I kept saying, ‘It’s over man, it’s over,’ and he broke down and was crying. It was a crazy time. At my father’s funeral, I made a vow. I told him, over his casket, ‘Papa, I’m going to bring the gold back.’ But it was hard, I was depressed for six months, a year even. I didn’t want to box. I just wanted to be depressed. I couldn’t pray, couldn’t read my Bible. God slowly but surely put the right people around me. My mother, Bishop Calloway, and my whole family, even though they were hurt, too. Slowly I just kept coming back, I started getting that itch to be in the gym. My first fight back I looked great, I knocked him out. That’s how we are in my father’s family—we take a loss, we come back hard. It’s not that we’re big and bad, it’s just in us, in the blood.
“Plus, there’s the spirit of God in me—people take that lightly. It’s like the new fad to profess Christ. But this is real. Reporters made comments like ‘Andre Ward found God on the way to the Olympics,’ like it’s some new thing, like once I got success I started talking about God—but it’s real. I get revelations that are hard to explain, but you just know, nobody sustained you or delivered you but God. You just know.
“I know God is real, and I really believe that I have a bigger task than just boxing. I mean, I have an idea of what it is, to share the gospel, to get it out, to tell people the good news about Christ—but I’m not sure what form it will take. Boxing is a platform, a pedestal to get eyes on me, to get the word out.”
Though sometimes in his postfight interviews Andre sounded fanatical, the more time I spent around him, the more his ardent faith felt real and sane. I hadn’t spent a lot of time around people who had really taken God into their hearts, although my older sister had recently been “saved.” But as I got used to the language and the constant references, the quoting of scripture, it came to feel more normal to me.
Andre was a much needed shot in the arm for Oakland’s boxing community and a source of great pride to all kinds of people throughout the city. When I wore an “Andre Ward S.O.G.” (Son of God) T-shirt, guys stopped me at the taco stand down in the hood and in the mall in Emeryville, and once a little old white lady stopped Virgil at Lake Temescal to say how impressed she was with Andre. I went with him to throw out the first pitch at an A’s game, and beforehand we joked around that he was going to bring some heat. When he got out there, he lobbed the pitch in to home, and I asked him, “What happened?” and he laughed and said, “It’s a little different out there with everyone watching—I just had to get it over the plate.” We walked as a group, Virgil and Antonio and a few friends and I, and everywhere we had to wait patiently for Andre to sign autographs and pose for pictures, something he did tirelessly. He would linger and chat and pose for as long as people wanted him to, and he wouldn’t be rushed.
Andre would sometimes go to Vegas or elsewhere to watch big fights—part of building a name for himself was to be seen at ringside, and his promoter would arrange for it. ESPN’s Friday Night Fights was coming to San Jose, just forty-five minutes south of Oakland. San Jose had a larger Hispanic population and was more of a boxing town. Boxing in the United States has always resided with the poor, with the immigrants. It was Jewish and Italian and Irish, and then black, and now it’s Hispanic.
The way television was working those days, they would broadcast mid-level bouts on cable, but the big title fights would still be pay-per-view. So ESPN had fights on Tuesday and Friday, and Showtime and FSN had fights, but not the best quality, as boxing was still hamstrung by its greed. Instead of pushing the sport onto free TV—like the Super Bowl—and increasing the long-range popularity, boxing promoters were still stuck on the short-term profit. If the Super Bowl or World Series had been pay-per-view all these years, would they be the cash cows they are today?
On the night of the fight, Andre was outside the training house talking on his BlackBerry, resplendent in a silk suit, with cuff links and alligator shoes, hair cut neatly and mustache trimmed and chocolate skin smooth and glowing with health. He was all smiles. He had just found out that I had gone to Harvard, and he said, “You keep a lot under your hat.” Virgil had talked to me about the way fighters dress, and Andre had echoed it. Other fighters often dressed with sideways ball caps and bling, all street—looking like rappers or street thugs—but Andre and Virg were trying to “take the game over.” Bob Arum and Don King, the dominant promoters, were aging and wouldn’t last forever, and Andre was “punching to make money without punching. It’s business; you got to look respectable to get respect. You got to give yourself the best chance to make the most money with the least risk, because one bad fight can do it.”
Andre knew that if he wanted to be taken seriously as a businessman, not just as a fighter, he had to dress the part. Of course, the really beautiful thing about fighting is that nothing matters unless you win. In the ring, the truth will out.
I went inside, as he was deep in conversation and Virgil was showering, and leafed through a press pamphlet from his latest fight. The interviewer had asked him to pick one word to describe himself, and he said, “Chameleon.”
I sat there and thought about that, and about what Norman Mailer had written: “Of course, trying to learn from boxers was a quintessentially comic quest. Boxers were liars. Once you knew what they thought, you could hit them. So their personalities became masterpieces of concealment.”
There is something about great fighters that is hidden in plain sight; in one sense, they are the most open people in the world, willing to tell you everything; but in another, they mislead, or allow you to mislead yourself. They stand up in the ring exposed, practically naked; and yet their strategy, their reality, is a secret. Fighting professionally is about illusion, deception, and it becomes woven into the fighters’ lives. When I first started talking to professional fighters, like Tony in Iowa, I thought he was open and forthcoming, but now I realized much had to be hidden. Look strong when you are weak, Virgil would counsel. Catch your breath but look like you are about to attack, so that he doesn’t realize you are catching your breath. Force him backward while you recover.
Virgil emerged in a brilliant vintage Everlast Sugar Ray Leonard sweat suit, and Bobby showed up, and we piled into two cars. I rode with Don and Will, Don’s son. Don was a short and slender, dark black man with long tight braids and glasses, wearing a batik shirt. He was in his late forties or early fifties, but his hair was still dark and his arms dense with muscle; he gave the impression of wiry power. He dressed and carried himself like a jazz musician. He was a trainer and a novice cut man and had known Virgil for a long time and was his assistant trainer, wrapping Andre’s hands, and developing as a professional cut man. The cut man is in the corner to look after the fighter’s bruises and cuts so that they don’t become a reason the fight gets stopped. If a fighter gets cut from a punch or, more likely, a head butt on the eyebrow, and the blood is interfering with his vision, the referee or doctor will stop the fight. If there are millions of dollars on the line, a cut man who can stop that bleeding in thirty seconds (or keep a bruise from swelling an eye shut) between rounds becomes a valuable asset. “I could always do shit with my hands,” Don said, “and I never been afraid of pressure. I don’t have no stage fright and I’m not afraid to work cuts, even though I don’t have a lot of experience.”
We arrived in San Jose, parked, and walked to the venue, Andre in his shimmering suit and everyone else dressed well. Bobby was with us, and he had just had eye surgery, so he was wearing thick massive black glasses and looked like Ray Charles in his white Kangol hat.
I got my media pass, and we went in and sat ringside. The preliminary bouts were under way, and the ESPN TV crew was running around setting up; they would only televise a few fights. Nonito Donaire was fighting Paulino Villalobos, and Nonito (or Nito) was an old-time friend of Virgil’s and Andre’s—he trained out of Joe’s in Hayward. Villalobos had lost his last six fights and was an opponent, and he came straight after Nito, tough and moving forward. Nito could do what he wanted—he moved, took potshots, and stayed elusive—and suddenly Virgil was galvanized and began yelling to him in a clear voice that I could tell Nito could hear, “Use your jab, Nito, it’s working, use your jab, and then go underneath—there you go, there you go!” Virgil was tense and committed. ESPN was a big deal to these up-and-comers, they had to make an impression, they had to look good. If you are fighting on TV, you have to look good, make an exciting fight, because that’s where it all starts. A ringside official whom Virgil knew turned around and said, “He can’t hear you,” and Virgil responded with a short laugh. “I bet he do. Uppercut to the body, Nito!”
I heard a woman in th