Chapter 5
Ali on the TV, dancin’ in the ring
Floating like a butterfly, stinging like a bee
“Fight Night”
I was barely two years old in July of 1969, but my parents were aware enough of history to plop me down in front of our old black-and-white TV to watch the Apollo 11 moon landing and later, astronaut Neil Armstrong taking that “One giant leap for mankind.” The landing of the Eagle lunar module was a momentous event for those lucky enough to see it, much less remember it. But it was not that otherworldly experience that ultimately lifted me from my chair and into outer space. Rather, it was witnessing the flurry of jabs and uppercuts landing on the faces of gladiators as I sat with my dad in front of the color TV on a Fight Night.
The 1950s had Sugar Ray Robinson, Archie Moore, and Rocky Marciano; the 1960s had Floyd Patterson, Sonny Liston, and a young Cassius Clay; but as far as my friends and I were concerned, boxing began in 1977.
There was something majestic about those matches. Fighters walked out shrouded in heavy robes, surrounded by their followers, all true believers. I felt my heart skip a beat as I held my breath watching them duck under the ropes and enter the ring for the first time. It felt like they were dancing and shadowboxing right into my soul. The spectacle of it all was alluring, but I knew there was more to the sport than that. It had a physical quality like football, but it also had a sense of beauty.
For the Sons of Starmount, Fight Night meant so much more than merely wanting to see who would wind up on the mat for a ten-count. Heavyweight boxing was the one special TV event that could defer bedtime and give us a chance to sit with our fathers as equals, at least as fans, for fifteen glorious rounds.
My dad sat halfway back in his seat, which gave him the ability to lean in to the TV screen when the time was right. Whenever he saw a sign of the fight heating up, like a cheek-splitting jab or a jaw-breaking roundhouse punch buckling a fighter’s knees, Dad pitched forward off his heels like he was trying to close the distance between his face and the boxer’s fist. I always kept one eye on Dad, looking for those important cues and trying to match his level of intensity, especially the way he held his breath during the most intense exchange of punches. I watched him slide his beer back and forth between his two hands on the flower-print metal TV tray in front of him. It made a hypnotic scratching sound as it glided end to end, keeping to the rhythm and pace of the round. I would try my best to mimic him with my bottle of root beer. At times I didn’t know whether to pay attention to the screen or to him. If I watched him the whole time, I might well miss the knockout punch of all knockout punches. But if I watched the screen the entire time, I would surely miss out on some subtle, but all-important clue on how to be a man. It was about being cool, it was about being in the know, and most of all, it was about being with my dad.
Heavyweights filled our screens with epic battles that year. The sight of blood spattering from the impact of a leather glove against the swollen eyes of what looked like the Elephant Man was eye-opening for us kids. But these fights were not just about the display of blood or the drama of a knockdown. For us, it was about the sense of nobility emanating from the fighters and the thought that they were passing it down to us. There was infinite power and grace in the ancient sport, championed in the 1970s by the likes of Joe Frazier, Ken Norton, George Foreman, and the greatest of all, Muhammad Ali.
My dad and I watched Ali land stinging blows on Earnie Shavers’s cheeks in the final seconds of their fifteenth round at Madison Square Garden. It was September 29, 1977. Ali won that fight and retained his title, but the adult world saw it as the beginning of the end of his career. I didn’t see it that way. I didn’t see a fighter in decline; I saw a Titan, an astronaut in his own orbit who would never touch down again in my lifetime.
“Float like a butterfly and sting like a bee.” That is the only phrase I remembered from Ali’s Desperate Hour.
For the first few days after any big televised fight, my friends and I would walk around the neighborhood hearing voices in our heads.
“Ladies and gentlemen, fifteen rounds, heavyweights. Introducing in the red corner…”
“Down goes Frazier! Down goes Frazier!”
“Eight, nine, ten! Mark Elliott is the new heavyweight champion of the world!”
Lost in our heads among our made-up victories, one could hear us repeat these lines aloud while shadowboxing down the street. Not to be outdone by history or pop culture, we also felt inspired to promote our own fights, mainly to our parents, as must-see events. We started out by fighting each other in our bedrooms in spur-of-the-moment, decidedly inglorious matches.
We all tried to avoid having to go up against Matt Bourgeois if we could help it. We weren’t scared of Matt, as he was not anger-filled, fearsome, or particularly big. But he was wiry, fast, and hard to hit. The more our punches missed their mark, the more his found theirs. We never got seriously hurt in our wranglings with Matt, but we occasionally saw stars. These were middle-of-the-day stars, not dark-of-night stars. The kind of stars that shine into the back of your eyes after your brain plays pinball around your skull.
Timmy and Matthew Stege occasionally surprised us with short but ferocious outbursts, though more often, they proved themselves to be seasoned cornermen; effortlessly wiping off our bloody noses and giving full-throated advice from their safe perches.
The most even matches were between myself, Jim Maples, Joey Fearnside, and Tommy Stege. They were all balanced, consistent pairings, but because of that, boredom eventually handicapped those bouts.
The most underwhelming fights were between John Maples and Clay Hudson. They were obvious opponents, sharing the same age, size, and reluctance, but one of them would usually wind up crying, and the contest would end as quickly as it had begun. The younger boys getting hurt and then crying was always a source of great concern for the rest of us. We could not afford for their tears to leave the scene, because when those tears made their way back home, less-than-enthusiastic mothers quickly interrupted our fun.
Between the mismatches that were over too fast and the boredom that came with always fighting the same guy, our fight-promotion business seemed to fall into its own ratings slump early in the summer. We were in desperate need of a new idea and a much bigger event.
Don King, with his trademark Afro and bravado, was as famous as the fighters were, and he set a high bar in the fight promotion game. Still, we wanted to put on a world-class fight, one just as good, if not better than one Don King could promote. We needed a grand affair, a moment so unique and outrageous that it would go down permanently in neighborhood history. We needed a prizefight.
We set our sights first on the most recognizable aspect of any big prizefight: the magnificent boxer’s robe. The ring, the opponent, and even the outcome weren’t nearly as important to us as the awe-inspiring boxer’s robe. These garments were kingly, so the flashier, the better. At first, we ripped off the sleeves of our older brothers’ and fathers’ coolest-looking shirts before eventually realizing that we needed more expert guidance. Our mothers stepped in and sewed makeshift boxing robes that turned out to be more akin to the ragtag look of Dolly Parton’s coat of many colors than majestic threads meant to inspire fear. We didn’t care. We finally had official boxing robes, which allowed us to enter the ring draped in mystery and surrounded by true believers, just as we had seen on TV.
We constructed a mighty fight ring in my backyard. As befitting the magnificence of a World Championship fight, our ring spanned nearly the entire grassy space on top of the steep hill above our concrete patio. With corner posts made from broom handles and shovels and turnbuckles made from dirty garage towels and duct tape, our ring soon formed the familiar shape. We wrapped it around three corners with salvaged hemp rope and twisted nylon line, finally tying them together behind the fourth corner with a special knot. We talked of “special knots” as if we were experts in sailing, but to us, “special knots” were just the shoelace knots we all knew how to tie. Within hours, my backyard was transformed into the Southern sandlot version of a Las Vegas casino.
Next, we had to determine who the gallant fighters would be, and we had great difficulty deciding who would carry that mantle. We never strayed too far from the one-for-all-and-all-for-one approach, so we ultimately decided that everyone in our group would be the boxer from our corner, facing an opponent via a two-at-a-time, tag team formula.
That decided, we then had to find and convince a worthy potential opponent to participate in our grand display. We knew that our opponent would be fighting all of us at some point, so partially out of a sense of fairness and partially out of a dream-drunk sense of invincibility, we decided to enlist an older, stronger adversary.
His name was Dalton Macoy, and he lived toward the top of Starmount Drive, near Meridian Road. He was an older teenager, around sixteen or so, and was big, scary, and mysteriously dangerous, at least in our young eyes. He was the perfect supporting actor for our Shakespearean-tragedy-meets-Roman-gladiator event, and it didn’t take much to convince him to sign on to our pugilistic circus. His eagerness was partially due to our taunting and trash-talking him, and partially due to his realization that this would be a rare parent-sanctioned opportunity to kick our loud-mouthed, snot-nosed asses. We imagined that Don King himself had invoked similar goading and arm-twisting techniques to organize and promote his exhibitions.
We scheduled the fight for a weekend afternoon and expected it to last a full fifteen rounds, ending in the most thrilling and triumphant moment our imaginations could muster. Though we were as green as the grass that covered our boxing ring floor, our audacity demanded nothing less than complete, grandiose victory.
As parents and friends streamed into the backyard arena, the boys and I alternated the roles of fighter and trainer in my bedroom, which had been designated our locker room. We stretched, warmed up, and shadowboxed in front of my mirror. We wrapped each other’s hands in Scotch tape and toilet paper, then donned the oversized boxing gloves and disseminated our final oversized advice. We lifted that advice from the 1976 boxing movie, Rocky, invoking the best corner guidance in history: “Keep your hands up,” “Go to the body,” and, “You’re gonna eat lightning and crap thunder.” Our prepubescent Southern drawls did take some of the gravitas out of Burgess Meredith’s gruff utterances, but it made us feel tough when we said it. We also knew enough about Ali to keep repeating the phrase, “Use the rope-a-dope to wear him out.”
The only advice that wasn’t pilfered, and that really came from the heart was, “If it gets too bad, hit him in the nuts.” It was the timeliest and most practical advice we could muster. We certainly didn’t have to borrow that line from Hollywood. Every ten-year-old boy knows that a quick punch or kick to your opponent’s nuts is a guaranteed way to bring any unpleasant situation to an end. It’s a powerful method of self-rescue, equivalent to blowing the canopy off a doomed fighter jet or pulling the ripcord on a parachute. Like some chromosomal fight-or-flight knowledge, “Kick ’em in the nuts” is a tactic that boys just know instinctually.
And so, “Kick him in the nuts. It works every time,” was the final and most earnest instruction given before heading up to the ring.
Jim and I were the first set of fighters to meet the teenager at the center of the ring. Timmy and John served as dual referees, having backed out of the actual fighting. To be honest and to give the younger boys their due credit, backing out was less an act of cowardice and more the result of a sudden surge of common sense.
The referees ran through the rules in high-pitched but serious tones. Once we understood, acknowledged, and then promptly cast aside the rules, Timmy shook the small cowbell we had temporarily lifted from the collar of a neighbor’s dog, and off we went.
We quickly discovered that a fifteen-round fight was a pipe dream. The teenager was both stronger and less forgiving than we had counted on. Whatever hopes we had entertained about him feeling embarrassed to punch little kids in the face, thus resulting in a hesitation we could exploit, soon vanished. He threw punches as if he were fighting an older brother or a drunken upperclassman at a party. And it didn’t take long for things to get out of hand.
Bloody noses and blackened eyes soon redefined our wholesome faces, and the cute, crazy-kids vibe we had previously sold our parents on slipped away. It didn’t take long for the “Executive Producers” in the crowd to send an unmistakable message: “Finish this before we finish it.”
Our cornermen, prompted by an unmistakable glare from one of the mothers or perhaps a growing sense of pity from seeing us get mercilessly pummeled, threw in the towel. The match was over before it had barely begun. Had it not been for the bloodied faces of innocent children, I think Don King would have been utterly disgusted with our lack of dramatic flair or big finish.
However, upright in our pride and steadfast in our sense of accomplishment, we owned the moment as if we had won the fight and proudly brandished our warrior’s wounds. We had gone toe-to-toe with the beast. We shook hands with Dalton, thanked him for beating us to a pulp, and retreated to the freezer for some ice. Our classy, underdog handling of our loser status was unmatched by many of our professional adult counterparts. We weren’t sore losers, and we didn’t make excuses other than to say, “If we had one more shot at him, we’d…” Yeah, well, in keeping with the character of the honorable sport that it was, we strove to celebrate the pomp and circumstance of the fight, rather than focus on its outcome.
To be honest, we sought a Don King-esque flair in all our pursuits, always fanning the flames of overkill. We only faintly celebrated violence and generally recoiled from it at first signs of pain or hurt feelings threatening to overtake our friendship. Even in our more primitive pursuits and raw prosecutions, from mud wars to Bigfoot hunting, we tried to maintain a sense of class and camaraderie. Without even trying to, and certainly without realizing it, we took the essence of professional boxing to heart. Some of us would lose that concept over the years, but in those heady ten-year-old days of 1977, we all totally got it. The glory days of boxing were our glory days. To paraphrase Muhammad Ali, “We were the greatest, and we said that before we ever knew we were.”
There would be other heavyweights of great skill and merit to come, like Evander Holyfield, Riddick Bowe, and Lennox Lewis, but that perfect era of heroes never came again for me, and only partially because I would never be ten years old again.
Ironically, one of the strongest and most dominating heavyweights the boxing world had ever seen did more to diminish the sport than any fighter with half his talent could have. When Mike Tyson bit off Evander Holyfield’s ear in that infamous 1997 bout at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, I recognized it as the exact moment of death for the grand sport I had always admired.
Thereafter, boxing would be a withering bone for me, slowly picked apart by expensive pay-per-view boondoggles, the rise of Mixed Martial Arts, and the ever-shrinking attention span of society as a whole. Maybe the most damaging of all the losses ushered in by that shrinking attention span is the disappearance of meaningful interactions between fathers and sons. I was lucky. The time spent enjoying an arguably violent sport with a man who championed non-violence and peace gave me the balance I needed as I grew into manhood.
I am grateful that, back then, the boys and I didn’t know what the sport would eventually become. Through our naive filters, we believed those heavyweight matches we watched with our fathers, and even the less-weighty bouts we fought ourselves, were not about money, fame, or power, but about skill and honor.
We knew the fighters, we knew their stories, and we felt their struggles in our bones. We believed that boxing was not brutish but beautiful. Accurate or not, that is how we saw the sport, and why we took it to heart in 1977.