock?’

  He glanced down at his clipboard in the manner of a nightclub bouncer, ticked my name off and motioned towards the scales, a proper medical set. I took my shirt off, and drew a deep breath as I stepped on.

  The needle swung straight to the mark and stuck there as if drawn by a magnet, barely moving as I stood trembling on the platform. Igor scribbled something down and conceded, in a thick Russian accent: ‘Seventy-five. On dot.’

  To my immense relief, there weren’t enough fledgling boxers to put together a full bracket, so my first fight would be a semifinal. I went home, ate and drank as little as possible, and slept as much as I could. I woke up the next morning to a warm spring day, weighed-in underweight in the bathroom, decided against further spitting, repeated the ritual with Igor and headed around the corner to the fights at the Brighton Le Sands Fishermen’s Club, universally known as the Brighton Fishos’.

  The club has since been demolished after the fishermen fell on hard times, but when I arrived it was a squat building of yellow brick and reflective glass, still standing and sparkling in the midday sun. The gravel car park was nearly full. Young men with sleeve tattoos and wraparound sunglasses clustered in knots, staring down everyone who went by. I walked to the door and did my best to avoid catching anyone’s eye.

  Inside, the venue was a rectangular hall the size of a school gymnasium with a ring set up in the middle. The high, ribbed wooden ceiling gave the impression the tournament was taking place inside a galleon. On a far wall an enormous acrylic painting symbolised British colonisation: four tall ships under full sail between a map of Australia and a map of the United Kingdom (only slightly out of scale at four times the size of the island continent). There was no sign of any Aborigines, which I guess was kind of the point.

  Below this masterpiece, tall rectangular windows running the entire length of the wall looked out on the mangrove-lined estuary where Muddy Creek joins the Cooks River and Botany Bay.

  And that’s it. I have absolutely no memory of my fight. I know that my opponent’s name was Eric Lawton, because it’s written down in the tournament draw, on which I was listed as Alex McClintoff; I vaguely remember him being a stocky guy with brown hair. My only other memory from that day is lowering myself into a hot bath when I got home, hoping it would relieve the soreness. I had bruises around my eyes and had hyper-extended my left elbow throwing a jab.

  I don’t think the amnesia came from Eric hitting me in the head (though if he did I suppose I wouldn’t remember it). Rather, I think that panic and adrenaline, instead of burning the bout into my memory like they did with all the others, erased all trace of it. Why this one? I couldn’t tell you, but neuroscience suggests it is a fairly common reaction to highly stressful situations. The research also indicates that stress hormones affect the accurate recall of traumatic events, but not the patient’s confidence in their accuracy, so make of that what you will.

  In any case, there’s one other thing I know. I must have won because I couldn’t have made it to the final otherwise.

  ‘Three rounds till beers.’

  That’s what my opponent in the final, a lanky guy called Tom from the Tszyu gym, said to me as we touched gloves. He didn’t seem to be taking the NSW Middleweight Title (Novice) as seriously as I was.

  It was mid-afternoon, the room was awash with sunshine, and we had just come up the internal staircase from the concrete boat ramp that served as the dressing room. This was more private than it sounds, since the ramp was located in the clubhouse’s central well, surrounded by the bulk of the building. It was as glamorous as it sounds, though. The canal was only metres from where the fighters warmed up and the air was thick with the savoury reek of mangroves.

  Even worse, the space was shared by the boxers from both corners. The man I assumed to be my opponent was doing pads with Igor only five metres from me and Paul. He was taller than me and skinny, with greenish bruises on his face from earlier fights. Standing around in that strange warm-up area, we were like a pair of lovestruck teenagers, unable to keep our eyes off each other but compelled to look away, embarrassed, whenever our
gaze met.

  Paul and Sean Bowes, a mate of Paul’s from the Australian team, were in my corner—blue this time. Dressed in jeans rather than the usual trackpants, they were stopped for chats by what seemed like every member of the boxing public in the building. I imagined that maybe, someday, I would be the guy shaking the hands and doling out the wisdom.

  But these daydreams were not front of mind when I met Tom in the middle of the ring. As always, my overwhelming concern was simply to make it to the end of the fight and climb down the stairs in one piece. When he dropped the line about the beers, I was too surprised to summon any words: I just stared at him. He probably thought I was trying to look hardcore. Then, with the rude clang of the bell, thinking went out the window.

  My basic game plan—jab and be awkward—was unchanged, but this time I managed to throw a dozen or so crosses and a handful of left hooks. Some of them even landed. I have a recording of the fight, and whatever my distorted view of my own abilities was at the time, it’s undeniable that under Paul’s guidance I was getting better.

  Also on tape are Igor’s repeated commands: ‘Don’t rest, Tom, verk.’ Whenever his coach says this, Tom, who is wearing runners rather than boxing boots, ups the pressure and swings wildly, tagging me with hard shots. In the first round I overreach with a right and he hits me with a left hook that reverberates around the hall with the sound of a slap. It was the kind of punch that sometimes results in a standing eight count, but at the time it didn’t feel any harder than any other. You can see how tired we are too, even by the end of the first.

  Paul was relaxed in the corner. ‘You’re smashing him with the jab. As long as you keep your hands up you can try some things. Go to the body, or try the left hook when he’s up in your face.’