g on, concepts he’d been pondering for the past five or ten years. Ideas about the hydraulics inside the body, ideas about why tai chi was good in the context of Western medicine—the internal organs are suspended and massaged, and circulation is vastly improved. His latest thoughts were about a punch: The impact is absorbed by the muscles; that is all the muscles are there for. Certainly, boxers have shown that big muscles don’t equal heavy punches, although overall weight is a good indicator.
Chen said that great boxers learn to do all this naturally. I noticed right away that some of the postures in the short form looked very much like old-school boxing pictures of Joe Louis, coiled in on himself. I remembered Pat Miletich pointing to a picture he had on the wall of the gym and saying, “You see that picture? All the old-time boxers would pose that way, coiled up for an uppercut, because if you posed that way, it showed you knew what you were doing, you had been educated in the science.”
Chen taught the short and long forms, and his attitude was that students should learn the short form all the way through, and then perfect it—instead of trying to get every posture perfect before moving on to the next. That way, you could start to derive the benefits of the form more quickly. Everything came from the short form; everything could be learned by learning the short form, although Chen laughed and said, “For fighting, you have to hit the bag and lift the weights, too.”
When I talked to Master Chen’s son, Max, who was preparing for the Golden Gloves, he said he just used the short form as a type of relaxation, of moving meditation. I was reminded of the ram muay and wai khru, the traditional, slow-moving dances that we had done before muay Thai fights. These had been moments of relaxation and could be considered moving meditation. But Max and his sister, Tiffany, didn’t think that tai chi had given them a big advantage in boxing or san shou; they thought it was just “good for you.” Master Chen said his own children didn’t have the maturity to understand what he was talking about, but they would learn it. They were pretty good, tough kids, although I never got a chance to work with them. Tiffany loved boxing and was training at Gleason’s, the most storied boxing gym in the world, while Max was more interested in the san shou and, someday, K-1.
On some nights, there was “form application,” applying the moves of the short form to actual self-defense and fighting, and on those nights Master Chen had everybody put on boxing gloves and punch the wall, again focusing on mechanics, on slamming and retraction.
He did hit hard as hell, I have to admit. His hips and body coiled and uncoiled, and he had a kind of snarling yell, shockingly loud, as he punched the wall. It was all about mechanics, pivoting, winding up, punching through, and impact. I almost never got it quite right, but he smiled and laughed and showed everyone again the differences. They were subtle, but they existed, and they allowed the seventy-year-old man who weighed about 140 pounds to hit the wall like a much heavier person. The fingers activating, the toe, the compression, the sinking and exploding, all the myriad details flowed together.
In the end, the sum is greater than the whole. Tai chi is about the generation of power, hitting terribly hard and moving smoothly and uncoiling perfectly. But there is something more, something greater.
Master Chen had been a student of Cheng Man-ch’ing’s, a man Robert Smith called the “Master of the Five Excellences” and one of the most legendary tai chi practitioners in history. According to Smith, Cheng had been dying of tuberculosis when he met Yang Cheng-fu, the greatest tai chi practitioner in the world. Tai chi reversed the tuberculosis and completely healed him. It’s not quite levitation, but I wouldn’t turn it down.
I was with Chen for only a few months, just long enough to learn the short form and get a sense of what it was about, but on the last day I had a minor breakthrough.
Master Chen was always repeating things, telling the same stories over and over, not because he was forgetful but because you needed to keep hearing them. You might have understood what he was saying, but you didn’t quite get it. And then, one day, suddenly something would slot into place and you would understand what he had been talking about all that time.
Tai chi has an entire vocabulary in Chinese about varying forms of energy and tantien, the place below the belly where chi builds up. Master Chen almost never used those words, as they smacked of mysticism to him, and he avoided that. Instead, he would use the analogy of tires inflating with air.
On my last day, there were only a few people in class, and we were refining the form. Master Chen kept talking about shrinking and growing, sagging and waking up, and a certain tenseness in the tantien. Suddenly, I started waking up with the inhalation in my lower stomach; it would fill and tense, and a concept that had been eluding me fell into place. I could feel my tantien.
Master Chen smiled and shook my hand and I thanked him, and he said, “I think you have enough to work on your own now. It will help you.”
A COLD GAME
Virgil Hunter and Andre Ward, Oakland, March 2005.
Kings Gym, Oakland
It takes constant effort to keep the slippery, naked, near-formless fact of hitting swaddled in layers of sense and form. Because hitting wants to shake off all encumbering import and just be hitting, because boxing incompletely frames elemental chaos, the capacity of the fights to mean is rivaled by their incapacity to mean anything at all.
—Carlo Rotella, Cut Time
I drove cross-country to Oakland in the spring. I was going to see Virgil Hunter and Andre Ward. Andre had won a gold medal at the Olympics in Athens and was 3–0 as a pro.
My shoulder was feeling better. The endless pulling on rubber bands seemed to have had some effect. I had talked Virgil into taking me on as a student. “Just imagine I’m a cruiserweight prospect,” I said to him. He laughed. Virgil would never be able to pretend I was anything other than what I was. It’s part of what made him a great trainer. I told him I wanted an amateur fight—having a fight focuses the training and clarifies the mind; it gives you a sense of urgency that helps you learn. I wanted a different kind of relationship with a teacher, more than I’d had in Rio or even Iowa. I wanted the one-on-one attention. If I was going to fight bare-fisted in Myanmar or MMA again anywhere, I better do it right. If my true love was hitting and getting hit, I figured I should have the best instruction available, at least for a while. And I was fascinated by Andre’s story, the life of a red-hot young prospect with all the advantages, being groomed for greatness. Finally, I thought it would be good for my understanding to take a look into the big-time world of professional boxing, from the inside.
The amount of literary material on boxing is staggering. World-class writers have fallen in love with “the sweet science,” from Hemingway and Mailer to Joyce Carol Oates; far, far better writers than I have addressed the issue. In general, they fall into all kinds of hyperbole, all kinds of difficult and complicated constructions and emphatic descriptions, in attempts to describe the visceral. Boxing writing often veers from the sublime to the ridiculous.
So I was going to get some one-on-one attention with a world-class trainer and fight an amateur fight. It almost seemed a step backward, to fight an amateur fight at this point (four two-minute rounds, headgear—are you kidding me?), but the fight was just an excuse to train hard. And I wanted to see Andre in depth, close up. People didn’t realize that although Andre had won gold at light-heavyweight, 175 pounds, he’d fought most of those fights weighing under 170 pounds. He beat a European champion and a huge (six-five) Russian world champion and gave up seven pounds. The critics were sniping at him for turning pro at middleweight (“Didn’t he have the power for light-heavy?”), or 160—but he had never been a proper light-heavyweight.
I arrived in Oakland without a place to stay, and through a friend of a friend ended up crashing on the floor of an unfurnished apartment in East Oakland. The neighborhood was bad, in the process of gentrifying but not there yet. Rough open streets, old factories, and rundown buildings: the West Coast urban wasteland.
The next morning I was up to meet Virgil in the pearly gray dawn, and as I headed toward my car, I could see a rat’s nest of papers and litter on the front seat. I walked slowly around the car in the warm morning light, with the ocean coloring the sky. One of the rear triangular windows had been neatly mashed in—the rock that had been used as a tool was still by the rear tire—all the doors had been unlocked, and the trunk had been popped. For some