On the Chin

  In fact Moore—‘The Old Mongoose’—did knock ‘The Rock’ down in the second round of their fight. But the exchange that has always stuck in my mind is from the sixth. As Marciano comes forward, winging punches from all angles, Moore hits him with a jolting right down the pipe, followed by a left hook and then another right, just as hard as the first. All from the greatest knockout artist of all time. Marciano doesn’t even blink. Not long after that, he clubs Moore to the ground. The crafty old fighter sits up on his haunches, raises his eyebrows and twitches his toothbrush moustache at the crowd as if to say, ‘You all saw me hit him with that combination. So why am I down here and he’s up there?’

  That’s one of the other advantages of having a beard. It’s incredibly demoralising to hit someone with your Sunday punch only to see them shrug their shoulders and keep coming forward. Which brings us to the most famous practitioner of this kind of relentless absorption, the owner of maybe the best-known chin of all time: the other Rocky.

  Sylvester Stallone’s hero was assembled from the stories of real fighters like some sort of Frankenstein’s monster of pugilism. Most obviously, he got his name and fighting style—not to mention his heritage—from Marciano. The plot of the first film, in which Rocky gets an unlikely title shot against the black champion Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers), and manages to hang on for fifteen rounds, was taken from the experience of New Jersey journeyman Chuck ‘The Bayonne Bleeder’ Wepner, who got a shot at Ali in 1975. And the working-class Philadelphia connection was inspired by Joe Frazier, who had a penchant for running up the steps of the Philadelphia Art Museum and really did use meat carcasses as heavy bags while working in a slaughterhouse.

  For many years the statue of Rocky outside the museum seemed like an insult to Frazier, Philadelphia’s greatest-ever fighter, who had no statue of his own. ‘Smokin’ Joe’ did himself no favours with his bitterness (at times he gloated over the damage he had done to Ali in their fights), but it was hard to escape the conclusion that if he’d been as white as Rocky, he would have been immortalised in bronze before his death from liver cancer in 2011.

  In the end it took until 2015, when, after a lengthy campaign, Philadelphia’s mayor unveiled a huge statue of Frazier, his arm hanging low after delivering his famed left hook, in the city’s stadium district. Frazier was ‘a real fighter and a real person’, said the mayor. ‘They could have made a movie about his life and called it Joe.’

  Unlike Frazier, Rocky doesn’t have much going on except his endurance (and a kind of reiki punching power that allows him to knock opponents down with punches that miss by inches). By the time he travels to the USSR to fight the greased Soviet killing machine Ivan Drago (Sydney Uni alumnus Dolph Lundgren) in the fourth film, we have a pretty good idea of his fortitude, even if poor Ivan doesn’t.

  ‘He’s not human, he’s like a piece of iron,’ says the unfortunate Russian to his cornermen after enduring two rounds of Stallone’s acting.

  So what exactly is a chin? And how come some people have one while others don’t?

  Looking at Marciano, Cobb and Chuvalo with their antediluvian profiles, you’d swear it’s physical. They all had the kind of face you could break your hand on, though their ability to take a punch may have had a role in the arrangement of their features in the first place—boxing’s version of the chicken and the egg.

  But if that’s true, why doesn’t Wlad Klitschko, with a jaw like a comic book superhero, have a chin of granite? The truth is, science hasn’t come up with a good answer to why some guys can take a punch and others can’t. One theory is that some of it is in the neck, which, by holding your head in place, acts like a big shock absorber for your brain. That’s the reason you always feel like you’ve been in a car crash the day after a fight, and why most boxers do neck exercises. You may have seen Floyd Mayweather wearing a leather skullcap with a weight plate chained to it and nodding his bald head like a dashboard toy. Others do headstands or neck curls. This probably has some efficacy, but, like punching power, for the most part a chin is just a gift that some have and others don’t.

  There are a few things you can do to increase your punch resistance in the short to medium term, though. First, it helps to be in incredible shape, as most good fighters are. There’s no way an untrained person could take a flush shot from a top professional, but other pros can and do all the time. This is part of the reason why boxers who don’t take their opponents seriously and undertrain risk being upset in the most shocking way.

  Another thing you can do is warm up. All athletes know that getting the blood flowing with some light exercise before the main event increases their performance and prevents injury, but boxers take it to the next level, often doing half an hour of skipping, shadow-boxing and pads in the dressing room before walking out. They like to arrive with a proper sweat worked up, and you’ll often hear commentators refer disapprovingly to boxers who arrive in the ring with dry skin.

  The other thing that helps is not getting knocked out. Well, obviously—but every time you sustain a concussion it makes you more likely to sustain another. That’s because concussion disrupts your brain chemistry, and in its aftermath your brain goes into an energy crisis, burning up glucose in a desperate effort to restore the chemical balance that keeps everything running smoothly upstairs. This debilitated state can last for up to a year, and leaves your brain without the energy to prevent the next concussion. As accidental participants in an enormous longitudinal study on the effects of repeated head trauma, coaches and fighters observed this phenomenon well before neuroscientists. They noticed that a boxer can fight for years and have a chin like Mount Rushmore, but one knockout is all it takes for their punch resistance to disappear. Chins, like iron or stone, are hard but brittle. They can be ‘cracked’.

  The most obvious cracked chin of recent years belongs to Roy Jones Jr, the middleweight, super middleweight and light heavyweight phenomenon of the 1990s. Jones was the stuff YouTube editors dream of—his reflexes and power were so fantastic that he could, and did, knock people out with his hands behind his back. People started to talk about him as one of the greatest fighters of all time, even while he was still defending his titles.

  Jones bolstered their claims with a move up to heavyweight to fight for a title in 2003. Its owner, John ‘The Quiet Man’ Ruiz, wasn’t anything special, but in the era of four belts per division I guess you don’t have to be. The sheer audacity of moving up from light heavyweight into the sport’s glamour division and beating a much bigger man—Ruiz was eight centimetres taller and fifteen kilos heavier than Jones—seemed impressive.

  But gaining all that weight—Jones skipped the cruiserweight division in his move to heavyweight, an eleven-kilo jump—then losing it again when he returned to light heavyweight messed with Jones’ conditioning. In his first fight back at the lower weight he looked slow and listless, but managed to scrape past Antonio Tarver.

  He wasn’t so lucky in the rematch. In round two, Tarver, an awkward southpaw, countered Jones with a huge overhand left, sending him to the canvas hard. Jones crawled around and got up, but was clearly unsteady on his feet, and the referee waved the fight off. The boxing world was stunned.

  Perhaps if Jones had received better medical advice he wouldn’t have fought again four months later. Perhaps he would have taken the year your brain needs to recover from a concussion. But he didn’t, and he ran into the underrated Glen Johnson, who hit Jones with a big overhand right in round nine. Jones was badly hurt, and the follow-up left hook sent him crashing to the canvas like a tree in the forest. He stayed down for fifteen minutes.

  After that, Jones’ chin was gone, and with it, his status as a world-class fighter. His tumble from heavyweight titlist to has-been was one of the swiftest declines in recent memory. Australian fans will remember his brief 2009 fight with Danny Green, in which the Green Machine sent Jones down with a nondescript-looking right hand to the top of the head, before following up with a fusillade of unanswered punches that f
orced the referee to step in. Jones has been knocked out twice more since, each time in more sickening fashion, and hasn’t beaten a serious opponent this decade. If ever there was an illustration of how a reliable chin is a necessary ingredient for success at the elite level in boxing, it’s him. His power never left, and he still shows flashes of speed, but once his chin and the reflexes he used to protect it disappeared, Jones could no longer mix it with the best.

  It’s a common story. Retiring at the top of your game, like Marciano did, is the exception rather than the rule in the sweet science. But while Jones might seem like a salutary warning, having your chin cracked could be a blessing in disguise.

  From a medical point of view, a granite beard simply allows you to sustain more head trauma without falling over. Sure, you might avoid a traumatic brain injury; but there’s no evidence that possession of a solid chin protects you from the kind of repeated cumulative damage that neuroscientists and contact-sport leagues around the world are currently so worried about.

  Unlike footballers, fighters have always known about the risks of their profession. Boxing as a sport is defined by the fact that it damages its participants. Dementia pugilistica, the subtype of chronic traumatic encephalopathy that affects boxers, was first described in 1928. That deliberate harm disgusts some people, and fair enough, but what’s truly disgusting is the unnecessary damage. The mismatches, the fights that aren’t stopped and the coaches who don’t protect fighters from themselves.

  The saddest and most famous example is Ali: a fighter with too much of everything. As his reflexes and speed faded, only his toughness remained. But that toughness alone was enough to keep him in the sport for six years after the Thrilla in Manila, his unbelievably brutal third fight with Frazier, which Ali described as, ‘The closest thing to dyin’ that I know of.’ Six years of getting punched in the head, on television and in the gym; fights with Shavers, maybe the hardest puncher boxing has ever known, and with Holmes, who beat him from pillar to post.

  Maybe, in an alternative world where Ali was knocked out—either by Foreman in Zaire or Frazier in Manila—none of that would have happened. Maybe Ali wouldn’t have ignored his own doctor’s calls to retire from the sport. Maybe he wouldn’t have spent two decades locked in his own body, virtually unable to speak. Maybe he’d even be alive today.

  After Francisco hit me, my knees locked and I began to stagger like a child wearing tin-can stilts. A hurt boxer looks like a drunk, but the way it feels is more like the moment before you faint. My body was numb and my ears rang, but I was conscious. My eyeballs were the only part of me that seemed to be under my control, so I took the opportunity to swivel them in their sockets and gawp wildly around the gym.

  I was still upright. Much to my dismay, Francisco was still standing across the ring from me.

  No more than a couple of seconds can have passed, but it felt like an age. Francisco must have recognised the panic in my eyes, because he didn’t pounce. He wouldn’t even have needed to hit me hard; the breeze from a near miss would have sent me over.

  Instead he eased off, backing away and feinting rather than pressing his advantage. Once he judged that I was sufficiently recovered, he started in again, but took the mustard off his shots. The guy might have looked mean, but he wasn’t cruel.

  I slumped back to the corner where Ivan, the coach, was standing on the ring apron with my bottle of water. He gave me a splash.

  ‘I got hurt,’ I said with a thick tongue.

  ‘Buddy,’ he said, ‘the whole gym knows you got hurt.’ He put his hand on my shoulder and looked in my eyes.

  ‘That’s enough for now.’

  AT THE ALTAR

  AFTER A FEW months in Guadalajara, getting belted by featherweights barely out of short pants was no longer doing it for me. I decided that if I wanted to go back to Australia hardened and battle-scarred, I was going to have to find someone my own size to really beat me up.

  So one hot, dry afternoon—it was always hot and dry—I asked Ivan if he could get me a fight.

  ‘Are you sure?’ he raised a scarred eyebrow.

  Not quite the vote of confidence I was hoping for, but I pushed on.

  ‘Please,’ I said in my limited Spanish. ‘I am going to train… very strong.’

  He gave one of those shrugs that reminded me whose funeral it was. ‘OK, but you have to fight at sixty-seven. Seventy-five is too big. Very dangerous boys at seventy-five.’

  ‘I don’t think…I am able to weigh sixty-seven,’ I said. ‘I am seventy-five now and already very…narrow.’

  ‘It won’t be a problem if you train hard,’ he said, clapping me on the shoulder and smiling a rare smile. ‘You better get to it!’

  How on earth was I going to lose eight more kilos? To say I wasn’t carrying a whole lot of excess weight would be a major understatement: at seventy-five kilograms I already looked like the angles page of a year-six maths book.

  And while Mexican is undoubtedly one of the world’s great cuisines, it’s generally not on the Weight Watchers approved food list. In traditional Mexican cookery, lard is practically a food group in its own right, hidden in everything from the masa of seemingly wholesome tamales to the ubiquitous refried beans. If anything, with an obesity rate of thirty-two per cent, Mexico’s ranking as only the world’s second-fattest country should be seen as a triumph of restraint.

  To complicate matters, I lived with seven other international students in a huge whitewashed party house, which, unsurprisingly, was not the ideal environment for a training camp. There was a lot of pressure to take part in household bonding over industrial quantities of Tecate Light and Jose Cuervo Tradicional; more than once I got up in the dark of the early morning to do my roadwork and found total strangers partying in our central courtyard.

  But somehow, despite the temptations of tacos and tequila, I did it. I’m still not entirely sure how. I think it involved substituting most of my meals with smoothies and running long distances on an empty stomach. I do know that for about a month I was extremely irritable and quite possibly delirious. That’s the only way I can explain the tattoo I had done at a grungy parlour around the corner from my house: a red and black starburst design about the size of a flattened football, inspired by pre-Hispanic Olmec art and inked into the middle of my back. I say was, but it’s still there. That’s the thing about tattoos.

  In my head the symbol represented something about being a warrior, and I spent the entire four and a half hours under the needle thinking about what a badass I was. Sadly, not everyone got it. My dad dubbed the tattoo The Cockroach, a nickname that is all the more unfortunate for being strikingly descriptive.

  I emailed Paul and told him about signing up to fight and ‘going super hard’ in training.

  ‘You are a goddamn legend,’ he replied. ‘Pissing myself that you are fighting in Mexico and more than a little envious. The years flew by, with more than a few injuries, and I feel like I missed a huge chunk of fun.’

  He added a diplomatic postscript. ‘Remember to keep that tight defence: hands up and never go straight backwards.’

  The night before the fight was miserable. I had a steaming hot shower to sweat out my body’s last few drops of fluid, then lay on my hard bed unable to sleep, listening to one of my housemates having sex and feeling sorry for myself. I drifted off around four and they were still going at it.

  When I awoke and looked in the bathroom mirror, the victim of a tropical wasting disease stared back. My cheekbones jutted over my hollow mouth like escarpments and you could have played my ribs like a glockenspiel. There were bags under my eyes, my lips were chapped and I could smell my own breath: it smelled like a share-house fridge. In short, I looked and felt like shit.

  Mexicans are some of the friendliest people in the world, so it was surprising nobody on the bus asked if I needed a doctor. Instead, I sat on the hard plastic seat and stared at the elaborate metre-high decal of Jesus that obscured most of the front window. The driver’s wife,
sitting loyally in the seat behind his little cabin as he hurtled through the rutted streets of Guadalajara like he was on the salt flats at Bonneville, did much the same. My arse, which at this point was as bony as my elbow, smashed into the plastic seat every time we went over a bump.

  After half an hour the happy couple deposited me outside the gym, where I had arranged to meet Ivan. It was a Saturday morning: quiet. Dogs lay in the shade of the shuttered stands that on weekdays sold brake parts and mufflers. The fine layer of dirt on the road showed only a few tyre tracks. Nobody around.

  The green metal door to the gym was locked. I knocked and heard the low metallic impact echo in the concrete stairwell. I waited and knocked again. Same echo. I sat down against the badly plastered exterior wall and waited. I should have been anxious, but I was too tired to feel anything.

  Stupidly, I had never asked for Ivan’s number. I would just have to wait until he turned up. Soon the sun was high in the sky, baking the dust. There was nothing to look at, nothing to do but sit there. The roadside dogs lay so still I began to think maybe they were rocks.

  One hour passed. Then an hour and a half. When Ivan hadn’t shown by the two-hour mark, I decided I couldn’t wait any longer: I drank my water and bolted down the bananas I’d brought for after the weigh-in. I started to feel better immediately.

  At the tiny concrete box of a convenience store around the corner I bought another two litres of water and a packet of chips from the tiny silver-haired owner. Sitting in the dark behind an iron grill, she eyed the skeletal gringo standing before her and eventually handed over the change. I felt compelled to explain my presence.

  ‘You know Ivan from the boxing gym? I was supposed to have a fight…amateur fight…today but he did not come.’ Tears of pure self-pity were welling up in my eyes.