“My father saw Jack Johnson in a honky-tonk in New York,” Ownie recalled. “He was sitting on a stage fieldin’ questions for a buck. He was wearing crocodile shoes and smoking a cigar through a holder. My old man paid his money and asked, ‘Mr. Johnson, who was the greatest fighter ever?’ Jack flashed his gold teeth and said, right saucylike: ‘You’re lookin’ at him, boy; you’re lookin’ at him.’” The audacity tickled Ownie. “See what I mean?”
“Uh-huh,” muttered Scott, taking notes.
“Not only was he a great fighter, but he was bigger than life and all the rules that hold the rest of us down like gravity. He was Genghis Khan and Chuck Yeager, cracking sound barriers with a jab. He showed up for one fight in pink pyjamas; he married white women when it weren’t done. When he beat Jeffries, there were riots from California to North Carolina.”
Nodding, Scott let his eyes roam Tootsy’s in search of colour. “Spartan,” he wrote in his notepad, with three heavy bags, five speed bags, and a grab bag of weights. The ring’s off-white canvas was stained with dirt and the rusty red of dried blood. Scott spotted a truck tire lashed to a pole.
“Does Halifax need someone colourful?” he asked.
“Halifax needs a top fighter with crowd appeal.”
Full-length mirrors, apparently salvaged from a defunct five-and-dime store, still warned: SHOPLIFTING IS A CRIME. Functional, Scott decided kindly. The gym had one whitewashed brick wall, a wood ceiling, and bits of shag carpet that seemed to have crawled from a 1970s rec room. “Grubby,” Scott wrote, and then amended for the kinder “traditional.”
“Right now, we have one Canadian champion in Halifax,” said Ownie. “Hansel Sparks. He fought my boy, Johnny LeBlanc, a while back, but for some reason the people didn’t take a fancy to Sparks. He’s a good enough fighter, but he didn’t catch on.”
“Why is that?” asked Scott, soaking up the room.
He liked the spare feeling of the gym, its single-mindedness, its utilitarian decor, the anonymity it granted, the curtain it hung on the outside world. In a place like this, no one was divorced, unemployed, bankrupt, environmentally ill, married to a Holy Roller, or anguished over a rebellious child. It was a refuge from life, an escape from a world that had become as unreal as the circus funhouse, a world you grew up believing that other people lived in.
“God knows.” Ownie picked up a 7-Up water bottle. “Maybe he’s been around too long, maybe they don’t think he’s going anywhere,” Ownie looked up, making his meaning clear. “I’m not knockin’ Sparks. I know the family.”
“Uh-huh?”
“They’re nice people. I hear Hansel and his mother, Girlie, are thinkin’ of openin’ a bed and breakfast.”
Scott let it pass, reflexes slowed by desk rust. “What about Turmoil?’ he asked. “Could he have the crowd appeal?”
“He’s raw, but he has the physical ingredients.” Ownie took a deep breath. “He’s a heavy, and he’s personable, but he’s not from here. We’ll have to see what happens.”
The gym was on the second floor of a wooden building that sagged like an old sofa bed full of crumbs. Downstairs was a wedding shop named White Lace and Promises. Across the street was a strip club run by bikers, brutes with shattered psyches numb to the violence that defined them, men with spiderwebs tattooed on their elbows, crosses on their cheeks.
From Tootsy’s second-floor window, Ownie could see Halifax and the harbour where convoys once queued, forming a lifeline to Britain. He could, if he tried, smell the uncertainty of young boys besieged by fear, and bombs that exploded like solar flares on the surface of the sun.
The trainer taped a ball. He had careful movements and a time-worn code that had got him this far.
1. Watch out for smiley-faced guys.
2. Never wear a dead man’s clothes.
3. Never train a fighter under the thumb of his father.
4. Don’t hunger for revenge; it ain’t always sweet.
“See this guy.” Ownie pointed at a pug-nosed fighter doing rapid-fire sit-ups. “He can hit, he can take it, and he ain’t too smart. They call them guys dogs. They’re good for nothing, really.”
As the Dog grunted, a pair of hungry eyes and jagged cheekbones loped up the stairs, a college distance runner trying to build strength by punching the bag. He was part of Tootsy’s outreach program. Scott watched him shed his backpack, his face a hollow homage to the Cult of Serious Training, a cult that owned his body and shunned non-believers. His arms were as thin as broomsticks.
When Scott had trained at Dalhousie University during the school year, the outdoor track was full of cross-country runners who seemed cold and wet, bloodless wraiths who came up behind you like a ghost ship, then vanished.
As Ownie waved at the Runner, Scott studied the trainer’s hands, which had two dented knuckles and age spots. Feeling Scott’s gaze, Ownie held up a big mitt for inspection.
“When I was a boy, my father thought I was going to be a giant. He saw my hands and feet and he kept waiting for me to grow into them. But I never did,” he snorted. “Five-foot-seven with triple-E feet.” He laughed at the ridiculousness of it. “Practically a dwarf.”
“I read once that everyone is born with a three-inch height range,” said Scott, an inch over six feet himself. “Whether you reach five-six or five-nine depends on what you eat. If you grew up in the 1930s, maybe the nutrition . . .”
“Nutrition?” Ownie laughed. “You’d sell your soul for a turnip.”
Age had shrunk the fabric of Ownie’s face, leaving an oversized Irish nose and ears under an HMCS Prince Rupert ballcap. Ownie’s blue eyes were fixed on the Dog, who was lying face down on the floor until, with a slight grunt, he executed a prone push-up.
“The best athletes are either extremely smart or extremely stupid.” Ownie pointed at the Dog. “They’ll put their bodies through the worst punishment and they’ll repeat it over and over without ever getting bored.” He looked at Scott. “The smart ones are seeing something new each time, a fine point the others miss. The dumb ones are just too dumb to get bored.”
Scott wrestled with the theory and all its implications.
After years of being a reporter, Scott had learned to be unreadable, to keep his judgments to himself. He wanted, for reasons he did not totally understand, to be free to come and go at Tootsy’s, a place he found both soothing and uplifting. He wanted to see how this all would end. It had been years since Trevor Berbick had fought in the city, years since Clyde Gray had brought in fans. Could the drought be ending?
Scott watched Ownie draw chalk targets on the heavy bag. As a favour to Tootsy, Ownie had stretched out the Runner — “Man, you’re as inflexible as the Pope” — then laced his gloves.
“Every punch has a number,” he was explaining to him: “1: left hook to the ribs, 2: right to the jaw; 3: right to the body. Sometimes, we order a combo to make it interesting.”
“What’s the hardest punch to learn?” asked the Runner, showing greedy teeth, calcium gluttons that had starved his birdlike bones. His hair was orange, and his entire face, even his brows and lashes, were covered with a yellow-orange wash that made his eyes seem naked.
“The left jab. It should be the easiest, but for some reason it’s not.” Ownie shrugged. “It’s a punch that you’ll need if you’re going to go anywhere. The left jab isn’t used as a club, it’s used as a whip. If you know how to use the left jab properly, that means you can box, and that keeps you in a fight.”
The Runner, Scott noticed, had been wearing a black Adidas jacket. Scott’s first real sweatsuit was a red zip-top Adidas, back in ’71, before the world of sportswear was fast and slick and ruled by Nike. The baggy jacket crawled up Scott’s back, the stirrup pants were uncomfortably short. The suit was made of a material that seemed impervious to rain, sweat, or dog bites, a cold, clammy fabric that never wrinkled and smelled like the backseat of a taxicab. He’d checked the label once before washing: Made in Yugoslavia. 45% cotton. 55% Helanca, the Greek goddess of synthetics.
At a time when everyone looked like rejects from the East German track team, Tim Taylor was a fashion insurgent in two-stripe North Stars and cut-off jeans that hung below his navel, cinched with a belt. His furry torso, two sizes too big for his legs, burst out of a chewed-up singlet. At the time, Scott thought Taylor was the only man in paddling with a hairy chest; everyone else had smooth, sculpted pecs that tanned to almond. One day, Taylor finished practice, changed, and got married, a life-altering move Scott heard about one month later.
Ownie had finished with the Runner, who slipped back into his jacket. He must be one of those slow-twitch muscle types, Scott decided, the kind of athlete who could run thirty miles but needed help with a twist top. His hands were about three fingers wide.
The door opened and in walked Turmoil and a mesomorph who was insulated from the world by black shades, earphones, and a French Foreign Legion head scarf. The two men weren’t speaking.
“Ahm gohn teach Donnie how to box.” Turmoil patted the mesomorph’s back, laughing even though nothing seemed funny. Donnie’s muscles tensed, straining the seams of a hot-pink T-shirt and leopard-print sweats. Behind the glasses, his unyielding eyes roamed the room like radar, slipping contact. “All Donnie know how to do is beat up white boys.”
“Donnie’s here to spar three rounds.” Ownie cut the small talk. “He knows the drill.”
Eyes inaccessible, Donnie unbuckled a Grizzly weightlifter’s belt, then stripped to a singlet and Lycra shorts. Bam. Bam. Bam. Punching counter-clockwise, an arc-shaped blur of muscle. While Donnie was warming up, a woman in a Raiders jacket crept through the door and found a spot in the corner. Her hair was pulled up tight in the fashion of a synchronized swimmer. She anxiously chewed her lip.
The door opened again and Johnny trotted in, smiling as though everyone had been waiting for him. He pulled up a chair next to Scott, ready for the show. He nodded at the woman. “Theresa met Donnie when he was doing community service. He got one hundred hours.”
Scott looked at Theresa and then at Donnie, who was following his chest into the ring. His head seemed to be attached to an invisible string coming from the ceiling.
“He okay now?” Scott asked.
“Oh yeah,” Johnny smirked. “He’s an expert on the spin cycle.”
Turmoil stripped to a white cotton T-shirt from Champion Management.
“Champion Management,” Johnny chuckled. “I heard that they’re a bunch of chisellers. I know a waitress who hooked up with their lawyer, Douglas. She says he’s cheap as hell.”
Ownie set the timer and the two men moved slowly in the ring, shuffling, touching gloves. Turmoil was half a head taller, but Donnie was, in Ownie’s words, “wrapped tighter than a Christmas surprise.” It was well known that Donnie had a weakness for women and a nasty disposition. When he had sparred with one of Tootsy’s former fighters, he had punched the guy’s lights out and then insulted him. “You couldn’t do nothin’ with me,” Donnie had scoffed. “And I had sex twice before I came in here today.”
“Turmoil should be able to handle him easy,” predicted Johnny. “Donnie’s only a blown-up cruiser.”
Turmoil raced out, throwing punches.
“Hey, man,” Ownie shouted. “Pace yourself. It’s not amateur hour, you’re not training for three rounds.”
“Man,” Ownie muttered, trying to process Turmoil’s performance in the ring. “You’ve got amateur written all over you, and not even that good of an amateur. You’re not getting the power because you’re not delivering right.”
Pop! Donnie’s jab struck Turmoil like a snake. Johnny shrugged surprise while Turmoil shook his head and moved forward.
Pop! Donnie got through again.
An old man was sitting ringside in a wooden chair. He laughed uproariously, like this was funnier than Fibber McGee and Molly, better than vaudevillian braggarts and blowhards. He slapped his leg and stomped a white leather shoe. He needed no introduction. In his prime, before his hair was as white as his shoes, before Fibber met Throckmorton Gilder-sleeve, Suey Simms had racked up one hundred and thirty fights, starting as a feather and working his way up to welterweight. He had fourteen bouts in Madison Square Garden, the mecca of boxing, the amphitheatre for gladiators such as Joe Louis, Ali, and Duran. “Suey Simms was in the ring for twenty-five years,” he liked to say. “Long enough to get an indexed government pension.”
“Ice!” Suey hissed each time Donnie’s jab connected. “Iiiiice.”
The old man, who was wearing a red scarf and a plaid tam, continued to cackle. Johnny nudged Scott, and Theresa freed her lip, relieved. Turmoil looked at the dirty canvas, eyes wide and disbelieving, as Suey doubled over in a fit of coughing, stomping one leather shoe until he caught his breath and hissed again, “Iiiiice.”
Three minutes ended with a buzz.
Ownie climbed into the ring, showed Turmoil something with his hands, and then climbed out. Puzzled, Turmoil stared at the canvas again. The corners of Donnie’s mouth curled into a smirk, like a flower opening to the sun. No one was paying his board, lining up fights, or hiring a trainer, no one was promising him a four-by-four; he was just a local fighter, as common as clay.
“It’s all right,” Ownie said to no one in particular, convincing himself. He turned to Scott, who pretended not to notice Donnie’s smirk. “It’s nothing we can’t fix,” Ownie told the reporter. “You see, some fighters soak everything up; they just want to learn, learn, learn. They’re hungry for direction, just wanting to be getting better.”
Turmoil blocked a jab and fired off a right.
Suey flashed the patented grin of the Tumblebug, the nickname he’d earned by celebrating each win with a handspring and a spectacular flip across the ring. “Suey Simms fought them all, black, white, yellow, and red,” he’d claim without provocation. “In all them fights, he never kissed the canvas.”
“Others haven’t got the self-confidence to admit they don’t know it all,” continued Ownie to Scott. “They got to tell themselves they’re great or they can’t fight. With them, you’ve got to make them see what they don’t know, make them see the hard way. Let them take a few shots to the head.” His voice dropped, and he added improbably, “So this could be good.” Turmoil blocked his first jab and sighed.