id a local TV interview. The Emile Griffith documentary, Ring of Fire, had just been on TV and we ended up discussing it at length. Emile Griffith was a very tough fighter in the sixties, who had won something like six world titles, and who also preferred to relax at gay bars. Benny “the Kid” Paret had insulted him at the weigh-in, called him a maricón (“faggot” in Spanish), and in his anger Griffith killed Paret in the ring. At least, that’s how the story goes, that’s the one-sentence Hollywood pitch. The documentary was excellent, with an emotional meeting between Griffith and Paret’s son. Griffith begged for forgiveness, and got it.
Virgil mused that it was the smaller guys who were usually getting killed in the ring, often taking bad beatings, walking out on their own power, and lapsing into comas and dying. Pat Miletich said that boxing averaged ten deaths a year worldwide. The American Medical Association puts the figure at .13 per 1,000, whatever that means, and I’ve read anywhere from five hundred deaths since 1884 to nine hundred since 1920.
The lighter-weight fighters are often the ones “drying out,” cutting weight to make the fight. Fighters will cut ten or fifteen pounds to make weight, and that dehydration makes them more prone to severe injury. It seems that it’s not the one big punch that proves fatal; it’s the accumulation of damage in a long fight that is so dangerous. It’s actually safer to get knocked out than to stay in there and take repeated beatings. There is a key difference between MMA and boxing, which in fact makes boxing more dangerous. It has to do with “stoppage,” when a referee stops a fight. In boxing, there is the standing eight count if you are stunned (rarely used these days) and the ten count if you are knocked down. This means you have eight or ten seconds to clear your head of the effects of a blow. It’s from the old rules, to give a man a “sporting” chance, so that some lucky punch wouldn’t decide a fight. In MMA, because the game continues on the ground, and a stunned fighter is in danger of getting hit unprotected, the referee stops the fight more quickly if one fighter cannot “intelligently” defend himself. So if you get caught stunned, just a little bit, just for a second—something that might get you a standing eight in boxing—the fight is over in MMA.
I asked Virgil, “Shouldn’t the cornermen have thrown in the towel?” and he nodded judiciously. “But remember, the corner works for the fighter; the fighter pays his salary. Now, as for me, if I don’t see a way to win, then we’ll be back to fight another day. But Paret’s trainer knew he could take shots. He’d taken beatings and come back to knock people out—maybe he was playing possum. But here’s where his trainer is going wrong—that’s no game plan. His trainer should have been working to fix that problem, not to accept it as part of the plan.”
Paret had indeed been famous for the legendary amount of punishment he could absorb, and many feel that the referee, who has been criticized for the slowness with which he stopped the fight, was waiting for him to stage another comeback. Griffith had Paret in trouble, and the referee seemed sluggishly frozen as Griffith laid into Paret as he slumped in the corner.
Virgil places the blame on Paret’s manager, a man who knew little about boxing and who exploited the illiterate Cuban for one last fight. Three months earlier, Paret had fought Gene Fullmer and lost a particularly brutal match. Fullmer was equally famous for the amount of punishment he could deliver, and he himself said he’d never hurt anyone as bad as he had Paret. The documentary showed a brief clip of that fight, and the shelling Paret was catching made me cringe. “Man,” said Virg, “Fullmer used to come up here to Oakland to get sparring, and his partners would have to wear baseball catcher’s gear to keep their ribs from getting torn up. He was perfect for what he did, which was get in and hurt you.” Paret’s damage from that earlier fight had contributed directly to his death.
Andre finished up his interview and came and sat with us. He told me how former world champion and all-time great Roy Jones Jr., one of his promoters, had said that Andre still fights like an amateur. In the amateurs, you are just worried about scoring points in the brief time you have, while in the pros you’re more concerned about hitting harder, pacing yourself, and doing damage. An interviewer asked Andre about what Roy had said, and he just laughed and replied, “Well, I’ve had a hundred and fifty amateur fights and three professional, so what do you expect? Ten years of my life I’ve been an amateur, so it’s going to take time…but that works for me, because I can use that for leverage when they want me to fight somebody I’m not ready for, if they try to push me too fast. I’m on a four-year plan for a title, and right now I don’t care if there’s two people in the audience—as long as I am getting the right fights.
“I respect Roy, he’s the fighter I’d want to emulate—he didn’t have a Hagler, a Hearns, a Leonard in his era. He didn’t fight bums, but he made them look that way. He’s out of boxing, unscathed, plenty of money, brains and family intact—that’s a great fighter.” Roy bucked the system and started his own promotional company, another thing Andre admires.
We sat away from Virgil and just talked. Andre sipped his green tea, and I sipped my fourth cup of coffee. Andre was slender and strong, with broad shoulders and a dense torso, a rocky, solid core. He has big brown eyes that are almost soft, and I could see why they call him baby-faced, why his opponents hope that he’s just a pretty boy who has been boxing clean in the amateurs and whom they can rough up. His look is polite and church-going, with a wispy young man’s mustache and beard. But there is a slight droop, a downward tug at the edges of his face, a look of sadness and knowledge. He has suffered; he knows his identity in the world, and despite his apparent youth, no one will rough him up and shake him from his game.
We chatted about his two kids, Andre Jr. and Malachi, and their mother, Tiffany, and how they met. Andre’s brother had been going to school up in Olympia, and Andre was visiting him when he met her. “My brother was boxing until he was fifteen or sixteen, and then he got tired of it. He had the talent of the two of us,” Andre says demurely, “but he pursued other interests. He didn’t love boxing, he just liked it; and to do what I do, you have to love it, that’s the bottom line.”
I asked Andre if he ever struggled with the commitment, and he replied instantly: “All the time, all the time. I didn’t understand what was possible, but my father did, and Virgil did. My brother and I, we went to school and then went to the gym every day; other kids got to play at each other’s houses, or get jobs. I didn’t understand it then, but looking back, I’m glad we sacrificed so much. It hit me recently, I’d say about eighteen or nineteen, when I had Andre Jr., my first child. I realized the best way to make an income was to go out and win the men’s U.S. National Championship. I set goals for that at seventeen and won it in the under-nineteen bracket, and got fifteen hundred a month as a stipend. There are so many camps and competitions abroad. That’s when boxing started getting real to me. There was a time even before my father died that I just wasn’t in it. I knew how to come into the gym and make it look like I was working, but I was just going through the motions.”
He sipped his tea and continued. “It was in 2002, my last under-nineteen fight. I was up at the Worlds, and my father was working, so he wasn’t there. One of my rivals, Curtis Stevens, was there, and the brackets came in the first night, and he was my first fight. So I called my dad and said, ‘You gotta be here.’ He grabbed his wife and jumped in his CRX and came down. That’s how he was—he would tell his boss, ‘Sorry, my son’s fighting,’ and come, there was no missing it. I’ve got that same spirit. He came, I won, I looked good; and I won the next night, and that was the last time my father saw me fight. He looked great. I thanked him and told him I loved him.
“The day after we got back, we were supposed to run this hill at five a.m., but he called me at four-thirty and said he wasn’t feeling well—and my dad doesn’t do that; he’s always there for training. That was the last time I talked to him. The next day, I was just back from a run with Virgil and was still wet when I answered the phone, and my cousin Debbie was crying. ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked her, and she said, ‘Lemme talk to Virg,’ and I said, ‘What’s wrong?’ and she said, ‘Your father—’ and I said, ‘My father what?’ She didn’t want to tell me, but now I was going crazy, and she broke down and said, ‘He’s dead.’ I just threw the phone. It didn’t make sense to me.”
We paused on the sunny morning. I was very quiet, just listening, careful not to break his thoughts. He was very intentionally telling me this story; it was a part of him that he wanted me to know.
Andre continued: “I went upstairs to Virg and