There were maybe four or five other complete beginners in the gym, just like me, college kids in running shoes with iPods, fat girls, a tiny Asian girl.
But I got over the embarrassment. I moved beyond those feelings—if what Virgil wanted me to do was slow and basic and endlessly repetitive, I reasoned, then I’d do it. I knew who I was—I was a writer trying to learn something. Virgil had told me that he was going to give me a straight right and a straight left, and with those two punches you could beat almost anybody in the amateurs, until you started getting along—and by then you would know how to improvise a hook, an uppercut. To be fair, I was somewhat discouraged—all this time and now I had to go back to the two most basic punches? But it’s better to do a few things perfectly than a whole bunch of things badly in boxing. Championships have been won with great jabs. If I fought MMA again, having good straight punches would be a big help.
Afterward, as I was taking off my wraps, Virgil said, “Fundamentals, Sam, fundamentals. If you don’t have them, you will run into somebody else’s.”
The next day, I went back to King’s by myself, acutely self-conscious. Andre, Virg, and Antonio had all gone to Southern California to fight. I skipped rope for fifteen minutes, the bell dinging away like some kind of call to prayer. It divided the hours of the universe into three-minute rounds (with a green light) and one-minute rest periods (with red). For the last thirty seconds of the round, the light would go yellow and ding a certain tone, meaning “Hurry up, the round is almost done, the end is in sight, give it everything you’ve got now.” I read all the signs fading on the walls as I jumped, and jumping rope was about the only thing I could do competently. I shadowboxed in front of the mirror for three rounds and then wrapped up and hit the heavy bag. My first thought was Damn, that thing is hard, as my hands and heart shuddered at the impact. The bag seemed like concrete, and by the end of each round I could barely keep my hands up. My punches would not have bruised a fly. My shoulders burned, and my left was shockingly weak. I had always prided myself on a decent jab, but right now it wasn’t anything more than a love tap to the bag. I forced myself through four rounds.
Virgil had introduced me to Bobby, an older trainer who was a good friend of his, a big ancient black man with a beautiful, creased face, like a cartoon of the sun. Bobby was seventy-five and healthy and happy. He had a huge smile, and Virgil called him “Blackburn,” after Joe Louis’s legendary trainer. Bobby was old school to the highest degree and convinced that the Brown Bomber would have beaten Ali because (of course) Ali pulled straight back. I stood next to Bobby and chatted companionably as one of his fighters was shadowboxing. There were already a few women in the gym, but another good-looking woman poked her head in, and Bobby said, “Million-dollar baby,” with a huge smile, and we laughed. He told me about boxing in the army and being stationed in Germany in the fifties and going on leave to Paris with cigarettes to trade on the black market. He is a living reminder of the decline of the sport.
Boxing has been in decline since the twenties, arguably, but still had massive popularity in the fifties and even seventies. It is an oddity, a curio of old Anglo-Saxon values that arose with the decline of the duel in Victorian England. Its popularity grew with the growth of all athletics in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. In his book Manhood in America, Michael Kimmel points at boxing’s rise to prominence at the turn of the last century, along with the popularity of sports in general, as a counter to industrialization and the effeminacy of modern society. Boxing was about the return of the true craftsman, the “artisan.” Kimmel talks about the artisanal vocabulary instantly adapted by boxing, which persists to this day. Boxing was a “profession,” and boxers were “trained” in various “schools.” Combatants “went to work” and “plied their trades” in the “manly art.”
Before the rise of prizefighting you have to go back to ancient Greece and the early Olympics to find men fighting with fists or gloves for entertainment or defense (at least in the Western world; obviously, the East was different). Gladiators used weapons.
Prizefighting became popular alongside bull-and bearbaiting and their “dark sister,” public hangings. Bare-fisted fighting favored the careful, conditioned man, as fights went on for hours with two to three punches thrown a minute. “The fancy” refers to the men who were fans and connoisseurs, of both dogfights and prizefighting, and as the fancy began to participate, the use of gloves evolved. Pressure from political antifight groups culminated in the London Prize Ring Rules in 1838, prohibiting striking below the belt, kicking, and butting. Later, the more famous 1867 Marquess of Queensberry rules solidified the use of gloves and the three-minute rounds with a one-minute rest, plus a ten count for a knockout. These rules in fact were a tremendous boon to prizefighting, legitimizing it, reducing the sky-high rate of fatalities, and bringing it into respectability.
Jack Johnson, the first black heavyweight champion, in 1910, chased the white champions all over the world before he got someone who would fight him for the title. His story is incredible. This was back when the heavyweight champion of the world was the be-all and end-all of manhood, the paragon of virtue, and the fact that a black man had the title was an almost impossible cross for white sportswriters to bear. Johnson didn’t give a damn, either; he was doing Muhammad Ali in 1910. They pulled Jim Jeffries, the former unbeaten white champ, out of retirement, and Johnson beat the shit out of him, laughing all the time. The outcome sparked race riots and led to many deaths—mostly of black men, of course. Virgil’s comment was, “Jeffries was exploited, man”—his sympathy lies with boxers, not color. And Virgil, although he was born in Berkeley, has roots in Texas; and the uncles who taught him to box had a direct stylistic link to Jack Johnson, who fought out of Galveston. Johnson was one of the first defensive fighters to be hugely successful, with a slippery, elusive style that confounded opponents. Virgil calls his own personal style, descended from what Jack Johnson did, “Texas slip ’n’ slide.” Over the decades, the game evolved from an Anglo-Saxon “stand-in-front-of-him-and-hit” brawl to the modern strategic and tactical masterpieces that were enacted throughout the twentieth century.
Just look at the numbers: In 1939, Sugar Ray Robinson won the Twelfth Annual Intercity (amateur) title, the Golden Gloves, at Chicago Stadium, in front of 20,000 people. You can’t get 15,000 fans to come to a professional title fight these days. Dempsey-Tunney, in Philadelphia in 1926, had a live gate of 126,000. Pay-per-view extends the live gate at forty bucks a pop but is perhaps promotionally shortsighted, as it limits the audience.
Television runs the show, and there has been much hue and cry about how it has killed boxing, with A. J. Liebling leading the charge in the thirties and forties. Local gyms and fighting venues dropped off precipitously—because you could see good fights on TV—and a strict boxing gym today has a sense of decay to it, the feeling that twenty years earlier there were three rings and two hundred guys in there working every day, but now there is one and it is empty. The bottom line is financial. Good athletes can make so much more money playing other sports without the risk and damage of boxing that it would be silly to fight. Football and other sports gained in popularity and took the best athletes at all levels; and the corruption of the “alphabet soup” organizations, and mandatory title defenses, muddied the waters.
I think the source of boxing’s decline lies deeper in American society. Kids used to fight more; violence wasn’t so frowned upon and didn’t escalate as it does today with the prevalence of firearms. The penalties are severe today—getting in a few bar fights can lead to weeks or months in jail, heavy fines, and tremendous hassle. The cops will invariably arrive. Everybody in the early part of the century, through the Depression, would be in fistfights, especially as young kids. You would know who was the toughest kid on your block, and how you compared to him, and then you would know how he compared to the toughest fighter in the neighborhood, the city, the state; and you would see how the best fighter in the state got his clock cleaned by Sugar Ray Robinson or Jack Dempsey, and you would have a direct relation to and understanding of that controlled violence.
Even among fight fans boxing has been in decline—because of bad decisions and rampant corruption, fighters owned by the Mafia throwing fights, and scandals. Still, fight fans will pay to see big fights, and boxing remains big business, albeit for only a few top fighters. The huge purses of the eighties and nineties, riding on Tyson’s mythic status, have likewise faded into legend. When Holyfield fought Tyson in the rematch in ’97, they both made thirty million dollars.
Boxing is also filled with nostalgia, as Liebling noticed, and sometimes it’s nostalgia for its own s