The old lady didn’t say anything, but gave me a grandmotherly smile that might have meant, ‘Hey buddy, don’t look so glum: you just dodged a bullet.’ Or maybe, ‘Don’t hurt me, crazy man.’
A few days later, when I sulked back to the gym, Ivan told me my match had dropped out. ‘I would have called but I didn’t have your phone number,’ he said.
By then, I couldn’t find it in me to care. My annoyance at losing three hours of my life was eclipsed by my gratitude to this unknown f lake of an opponent for sparing me pain and humiliation.
I didn’t know any of this on the morning, though, and went for a final look at the gym before taking another white-knuckle bus ride home, where I was greeted by my party-hardy Canadian bro of a roommate, Joe, dressed in a poncho, San Jose Sharks flat-brim cap and reflective lime green sunglasses. He started shadow-boxing and humming the Rocky theme as soon as I walked in the door.
‘Hey Bud! How did it goo? Did ya get the big kay-o?’
‘Cancelled, mate.’
‘Oh brooo, that sucks.’ He looked downcast for a second, then cracked a big smile. ‘But look on the bright side.’
‘What’s the bright side?’
‘Now you can have a brewksi or three with your old friend Joe.’
•
That was it. When the fight fell through, something cracked. As epiphanies go, it was fairly obvious: I was never going to make it as a boxer. Why this hadn’t occurred to me before—particularly through all the months when Francisco was beating me like a drum—I don’t know.
Lying on the hard bed in my tiny tiled room, the only way I could explain it was that I had been in a sheltered environment: a beginner competition in a small, rich country is a rock pool compared to the vast, deep, scary ocean that is the boxing world. Even in the small Aussie boxing scene, the stars had to align—I found the best teacher anyone could ask for and probably got lucky with opponents—for me to win a handful of fights.
Paul might have meant what he said about aiming for amateur success, but honestly I doubt it was ever on the cards. Maybe he got carried away too. Looking back, I’m pretty sure I would have had the same kind of realisation if I’d kept fighting in Australia, except that it might have come with more pain and embarrassment, in the middle of a boxing ring with someone my own size and way above my level.
It all seemed so self-evident that I wasn’t even disappointed. How deeply can you mourn a dream that was a mirage in the first place? I was a little sheepish about the loss of perspective, though: about letting the tiniest amount of success go to my head. Listening to my housemates partying in the courtyard, I reflected on the months of self-serious fighter talk I had subjected them to: all my gym chat, all my secret fantasies of pro success. I wanted to fold up bodily and disappear.
(‘Shouldn’t Alex be back from Mexico by now?’ someone in Australia would ask.
‘Yeah, but halfway through the year he realised his boxing chat was out of control. He compressed himself into a shame diamond, I saw it on Facebook.’)
On the upside, spending my evenings drinking litres of Mexican beer was a lot more fun than spending them getting hit in the nose—and at twenty-one the side effects were a lot less noticeable. I could still head to the gym every now and then to hit the bag or spar (not with Francisco if I could help it). And I could be involved in the sport from a safe distance.
I had started writing about boxing not long after meeting Fritzy. Never mind that I didn’t know anything about it; I thought I had something to say and that was the most important thing. Reading up and trying your hand at a hobby are only the first two steps for an obsessive know-it-all: the third is telling everyone about it.
I got involved through reading a site called The Queensberry Rules, run by an owlish Washington DC political reporter named Tim Starks. I became a daily reader, then a regular commenter, and eventually, with Tim’s blessing, a contributor.
Tim was not just a great editor but, like Paul, a mentor. Over the years that followed he taught me more about journalism than any university tutor. I ended up writing hundreds of posts for TQBR, and Tim was meticulous about going through them, highlighting everything from poor spelling and grammar to leaps of logic.
So when it became clear that my boxing future lay on the safe side of the ropes, writing was the obvious way to stay involved. Thanks to the start Tim and TQBR gave me, I’ve since been lucky enough to write about fights around the world, from Samoa to the States.
But my first big assignment was in Mexico City.
•
The card featured Canelo Alvarez, then a young junior middleweight titlist, and future titleholder Leo Santa Cruz, then a highly fancied bantamweight prospect on the verge of a shot at a belt. I would have been eager to go in any circumstances, but the fact that the event was to take place in the world’s largest bullring, the Monumental Plaza de Toros, added an extra point of appeal. This, I thought, was a big deal.
So I was shivering from excitement as well as the cool mountain air when, on the night of the fights, I emerged from the Metrobus into grey, grime-encrusted streets named after a colourful mix of North American cities (Calle Cincinnati) and great artists (Calle Holbein). The bare concrete of the plaza loomed over its surrounds like the bleached exoskeleton of some ancient, half-buried colossus.
Dodging vendors selling tamales and football jerseys, I found the media entrance and presented my credentials to a tiny security guard dressed like an Italian policeman, all peaked cap and Uzi. He patted me down and pointed wordlessly to an arched entryway. This led into a steep, white-tiled tunnel reminiscent of a subway station, except there was dust everywhere and no escalators, and everything smelled of manure.
It was only halfway down, when I began to make out the red earth at the exit, that I realised the tunnel led directly into the arena. I hadn’t stopped to consider that the ringside seats would be on the killing floor. Was this passageway normally a one-way street for unfortunate bulls? Or was it used by matadors—go down nervous, come back triumphant?
The tunnel spat me out into the ruedo itself. All around, thousands of empty seats rose vertiginously into the smudged night sky. The circular arena was, I now comprehended, partly buried, the soaring concrete of the street-level facade only hinting at its true depth. It was a temple of blood sport, a half-excavated Aztec altar. I was awestruck. Doubtless I looked like a total rube as I made my way to the ringside media section, craning my neck to get a look at the seats in the nosebleeds above.
But my excitement about seeing a night of fights in a famously boxing-mad country quickly faded. It began to rain almost straight away, a dirty, chilly drizzle that turned the dusty floor to mud. The fights themselves were even more of a downer, mismatches of a kind that seemed to befit the venue. Worse, maybe—at least the bull occasionally gores the matador.
Even the MC seemed embarrassed as he presented Edson Espinoza, a flaccid, depressed-looking beanpole of a middleweight. He was announced as the owner of sixteen professional wins, but a quick look at Boxrec revealed this to be a whopper: Espinoza’s sole previous fight was a stoppage loss three weeks earlier.
He was to face Nobuhiro Ishida, a Japanese middleweight riding high after an upset win over contender James Kirkland. Nobody would have said Ishida was a world-beater, but he had been fighting since he was eleven and had been in thirty-one professional fights for twenty-three wins. The sole purpose of the bout was to keep him busy ahead of a possible big-money fight.
Espinoza looked like he had never been in the ring before. He bounced around like a wounded stick insect and assumed a look of sheer terror whenever Ishida approached. I suppose he needed the money, but even so I felt sorry for him, running, holding—trying to avoid the inevitable. For Ishida, it was target practice. Even he looked abashed as he strafed the Mexican with left hooks and right hands.
But at least one person did his job. When, two minutes into the first round, Espinoza bent over in the middle of the ring and stayed there, tu
cked in a ball like a traumatised child, the referee grabbed him, looked in his sad eyes and waved it off. Ishida didn’t even celebrate.
Santa Cruz’s bout was even worse. Like Ishida, he was facing an opponent who had only fought once before. Like Ishida, his opponent had been knocked out in his last fight. Unlike Ishida, Santa Cruz was considered a future world beater, and in fact he won a bantamweight title just two fights later.
Santa Cruz’s opponent, Jorge Romero, looked like an overgrown, overfed child and entered the ring with the air of a man being led to the scaffold. Standing at centre ring, he looked to be about fifteen centimetres shorter than Santa Cruz.
Unlike Ishida’s bout, this fight dragged on painfully, both for the spectators and, presumably, Romero. Santa Cruz, either inexperienced or keen for some exercise, tortured his opponent pitilessly. The dull thud of body shots, a sound like somebody closing an atlas, could be heard echoing in the near-empty plaza.
I felt like I was going mad. Wasn’t anyone going to do something? I winced as another body blow landed, and looked around at the assembled journalists on press row. They were chatting casually among themselves, complaining about the rain. Nobody was concerned with, or even really watching, what was going on in the ring.
Finally, in the third round, after doing everything but cut off Romero’s ears, Santa Cruz delivered a left hook to the body as the coup de grace. (Yes, I know I disparaged the bullfighting metaphor in an earlier chapter, but we’re talking about fights in an actual bullfighting arena: the temptation is too much.)
After Santa Cruz and Romero left the ring, there was a long, damp pause. The main event was being televised on HBO as part of a double-header; the other half, taking place strangely enough in the real Cincinnati, had not yet finished. I put away my laptop, donned a plastic poncho and waited.
The vast ring of seats peering down on us remained almost entirely empty, a few hundred voices evaporating into the dirty clouds. The few ticket-holders, now even more subdued, had been herded into the lower tiers of seating to give the impression of a halfway-decent turnout. The whole miserable spectacle was for the benefit of HBO’s cameras.
When Canelo’s fight with Puerto Rico’s Kermit Cintron began forty-five minutes later, it wasn’t much more competitive than the undercard. Cintron’s bearing was so maudlin he appeared on the verge of tears. Canelo simply stalked forward, spearing his opponent with jabs and crosses until by the fourth round only the ropes were holding him up. With no improvement in the next frame, the referee decided to spare Cintron further indignity and waved it off.
It was a sad night. Neither Romero nor Espinoza ever fought again. Cintron was never again considered a contender. My dream of Mexico as a boxing wonderland was shattered. Unlike yours truly, Mexicans knew a mismatch when they saw one coming, and preferred not to pay for it.
I filed my story and made my way back up the tiled tunnel. On the rain-slicked street outside the vendors had already packed up. I hailed a taxi. The driver, a taciturn man a few teeth short of a full set, with a ponytail erupting from the back of his bald head, asked me where I was going. I told him, explaining with no small measure of pride that I was a journalist: I’d been at the bullring to cover the fight. At least that’s what I thought I said. He understood I had declared myself a member of the Partido Revolucionario Democrático, then Mexico’s left-wing opposition. But once we cleared up the misunderstanding, I asked him whether he had listened to the pelea on the radio. Having assessed my linguistic capabilities, he answered in halting English.
‘What fight?’ He made a face. ‘Boxing…all shit now.’
PUNCH DRUNK
THE TAXI DRIVER may have been correct. That night in Mexico City, with its terrible matchmaking and empty seats, made me seriously question what in God’s name I was doing supporting an industry that pays poor people to get humiliated on TV. It’s not as if I hadn’t known about boxing’s many problems; but there’s a difference between reading the theory and seeing the practice up close with your own eyes.
I’d always felt self-conscious about my comfortable upbringing. In Mexico it was even more obvious that I was an outsider. I had been welcomed into the gym, but I was ashamed to have even been present at the degrading spectacle in the bullring.
Was boxing, to paraphrase Muhammad Ali, just a lot of white men watching two brown men beat each other up? Can an eighteen-year-old from a disadvantaged background really consent to something that might render them a vegetable in thirty years’ time? Is it forgivable for us to pay people, even indirectly by watching TV, to fight for our amusement? I think most people who watch boxing eventually ask themselves these questions and wonder, as Scottish writer Hugh McIlvanney once did, ‘if the game is worth the candle’.
McIlvanney wrote those words after the death of bantamweight Johnny Owen in 1980. Owen, a jug-eared, freckled young Welshman, never woke up after being knocked out by Lupe Pintor in a bantamweight world title fight. He was far from the last fighter to die from a brain injury. In the end, boxing is not and cannot be safe. Most people who participate in it for long enough end up losing some part of themselves in the ring. A smaller number lose their lives.
I am thankful that I have never been present to see a person seriously hurt or killed in the ring. But I have seen several such incidents on screens, and the fact that I didn’t stop watching after the first is enough to make me wonder what kind of person I am.
When someone gets hit in the head, their brain bounces around in its fluid, crashing into the walls of the skull, twisting and bleeding. Sometimes, when a boxer is hit particularly hard, or particularly often, or in the wrong way, or if they are fatigued, or if their cerebrospinal fluid has been depleted from dehydrating to make weight, it starts to bleed harder and to swell, which can cause the brain to shut down.
In the sport’s long history, thousands of boxers have died. Most were killed far from the glittering lights of Las Vegas or Madison Square Garden, their final moments witnessed only by those who happened to be present in the smoky club or on the muddy field. Comparatively few fighters have died in the full glare of the spotlight. But it has happened. Gay welterweight champion Emile Griffith battered Cuba’s Benny Paret to death in 1962 after Paret called him a maricon (faggot). In 1963 featherweight champion Davey Moore died after being hit on the back of the head by Sugar Ramos in a fight broadcast on US national television, prompting an outcry and a Bob Dylan song: ‘Who Killed Davey Moore?’ (There was plenty of blame to go round, Dylan concluded.) Duk Koo Kim’s death, mentioned earlier in the book, came two years after Johnny Owen’s passing. In its aftermath both Kim’s mother and the bout’s referee, Richard Green, committed suicide.
As a consequence of boxing’s own disorganisation, there is little comprehensive data on ring deaths and injuries around the world, but the Manuel Velazquez Collection, a chronicle of international media reports assembled by a US government clerk of that name and continued by martial arts enthusiast Joseph Svinth after Velazquez’s death in 1994, provides the best information. As of 2011, the collection listed 1,865 deaths caused by professional boxing, going all the way back to the 1720s.
The numbers assembled by Velazquez and Svinth make for fascinating, if morbid, reading. The level of detail means you can drill right down from general, decades-long trends to individual cases. According to the data, ring deaths were relatively uncommon throughout the bare-knuckle era, when there were fewer fighters and they fought less often. The danger peaked during the 1920s, a decade in which 233 boxers were killed. The single most dangerous year on record was 1932—with thirty-nine boxers killed, while only two died in the safest year, 1998. From the beginning of the gloved era until the end of World War II, Australia had the dubious distinction of having the highest per-capita rate of boxing fatalities in the world. More deaths occur in the sixth round than in any other, and the average age of fighters killed in the ring is 23.1 years. Disturbingly, the youngest was just twelve years old. Ten professional boxers have been invo
lved in not one but two fights in which their opponent died.
Obviously, the numbers don’t begin to tell the story. Each death creates grieving families; it traumatises opponents, officials and cornermen. Then there’s the crowd, who must grapple with their own culpability or deny it.
I can only speak from the experience of having seen it on a screen, but when somebody is killed or injured as you watch, your initial response is horror, and it is directed at yourself as much as the spectacle. The illusion has been shattered, the curtain drawn back: you are watching two people hurt each other, and you are enjoying it.
But you cannot dwell on that too long without destroying your image of yourself as a good person, so instead you think of the dead man and his family. Could anything have been done to prevent the tragedy? (Is tragedy even the right word for something that is a predictable, if unusual, result of the violence on show?) Is there someone we can blame? Was it the referee’s fault? The matchmaker’s?
But in the following days you cannot help but return to the initial awfulness. Self-centred as it may be, you’re left to chew over what the whole thing says about you. The whole thing was staged, in essence, for your entertainment. Can you square the guilt? The fact that you sat there and watched someone die, or be beaten senseless?
The first time I confronted these questions was in 2013, when Magomed Abdusalamov, a Russian heavyweight contender, suffered a brain bleed after losing a bout on HBO. He was put in an induced coma and surgeons removed part of his skull to relieve the swelling. He suffered a series of strokes in any case but, somewhat miraculously, he survived. Today he is severely brain damaged, paralysed on one side of his body as a result of the strokes. He cannot walk or form full sentences and his once-sturdy torso now resembles that of a man twice his age. He will never box again, though that hardly seems to matter.
I experienced all the same sensations in 2017, when I watched a tape of the Australian boxer Davey Browne’s final bout. I didn’t seek out the footage for entertainment—a recording in which you know someone has died is essentially a snuff movie—but I was asked by a friend involved in the inquest to give an opinion as a boxing fan, and I thought it might help.
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