On the Chin

by Alex McClintock

  In terms of the total number of boxers affected by CTBI and the specific risk factors, the data is less clear. There are a lot of variables to control for—age, career length, amateur fights, sparring habits, style—and a CTE diagnosis can only be made conclusively after death, via a brain autopsy. The studies that have been done over the decades using cognitive tests and steadily improving brain-scan technology have mostly been small, but all point to the fact that a significant minority of long-term professional fighters have some form of chronic brain damage.

  Combine boxing’s lack of a powerful players’ association that could speak for former athletes, the understandable embarrassment of some cognitively impaired ex-fighters, and journalists’ (absolutely proper) respect for these old pugs’ privacy, and it’s likely that, if anything, the extent of the problem has been underestimated.

  And so the bottom line is we sit and watch, and enjoy—even love—a sport that ruins and kills people. I’ve asked myself many times: what the hell is wrong with us? With me. The day after watching the Davey Browne tape, I woke up thinking about it. About the nonchalance I’d feigned in front of the lawyer who asked me to watch. Was it even feigned? What exactly had this sport done to me?

  But each time I’ve thought about stepping away I’ve been back watching fights within weeks.

  Hugh McIlvanney described it as ‘an appetite as worrying as an addiction’. The British-South African writer Donald McRae called it being ‘lost in the maze’ of prize fighting. Whatever you call the force that drives fight fans, we are like junkies, forever chasing the highs of great fights, those elusive, even contests in which styles mesh and athletic competition gives way to something primal, a confrontation between champions, a battle of wills. The violence of a boxing match can be a crucible, the heat of which, for better or for worse, distils two human beings down to their essence. In the blinding light of such an encounter, all the mismatches, the corruption, the cheating and damaged lives cease to matter.

  To be honest with you, I find it difficult to write about. There’s no way to describe any of this in anything but the most earnest terms, and so many others have done it more expressively.

  It’s not something reasonable. It may not be excusable. But once boxing gets under your skin and into your veins, you can’t shake it.

  YEAH RIGHT, JEFFREY

  NOT SO LONG after the coroner delivered her findings regarding the death of Davey Browne, I boarded an early morning flight to Brisbane to see Manny Pacquiao fight former PE teacher Jeff Horn at Lang Park.

  Bleary-eyed and in need of coffee, I opened my Sydney Morning Herald as wide as my economy-class seat would allow and was jolted awake by the shocking news that boxing was dying. In ten years, wrote one columnist, we will regard prize fighting like we do smoking cigarettes indoors, driving without a seatbelt and not letting Aboriginal people vote. We’ll wonder how it was ever allowed at all.

  Leaving the choice of analogies to one side, this came as something of a surprise to me. Not only was that very newspaper devoting pages and pages to coverage of Pacquiao vs Horn, but the aeroplane was full of fight fans—middle-aged men with vintage Kostya Tszyu and faux-vintage Muhammad Ali T-shirts stretched over their paunches, younger guys with tattooed arms and white trainers, and whole extended families of Filipinos decked out in red, white and blue Pacquiao merch. Already, more than fifty thousand people had bought tickets to ‘The Battle of Brisbane’.

  This seemed all the more impressive because when the bout was originally signed, the overwhelming reaction from both the Australian public and the media was, ‘Jeff Who?’

  Though Horn had fought at the London Olympics (not to mention Souths Juniors), he was largely unknown outside the Australian boxing fraternity. Even within that limited circle, the view of his prospects against Pacquiao was best summed up by his loving wife Jo, who, upon learning of his world title aspirations, replied, ‘Yeah right, Jeffrey.’

  The unlikely match-up had come about for a variety of reasons, none of them to do with the young Australian being the most qualified opponent for Pacquiao—I think even he would have admitted that. The pair shared a promoter, Bob Arum’s Top Rank; Pacquiao wanted to fight outside the US for tax reasons; and Horn’s team dramatically underbid the other available welterweights. They agreed to take just $500,000 out of the purse, leaving the aging Filipino legend with a guarantee of $10 million.

  Still, there was, and is, a lot to like about Horn. After being bullied (much worse than I was) as a kid, he took up boxing at a similar age and did all the thing I dreamed about but didn’t follow through on: the non-novice amateur titles, the Olympics, the pros. Beyond any of that, he just seems like a stand-up guy. The day after his fight with Pacman the paparazzi caught him taking the bins out.

  Neither Horn nor Pacquiao subscribe to the Floyd Mayweather school of trash talk, so the build-up was somewhat muted. The biggest drama came when Horn gently chided his more famous opponent for spending a pre-fight press conference staring at his phone. (Having been to a few such events myself, I don’t really blame him.) ‘I tell the kids when I’m at school to get off their phones when I’m talking, so he’d be definitely on detention,’ said the mild-mannered Australian.

  Yet despite the lack of verbal fireworks, the bout became a national fixation. It was the stuff of Hollywood: a living legend against a local high school teacher. A fight like that promotes itself.

  Friends and acquaintances who I’d never known to show any interest in boxing began asking me what I thought of Horn’s chances. (Not much: some boxing expert I turned out to be.) My uncle raved about the size of The Hornet’s Popeye-like forearms. Even at the respectable offices of my then-employer Radio National, broadcasters switched from talking about human rights and the global left to discussing left hooks and right crosses.

  I wasn’t precious about any of this—more overjoyed that everyone was suddenly interested in my weird hobby—but it was unexpected. A model-train enthusiast might feel the same way if he woke up to the sound of breakfast radio hosts discussing the relative merits of different narrow-gauge scales.

  It was a challenge to my ideas about the state of the fight game, though. After the disappointment of Mexico and a decade of fandom, I was almost resigned to the fact that boxing was, if not dying, then significantly enfeebled.

  I was hardly alone: pessimism and nostalgia are the natural state of the fight fan. The sophist philosopher Philostratus set the tone in the third century CE, pining for the days before ‘the energetic became sluggards, the hardened became weak, and Sicilian gluttony gained the upper hand’. (Gluttony was the Regency term for ability to absorb punches, hence ‘glutton for punishment’.)

  A mere seventeen centuries later A. J. Liebling observed: ‘One thing about the Sweet Science upon which all initiates are in agreement is that it used to be better.’

  If I’d paid more attention to Liebling, and to history, I might have worked out earlier that while boxing has always gone through ups and downs, its attractions have remained constant. To paraphrase the American broadcaster Max Kellerman, if you walk down a street and see a man teeing up a golf ball on one corner, a game of pick-up basketball on the next, a few guys playing baseball on the third corner and two men in a punch-up on the fourth, where do you expect to see the crowd?

  The Australian public’s enthusiasm for Pacquiao vs Horn convinced me that boxing’s f laws and complexities are only superficial: fights have a primal appeal and when the right ones come along, people will always be interested. That a significant chunk of the population is drawn to this violent ritual may not say anything nice about human nature, especially given the facts dealt with in the previous chapter, but it’s why prize fighting, unlike synchronised swimming, lawn bowls or drag racing, manages to make the leap onto the front page every once in a while.

  It’s even possible that boxing could one day regain the cultural cachet it had in the mid-20th century. It has recovered from decades of decline before, as when the do
ldrums of the Victorian era gave way to the rise of the gloved sport.

  Sure, it’s riven by disagreements, racked by corruption and threatened by safety issues, but that has always been true. Today there are positive signs for pugilism: investment by major media players; growth in the former Soviet bloc and China; a full-on renaissance in Britain and increased interest in the women’s side of the sport to name just a few.

  All that said, I wouldn’t count on a return to the glory days. Boxing has a tremendous track record of shooting itself in the foot, and everyone involved in the fight game is too busy looking after number one to worry about its best interests. Even if promoters, managers and sanctioning bodies were concerned with something as difficult to measure as the health of the sport as a whole, boxing is too decentralised for any one entity to make much of a difference.

  My overall philosophy is that boxing still has the power to capture the imagination of the masses but, since nobody has any influence on its overall health, worrying about it is a waste of time. Far better to simply enjoy the fights and soak up the atmosphere when everyone else comes along for the ride.

  This was exactly what I planned to do in Brisbane. When the fight was announced, I decided straight away that sitting quietly on press row during Australian boxing’s biggest party wouldn’t do. Instead, I bought the best tickets I could afford and went not as a writer, but as one fan among tens of thousands grateful for the chance to witness an icon in action, allowing ourselves the faint hope we might witness something transcendent.

  In theory it was the middle of winter, but when I landed in Brisbane, the tropical sun was warm in a cloudless sky. My anticipation built as I drove into town from the airport, Pacquiao’s Lego hair and Horn’s grimace flashing past on billboard after billboard.

  A few hours later, sitting on Caxton Street, drinking XXXX and watching gangs of Hawaiian-shirt-clad yobbos maraud from pub to pub, it felt like there was a static charge in the air, as if the whole city was primed and on edge, waiting for the opening bell. Maybe that’s just Brisbane on a Saturday night, but either way I felt about ready to jump out of my skin.

  The fight wasn’t the only thing I was looking forward to that weekend. In fact, I was almost as excited to meet up with Paul, who by pure coincidence happened to be in town. I had seen him only once in the six years since I got back from Mexico. He left for Los Angeles while I was away, had three kids and bought a house there with his partner Daisy.

  That wasn’t the only thing that changed. When I returned from Guadalajara, Matt was a new father, understandably short on time for training. David, likewise, was missing. He had graduated as an engineer and left town to make megabucks working in a gold mine in the Pilbara. Later he told me that on his first day, as he was driven down into the pit in the back of a truck, the huge, bearded miner in the front seat turned around and quietly sang: ‘We’re going to rape you.’ Everyone else in the cab cackled uproariously as the darkness closed in.

  ‘It was a gee-up, but still, I was pretty glad I knew how to fight,’ David said in his unruffled way.

  And as if to underscore that a period of my life was over, the university demolished HK Ward. After the hundreds of sweaty hours I’d spent there, everything I’d learnt and the friendships I’d forged between its smelly walls, it was terrible to see it gone, as if a developer had knocked down my childhood home to build a block of flats. (In this case it was some university administrator with a keen sense of irony: the gym was to be replaced by an obesity research centre.)

  They built a new boxing gym around the corner, but it felt different. Too shiny and clean. Too many old faces missing. I trained, somewhat half-arsedly, at various other gyms in the years that followed, hitting the bag and sparring a bit. At one point I even signed up for another fight, but backed out after stalking my would-be opponent, millennial-style, on Facebook. To my horror, he was a real amateur prospect, training at the Australian Institute of Sport. I didn’t want to get bashed, so I quit. I wondered what Paul would think of this when I spotted him in Brisbane, sipping a flat white on the footpath outside a tragically hip cafe.

  He saw me crossing the road towards him, cracked a smile and waved. In the years since I’d seen him it seemed like his body had forgotten the memory of making seventy-five kilos: he was covered in new slabs of muscle, more like a cruiserweight than a middleweight. His face was just the same though. Pushing forty, he still looked like a kid.

  ‘How good is this?’ he said emphatically, gesturing widely to encompass everything important: the sunshine, the coffee, being together, the fight about to take place down the road.

  We caught up on everything: I told him about David’s turn in the mines, and how he had now chucked in engineering to become a doctor. Paul told me he was auditioning for a job as the boxing commentator at the Commonwealth Games, taking care of his kids, doing some personal training and writing a novel in his spare time.

  All the time we were speaking, groups of men and boys dressed in T-shirts and jeans were shuffling past, down the hill towards Lang Park.

  ‘What do you think of Horn’s chances?’ I asked.

  ‘Pac should win, for sure,’ he said. ‘But you never know…he’s getting older. Horn’s a tough guy.’

  ‘No way! Who has Horn fought?’

  In the back of my mind I wondered how Paul really felt about Horn getting such a big opportunity. It must have rankled after the premature end to his own professional career, just as it must have hurt to see Daniel Geale and Danny Green, his Olympic teammates, win world titles and make millions. To change the subject, I told him sheepishly about the fight I didn’t have.

  ‘You did the right thing,’ he said. ‘I mean, nothing wrong with going in with someone better than you, it’s good experience. But what were you going to get out of it?’ He shrugged. ‘Still, you probably underestimate how well you would have gone. You might have boxed his ears off.’

  It was a nice thing to say, but I could see it in my former coach’s eyes: if he had been in my shoes, he would never have backed out. In fact, I got the feeling that given the chance he would have climbed in the ring with Manny Pacquiao that very afternoon, something I wouldn’t have done with a cricket bat in my hand. Paul might not have had the success he deserved as a pro, but he was a real fighter. I wasn’t. I never had been.

  ‘It was a bit of a wuss move, I know that,’ I said.

  ‘Relax,’ said Paul. ‘How many people can say they’ve had a fight? That they got in the ring with another man? You tested yourself. You know who you are. That’s something you’ll always have.’

  I was overwhelmed by a wave of gratitude to this generous man who’d taught me so much. We hung around chatting for another hour—about coffee, boxing, girls, life—then I shook his hand and dived into the stream of humanity flowing towards the stadium.

  As I walked away down the hill, I thought about the years I spent trying to be a boxer, first under Fritzy, then under Paul, then in Mexico. They were some of the best of my life, a time of excitement and education, intense focus and hard work.

  I know now that the pain and sacrifice real fighters endure is something else, orders of magnitude beyond what I went through; possibly beyond what I can imagine. Still, I like to think that my flirtation with fighting made me more sympathetic to the men and women who dare to risk it all in the ring. Their courage, determination and grace leave me awestruck.

  As for my own experience, I didn’t need to go that far to get something out of the sweet science. Boxing got me healthy, but that was the least of it. It helped me understand my own body. It taught me discipline. It showed me I could rely on myself. It pushed me far out of my comfort zone and made me face my fears of being judged, of being hurt. It showed me how to laugh in the face of darkness and it taught me to accept what I cannot change. It expanded my social horizons.

  In the ring I learned about violence and resilience, but I also discovered their limits. There’s always someone harder than you out there—in m
y case, quite a lot of them. Unless you actually are a fighter, toughness is a pretty narrow way to define yourself as an adult or as a man. Unlike boxing, life is not always a brutal competition filled with conflict, pain and sacrifice.

  In short, boxing taught me how to be an adult. And if it can do that for me, a person who, despite being a bit of a nerd, has had plenty of advantages in life, I can only imagine what it could do for someone with none.

  I’m not suggesting that boxing should be compulsory in schools or anything—a lot of kids would be completely traumatised—but so long as there are young people in difficult social situations, it should be available for those who might need it. It’s a therapy as much as a vocation, and I have no doubt that despite its dangers it can change lives for the better.

  These thoughts echoed in my mind as the crowd pressed me forward towards Lang Park to join my friends, past more men in Hawaiian shirts, a Manny Pacquiao impersonator and bronze statues of rugby league greats. Walking from the bowels of the stadium to the seats felt like entering a cavernous vacuum, the ring dwarfed by the towering stands and the open sky above, the grassy field lined with white plastic chairs in neat rows. Fifty-five thousand people were here to watch a boxing match. My heart soared. This, I realised, was the feeling I’d been chasing in Mexico.

  The card was taking place in the mid-afternoon to accommodate the American television audience, and our seats were defenceless under the blazing sun. All we could do was stay hydrated with mid-strength beer and drag our superfluous coats over our exposed heads.

  Time stretched and wobbled. An electrician from Canberra got the nod over the son of former world champion Shane Mosley in a formless eight-rounder, drawing surprised applause. In a junior bantamweight bout, a Filipino titleholder dismissed his Japanese challenger, but the crowd was focused on the advancing shadow as the sun dipped slowly behind the western stand.