The fighter loses sight of his own identity; he wants to show he’s just as tough as his opponent, so he brawls. Andre’s opinion on the Corrales fight was similar, even though that fight was grabbing boxing headlines. He murmured: “It was a great fight, no doubt. Promoters, managers, fans—jumping up and down, it’s a big party. But at some point that night, both those fighters go to their rooms and look at themselves in the mirror; they both are going to have to lay on that bed and look at the ceiling. You don’t know what kind of damage you may have taken in that fight. After all the hoopla and cameras and lights, and everyone has gone home, the fighter is sitting there by himself, and eventually he’s going to have to look his kids in the eye. And if something’s not right with the man, then nobody’s going to be there with him.”
After the fight, we fell back into the routine of training, and the days flowed together. This is what boxers do, they work. Road work, bag work, plain “work” (sparring), an endless compilation of hours of training. It’s a journey that never ends. A forty-year-old fighter works as hard on his skills as a ten-year-old does. I could see fighters progress. I saw Heather come along, and also a young amateur named Karim, whom Virgil had been working with at King’s. But Karim’s commitment was often questioned, and to his face.
“Did you run today, Karim?” Virg would drawl, and Karim would reply with an emphatic yes. Karim was short, muscular, and leonine, a coiled spring of power, an awkward fighter but tremendously quick and strong, something that had intrigued Virgil into training him. Virgil saw the potential. But Karim had a wife and kids, and a job, and sometimes his commitment wasn’t there. That’s the other thing pro boxers need, the commitment. It is easy to become enthusiastic and fall in love with fighting for six months, or a year; but to stay in love, to force yourself into the engine of pain every day for three years, then five—that’s where the pros separate themselves.
Karim walked off and Virgil muttered, “A fighter will break his own heart, and then the trainer’s heart.” What he meant was that a fighter will put in the time, the work, for years—and then suddenly become derailed, allow himself to be derailed, by a woman, or a situation, and will lose the ability to focus in the gym. He breaks his own heart, and of course the heart of the trainer, who has invested so much of his life and his future with the fighter. The trainer and the fighter have as deep a codependency as there is in sports, totally reliant on and tied to each other. The trainer has nothing without the talent and will of the fighter. He literally has nothing—he makes money only from the fighter. A trainer is defined by his fighters. He pours a tremendous amount of time, money, and emotion into the vessel of the fighter. Virgil has always had his job with the county and so has been able to train patiently and not rush his fighters for a payday. But he did mutter to me about Andre, “This kid is taking me places I would never have got to.” There is always the danger of the fighter leaving the trainer, going to another trainer, and in fact there are rules in the gym (along with “No spitting on the floor”) that prevent a trainer from talking to another trainer’s fighter. Stealing fighters is universally despised but an ever-present threat, especially when a fighter starts making money.
I kept working, with Virgil and on my own, trying to concentrate, trying to stay focused. Virg worked me with the mitts, telling me not to raise up as I jabbed. I was coming up onto the tips of my toes, floating. “Don’t raise up,” he said, nearly every time. He finally put one mitt on top of my head and held me down. “Don’t raise up, because you’ll get hit.” It was frustrating because my body wanted to do it a certain way, and I was fighting it. I kept raising up, just a little.
We stopped. “It’s not about getting it right or wrong,” Virgil said. “There is no right or wrong. It’s about not getting hit. We know getting hit is bad for you, so we avoid it. That’s what we’re working on here, not getting something ‘right.’ Don’t critique yourself.” I was reminded of a skipper I’d worked for on a yacht, who’d told me, “Nobody laughs if it works,” when we tried doing things in unorthodox ways.
Then he had me throwing rights, the right cross, anchored on the front foot and pivoting on the rear, for power, and he stood on my left foot to pin it in place, stood on it hard. It was a little embarrassing to be a grown man and be treated like a child, but Virgil was trying to get me right, trying to get me to punch with balance, something that should have been done when I was eleven years old.
I was hitting the heavy bag later, and between rounds Virg said, “Sam, you’re always in a hurry. I’m starting to realize the kind of guy you are. I got to slow you down, make you deliberate. Nothing ever got to a hundred miles an hour without going through twenty.”
Andre was preparing for his next fight, in Memphis. He would be fighting on the Johnson-Tarver II undercard, which refers to the way the promoters put together a night of fighting. You have to have a draw, a main event, with names that people recognize and want to see. Promoting is about establishing a narrative. In this day and age, it is nearly always going to be a title fight, meaning for a world title, a belt. I won’t even get into the “alphabet soup” of ranking organizations because I don’t understand it and not many do. It comes down to this: There is no federal governing body in boxing, just state commissions, and pretty much anybody who wants to have a big fight and call it “for the whatever-weight championship of the world” can. There are three or four organizations that have some real meaning, and quite a few that don’t. When a fighter wins all the titles in his weight class, he “unifies” the belt, which means he really is the world champion—now it means something.
On the same card, or schedule, will be six to ten lesser bouts with up-and-coming fighters. Andre would be on the undercard, as this was going to be only his fifth professional fight. After he has fifteen or twenty fights, he’ll be the main event, contending for a title. How fast he gets there depends entirely on him, how strong he looks fighting these second-or third-tier guys, how many knockouts he gets, how popular he becomes. The boxing community has opinions about him, and they are waiting to see what happens. He won gold, a major achievement, and that means he can box. But is he strong enough? And can he take a punch? Andre was rocked early in his second fight but survived smoothly and came back and knocked the guy out. Was geting rocked indicative of growing pains—or was it a sign that he’s not powerful enough for the pros? The fight fans and writers, the boxing community, are always the smartest guys in the room. They are instant experts, and they form opinions based on misunderstandings and hearsay and “facts” heard from other writers and commentators. The truth is that they are easily swayed and misled by hype and flashiness, and the real core people who understand boxing are few and far between.
There is no better illustration of this than the example of Mike Tyson, Iron Mike. Most boxing fans you talk to still love Mike and would pay to see him fight, which is absurd when you think how long it’s been since he’s had a meaningful fight, ten years or more. Tyson has been a C-level fighter since he left prison, years and years ago, but for his rematch with Kevin McBride that ended so fittingly, there was more international press and pay-per-view than there was for a somewhat meaningful fight between Miguel Cotto and Mohamad Abdulaev that same night.
Boxing fans are still victims of the myth of Tyson’s invulnerability, his fearlessness, his monstrous power and rage. Tyson won the heavyweight title and unified the belt at nineteen, the youngest fighter in history to do so, and he obliterated everyone in one or two rounds, millions of dollars a fight for a minute’s work. Some people still consider him the greatest heavyweight of all time—because they want him to be, they want to believe in that mythical creature that no one can withstand.
Once Buster Douglas managed to survive six rounds and show that it could be done, Mike was doomed. Holyfield completed the revelation, and that’s why Mike bit Holyfield’s ear off—he wanted a way out. I love Mike Tyson, not so much for his youthful invulnerability but for his intelligence. He can be beautifully eloquent (and horrifically crass) when he speaks about himself, and his tragedy is our tragedy, because your heavyweight champ speaks to your generation. The heavyweight championship is not so much a title as a morality play, it’s been said. Look at Jack Johnson, or Muhammad Ali—look at what the world does to the heavyweight champ.
Tyson is no exception, and his mournful tale is about America at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first: money and corruption (in the corrosive sense), and Tyson’s inability to escape from his own nature despite his fervent desire to do so. He has tattoos of Arthur Ashe, Che Guevara, and Mao Tse-tung—he has always wanted to change.
Virgil