the mirrors, hit some pads with Virgil, and then sparred. Heather would come after me with everything, and I had to work on my defense and keep her from hitting me, sometimes touching her with my gloves if she was too open or standing still where I could hit her. She was deadly serious and came out swinging, looking to take my head off; I was surprised by her genuine aggression. She was tenacious, and I had to move and block and be careful, because she wanted to hit me.
Virgil was deeply satisfied, because I needed the defensive work and she needed to start the process of getting comfortable in the ring. Not that I was comfortable—it was the first time I had been in the ring in more than a year. We went five rounds that first day, but in the days that followed we would go eight or even ten rounds, Heather usually charging, and me dropping back, and as she got better I had to work harder to avoid getting cracked. I came to see Virgil’s wisdom in training us together, because it was good for both of us.
“There’s a method to my madness,” he said. “I am using you and Heather because you can complement each other. I want to work on Heather’s natural strength and aggression, because she’ll be able to overwhelm these other girls. You need to work on your defense, especially against amateurs, who are going to be charging. You need to touch and move, instinctively—you’ve got to outthink them. It’s a thinking man’s game.”
Virgil and I once discussed Heather while we walked around the lake.
“You know, I got the women’s finals for the nationals at home on DVD and I’ve been watching them, and I can see from the way they hook that they’ve been trained to fight like men, instead of doing what comes naturally,” he said. “You got to look at what you got; their hips are different in the way they move. The mechanics of how they throw a hook is going to be different. The first thing I’d be drumming out of a woman fighter is that this is a man’s sport.”
Heather’s real strength lies in her aggression and determination. “She has the fuel,” said Virgil. “Every fighter needs to have fuel, and she’s got it. Fighters feel helpless. They have been victims, and then they start victimizing others and then themselves, and real fighters learn to use it, to harness that aggression. I never thought I would train a girl. We were talking and she said, ‘God would work it out,’ and I realized that God had put us together for a reason.”
Heather’s mom had been in and out of mental hospitals her whole life, diagnosed as schizophrenic when she was really manic-depressive. She tried to kill herself numerous times. Heather had a twin sister and an older brother, and they had to deal with her mother going through spurts of health and sickness. “You could see it coming, her bad days,” Heather said, very matter-of-factly. I could imagine what that must have looked like to a young child, seeing your mom sink into a funk and knowing that she might really kill herself this time. Heather’s father died in 2001 from some sort of infection. After Heather told me these things, her constant relentless aggression in the ring made total sense, and Virgil knew he had something. Heather had the fuel; I had to wonder if I had it.
The days began to develop a rhythm, running in the morning, training at King’s in the afternoon, sometimes at Joe’s with Heather, sometimes at the house.
Antonio and I would run the lake easily, chatting about girls and movies, and then he would blast off and run five stairs before I could run two. He said to me as we finished up once, “I don’t like fighting but I love it, you feel me?” and I did, I felt him. What he meant was that he doesn’t start fights, doesn’t want them to happen, but he loves it when he’s in it, the flush and rage, the joys of hitting and being hit.
Virgil said that Antonio was “uncoachable” until he reached him. Virgil, with all his experience at the juvenile hall with troubled kids, is a master at reaching them, because he speaks and understands street language and credibility. He commands respect—that’s how he can reach tough street kids, because he was one of them and understands their mentality, and he is interested. His attentiveness and ability to listen are intense, and his ability to see into a person profound.
Later that day I worked with Virgil down in his garage; the door was up with a cool breeze coming off the ocean, and the sun was blasting down on Oakland below us. We listened to up-tempo jazz and Cuban drums, complicated rhythms. Boxing is all about rhythms; Sonny Liston would only work out to “Night Train” on an endless loop.
“Sam, you go through changes in your career, even you. You have to be objective and look at yourself honestly, and the situation—this goes back to knowing who you are. You change. There are different phases of fighting, and right now you are thirty years old—you’re not thinking about being a young fighter, you’re thinking about being the toughest thirty-five-year-old man on the planet. Better than you ever were in your twenties.”
V had me throwing the straight right into the bag and then coming back with the hook. He wanted me to stand still when I did it, but as I threw it, over the course of the round, I crept to my left. He said, “Look where you are now. That’s what happened without you even thinking; it means you want to punch moving left.”
I already knew this about myself, and I thought it was inevitable for an orthodox fighter. An orthodox fighter is right-handed and leads with his left, keeping his stronger hand in reserve for the power punches. As you move with each punch, you are always taking tiny steps with your left foot, and it means most orthodox fighters drift to their left as they fight. I had noticed this even back at Harvard, in sparring; I told a friend that anybody who could move right would kill everyone.
Virgil brought me back to the present. “Now concentrate on staying in the same place,” he said. “As soon as you start moving, you become predictable. I’ll see what you do, and in the later rounds I’ll have you moving into my right. I’ll set you up.”
In between rounds, in the one-minute rest period, Virgil would elaborate. “It’s like mountain climbers reading a mountain, when you start reading a fighter. You study, you look for different routes; ways up and ways down, things you would do if you were hurt, if the light changed. But you study just like a subject in school—you go back to it and check it. I give you a double jab and see what you do, and then I give it to you again, and then later I come back to it—‘Yeah, you’re still doing it’—and then I find the right moment.”
We hit mitts and my left arm began to burn, and Virgil whapped away at me, slapping my head and going to the body, forcing me to cover and have defense and then throw the quick four, jab-right-left-right, bapbapbapbap—and he kept saying, “You’re killing it, don’t try and kill it, just relax, relax your face, just deadpan your face and it will relax your whole body,” and I instantly felt how my face had frozen into a rictus. I relaxed it and let it slump expressionless, and finally my whole body started to relax, my shoulders eased, and I just tapped the mitts and Virgil was happy. “Relaxed, you can go on and on.”
He told me, “The more relaxed you are, the more economy you’ll have in your motion. The first time Holmes fought Norton, he threw maybe seventy punches and landed thirty-five—and when he fought him three years later, he threw fifty punches but still landed the same amount.”
That night in my room, I heard gunshots, not too far away, the loud flat cracks, closer than expected. I waited for sirens, and it was much later when I finally heard them and saw the chopper, strangely quiet out the window. The choppers here must have had some kind of noise-reduction system, because they seemed so much quieter than the ones I used to ride firefighting. They would flutter over at night like in some kind of science-fiction film, robot hunters from the future.
I woke early, at five or six, and there was a particularly vocal bird outside my window in the deserted predawn, singing a song that sounded familiar. Eventually, I realized it was the car-alarm progression, the one that everyone knows, the varying beeps and blares of a standard car alarm. The bird had picked it up and built on it, but the underlying theme was recognizable.
I climbed into my car and rode down to King’s through the hood, my daily ritual. What made a poor neighborhood in Oakland was the same as what makes a poor neighborhood anywhere; it’s the numbers of people loitering, with nothing to do but hang out and watch the street go by. I drove through the wide streets without looking too hard, only peripherally noticing the windows and doors guarded by wood and iron, the out-of-business shops and restaurants, old cars, things that could never be on the street in Massachusetts, sometimes with brilliant spinning chrome rims, music thumping, in front of and behind me.
One morning, I met Andre and Virg down at Coffee with a Beat and sat chatting with Virgil while Andre d