er rounds, you let him try and do what he wants to do, but now you know what he’s trying and you’re fresh and you can destroy him—because he’s finally got you where he wants you, but now it’s better for you.”
Andre’s training breathed this philosophy throughout. At the NovaCare rehab center in Castro Valley we did the Acceleration program, which was a lot of sprinting on a frighteningly steep treadmill. Amateur boxing goes for four two-minute rounds, so it’s very quick and explosive; a two-minute round can go by in a heartbeat. Sprinting builds up that short-term endurance and, most important, quick recovery time, that oxygen-debt relief between rounds. Afterward we did some medicine ball throwing for core strength and explosiveness, and shoulder stability drills. We didn’t even look at free weights, although Andre has done them in the past to build strength.
On alternate days there was Pilates in a clean, upscale gym on pretty wooden machines, again focusing on the core and shoulder strength and stability. Virgil discovered Pilates himself when he was rehabbing an injury, did some research, and found out that its creator had been a boxer. I was slightly skeptical, but Andre had been at it for eight weeks, and he said it had made a big difference in his strength and flexibility.
After lunch and siesta (Andre swears by the afternoon nap, and I am a fervid supporter myself) we met again at King’s Boxing Gym, on Thirty-fifth Avenue in downtown Oakland. This was a real boxing gym, clean and well worn and crowded with fighters and bags, the walls covered with fight posters and pictures of boxers, the feel of old sweat and blood. It’s quite a contrast to the Pilates and Acceleration places. Old school. Real fighters eyed me in a way that is not hostile or even curious but just appraising.
No one in the world is a better judge of a man than an experienced old boxing trainer; he can judge deep into a fighter’s flesh just by watching him move, watching him do a few things. Old fight trainers are like horse-racing trainers in their appraisal of flesh, teeth, and bone, with the added advantage of having been the horse, knowing the horse from the inside out.
I felt vulnerable in front of those watchful eyes. My weaknesses were going to be exposed for all to see. Andre was stopped for handshakes and smiles and conversation. Virgil was going to take him out of here to Texas soon, away from all these distractions.
I watched Andre shadowbox and there was an inkling of his capabilities; every now and again, in his relaxed shuffle, there was a jab that was faster than thought and crisper than a brand-new hundred-dollar bill. He was light and graceful, and his hands gently knifed the air, carving through hooks and uppercuts, effortless. His face was smooth and open and guileless, and he looked young; but when he spoke, he seemed mature, unflappable.
I asked him if he’d ever been hurt in the ring.
“Naaw, not really,” he said. “It’s been a couple of years since anybody’s landed a clean shot on me. My older brother and I used to get into wars during sparring, but he’s taking a few years off boxing right now. Nobody’s ever hit me as hard as he did.”
Andre sparred a young welterweight before me, a kid who made it to the nationals in 2000 and now fights pro, and Andre handled him with an ease that could be called contemptuous if there was any contempt in him, which there wasn’t. To me, what shone were his feet and his explosive quickness, the springiness in his bouncing; his body was under the total control of his mind. If he wanted to bounce one way and then flash back the other, bobbing and weaving and then—bing-bing-bing—flashing through three long punches with his glowing white gloves, he did it, and so fast it was very hard to understand what had happened.
Finally, it was my turn and I climbed through the ropes clumsily, no longer conscious of the other eyes in the gym. We began sparring and I was hesitant and awkward, and Virgil yelled, “Hold on a second. Sam, get over here.” He was laughing a little. I ran over to the corner.
“Sam, would you hit him? He can protect himself. Now, hit him!” Virgil’s voice was high and amused. I nodded and turned around. For the next two rounds, I went after Andre and tried to tear his head off.
It was instantly apparent how good he was, and how great the difference between us in skill and speed was. Andre zipped me twice and then basically stopped throwing punches; instead, he worked on his defense and his movement, and I went after him and missed by miles. I threw hooks that started off aimed at his head and ended up faltering in the air feet from where he was. I got him in the corner and threw a barrage, a dozen punches, and he blocked and bobbed and shifted and not one punch got through, and then he dipped and spun away. He didn’t punch me because if he had, I wouldn’t have been able to do anything. He jabbed me once or twice and I was hit before I saw him move. If he wanted to knock me out, he could have done it in seconds.
I heard the guys in the gym yelling, “Let your hands go” (meaning start throwing more punches) at me and “Don’t let him hit you” to Andre. He blocked punches before I even threw them, checking me as I started to move, waiting patiently for my hands to get going.
In all, I threw, I don’t know, maybe sixty punches and I caught him once, my pathetic little triumph, a glancing hook as he danced away. He threw three light jabs before he stopped punching entirely, and they all were on the money. My mouth guard had a little blood in it, nothing new there. He thanked me for the workout, and I thanked him for not murdering me.
Both Andre and Virgil were really nice guys. You got the sense almost immediately that there’s no bullshit, no overt ego, just confidence and competence and a game plan for Andre’s career. They were looking far past the Olympics. Andre knew his style would work well in the pros, with more and longer rounds and less focus on points. He knew how dirty boxing could be; he’d had friends go pro with the wrong trainers, get thrown in with pro fighters with fifty fights and get beaten badly. Andre wanted to be out of boxing and rich by thirty—with his brain intact. He had a wife and two children, so I asked him if his wife worries about him, and he smiled. “She used to, but then she started watching me fight and she sees I don’t get hit much and now she doesn’t worry.”
After sparring, Andre and I stood around the ring, covered in sweat but relaxed in the easy camaraderie of men who had just fought and now could be friendly again. We talked about the routine, and the dangers of boredom with training, and I said something silly and clichéd like “You gotta stay hungry.”
Andre laughed. “Hungry? You gotta be starving, man.”
I had an extra day, so I ate lunch with Virgil, and we walked around one of his old haunts in Oakland. He took a little interest in me as a fighter when I told him about what I was doing.
“That’s just brawling, that stuff,” he said of the UFC, and he was right, to a point. The stand-up fighting is often brawling. He told me that if I spent a year working out in a boxing gym, I could be a bad-ass and make money as a sparring partner, which was very flattering, if unappealing. Life as a punching bag.
Virgil was a “gunslinger,” something he doesn’t talk about much. He fought in unsanctioned bouts coming up because the money was often better. I started pestering him for advice. I asked him which school he belonged to, look at your man’s eyes or his body. Virgil is of the latter. “He ain’t going to hit you with his eyes,” he said with a chuckle. “In the ring, I can make you look at what I want you to look at.”
He was very unhappy that I didn’t know anything about my opponent; that was just foolish. How can you prepare for something you don’t know? He told me to make a quick assessment of the opponent and to watch the enemy trainer. Is he calm? Is he talking to his fighter all the time, making him nervous? Does the trainer have no confidence in his man?
“Truth in observation, that’ll win a fight,” he said.
Back in Iowa, summer was on its way, and I had about a month of hard training left without interruptions. I started doing “the circuit,” an exercise routine Pat lifted from a women’s magazine, in which you do two exercises for each body part and then run hard for eight minutes (increasing the speed every two minutes), and you do this whole thing three times, before practice.
I started to feel strong. I had friends. I played chess with Sam Hoger, the “Alaskan Assassin,” a twenty-two-year-old pro heavyweight, from Alaska by way of Panama and Germany. Sam was getting his MBA and was dead set on Harvard Law; luckily, I beat him at chess, because he could have surely kicked my ass. He wore flashy suits and was an environmental lobbyist as well as a student. He was a big, dusky, well-coiffed fellow, a little larger than life, jolly and loud and intelligent and calling out, “Hey, girl,” to nearly every girl we walked past in a friendly, nonaggressive way, half self-mocking and half curious. That was something Tony did, as well: “Hey, baby…Then, sotto voce: “Your name is Baby, isn’t it?”
There was a l