Gordon Marino
While boxing may have seeped to the bottom of the back pages of the sports section, it still provides some of the most potent metaphors for capturing the hurly-burly of life. We encourage those who have absorbed a blow “to get up off the canvas” and praise them for refusing to “throw in the towel.” A symbol of surrender in the stylized war that is the prize ring, throwing in the towel is a gesture that goes back to mid-nineteenth-century days of bare-knuckle fighting when a combatant’s corner, judging their man to be beaten and in danger, conceded defeat by flinging in the sponge used to wipe a fighter’s face.
One of the last and most famous of the bare-knuckle fights took place in July 1889 in Mississippi, when John L. Sullivan and Jake Kilrain beat each other about the head and body for over two hours in 108-degree heat. Sullivan began vomiting in the forty-fourth round, but he somehow regained control of fight. A ringside doctor informed Kilrain’s seconds that their man might perish if he continued, so his trainer tossed in the sponge. In time, the towel would come to replace the sponge as the flag of surrender. After watching his man being humiliated and unmercifully thrashed by Jack Johnson for fourteen rounds in their 1910 bout, Bob Armstrong, trainer of “Great White Hope” Jim Jeffries, flung in the towel. Max Schmeling’s trainer, Max Machon, did the same when Joe Louis knocked his fighter down for the third time in the first frame of their historic 1938 rematch. At the time, throwing in the towel was not a recognized way of stopping a contest, so referee Art Donovan kicked the towel away and continued counting before recognizing that Schmeling was, indeed, done.
Even outside the ring, as a mentor in a world that constantly prattles about the all-importance of “having a dream” and “never giving up,” it sometimes happens that the caring course of action is to help someone throw in the towel, even when that person is on a quest at the core of his or her identity. As a very slow Division I receiver, I was nailed to the dream of making it to the Elysian fields of the NFL. When that, of course, didn’t happen, I felt distraught and worthless, and many disturbing behaviors ensued. I wish I had had someone in my corner to sit me down for a talk.
Few people have had the experience of literally throwing in the towel. Unfortunately I have. It felt like a left hook to the liver when I threw in the towel on Vicente Alfaro.
*
“Don’t do it, Gordon. They’ll break your heart!” That was the counsel Angelo Dundee offered when I confided to him that I was going to manage and train a professional fighter. Angelo had a prodigious capacity for friendship. After I interviewed him for a fitness magazine piece, we started chatting a few times a week about boxing, family, old times, our Italian heritage, good restaurants, whatever. He was always jabbing and japing; it was rare for him to take on a somber tone, but there was nothing jocular when he told me to stick with the Golden Gloves amateurs I had been coaching for decades and stay away from the pros.
One October afternoon, when I was teaching a boxing basics class to middle schoolers at the Y, a diminutive, athletically built Latino guy in his twenties pushed through the heavy armory door. Hands in his jacket pockets, he stood off to the side, his eyes fixed on us as we worked through jab drills on the mitts. He looked like a fighter, but I figured he was there to tell me about a cousin who wanted, or more probably, imagined he wanted to get in the ring.
At the end of the session, the twenty-something guy slid through the gaggle of kids and with a thick Mexican accent blurted, “Hey. You want to train me? I am Vicente Alfaro.” Huh? At the time, his English was as feeble and as halting as my Spanish, but he managed to explain that he’d had a lot of amateur fights in Mexico and that he had a 4–0 record as professional.
Because of my exotic boxing/professor mix, I had received some local ink, enough so that my heavyweight ego would have liked to imagine that it was my reputation that lured Vicente to the Y. But it is more likely that he was just frustrated with his largely absent manager-trainer, Oscar Ortega (as I will call him), who lived about fifty miles away and worked on the railroad. Vicente complained that he never saw Ortega until a few days before his fights, and that Ortega was taking more than his fair share of Vicente’s purses.
The next day, we started working together in the half-finished basement of a local Mexican deli. We lived in rural Minnesota, an hour from the boxing dens in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul. From the first bell of our relationship, then, I knew that between our location and work schedules, getting sparring was going to be a major problem. Nobody in town was in Vicente’s universe of boxing abilities.
Day by day, pieces of Vicente’s fistic history emerged. I learned that his father, a former pro, had trained him back in Mexico City since the age of six. I also came to understand that upon coming to the states he took an eight-year layoff from the ring, which ended when Ortega just happened to walk by and catch sight of Vicente in a garage hitting the heavy bag. Ortega could see that Vicente knew how to use his hands and convinced him to compete again. In his first and only amateur competition in the United States, Vicente won the bantamweight belt at the Ringside Tournament, a national competition.
Ortega immediately convinced him to begin punching for dollars. For his pro debut, Vicente traveled to Detroit on a week’s notice to take on former Olympian Ron Silas. As would become the rule, Vicente was fighting in the other guy’s hometown. He was supposed to lose. He dropped jaws ringside by putting Silas on the canvas and copping a unanimous decision.
I used to sneer when I watched someone fighting on television who hadn’t been in the ring in a couple of years. “Must be laziness or fear,” I used to think. But that was before I personally learned how hard it was to get reasonable matchups; unless, of course, you are a manager with pockets sufficiently deep to get your man on a card by paying the purses and expenses for both your fighter and his opponent. Tyson’s team did just that when Iron Mike was clambering up the boxing ladder.
I couldn’t bankroll Vicente’s career. All I could do was beg and make nice with local promoters. But that was no abracadabra. Vicente’s best fighting weight was 118. There were not a lot of small guys in Minnesota, and by the time that we hooked up, he had already muted the marketability of three local stars. No one below 126 pounds wanted anything to do with him.
After a year with only one bout, Vicente was offered a fight in California with Golden Boy prospect Manuel “Tino” Avila. Usually such tenders came with only a week or maybe ten days’ notice, but this time he would have a month to prepare. We, or rather Vicente, would be exchanging leather with “Tino” in his hometown of Fairfield, California. Avila was 8–0, but he had yet to match up against anyone with a winning record. More importantly, he didn’t seem to be a big banger. Even against weak opposition, he had notched only one knockout. The rule that I established with myself and we agreed upon was that I would never put Vicente in a bout I didn’t think he could win. In his most recent tussle, he had beaten Gary Eyer, who was also 8–0, in his hometown of Duluth. Judging from the YouTube videos, it seemed plausible to think that he could pull off another surprise with Avila.
Although boxing was in Vicente’s DNA, he was not one to fight for glory or fun. He was always in good condition, but he had no interest in working out until he had a contract. He took pride in his craft. He didn’t drink or even have a sweet tooth; he husbanded his energies and the money mattered. He was trying to raise a family on a nine-dollar-an-hour wage as a factory worker. The promoter was offering $2,500 plus expenses, including the cost of the numerous medical exams demanded by the California State Athletic Commission. There was one more perk. The fight would be aired on Telemundo. Vicente’s father, whom he had not seen in almost a decade, and in all likelihood might never see again, would be able to watch his son box on the tube. So, there we were on a late August night in a small-but-packed arena in central California.
*
On the circuit in professional boxing there are two dressing rooms: one for the favorites, the “A side” fighters, and another for the “B siders,” those who, like Vicente, were brought in as fodder. We were stationed a floor below the ring level in a men’s room turned locker room. It was like being in the anteroom of the Roman Colosseum. The building was vibrating from the noise. You could hear the mad roar of the crowd, fans erupting and stomping their feet, as some near-decapitating blow landed. One after another, our dressing room comrades came skulking back panting and in sullen defeat.
A lanky welterweight with a long angry gash over his eye pushed through the door and dropped into a folding chair. Shaking his head, he repeated, “I have to train harder, have to get back to work.” He was already a veteran of two dozen fights. It didn’t matter how much he trained; he was never going beyond opponent status.
The next victim, a short, stocky light heavyweight who also competed in mixed martial arts (MMA), returned with a huge welt on his side. Relieved to be done with his work, he was laughing, “I think that motherfucker broke my rib!” He and his trainer had packed some Coors in their ice bucket and were popping them open. They laughed the beating off and talked of getting an MMA booking when his rib healed.
At least at the local level, there are a lot of MMA fighters who cross over into boxing these days. In general, they are as comfortable in violence as they are on their living room couches. And unlike boxers, they don’t have their ego eggs in the basket of staying undefeated. They are not haunted by the terror of a loss. Perhaps as a result of the trickle-down effects of Floyd Mayweather’s mentality, many professional boxers begin with an obsession about maintaining an unblemished record. Instead of thinking of each bout as a session in which they will learn something new about themselves and their craft, boxers imagine that a defeat will detract from their paydays. But in the cage, even the best fighters have losses and often a number of them. Also, while a boxer can’t really quit when he is getting throttled and is hopelessly behind, MMA combatants can tap out honorably rather than endure the indignity of being counted out. The relaxed mindset of MMA fighters on boxing cards can sometimes translate into a big punch and an upset, but not on this night. It hadn’t worked out that way for the jovial gladiator who had just pushed through the door and plopped down next to Vicente.
We were about forty-five minutes out from fight time. Vicente was playing with his iPod, joking with the other boxers. I was grinding my teeth. To me, he seemed too loose. I was waiting for him to become alert, to confront his fears and get his fight face on. But I was not about to begin playing Cus D’Amato in the hour before a big bout.
Vicente did not cut easily, but it did not take much to get the faucet of his nose pouring. Even during sparring, when his nose gushed, he would panic because he felt like he couldn’t breathe. Angelo, who was an expert cutman, had tried to pass on some of his first-aid knowledge to me. Use pressure. Hold one nostril closed. Apply Adrenalin. But my confidence in my EMT abilities was nil. When we signed the contracts, I had insisted that the promoter provide a cutman who would also wrap Vicente’s hands. The guy was an old pro whom I vaguely recognized from television, Jessie Estrella (as I will call him).
Maybe in his mid-fifties, Jessie was a short, powerfully built Mexican with steely hair. For years, he had been running a local gym. I had spent a good deal of the day before with him as we shuttled Vicente from one medical test to the next. Almost the entire time, Jessie blustered about his George Foreman–like punching prowess. He boasted about having knocked this guy out in the ring and that gang leader out in the street. When Jessie was looking the other way, Vicente rolled his dark eyes, shook his head, and suppressed a laugh. On edge as I was, Jessie jangled my nerves enough that there was a part of me that had an impulse to test him. But he was my partner for this night, and he knew his boxing.
About forty minutes before we were scheduled for the lion’s den, Jessie came in to wrap Vicente’s hands. For many fighters, this is when their nerves bubble up. I once had a 147-pounder in a Golden Gloves tournament who had me wrap the same hand three times. I became exasperated and pulled some faces. He fractured his thumb in the fight. A few weeks later, one of my other fighters confided that my welterweight thought I had left his thumb exposed on purpose because I was mad at him. Vicente, who à la Manny Pacquiao usually wrapped his own paws, was happy with Jessie’s handiwork.
*
When we stepped into the ring, Avila, who was four inches taller and seven years younger than my fighter, now looked to be about ten pounds heavier. Boxers weigh in the day before a bout but in the next twenty-four hours can easily pack on pounds. The ring seemed as small as a closet, which should have been to our advantage, at least based on my mistaken assumption that Vicente would be the physically stronger of the two and the harder puncher.
Whenever I worked the corner in the amateurs, I was always clad in a black Fifth Street Gym T-shirt that Angelo bequeathed to me. I wore it only for fights. I also kept a boxing glove keychain in my pocket that Angelo had inscribed, “To my good friend Gordon, Angelo.” It was like a diluted form of ancestor worship. Years ago, students were wearing bracelets with the letters WWJD—what would Jesus do? On fight nights, I was mentally wearing an amulet with the initials WWAD—what would Angelo do? As the minutes slowed and jerked toward fight time, I tried to channel my late friend, praying and thinking, “I can handle anything, but please don’t put me in a position where I have to think about stopping the action, about ‘throwing in the towel.’”
Just when Vicente was getting gloved up, I had gone to ask the promoter about something. While I was gone, the commission guy gave my second the wrong-sized gloves. Because I was as nervous as a fighter in his debut, I hadn’t checked them. Worse yet, I hadn’t even glimpsed the extra heft when we were warming up on the mitts. Only after we climbed into the ring did one of the judges notice that Vicente’s mitts were ten ounces instead of the appointed eight ounces for weights below 147 pounds.
When the glove glitch was discovered, we were already in the ring and on the air. We remained under the klieg lights for the five minutes it took to exchange gloves and re-tape. The television crew was irate. Vicente, who was wearing a ridiculously oversized sombrero that kept falling off, was embarrassed but kibitzing and taking pictures with ringside fans. He was driving me crazy. I wanted him to stay focused, but it wasn’t his fault that his trainer couldn’t tell the difference between ten- and eight-ounce gloves. Tino was glaring with irritation, and I was giving myself instructions not to torture myself about the mishap. Silently, I kept repeating, “This is not about you. This is not about you. It is about Vicente.” It may have been the best advice I gave all night.
Vicente was tight in the first stanza. He was backing straight up, and when he moved forward he was squared. He bent so far forward that he was pushing his punches. He wasn’t snapping his left. Meanwhile, Tino was sticking him with hard jabs down the middle. About two minutes in, Tino connected with a short left hook to the head that knocked Vicente off balance and shook him out of attack mode for the rest of the round. When he came back to the corner, I asked Vicente how he was feeling.
“Fine . . . fine,” he assured me. “I’m fine.” I toweled him off a little, bent in low, and said, “Listen. We only have six rounds. This is his hometown. You know what that means. Pick it up. Let your hands go. When you get inside, stay there.”
It is elementary. The shorter opponent has the advantage at close quarters. After all, it is hard for the taller opponent to get leverage and punch down. And when you tower above your opponent, you can’t go to the body without exposing your chin. I was prodding Vicente to move his head, like Joe Frazier against Muhammad Ali. I wanted him to come in behind his jab, break the perimeter, and get underneath Tino’s long arms. At the same time, he needed to keep that little bit of cushion, that little bit of space required for punching room. In order to do this, Vicente had to keep from pitching forward, and also to prevent Tino from doing the octopus move—grabbing him and tying him up.
In round two, there were some rays of hope, even though Vicente suffered a flash knockdown on what looked to be a slip. He caught a jab at the same time his feet got tangled up, and his knee hit the canvas. He wasn’t hurt, but it meant at least a 10–8 round for Tino, which quickly sparked a sense of desperation in our corner. Vicente needed to put some pain in Tino’s in-box fast.
Boxers practice different moves and combinations in the gym, but what works on the bag or in sparring does not always make it past the rehearsal phase. For example, Wladimir Klitschko is an NBA-sized six feet seven. Almost all of his opponents get low and try to get inside on him. One of the ways to checkmate that strategy is to bend that back knee and zing a right uppercut as the opponent is leaning in. Klitschko’s trainer, Emanuel Steward, once told me that Wladimir had been working on that punch for years and had no trouble letting it fly in sparring sessions. But come fight night, he invariably left the uppercut in the tool chest.
In training, Vicente and I had been working on a fistic concoction. The plan was to stab a couple of hard jabs to the solar plexus then go low, load up the legs, feint the jab to the body, and snap a hard right to the head and punctuate it with a left hook. Ideally, your opponent should be trying to step in with a right hand to counter against the jab to the body, and then, at least theoretically speaking, you have the combined force of your right hand and his forward momentum.
Vicente possessed a straight and hard jab to the body. Tino had a high guard, and in the second stanza Vicente was able to lance him with the body jab. Then, as planned, he dipped, feinted the jab, and caught Tino square with the right on the chin. With renewed hope, I flew off the stool, yelling eso, eso! The bad news: Vicente failed to bring the hook behind it. The worse news: it was Vicente’s best right, and, while Tino acknowledged the shot with an annoyed look and a step backward, he was neither wobbled nor flustered.
Despite all the conditioning, the sixty rounds of sparring, the hundreds of uphill sprints, adrenaline was taking a big bite out of Vicente’s stamina. In the corner, after the second round, I put my hand on his legs, looked intently into his eyes, and exhorted, “Use the jab. Get inside and let your hands go. Two combinations in a row! This is the opportunity of a lifetime. Give me everything for the next twelve minutes.” “OK. OK,” he answered with quiet purpose. But it wasn’t OK. This wasn’t the movies. Tino was gaining the momentum of confidence and starting to time solid rights. The stress of being on television and having to cope with this bigger and younger fighter was steadily wearing Vicente down. He was breathing hard, pushing his blows, feather punching. That wasn’t the fighter I knew.
A minute into the third, Tino landed a left-right combination. It was a classic. Silver beads of perspiration flew, the crowd exploded with glee, and as Vicente’s body recoiled his knees hit the canvas. He took some deep breaths as the referee gave him an eight count. I swung around the ring post to catch a glimpse of his eyes. He looked alert and in something less than deep distress. He stood up, the ref wiped off his gloves, and Vicente was back in the fray, bravely trying to work to Tino’s body, but there was nothing on his shots.
Amid the din, Jessie came over and whispered, “Throw in the towel; this kid is too strong and he is too tired.” I was shocked. Vicente was losing, but he was making a fight of it. “He can make it to the end of the round. I’ll see how he is,” I said without looking away. But just then another shot thudded against Vicente’s forehead. I could see that both his eyes were swollen and he was breathing through his mouth, a sure sign of exhaustion. Like sweat, the thought was starting to drip, “There are three rounds to go—and no chance of winning.” In the world of the ring, there is endless chatter about never quitting. Throwing in the towel is a radical move, almost taboo. Boxers are encouraged to think of themselves as warriors, and warriors don’t surrender or have someone surrender for them. After Eddie Futch, who had seen four fighters die in the ring, stopped the third Ali versus Frazier fight, Frazier was so irate that he barely spoke to Futch for the next twenty years. If only to shield his ego, you want your fighter to finish on his feet, no matter how mangled his face might be.
Jessie was emphatic, “I worked with the other kid. I’m telling you. He’s too strong. Your guy has nothing tonight. Don’t let him get hurt.” Jessie’s last sentence grabbed me by the Adam’s apple. As though I was getting ready to pull the lever on the electric chair, I stood up and clutched the white towel, watching, waiting, hoping that I could put it down. Then another gloved fist came crashing through the gate. Sentences, like news bulletins, were lighting up behind my brows: “He doesn’t have health insurance. He has a family.” Robot-like I stood up and tossed the white cloth into the night and over the ropes. Just as I let it go Vicente landed a hard jab. It took about a half-second for that towel to shift the scene, but fast as a dream, the third man jumped between them and the frenzied action screeched to a halt. There was a moment of perplexed silence in the arena, and then the howls and boos cascaded down toward the ring. The crowd was in a collective dudgeon for being cheated out of the coup de grâce. Vicente was puzzled and seemed to be asking the ref what happened. When he figured out that I stopped the fight, he came back to the corner with his arms extended as though crucified. His face squinched up like a ten-year-old boy’s. He yelled, “What? What are you doing? I can’t believe it!” He kept shaking his head in disappointment as though the man who had been with him five to six days a week for the last two years had suddenly put a shiv in his back. Maybe I had; I really didn’t know.
Tino, who was broody to begin with, felt so cheated that he wouldn’t even come over to shake hands. While I was pulling Vicente’s gloves off, the ref slid over and quietly told me, “Brilliant stoppage.” A few minutes later, the doctor echoed the same. Easy for them to say. Right or wrong, I would never have halted the fight at that point had it not been for Jessie’s voice in my ear.
As soon as he finished cutting the tape off Vicente’s hands, Jessie vanished. His son was in the next fight, the main event. Weeks later, I started wondering whether Jessie had pressured me to stop the fight simply because he wanted to get back to the dressing room to warm up his kid. Also, Jessie was working for the promoter. Tino was a prospect without many knockouts on his resume. Thanks in part to Jessie, Tino got one that night. Did the philosophy professor/cornerman get jobbed? Maybe so, but it wasn’t about me.
*
In boxing, at least in this country, whenever a fighter gets trounced but takes a brutal beating, people slap him on the shoulder and offer praise for having a certain part of the male anatomy. It is as though the crowd gets its red badge of courage with the fighter’s blood. Oddly enough, boxing people love to quote Nietzsche: “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” Not always so. I have been around boxing long enough to know that those hurricane blows can shake the hinges off the world behind the brows. Muhammad Ali is a monument to the human spirit and the perils of the gloved game, but he is not a rarity. Go to the annual reunion at the International Boxing Hall of Fame and it can seem like a kindergarten; so many of the old fighters with brains and memories short-circuited, a pocketful of mumbles.
Mike Tyson once told me that when things get really bad, it is better for the corner to throw in the towel. As Tyson explained, you not only save your fighter’s health but his ego. And the ego is essential in boxing. Tyson said, “After a few days, your fighter will be blaming you for the stoppage. He’ll be telling himself and everyone else that he could have won, if it hadn’t been for you. And that’s what you want him to think.” Maybe so, but on this Saturday night, we were a few days away from those few days.
After a quick check-in with the doctor, we were alone and I was holding ice packs to both of Vicente’s swollen eyes. He wasn’t looking at me. He was fuming. There were not many chances at being center stage for Vicente. What dreams there were drifted around the brightly lit squared circle to which he had been faithfully married for twenty-plus years. And now?
I winced as I thought of Vicente’s father in Mexico watching the fight in disgust, the father who was so proud that his son in the States was fighting on television. There was a long uncomfortable silence, and then I all but whispered, “I love you, man, you’re family. I couldn’t let you get hurt.” At first Vicente remained stiff and wordless. Then his shoulders relaxed and, choking back tears, he muttered, “Entiendo, entiendo, I know, I know.”