Boxing 101 Plus - corrected copy

 CORRECTED COPY  -  sorry, folks

One of the sureties of my life on this earth is that I will never be welterweight champion of the world. I wasn't very good at it, but there you go. One of the proudest days of my life is the day I finally "got" the hook off the jab. 

I liked hanging out in gyms where members were there for survival not style. Gleason's. The Wild Card. The Left Hook. Kronk's in Detroit where Tommy Hearns trained, Fifth Street in Miami where Muhammad Ali learned to float like a butterfly and sting like a bee.  I didn't know any LA gyms, yet, so my first month in LA I joined the Beverly Hills Health Club. I was new out there so what did I know? Two things I remember: flabby guys sitting in white steam cabinets with their heads sticking out smoking cigars, and Sid Caesar asked me to spot him on a bench press. His own weight. Pretty good. Then I discovered the Left Hook and the Wild Card, where the pros go, and things got serious.

I cannot imagine any other athlete with the conditioning of a boxer. You see more six packs in a boxing gym than you do at the local bodega. Shadow box with yourself in front of a mirror for three minutes then see how you feel. These guys train for thirty-six, but it's not merely physical conditioning that gets them through. Ring IQ is what does it: the ability to continually assess what you're up against, calculate the opponent's timing, check his foot work and balance, change your angles, exploit openings, stuff your fear - you box; you don't fight.

Jews and fists? The Yiddishe Kopf a thing of the past? Shtetls and Dybbuks were their types of games. Seriously. Shtetls and Dybbuks. That's what they were called in those eastern European villages. But, Jews and Fists? Boxing  may not have been in shtetl DNA, but then there were the likes of Benny Leonard,  Maxie Rosenblum, Battling Levinsky, Abe Goldstein, Max Baer, Jewish guys with noses that looked like California and fists that turned the other cheek. 

When we first began to date Jamie was stunned when she found out I did this thing. ""Why would anybody do this? ", she wondered? "I don't do it for the money,"I said, almost apologetically. "Then why do it at all?" she shot back. I enjoyed being in the ring. I wasn't there to hurt anybody. I simply liked the challenge. refining as many defensive maneuvers as possible to avoid getting hit. Not so different from my revelation in the Marines that I really didn't want to hurt anybody. So why do these things, you ask? You tell me. I still don't know, and it's getting late. Now that I know for certain that the welterweight belt is out of reach, I can sleep.