had discussed what they were going to do. Rachel had said, “It’s just for show, do whatever, dance around a little,” but Virg said, “Let’s get a good workout in while we’re at it, and give them what they want to see.” We were three days out from the fight, and some fighters wouldn’t do much, but Andre was so young and full of energy that he needed to go hard and brief.
Andre was in a different category, even from Antonio Tarver, the main event. His movement was quick and powerful as he shadowboxed, his speed deceptive. He was graceful; there was a sublime quickness, his body daring and shifting, his feet drifting and touching, slips and slides and feinting with his whole body. Of course he was fast, but speed comes from many places. Andre was as still as stone and then he moved in unexpected ways—and he didn’t telegraph, which made him that much faster. His control over his body, his link between body and mind, was the most complete thing I had ever witnessed; his feints were with his whole body, not just his head or hands, and this made them irresistible. Whatever his mind could imagine, his body could do, flowing and skipping, bounding and bouncing.
There is a tendency, which I succumb to, for “normal” men who encounter good professional fighters whom they like to wax poetic, and fall gracelessly into silly hyperbole. Mailer wrote about Ali as if he were the second coming of Christ, and other writers went even further regarding the Greatest. Andre Ward, to me, a regular guy with regular reflexes, was an incredible, sensational fighter—but at the top level there are a lot of guys who are incredible and sensational and more. Andre had a shot at being up there—but he hadn’t proved himself yet, not in the professional world.
Virgil joined him for pad work and was working almost as hard as Andre, pushing him around, walking quick in steep, dizzying circles, Virgil’s eyes intense and boiling. It was a performance, but the genius of Virgil was knowing that it was good for Andre to perform like this. He was young and needed a hard workout with only three days before the fight. Over the loudspeakers, there was a long drum solo on the jazz jam and Andre and Virgil slipped into the rhythm, probably without even noticing.
To cool down, Andre stripped off his shirt and skipped rope, which energized the female attention in the crowd. He skipped effortlessly in the blazing heat, muscled and sleek. He wasn’t bothered by the crowd—his gracefulness extends in that direction. He plays to it without uneasiness or ego. He stayed onstage until he was ready to leave and said a few words into the microphone without faltering, just that Memphis had given him the key to the city and now Memphis was his second home. He existed in a state of grace.
Antonio Tarver was doing his workout when we left, and Buddy McGirt, a three-time world champion and now a great trainer, was holding pads for him with his flip-flops on, barely moving around the ring at all. Compared to the frenetic dance that Virgil had led Andre in, it seemed strangely static.
We talked about this in the van on the drive home, Virgil holding forth on why Andre was different, why he was, as Roy Jones had said, a throwback to the golden age of boxing: because Andre had the killer work ethic. It was why Ali and Frazier were still going at it hammer and tongs in the thirteenth and fourteenth rounds of the Thrilla, and why current fighters like Tarver and Johnson (in their first fight) were both exhausted in the ninth and stood in front of each other and didn’t even punch. Neither Tarver nor Johnson would even be near the level of Holyfield if he were still around as the light heavyweight champion. He would have been too talented for Johnson and too hardworking for Tarver. “Tommy Hearns was only a slightly above average fighter, but he would put himself through such a hellish camp that he could put things on you,” said Virgil, talking to Andre. That may have been true, but Hearns seemed to me to have been pretty talented, with his big right hand.
“They can’t do what you do,” Virgil said, encompassing all current fighters, and Andre listened impassively, staring out the window. Part of what a trainer does is manage his fighter’s mind—more than any other sport, the trainer controls his athlete’s perception of the world and of himself.
We bought an electronic scale. Andre planned on having a “flush” later that night; he would fill the tub with ice water to flush the lactic acid out of his system, and then get a rubdown. It was a trick he’d learned in the Olympic camp.
We ate a little at the hotel and then walked in the turgid night, bugs swarming in the pools of light and everywhere the thrum of the freeway and hum of wires and planes and technology.
The next morning, I sat down with Gabriel Ruelas for an interview. Don Clark wanted to tag along; he had seen the fight where Jimmy García died and wanted to hear what Gabe would say. Gabe was eager to talk to me, he wanted to talk. He knew that despite all his world championships and great fights, what everyone always wanted to know about was Jimmy García.
“There’s an article you should read,” he said, “‘Dream of Life, Dream of Death,’” by Gary Smith for Sports Illustrated in ’95. I have a lot written about me, but this one is very different. The best thing about me, it gave me chills. He really touched me.” I have since read it, and it is a great piece of boxing writing, and an excellent look into the kind of man that Gabriel Ruelas is.
The short version is that Gabriel Ruelas, the WBC super-feather-weight champion, fought Jimmy García, the Colombian champ, in 1995, and after the fight García went into a coma and died three weeks later. Ruelas was the heavy favorite going in and outclassed García for the whole fight but never managed to put him away, and García’s corner—his father and brother—kept sending him in for more punishment. If we look at boxing deaths the way we look at firefighting deaths, where we look for common denominators of “tragedy” fires, one of the common factors of “tragedy” boxing matches is the father as cornerman—strange, frightening, but true. Also, García had taken a bad beating six months earlier, from Genaro Hernandez.
There was a certain amount of inevitability to the conversation. Gabe had made telling the story a part of his life—it was part of his identity now, thrust upon him by the circumstances of the world. He and Jimmy were tied together forever; he would never be free from the onus. He knew that everyone knew, that they were thinking about it when they looked at him, and they had questions, even though some were too polite to ask. They came like me and Don, under the guise of being journalists. Gabe explained it this way: “In order for me to move on, I had to make it part of my life—I thought maybe I could get away and put it behind me, but I can’t. So I say to people, ‘Don’t worry about it, it’s okay,’ when I see them bump their friends to tell them not to talk…. Sometimes peopleare rude, they ask, ‘Are you the one who killed that guy?’ and if they are very uneducated, they say to me, ‘How does it feel to kill a man?’ But they are just uneducated, you can’t get mad.”
It was an interesting choice of words, as Ruelas was from a part of Mexico in the mountains near Guadalajara where there was nothing, no stores, no roads—“If you ate it, you either caught it or grew it”—and Gabe grew up uneducated in a way that few in the world still do. There were no clocks; he used the sun to tell time. “We didn’t know any better, so it was great, we were beautiful. I learned to appreciate everything. We were illegals, crossing the border without green cards, and a guard stopped me, but he had just seen me fight and asked for my autograph…. We made something of ourselves, my brother and me.” He and his brother both had excellent careers with the Goossens. They had been dirt-poor boys selling candy before they found boxing, and they were called the “Candy Kids.”
Gabe looked at me across the table, his eyes soft and large behind his glasses, his voice quiet. Boxing writers never want to write about someone being punchy. Listen to Joe Frazier talk, to Thomas Hearns talk. Young fighters whisper it. Andre muttered it to me about Gabriel: “He ain’t right.” It’s a scientific fact but one that everyone in the game wants to avoid thinking about: the price of fighting. The slurred speech, called cotton mouth, the slow encroachment of dementia pugilistica. Writers avoid it when talking about their heroes. (I smoothed out Gabe’s dialogue here, granted him an eloquence and clarity that perhaps he didn’t have.) It can happen from one fight, from one concussion, maybe