Sam Sheridan
Picture the ungentrified boxing gym, with a half-dozen professional fighters working on any given day. Pieces of plywood flooring over concrete, with terraced holes worn through where fighters skip rope, the metronome tick-tick-tick. Bags wound tight with duct tape. Fight posters on every inch of wall space, banners hanging from the high rafters. Older men, of varying hues, watching all day long, ancient eyes. Trainers judge men like horse traders judge horseflesh: slap the withers, check the teeth. The incessant ding of the timer, the call to prayer, the hut hut hut of young black men on the bags, in the ring, in the mirror.
Some afternoons during my workouts, I’d watch an older black heavyweight “work” with two young white men who were paying for training. They were kids, really, maybe seventeen or eighteen, good-sized but soft, beefy, unfinished. Formless faces. The pear-shaped heavyweight, in his forties, had fought pro, some twenty fights, with about an even record. He now taught boxing.
When I saw him teach mitt work, the first thing that popped into my head was That dude should be arrested. In the weeks I saw them work, the kids never learned how to throw a single punch. He never taught them any footwork; he just conditioned them. He worked them relentlessly on the mitts, sometimes without the timer, letting them throw bullshit “combinations” of pitty-pat punches from the hips, from anywhere, flailing away. Uppercuts that started at their knees, and ended in a Seig Heil. As long as their gloves made contact with mitts, from any angle, arms curled or straight, that was fine with him. Then he’d put them on a heavy bag and walk away for a half hour.
The real tragedy was yet to come. The heavyweight would put on his face-saver headgear (like a catcher’s mask) and spar these kids for three or four rounds apiece. And he would absolutely crack on them, just light them up. If they started to press or he got tired, he’d fall back on pro tricks: he’d hold their head and jack them with uppercuts. He’d feint them into immobility, and rip them with body shots and hooks.
It was unreal. These kids would leave the ring, strip off their cruddy borrowed headgear, and smile; the fronts of their T-shirts soaked with so much blood they clung to rolls of fat, belly-button indentations, shiny like a second skin. Like someone had carefully poured blood from a pitcher all over their shirts, too consistent to be convincing if you saw it on film. Probably had their noses broken on at least one occasion. I’ve had my nose broken a few times sparring; you bleed like a stuck pig.
Those poor bastards thought they were learning how to fucking fight. But they weren’t; they were just getting the snot kicked out of them and paying for the privilege. They thought they were learning to be tough, and maybe they were, a little. But mostly they were role-players in this heavyweight’s strange revenge fantasy, while a roomful of trainers averted their eyes. There absolutely was something messed up about it, if anyone cared. It was a corruption of sparring, because sparring is fighting between near equals, for a specific training reason, and this had the master/student relationship involved. The kids knew they couldn’t and shouldn’t win.
But nobody really cared; as they say, boxing is not a game, you don’t ever play boxing. The whole scene happened kind of fast, before you were really paying attention; there was a car-accident quality to the experience. By the time you realized what you were seeing, it was over. The beatings landed just on egregious, the kids seemed to revel in the punishment; and besides, one of the gym rules on the walls was that trainers don’t talk to other trainers’ fighters. Everyone is judged, but only the longtime insiders share any information, and then only with each other, like an Irish terrorist cell. The only way to infiltrate is to hang around for eight years.
There was something dark in the beatings administered, something about race and vengeance, something cruel. Boxing is still a color game, segregated and tribal, although talent transcends color. Not all men are created equal in boxing, and we know it. When I complained about being easy to cut, about being a bleeder, an older veteran trainer looked at me with a frank look, “You’re a white kid, right?” You should know better.
I was learning to know better. I had come to this particular gym ostensibly to research and write a book, but really, I was in the gym for the reason that most young men learn how to fight. I wanted to be a hero, I wanted to be a badass, I wanted the great instructors of the world to teach me their magic and make me invulnerable . . . reasons not too different from the reasons those kids had for getting the snot kicked out them. I could cloak it in the aura of respectability, with a book deal in my hot little hand (and a college degree in my back pocket as an unspoken excuse as to why I wasn’t a good fighter). I’d traveled and fought in Thailand and the Midwest, I’d put my time in at the gym, but I recognized those two kids.
Wasn’t I essentially doing the same thing as they were, albeit a fraction more seriously? Was I in this for masochistic reasons?
What is boxing for?
I think I know what boxing is. It’s entertainment. Like pornography, flashing a female baboon’s inflamed estrus rear at male baboons elicits a certain response. Similarly, watching men fight elicits a certain automatic interest in males (and some females) of the species. They’ll pay to see it done well. But that’s what boxing is; what is boxing for?
Maybe the first thing that pops into your head is the narrative established in countless promotions: boxing “is for” poor kids to find “a way out,” a venue (like other professional sports) for the talent-rich and option-poor to make money. The dirty street kid becomes champ and buys a mansion for his mom. The Ruelas brothers were from a region of Mexico so poor that they had no electricity; they used to sell candy in the dusty streets until they stumbled into boxing and went on to win world championships . . . That’s the story we all want to hear: the rags-to-riches path. Sure, boxing is for that.
Maybe more important but less obvious, boxing is a way for damaged men and women to find wisdom. For those for whom hurting and hurt are inextricably tied together in such a way that they become their own worst enemy, boxing can offer a path to manhood, a path to competence, a way to be respected. The violent kid can pour his violence into the ring, and the ring will absorb everything and still eagerly take more. The expected motivations are usually back there somewhere—the abusive or the vanished father.
Professional fighters usually have all the uncontrolled rage absorbed like a sponge by their trainers, by the heavy bags, by sparring partners; while they must cling tightly to their controlled rage, sharpen it like a spear, and hoard it for the opponent. If it runs out, so do their careers.
Professional boxing is about money. If it’s about anything else, you probably shouldn’t be doing it. When kids ask me if they should go pro, I respond with the old trainer’s question: Could you be a world champion? Because if you don’t realistically think you can be champ, you have no period business period in professional boxing. (There’s an exception: if you’re so damaged that if you don’t box you’ll end up in prison, then go ahead and box, even if you have no shot at ever coming near the big time or even being any good.)
So this is what boxing is for, for those talented and strong and young enough to do it professionally, to fight for titles someday. For money, for a way out; for the damaged to find wisdom, order, and an organizing principle.
What is boxing for, for the rest of us?
*
I discovered boxing at Harvard University, not the Harvard Janitorial School, as some have hypothesized.
The Malkin Athletic Center, or “the Mac,” was the closest gym to the Freshman Yard, a gym for students who weren’t playing school sports. I had spent a year in the merchant marine, gladly turning my back on football and lacrosse, discovering wine, women, and cigarettes; but I still needed to do something. If I don’t exercise, insomnia sinks its fangs into me and tears me to pieces.
Entering the Mac was like stepping back in time; a trapdoor and wormhole that opened into a forgotten corner of 1950. Old white men checking IDs at the door, the hot air of the pool, echoing halls tiled in linoleum. There was an ancient, rattletrap weight room in the basement. I’ve seen prisons with more up-to-date equipment. You worked out in there and felt like you were in a black-and-white exercise documentary about the 1952 Polish gymnastics team.
Upstairs at the Mac, I attended some tae kwon do classes taught by well-meaning grad students. They were nice enough, but the scene was what we call in the martial arts world a “pajama party.” Playing dress up in a white gi. I have no problem with traditional martial arts, as long as I feel confident that your black belts could kick my ass. I could have taken these black belts’ lunch money on the first day.
Up another flight of the stairs, the timer’s ding lured me in. Two small rooms with high ceilings, a dozen heavy bags, the walls lined with various speed bags. Working out, mostly typical Harvard kids: nerds and a couple of slightly more athletic kids who had dropped out of football or turned up their cool noses at collegiate sports (like me). Boxing, not that interesting . . .
But along comes Tommy, the boxing coach, and everything changed for me. I had no idea who he was, or what he was, but I could sense authenticity. His battered face, his carriage, the wiry-old-man strength inherent in his limbs conveyed a depth of knowledge; here was someone for whom boxing was breathing, was walking. His footwork was perfection; he couldn’t throw a bad punch if he tried. He taught us to shuffle, and I could see the power and poise still inherent in his whole instrument. The integrity was physical.
Tommy was delightful and delighted. He was a goddamn treasure, and nobody knew it. A bunch of Harvard kids who might have picked Mike Tyson out of a lineup but that was as far as it went, and here was a piece of living boxing history. Shake the hand that shook the hand of the great John L. . . .
Tommy Rawson had been a New England lightweight champ in 1935, and he’d known Jack Johnson; his father had been a bare-fisted fighter who’d apparently been friends with Jack Johnson. Tommy coached Rocky Marciano as an amateur; he’d refereed Sugar Ray Robinson. None of us really understood the prize we had in him, already in his eighties, uninterested in names. He’d still hit the bag, with a huge grin, strange half-gloves, “Hey sluggah . . . hey champ . . . don’t start weaving until he gives you trouble . . .” His crumpled face wore the irrepressible beam of a man pleased with life. Here we are, this is what we do, and ain’t it grand.
Tommy started with footwork. He had us line up in rows and for hours, weeks, shuffling up and down the hallways or across the dance studio floor. I shuffled up and down the hallways of the gym, just doing footwork, learning how to sync the jab with the shuffle, three or four days a week, for weeks before I ever gloved up and hit the bag. Just working on the jab, then the right hand, getting the feet right, not worrying about hitting something. I’ve never seen anyone teach boxing that way since. It felt like the way you might teach little kids, third graders.
Later, as I continued my fighting education, I would hear trainers say, “Those who get taught hands first, the feet never catch up.” I see this a lot with men who learn to box as adults; they want to punch shit really hard and so they slam the mitts or the heavy bag, and they never learn to punch because they never get their feet right. You see guys in MMA who murder the mitts but can’t land a punch inside the cage, because they’re wrestlers or jujitsu guys who never learn boxing footwork. You want quick hands? You need quick feet. Power in punching, anyone will tell you, comes from the hips, the legs, the feet, the movement up from the toes—all of it working together. Guys who punch with their arms can’t bust a grape. My footwork has always pleasantly surprised trainers. And I owe it all to Tommy, to his method. He understood the right way to teach boxing, even if it was hard because men are desperate to start hitting when they start boxing.
Tommy would also get us sparring, headgear and Vaseline. But he would strictly control it. For instance, if I was sparring with a new kid, I could only jab to the body, whereas he could throw everything to me. “Everything to the body, only jab to the head,” he’d say to one guy, and then turn to the better fighter and say “Only jab to the body.” I’ve never seen that anywhere else, either. It was a great way to keep kids safe while giving them a taste, and to make sure they were trying things in sparring, not just freaking out.
Fighting is a little like losing your virginity. Before you do it, there is a lot of speculation, a lot of anxiety, some wild flights of imagination. And then you start doing it, and you find Oh, this is fighting, I’m still me. You aren’t transformed into something else, it’s not some dark door you pass through, the world is still the world.
Little boys delight in the fantasy of the hero—Bruce Lee against a hundred, whirling through them like a dervish, lethal and untouchable; the potent man, free from fear, better than all those around him. Boxing punctures that fantasy. Even as a little boy, when I watched boxing I was surprised at how few clean shots landed, compared to the action movies I was used to. My four-year-old finds boxing boring, compared to cartoons and their perfect kung fu violence, and I remember feeling the same way. The myth of fighting is far more appealing than the reality, until you start doing it.
The truth is, not all men are created equal, and there is a limit to what you can do. In America, the land of eternal optimism and “anyone can be president” and the power of positive thinking, where “no excuses” rules the gym walls and anything can be yours if you want it bad enough, we are especially in need of a reality check. Nothing checks your reality like a good punch to the face; nothing reminds you as effectively that there is a real world out there, a hard-edged cold world of materials that have no interest in you, no sympathy for your desires. A world that doesn’t particularly care how hard you work, if you don’t produce results. You can philosophize all you want about how perception makes reality, about how nothing exists but that you perceive it, Schrödinger’s cat and a tree falling in the woods, but you get punched in the face and you better adjust. The cat is dead, in that box. It’s not in some limbo. You can train as hard as you want, run the stairs to the World Trade Center three times a week, but you get in the ring with a real puncher (God forbid) and you realize that life ain’t fair. Some dudes can hit. When they land on you, the blows alter your world—and if you don’t have that power, you can’t reply. The comparison I fall back on is that of an adult sparring with an eight-year-old, or maybe a ten-year-old; there’s nothing that kid can really do to you in the ring. The strength-and-speed ratios are too different. It may look fair, on the outside, if the two combatants are about the same size; but it ain’t.
So yes, young man, young woman, go box. But use boxing to strip away illusions. By all means, take karate, go to kung fu classes, but you better, at some point, strap on a headgear and some fifteen-ounce gloves and get popped in the face. You’ll understand on a whole different level what is possible, what range means, where you can operate. Getting punched in the face has a wonderfully trenchant effect of showing you what works in a fight. Martial artists may say that boxers will break their hands in a street fight, which may be true, but I’ve known and seen street fighters absolutely starch dudes on the streets of Boston or Tijuana without breaking the skin on their knuckles.
Part of this lesson is about identity. In boxing, you need to know who you are, and not lie to yourself. Tommy Rawson knew who he had; he knew what he was doing with a bunch of college kids who were never, ever going pro. He knew there was value in what he was doing, regardless. He set up sparring so that both the stronger and the weaker were forced to learn (by doing) to have any success. The kids at the ungentrified gym, getting the shit kicked out of them, were living in an illusion of toughness and manhood, of tests. I was getting their education because I knew enough to see it, but I doubt they understood or wanted the real lesson that heavyweight was teaching them. Those kids were learning how to lose a fight. Contrary to popular belief, that is worth something; but it’s not worth the price they were paying.
Boxing, more than any other sport, forces identity down your throat. You need to understand who you are as a fighter to have success, or even survive. In the ring, the truth will out. If you’re a boxer, don’t brawl—make him box. If you’re a brawler, don’t get frozen—get in and let your hands go, get your shots in, make him fight your fight. I’m a tall white guy with limited athletic ability, good endurance, and a good work ethic. So, I remind myself, don’t try to fight like Muhammad Ali or Floyd Mayweather. Fight like Winky Wright (in my wildest fantasies). If James Toney is in the gym and calling out for challengers to get in and spar him, do not get in there, no matter what he says about you. You’re not gonna learn anything in there except the lesson you should already know: Don’t get in there with the wrong guy.
By the time I got to that ungentrified gym, to watch that heavyweight whup up on those boys, I knew enough not to get in there with him. Sure, I could have done better than those kids—but that heavyweight was tricky enough and mean enough to do some damage if and when I got careless or tired. He could play in that area between sparring and fighting far better than I, lull me into a relaxed pace—we’re just sparring—and then drop the hammer. He had legitimately bad intentions, and even when fighting I never really did. More to the point, I already knew the lesson that heavyweight was teaching, and he wasn’t teaching anything else.
The true value in boxing for an amateur is to experience the nature of reality. You learn a very little bit about the fury of a fight for your life. Even at Harvard, the very first time I got popped hard in the face, I felt it: He’s trying to kill me. I better kill him first. The ungentrified gym taught this lesson a little sooner, a little more harshly: boxing is ruthless. A real fight, what a sparring session can sometimes turn into, is kill or be killed, in its essence. Those kids sparring with the heavyweight weren’t allowed into that equation—because they weren’t sparring an equal, they were sparring a teacher, and the teacher was supposed to be teaching them. They already knew who was better, before they got in the ring; the outcome of the encounter couldn’t be in doubt. Part of the learning process is testing yourself; and you can’t test yourself against a guy you can’t ever beat, who wears a face-saver so even if you do land you’ll never bloody him up.
*
I sit here at my kitchen table, almost in my forties, I’ve been writing since three thirty this morning, thinking about my son, nearly five now (this essay has taken some time to write). I took him to a boxing gym nearby for the first time, a real boxing gym in Santa Monica (will wonders never cease), run by a bunch of Irish pros, and he got to hit mitts with a real boxing trainer, up in the ring, wearing my ratty bag gloves. His face was serious. So very, very serious. I can’t stop thinking about it. His wide eyes. He hovered around me, staying quiet, staying close . . . what will this memory be when he is grown? I will let him box, if he wants. But I won’t let him turn pro. The head trainer, a retired professional with an Olympic bronze medal, agreed that his own son would never fight professionally.
What else is boxing for? In the big picture? Is there something else, a value like the one Victorians sought in rough sports, promoting the gameness of the British fighting man? Of course, obviously, boxing by itself doesn’t make you a good person. Learning to punch and getting punched in the face doesn’t mean you achieve wisdom. But I think there is real value in learning to fight. There is something my son should know.
Contrary to popular opinion, violence in the world has greatly declined. Oh sure, the twentieth century was the bloodiest on record, and so forth—but not in the percentages. The likelihood of you dying a violent death before the dawn of civilization, in hunter-gatherer societies, was pretty high, anywhere from 15 to 60 percent. Since civilization started, violence has been in a slow decline in every single measurable category. The likelihood of you dying a violent death in the twentieth century was something like 3 or 4 percent. It’s even less now.
You can feel the decline of violence in our culture: you can’t get in a fistfight anymore; it’s not allowed. Does anyone even know how to put on a chip on their shoulder anymore, to get it knocked off? When I was growing up, kids could fight a very little bit in the schoolyard—I got slapped around once or twice—but for the most part, any kid who throws a punch these days is headed into official trouble and therapy. If I got in a bar fight now, I’d be looking at thousands of dollars in legal fees, pretty much guaranteed. Sure, our movies are violent, our video games are violent, but the murder rate is remarkably low, historically. Slavery is illegal, dueling is illegal and out of fashion, a samurai can’t check the quality of his katana on me, the Spanish Inquisition can’t torture me into confession, and crucifixion isn’t an acceptable legal sentence in any country in the world.
Boxing is a holdover from a more violent era, from Regency England, where watching a dog kill rats was considered very sporting for gentlemen. Boxing is incongruous in the modern first world. There is no longer any doubt about the brain damage, the CTE prion breakdown caused by the thousands of blows to the head, the multiple concussions. Gabriel Ruelas, who had an opponent die—he essentially killed a man in the ring—once asked me, rhetorically, bitterly, “How safe can you make a sport that’s about hurting people?” Boxing is a remnant from a rougher past, when violence was a part of life, when damage was normal.
Our understanding of violence here in the first world is laughable. Not only do we rarely experience it, we don’t know death. We rarely slaughter our meat or handle our own dead. Violence and death are abstractions for most, abstractions based on abstractions, growing more distorted down the kaleidoscope of movies, pop culture, first-person-shooter video games—designed and written by people whose experience with violence and death comes from earlier movies and video games.
Yet they fascinate: violence and death are still a part of us, a part of life, a part of our decision making. Violence can still come and find you. Anyone can be a murderer, the genetic disposition is there. If pushed, given the right circumstances, you would kill. We vote for officials who take us to war, and a big complaint among the drill sergeants of today is that the new recruits have no connection to physical violence, they’ve never thrown a punch in anger. We do most of our killing from afar with bombs, planes, and drones. American casualties are unacceptable. Our wars are fought over things worth killing for, but not worth dying for.
The first time I got cracked in the face, I felt a deep, twofold thrill. It was a combination of that didn’t hurt and he’s trying to kill me, I better kill him. The taste, the thrill, changed my life. The deeper I got into fighting, the more interesting I found it.
One of my most powerful revelations began at Harvard but was completed much later, sparring MMA at the best camp in the world, and boxing with professional boxers. A lesson that you first start to learn in kindergarten: who’s the fastest kid in class? A lesson that runs antithetical to what every adult tries to teach you: everyone is equal.
Boxing, for me, has been about understanding, a chance to mitigate the supreme narcissism we’re born with. I was a sheltered white kid growing up in rural New England; I needed a little damage to understand, for empathy, for comprehension. Damage is part of childbirth, of creation, of creativity, of growing up. I would argue that the end of the draft, the bombers, and the drones all extend our collective adolescence. Of course, getting punched in the face by an opponent of about your own size, wearing protective gear in a ring, when you’re ready for it, is not a shortcut to enlightenment for everyone, or even a really truthful example of what real violence is and does . . . but it’s better than nothing. It’s a crack in the door, a peek through the keyhole. It’s a glimpse at the knowledge from an earlier era, as Ian McEwan wrote in Black Dogs: “out here the rules were exposed as mere convention, a flimsy social contract. Here, no institutions asserted human ascendancy. There was only the path which belonged to any creature that could walk it.” The ring belongs to any man who can hold it. Boxing is a frontier to our savage past. A reminder of what you don’t know.
There are more reasons to learn boxing. There is intense satisfaction even for those who will never be champ. Even if you’ll never be very good, you can still make yourself better. You train and improve like the sun follows the moon. There is the satisfaction of learning how to move and punch, of becoming dangerous. To an untrained man, I’m a reasonably dangerous proposition. I know I can survive against low-level fighters, if only for a few rounds. There is a poetic joy in an action well done, a visceral thrill to solid punches, to digging hard shots into a bag. To floating like a butterfly, if only in a shadowboxing match. The intense satisfaction of landing a hard hook in sparring, and seeing your opponent change his style, knowing that hurt him.
Fight fans watch and watch, because in that one out of a thousand fights, you see something special. In two fighters of at least “good” caliber, the styles match up, and you get to see real courage, true heroism in the face of danger. It’s electrifying. It has to be live—tape it and watch it days or months or years later and it’s like reading about a fine wine versus drinking it. It has to be happening in the moment; we’re all discovering it together, the tick of seconds, the real-time surge of real wonder in the crowd. We get to see qualities we aspire to: courage, confidence, competence, skill in an arena of savage risk. It’s euphoric. There isn’t much of that in the everyday modern world; it’s beguiling and wonderful, addictive and emotional. Real human courage is the most compelling spectacle there is, the most riveting drama. It’s what every movie aspires to, what every professional sport or spectacle ends up aspiring to.
There is value there, in risk and reward and damage—because the world deals in those terms, no matter how safe and secure you try to make it. As Mark Helprin wrote, “You must give everything you have.” If you don’t take risks—if you don’t, on occasion, push yourself to the edge—you risk becoming one of those people who “continually expose their souls to mortal danger in imagining they are free of it, when, indeed, the only mortal danger for the spirit is to remain too long without it. The world is made of fire.”
Boxing is a land of secrets and half-truths, where nobody knows anything and everyone is an expert, where survival is like finding water in the Australian outback; you have to know where it is or travel with someone who knows where it is.
But go; by all means, go.