On the video, round two is more of the same, but before round three my opponent must get a hell of a pep talk from Igor, because he comes out all guns blazing, pummelling me with wide hooks and overhand rights. I remember being so weary I could hardly move, biting down on my mouthguard and willing myself to throw punches.
Towards the end of that last round, Tom charges forward, punching with both hands. I cover up and put my head on his chest, inside his range. He throws a right hand, I roll under it and then, somehow, I pull off the coolest-looking move I ever made in the ring—a hard left hook that stands him up and sends him stumbling backwards. You can see how stunned he is; his hands drop and he teeters for a second, blinking hard, opening and closing his mouth like a goldfish. A better and more experienced boxer would have run across the ring and gone in for the kill; I didn’t even notice he was hurt. I was just glad he wasn’t punching me anymore.
A minute later, it was over. A high-five with gloves on; a deep breath. I knew I’d won. Paul was ecstatic.
‘Mate, that was epic! I thought they were going to put a count on him there. You’ve got this easy,’ he said as he pulled my gloves off. Sean, less emotionally invested, looked more sceptical. But then the announcer read the decision and the referee lifted my hand.
More than relief, more than triumph, I felt a sense of satisfaction. Achievement. I’d done something nobody who’d known me a year ago when I was fat and aimless would have thought possible. I had applied myself. I had proved I wasn’t afraid. I could fight. And I was grinning like a clown.
Instead of a trophy, I got a medal on a blue ribbon. It was the exact same medal the runner-up received, but that didn’t stop me wearing it for the rest of the day as I hung around, watching the other titles. Mo from HK Ward fought a more experienced foe, and lost the decision after taking too many punches along the ropes. Tim Tszyu, Kostya’s son, won a junior belt and I thanked my stars he was smaller and younger than me. Two huge heavyweights got into a slobberknocking brawl, and I was genuinely afraid the ring would collapse as they careened from one set of ropes to the other.
Whenever I got up to go to the bar, some old timer or coach would spot the medal and pull me aside to offer congratulations or a quiet word of advice. Later, after an hour and several beers, I glimpsed my opponent sitting on a plastic lawn chair on the other side of the ring, laughing and surrounded by friends. He caught my eye and raised his schooner with a smile and a nod.
I was the champ. How cool was that?
CHINNY
THE HARDEST I’VE ever been hit was by a fifteen-year-old.
It was in a big, hard gym on the industrial outskirts of Guadalajara, Mexico’s second-largest city, six months after the state titles. I was there on a university exchange, having chosen Mexico over Spain, my other option, mostly on the basis of its boxing pedigree.
After the United States, Mexico has produced more world champions than any other country, including all-time greats like Julio Cesar Chavez, Salvador Sanchez and, of course, Ruben Olivares. It continues to pump out top fighters, especially in the lower weight categories, and the sport remains a staple on Mexican free-to-air TV. Moreover, in boxing ‘Mexican’ is a byword for a certain sort of fighter—a rugged, determined and hard-punching aggressor. This association is so strong that in recent years the term has often been used as a promotional gimmick. Kazakhstan’s Gennady Golovkin donned a sombrero, mangled some Spanish and made ‘Mexican style’ his catchphrase, while the definitely-not-Hispanic featherweight Evgeny Gradovich adopted the moniker ‘The Mexican Russian’.
Riding high on my success in Australia, I saw a year in Mexico as a chance to toughen up in the country’s notoriously uncompromising gyms. I hoped I would learn secret Mexican fight craft that I could take back to Australia and utilise in a bid for elite amateur success, maybe even a pro run. Hell, I could be ‘The Mexican Australian’. But it didn’t quite turn out like that.
Walking around Guadalajara for the first time, I was deflated to learn that there was not a boxing gym on every corner. I had to go looking; walking down potholed lanes in the historic centre and dusty streets in the suburbs. Eventually, after trying several trendy fitness centres and an ancient YMCA-type establishment, I settled on a gym I deemed sufficiently hardcore.
When my Cine Mexicano 101 class finished each afternoon, I caught the forty-minute bus from the old city, with its crumbling seventeenth-century facades, to the outskirts of town. The gym sat on the same road as a cement works, between stalls that sold spark plugs and distressed-looking tyres. The air smelled of car exhaust, iron and quicklime; occasionally men in cowboy hats rode past on piebald horses.
The boxing club was up two flights of stairs. A terracotta-tiled floor, a dozen bags of various types and a ring, no windows. A dozen people would show up to every session: young children, office types looking to lose weight, a couple of journeymen and a handful of serious-looking teenagers—in Mexico you can turn professional at sixteen.
The trainer, Ivan, was a gaunt pro, semi-retired after two dozen fights. He dressed in cheap synthetic trackpants and gelled his hair into spikes. If not for his pulverised eyebrows he could have been in a boy band.
Every day he’d lead us through a circuit—twenty minutes of jumping rope, then shadow-boxing, footwork drills, bag work, pads, more bag work, push-ups and sit-ups. Once a week, after the warm up, he’d ask if anyone wanted to do un sparring.
It was a while before I took him up on the offer. Guadalajara sits at about the same elevation as Denver—1,600 metres above sea level—and for the first few months I was short of breath whenever I did anything more strenuous than walk down the street. Even shadow-boxing felt like moving through molasses.
But eventually I acclimatised. After a grand total of five fights I looked down from my lofty perch as NSW Middleweight Champion (Novice) and figured I would be able to mix it up with the local boys. Maybe even teach them a thing or two.
Ivan recognised my limits straight away, and in retrospect it seems likely he picked my first sparring partner accordingly. I had at least one major advantage over Cesar—namely, he was nearly half a metre shorter than me, which made our sparring sessions predictable. Cesar would stalk forward and I’d use my longer reach to jab him. Occasionally he’d manage to dive forward like Superman and hit me with an uppercut or a hook.
Eventually this routine got old for both of us. Having proved myself against this flyweight terror, I made it clear I was ready for new challenges. Ivan shrugged as if to say it was my funeral, and said I could spar with one of the serious-looking teenagers.
Francisco was his name. He had short curly hair, thin lips and high Mexican cheekbones. He trained every day with his younger brother, whose name I’ve forgotten but who looked exactly the same, only a few inches shorter. They wore matching sweat vests made of synthetic raincoat material and never smiled. They looked like little undertakers.
On the night we first sparred, Francisco was already in the corner when I got in the ring. His brother was helping him put on a pair of gloves that looked to date from some time between Columbus’ arrival and the Mexican Revolution: the brown leather was dull and pebbled, and the horsehair stuffing was escaping at the thumbs. Too old for velcro, they laced up around his wrist with a neat bow.
When the bell rang, we felt each other out a bit. His hands were hard; I don’t know if he felt mine at all. He put the pressure on, staying just inside my range, moving forward all the time. I wasn’t fast enough to get out of the way or skilled enough to move sideways like Paul had always warned me to.
With twenty seconds to go in the first round I already felt touched up. I was breathing hard, feeling the altitude and the strain of staying alert in the face of his advance.
I took a step forward—hands up, eyes down, chin not down far enough—as he stepped back and lifted a scything right uppercut onto the point of my jaw. I blinked. When I opened my eyes my body was no longer receiving instructions from the control centre.
> The progression to the elite level in all sports is like a funnel: thousands of aspiring athletes go in, and after several years a few professionals come out.
A junior tennis player from Adelaide dominates South Australia and is competitive at a national level, but her serve is just a fraction too slow, so she never makes the WTA. A rugby player is large for his age and gets recruited for a representative team in high school, gets a scholarship to university and eventually plays three seasons for a club side, but there are half a dozen props bigger than him in the state so he never plays for New South Wales, let alone the Wallabies.
The same process happens in boxing, but much more violently. Perhaps the single most important selection criterion is whether you have ‘chin’ or a ‘beard’—the ability to take a punch. It’s almost impossible to make it to the top level if you don’t.
In the amateurs—where the governing ethos is to stop fights before young fighters get hurt—actual knockouts are relatively rare. A promising boxer might never realise that their chin is a liability. My own chin was only ever tested in the gym, never in a fight. (Also, no one but me thought I was promising.)
As boxers step up the ranks, first to international amateur competition and then into the pros, the tests become stiffer and stiffer. It’s relatively common for prospects advancing through the ranks to reach a level where their chin can’t hold up, at which point they progress no further.
Take the case of David Price, a bronze medallist for Britain in Beijing, who entered the professional ranks with huge expectations placed on his broad shoulders. Named ESPN’s prospect of the year in 2012, the six-foot-eight Scouser was on track to fight Wladimir Klitschko for the heavyweight championship when he ran into forty-one-year-old former title challenger Tony Thompson, who hit him with a counter right hand that sent him sprawling to the canvas in the second round. He never recovered, and Thompson’s post-fight interview, in which he said when asked about his post-fight plans: ‘I’m going to break my wife’s hip, I’m going to have sex with her in the wild…Donate a wheelchair to the save Mrs Thompson fund,’ was almost as memorable as the rest of Price’s career.
Like sailors with a disposition to seasickness or veterinarians with allergies, chinny boxers who stick at their ill-chosen profession must be accorded a grudging admiration. Respect, however, turns to disbelief in the case of the aptly named 1990s middleweight Eric Crumble—who, according to Boxrec, fought thirty-one times in a fourteen-year career, losing all thirty-one bouts by KO, including one to an opponent with ninety-five losses on the books.
Still, if Price and Crumble are looking for inspiration, they could do worse than the Ukrainian Klitschko, who held the heavyweight championship for six years and was the rare exception to the rule that fighters with glass jaws do not survive as champions. ‘Dr Steelhammer’, six foot six and 120-plus kilos of muscle—was not blessed with resilience to match his physique. In 1998, journeyman Ross Puritty (who had thirteen losses on his record) was the first to demonstrate that a single punch could turn this man of metal into a heap of cold spaghetti. Contenders Corrie Sanders and Lamon Brewster followed suit a few years later, and for a while it seemed like Klitschko was fatally flawed—until he hooked up with Hall of Fame trainer Emanuel Steward, who taught him to fight more cautiously, hiding his chin behind a high guard. It wasn’t the most exciting thing in the world to watch—in every single fight, Klitschko would pulverise his opponents with his railgun jab until they became demoralised, at which point he would drop the boom (in the form of a massive right hand) and send them to sleep. Years went by without him throwing so much as a left hook. It earned him the distaste of many fight fans, particularly in the States, but the system worked: he regained the heavyweight crown after the loss to Brewster and held on to it for the best part of a decade.
Few fighters have the discipline to protect their chin the way Klitschko did. In defence of Price, Crumble and all the fighters whose suspect chins stop them getting very far, surely glass jaws are the norm. The capacity to absorb blows from people who spend their entire lives training to punch people as hard as they can is what’s freakish.
I’d been hit hard plenty of times before Francisco cracked me. Just not that hard.
As I’ve said, I was so keyed up in my fights I hardly felt anything—I couldn’t have told you where the black eyes came from. You feel the punches more in the gym, with the adrenaline flowing a little less freely. Getting bashed by Fritzy’s son was a nightmarish experience and I had a headache for days afterwards, but I never felt I was going down.
Different punches from different people have different textures. Some fighters’ hands might as well be granite, while others are more like rolled-up magazines. A hard right or a stiff jab can be like touching an electric fence. You feel the jarring thump, everything goes black for a second and you clench your teeth, maybe your head snaps back and you see the ceiling, though that happens so fast you hardly register it. If it’s an especially hard shot, the impact knocks the wind out of you, your nose cartilage aches and a sour taste fills your mouth.
But it’s the punches you don’t see that hurt the most, or so the old timers’ adage goes, and you mostly see straight punches, even if it’s in the microsecond before impact. The old-timers were talking about hurt in the boxing sense—the inability to recover—rather than physical pain, because getting whacked on the nose hurts a lot.
Hooks and uppercuts, and sometimes straight punches that twist at the last moment, have a more obvious effect on your brain. Time slows down, the room around you starts to swim, parts of your body that have always been quite obliging suddenly decide they no longer want to take orders.
The reason for this is threefold. First, uppercuts and hooks are generally harder than straight shots because they allow the thrower to twist their body and put their weight behind the punch. Second, uppercuts come from underneath and hooks from the side, so you’re much less likely to see them coming and tense your neck to absorb the blow. Third, and most importantly from a medical point of view, hooks and uppercuts, with their scything motion, twist your head and turn your jaw into a lever, multiplying the force applied to the brain inside your skull.
That’s why accurate punches to the chin are described as being ‘right on the button’: it’s an off switch.
The fact that I got my clock cleaned by a fifteen-year-old who weighed no more than sixty-five kilos made me realise I probably didn’t have a chin for the ages.
Which was too bad: having one brings with it a big list of advantages in the ring. It takes the knockout, that ultimate eraser, off the table for your opponent. You fight better when you’re not hurt, and judges are far more likely to score rounds for you, because your opponent’s punches don’t look as effective even when they connect. And you don’t have to worry about losing points for being knocked down.
In fact, a quick look at any all-time pound-for-pound list reveals that, more than any other factor, it’s the ability to take a punch that sets great fighters apart from the merely good.
You can be a legend without being a big puncher—the indefatigable ‘Slapsie’ Maxie Rosenbloom had just nineteen knockouts in 299 fights: he claimed he ‘didn’t want to hurt nobody, just smack ’em around a bit and let ’em know who’s boss’. And you can be a legend without silky-smooth skills—Harry Greb, the great middleweight who between 1913 and 1926 fought 298 times (with only one eye), was known as ‘The Pittsburgh Windmill’ for his scornful attitude to proper technique, and indeed the finer points of the Queensberry Rules. But you cannot be a boxing legend without the ability to take a punch. Klitschko’s dominance of a historically weak heavyweight division doesn’t change that. The fact is, many of the hardest chins in boxing history belong to the greatest boxers.
At the other end of the spectrum, there have been many average boxers with incredible chins. Randall ‘Tex’ Cobb will never make it to the Boxing Hall of Fame in Canastota, New York, but he had an all-time great beard. Such was his ability to
eat leather that broadcaster Howard Cosell quit boxing in disgust after calling Cobb’s 1982 fight with heavyweight champion Larry Holmes, in which the Texan received a horrific beating.
Cobb, at least, retained his sense of humour. Asked by referee Mills Lane if he knew where he was, he answered: ‘Yeah, I’m in Reno, getting the shit kicked out of me.’ After the fight he insisted he would fight Holmes again, only he didn’t think the champion’s hands could take the abuse. And nobody would put George Chuvalo, the Canadian heavyweight who fought Ali, Foreman and Frazier without once going down, on their list of the best ever.
But when a good chin is paired with other attributes, it’s a shortcut to success. Ali himself had an incredible beard. He needed it: his ring record is a who’s who of the hardest punchers ever at heavyweight, including Liston, Frazier, Foreman and Earnie Shavers. Against those four men, Ali only went down once, when Frazier hit him with a left hook that looked like something out of an abattoir in the fifteenth round of their 1971 bout at Madison Square Garden. He got up almost immediately and survived to the final bell.
In all his sixty-one fights, Ali was only stopped once—in his last title fight, that sad clash with Holmes. It was more of a mugging than a passing of the baton. By that point—1980—Ali was past his best and may already have been affected by Parkinson’s disease. Holmes won every round, but even then Ali never left his feet—it was Angelo Dundee who stopped the fight after the tenth round.
Rocky Marciano, these days most recognisable as the big ugly guy in posters that feature Marilyn Monroe and James Dean playing billiards with Humphrey Bogart, is another good example of an all-time great with an all-time great chin. He wasn’t called ‘The Rock’ for nothing. Though he might be slightly overrated (he retired undefeated; and he was white), Marciano did beat fellow greats Jersey Joe Walcott, Ezzard Charles and Archie Moore, who, when they fought him, had administered a whopping 187 knockouts between them.
On the Chin Page 22