The absurdity of Duke’s “plan” wouldn’t leave me. At every moment I felt a little like laughing and a little like quitting. What were any of us going to get out of pursuing him at this stage? Paul wasn’t a fool, and neither was Karen. Still... if Garrett could convince our team, with a straight face, that this stunt was the right move, and what’s more, if Freddie could actually pull it off—I’d known he was powerful, but surely there were limits—then what grounds did I have for protest? Not that I necessarily wanted such grounds, not all the time.
While the Chicago apartment remained in his hands for now, Duke had come to stay in New York with Bryan, even after his old friend’s mother had returned. Here he was sheltered from the sportswriters of Chicago, who’d been hounding him from the start, and from his parents, too, whom Bryan’s mother kept bringing up. How long had it been since she’d seen Sheila and Dante? And how were they all doing now in Chicago?
Before any fight was made or even on the horizon, Duke embarked on the brutal training regimen of a boxer in camp, far more vigorous than anything football players endure. Who would train this hard on a lark? I wondered. He must have been serious in some way about his fantasy. In any case, I thought, training would keep him in football shape for whenever the tryout eventually came, post-suspension. It could only give him confidence. But what if Freddie, by some miracle, did figure something out, and somebody bit because of Duke’s 14-1 amateur record, and moreover, because of all my pieces around town, which guaranteed a certain interest, whether it was rooted in sports, spectacle, or would-be celebrity schadenfreude? In that case, staying in New York really did feel like Duke’s only option. It was here, I knew, where he’d first boxed, at the downtown gym he and his older brother used to frequent, together with friends from families with far less support. And it was here, I would learn, that he met Anton, a fighter-turned-trainer from Belarus who’d had a small amount of success at welterweight, and who in his retirement had developed a stable of successful amateurs, a few of whom had gone pro and surpassed him handily, winning belts at flyweight and bantamweight. Anton frequently trained immigrants from former Soviet states. His first gym had been in Bay Ridge, but success made a Manhattan branch viable, and that’s where he started training non-Slavs, and, exceptionally, blacks and mestizos who showed first-class promise. Anton had once declared—and Duke remembered it vividly: “I can train you even still.”
One night Duke excitedly called me down to Anton’s Chinatown gym, his spirits lifted by the fact that his suspension hadn’t cost him his place in Garrett’s campaign, or the money that flowed from it. (How much I was never told; enough, I suppose. Garrett was floating everyone around him.) The gym, being wedged between bakeries, had the smell of pork bun hanging over its entryway, and even deep inside, all the way back to the locker rooms, the aroma of roasted meat persisted, though perhaps it had complementary sources within, all the flesh roiled and pummeled there in the rings and on the mats in the broiling heat.
“Most of the great fighters train out west,” Duke said when I met him in one of the physio rooms. “Big Bear, or Oxnard, or LA. Some of them go out to Colorado, for the altitude.” He was straddling a long bench of a light wood polished to a shine, and having his hands wrapped by an older man: Anton, I presumed. The Slav eyed me briefly, his lids half-closed, while rhythmically weaving the cream line of gauze around Duke’s hands, through his fingers, in a pattern he must have mastered decades ago. There was no tentativeness to his movements, even to his redress of small, unavoidable mistakes—an angle that didn’t quite work out, say, given the girth of Duke’s once-broken ring finger, leaving a lump in the coiled tape. He would unwrap the tape at these junctures as gracefully as he’d wrapped it. Duke appeared mesmerized by the weaving, or else he was rehearsing something in his mind, perhaps old lessons Anton had given him about what to do with these wrapped hands in the ring.
“Not too tight,” Duke said.
Anton didn’t acknowledge his charge. He probably retained an idea of how tightly to wrap Duke, from all the times he’d worked with him before, years ago now, when Duke had been pursuing football officially but boxing with friends and gym-mates for the fun of it. Anton sat on a stool astride Duke, his mouth hanging open a little, an unruly crowd of teeth poking out, breathing audibly, just below a wheeze, while boxers and personnel came in and out the gym. Not many people were here. It was very late, near closing; I was surprised the place was open at all. But Duke had wanted some private time with his former mentor, the one who’d first engrained in him the frame of mind he now used on the football field.
“How many times have you wrapped me, you think?”
“Not so much, really. My crew handled it, more than me. You and your brother, the older one. I worried about the big things, they could handle the wrapping. You should have been using the cotton wrap, doing it yourself, with the Velcro, like he did. But you were special. So we didn’t mind taking all the time doing the gauze and tape.”
“Tape was for prospects, champions,” Duke explained. “Allen just didn’t last, he was a wrap man all the way.”
Anton stopped for a moment and closed his mouth. “Why don’t you sit?” he said, I assumed to me, as I was the only one standing nearby. He hadn’t asked my name, and Duke hadn’t bothered to introduce me, perhaps knowing his old trainer would have no interest in my kind. The only thing that could entice him to speak to a stranger was the look of a prospect—something I decidedly lacked. He resumed his wrapping, more quickly, though, with the foundation in place. Duke’s dark fists had mostly disappeared in white.
“Your brother was not created for sports,” Anton said slowly. “That’s okay.”
“You can say it if you want, Anton. He’s a bitch. I’m older now. That’s okay.”
The trainer looked up at his old student as he finished the job. “You don’t have to say that. You shouldn’t say that.” He got up and brought a pair of gloves back with him. “And you shouldn’t say you aren’t great—even when you aren’t. You see? Or when you’re doing the thing you have no business doing.” Duke stared at his hands and flexed them, shaking his head. Anton shook his own in response. “Or helping the one you shouldn’t,” he said with some regret, his gravelly voice here clarifying a bit because it was said so softly, at the only volume that didn’t strain it. Duke stuck up each of his hands as if in surrender, and Anton thrust a red leather bulb onto each of them. He laced and taped them at the wrist, while through the window in the door I could see others gathering their stuff in duffel bags and leaving with reddened faces, looking good and beaten.
It was almost midnight when we three reached the floor, and by then the place was nearly empty, with only Anton’s staff remaining. If, in the back of the gym, white and green predominated, out here it was black and red. The bags along the northern edge, hanging in darkness, and the ropes of the last illuminated ring, both appeared black, while red was all around, and not just on beaten faces. The gloves, Duke’s shorts, and the canvas itself were all strategically crimson. No-one could see, then, when fighters took off their headgear, and sometimes even the gloves, going with bare knuckles for the off-the-book matches of the lesser fighters—the ones who for whatever reason, whether time, commitment, or talent, were never going to make it on the circuit, amateur or pro—no-one could see just how much blood was being spilled. It gave even the foolish courage, this ignorance. It also probably meant you didn’t have to clean it up quite as quickly, even for the routine cuts and bloody noses headgear couldn’t protect you from. I bent down to the canvas and thought I detected streaks of red that weren’t quite the same as the rest. How many reds, how many bloods, were painted here? Anton’s was notorious for these out-of-hours matches, late into the night and early morning. The boxers could make half their money from the bets Anton’s Belarusian friends placed on their fights. As for the other half: factory work, construction, drugs, and theft usually sufficed.
The dead hush around the paraphernalia of boxing, the speed and heavy bags, the mitts scattered about, the stacks of towels, the clean bleached ones and the ones in the other bucket that I could see were, yes, somewhat redder, left me sick. Places like this were meant to throb and thrum, as when I’d first entered, half the people throwing punches and the other half dodging them. Now it was just Duke. He hopped up on the ring’s apron in a heather T-shirt with the sleeves chopped, before ducking under the ropes. I’d thought, when he was on the football field, that at times he moved like a man of combat sports, someone who sought out collisions. I could see why now, as he shadowboxed in his headgear, the way he crouched down low, the sense of energy on the brink of surging forward, upward.
“So, when I put this guy on his ass,” he called down to me, ringside, “you’re going to remember it all? Where’s your pad?”
“Probably not everything.”
“Just what matters—is that it?” He shook his head and tapped the top rope with his glove, as if tussling my hair from a distance.
I smiled, but really I was thinking of the dance of gauze I’d just witnessed, the solemnity in Duke’s face twinned to his mentor’s regret. Or could I draw the fist blown up so big you could only see Anton’s hands circling Duke’s, and nothing else? Maybe I’d already gotten all I needed tonight, and Duke hadn’t even thrown a punch.
From the locker-rooms several men came our way, including a gangly shirtless one gloved in white. When they reached us, Anton nodded to the boxer—Sasha, it turned out—who humbly offered his gloves to the trainer. They went together to the ring and Anton ably pulled down the top rope for the fighter to enter. I ended up sitting beside Anton in the crooked row of blue folding chairs, but still he seemed to think speaking with me was pointless, or even rude. I admired his ways and kept as quiet as he did, though I felt oddly comfortable next to him. If he’d gotten up to sit somewhere else, I’m quite sure I would have placed myself by his side again without a second thought. Where better to observe the sparring than from a veteran’s point-of-view? He would sit only where he could diagnose the most.
Sasha was an inch taller than Duke, with limbs that were obviously longer: the bigger man, as they say, even if he weighed the same. The two men paced around the ring in a circle, stretching their jaws and paying no mind to each other. Seeing them both with mouths gaping—here was another image I would have to file away. Into these maws were thrust mouthpieces by two young men who could have easily been Anton’s sons or nephews; they had the angular features I imagined Anton possessing before he’d been softened up by fists and spirits. Sasha began shaking out his limbs perfunctorily, looking almost bored. He was a sparring partner for contenders; his only use was as a launching pad for others’ careers—even Duke’s, come to think of it.
Several of the boys running around, mostly young white men, along with a couple of Puerto Ricans, descended upon our makeshift row of seats. Two of them crouched near the ground on one knee, as if ready to sprint at Anton’s call. The fighters finished wriggling, the sweat spraying off their bodies gradually diminished to nothing. Finally they faced each other. Anton waved his hands at them, as a conductor might at his orchestra, but with a curious turn of the head, as if he wanted to get this over with. He didn’t seem convinced about Duke’s idea of re-entering his sport. Maybe he’d even been insulted by it, and he was hoping Sasha could disabuse the other man of his delusions.
There and then, the two cruiserweights metamorphosed into predators. I knew one of the bodies well by now, its compactness and density, with no obvious markers of grace to it, but a basic strength always radiating. The other, shifting into his fighting stance, evidently had such different lines and points of balance. Sasha was a man for the shoulder roll, or the turtle, as it was sometimes called. It looked odd to me to see a white man of such height do it. Slavs typically fought like tanks, using granite jabs and a relatively simple defense: a high guard, fists just to the sides of the eyes. Anton must have picked up a few of these tricks from the blacks he’d trained. They of course were associated not with the robotic quality of Eastern Bloc fighters, but with elusiveness, that word used on the football field just as it was in the ring. Duke, on the turf, had this quality in spades, but now on the canvas he was looking less slick, standing squarely and plodding around flat-footed, though admittedly in a more professional posture than I’d expected when he’d first gotten in the ring.
I’d once liked boxing very much as a child, its being the one sport Ty and I could get equally excited about. Seeing two men, especially journeymen, generally with police records the commentators relished excavating, face off on the undercard in a half-empty arena, effectively fighting for their supper, was an irreducibly powerful experience, however unconscionable it may have also been. Though Duke’s case was different in vital respects, it had some of the desperation that could make boxing so compelling: not the easy flash of champions, but the grubby chutzpah of unknowns.
Sasha easily rolled the light jabs Duke probed him with, making himself into a small target by refusing to square up. Soon he was countering with his own jab, long and crooked and hard to read. Duke kept looking down at me, right in between his failed salvos, and especially after being caught flush by increasingly heavy shots. Anton didn’t appear as displeased as I’d expected him to; rather, he wore a stoical expression of inevitability. I’d learn later that Sasha, remarkably, was just seventeen, an up-and-comer who might someday do damage, but not yet. Duke was the stronger of the two, with more snap on his punches, but his timing had atrophied since his heyday in the ring. His balance was weak, too; several times, on soft checks by Sasha, his gloves ended up touching the canvas: a scored knockdown in a real match, even if no damage had been done. He’d need to fight on the inside to make any headway: Sasha was simply too long.
“Ten seconds!” yelled a tiny Puerto Rican holding an old circular stopwatch of a style I’d seen only in movies. Duke rifled off a combination that mostly missed and soon after the boy screamed, “Round one,” signaling its end. Duke had spent the first frame eating Sasha’s fists; nothing huge, mostly jabs, but still.
In the second round, Duke changed things up and started crashing his way forward. When Sasha backed him up with that long jab, Duke would wing wild hooks at him, abandoning all his lessons, perhaps sensing there was no other way to connect. Sasha got his right hand on track, rocking Duke with sharp hooks to the body that made him wince and hunch forward, and then several uppercuts right on his exposed chin. If nothing else, Anton was seeing that Duke could still take a punch. The two whites next to Anton were speaking in his ear at this point and yelling a few words in Russian at their kin.
After a long while, Duke managed to land a telling punch—directly to the Slav’s throat. Anton had to stop things briefly so that one of the boys could replace Sasha’s mouthpiece; he’d involuntarily spat it out. Yet not long after that came a wonderfully clean liver shot from Sasha that pushed Duke back into the ropes and, after a short delay, utterly disabled him. Sasha got off a combo upstairs while Duke was clutching his side. It dropped Duke to one knee; his eyes shut in terrible pain. Sasha was close to giving him an overhand right you felt would send him straight through the canvas when Anton waved it off, muttering something to the boys. They went to tend to the fighters while clearly favoring Sasha. Anton got up slowly, gingerly. Duke watched him limp off—I hadn’t noticed Anton limping before—and then looked at me as his gloves were undone by the boys.
I might have done something with this, the wincing, faraway Duke, sizing up Anton’s disgust or disappointment, but still I found more interest in those hands. At the moment, they were being cut free, but I was thinking of the past, the kinetic geometry of the gauze as those fists were dressed for combat, and the grimly paternal face of Anton, such a contrast to Garrett’s, preparing a former protégé for a fight he shouldn’t really take.
Duke ignored Anton, of course. In the weeks that followed he kept on training—and improving, actually, regaining some of his form and technique. It still wasn’t enough to change Anton’s mind, after what he’d seen against Sasha. So Yuri, a surrogate from Anton’s clan, took over the training. Duke, for various reasons, was now a talented sideshow in New York, regularly on the sports pages of the Post and the Daily News, even the front page, and there were calls, meant mostly as provocations, for the floundering Giants to work Duke out. Freddie apparently was burning through his Rolodex, soliciting every contact he had—and he had some of the best—to get his man in as a late substitution for any fight with any champion, near-champion, would-be champion, or former champion in the tri-state area, not to mention Vegas. Waiting for someone to fail, to get hurt, is what opportunity in sports came down to, it didn’t matter which sport.
Each time I heard that Freddie had come up short again in his quest, the viability of Garrett’s project seemed that much more far-fetched to me. Yet even if Duke’s scheme came to nothing, as it probably should, it was still a thought that Duke had had, wasn’t it? We all knew that the things that never happened for us counted for a lot. In consumer life, it was these other possible selves—they seemed possible enough, anyway—the ones we lived only in our minds, for which we acquired so much, anxiously, incessantly, searching out stimulation: it was this life, the life, you could say, of delusion, that so often trumped our quotidian existence. What is it that made such a life inauthentic per se? Was there a consumer anywhere who thought, really, that by drinking Bud Light he was any more likely to marry the swimsuit girls from the television spots? Not even Paul’s research, and he hardly had a positive view of humankind, showed any such thing. It was only if you thought that people were more oblivious than they were, that they somehow didn’t realize they were trafficking in magical thinking and convenient, cathartic conflations; or you thought fantasy couldn’t be a legitimate end in itself, a way of life, even; or you were in thrall to the absolute value of truth in human life, instead of seeing it as just one instrument among others—only then did Duke’s scheming have to be beside the point.
Frankly, even if people weren’t aware of their fantasies as fantasies, I didn’t see why anything necessarily had to be amiss with their fictional lives. That’s what Quixote was about. Duke’s idea of boxing his way out of trouble, as though life were some sort of surreal Lifetime movie, was genuinely quixotic, wasn’t it? Was he in on its ludicrousness, though? He was certainly too probing not to have noticed it, at least on occasion (just as one suspects Quixote does). But there were other moments in Duke’s life when no space for reflection was open, like when he was training, down at Anton’s gym, working blisteringly hard on the bags or doing one-armed push-ups to the point of collapse. And, in those times, I don’t think it would have been possible for him to continue without believing in this scheme—which would be to not see it as a scheme at all.
I got the feeling Duke undertook many things in this spirit, probably even football itself, at least in the beginning. He’d said his mother had done the same, in studying sociology as a poor black woman at Illinois State, a less than elite college; and perhaps she’d paid for it somewhat, too. But she’d done it anyway, because that was her fancy. Was it not also how Donald J. Trump became president? On a lark? Larks could lead all sorts of places: to the things Duke was getting up to again back in Chicago, with his friends, the things that had me concerned, and just as much to his tenuous career in football.