In boxing exists a condition known as “the championship rounds”, the time that comes in a fight when the fighter must dig as deeply as ever to keep fighting with all his heart and soul, must dig in more than he ever imagined he could, than he ever imagined was even possible in this world. The final two rounds of the match are the championship rounds. No matter how hurt, how tired, how exhausted, how much your arms ache to drop by your sides, how unable you are to keep slipping punches, how unable you are to do anything but fight back with a ferocity you worked to acquire – there is no urge to give up, no desire to do anything but keep at it until it is stopped. He does not break (unlike a certain recently appointed supreme court justice) but pushes himself towards his goal with all his heart because that’s where it’s at, the heart, that’s where it comes from, the heart.
The will can give out, but not the heart.
There are three minutes from my life that I value more than most. Freddie Brown, Roberto Duran’s corner man, trained me at Gleason’s Gym in the early 70’s. Freddie was a tough old bird, an ex-fighter himself with a career that left his nose on the wrong side of his face. Freddie was a banger. He stood there and fought it out. I don’t know that Freddie was ever knocked off his feet. I do know that every three minutes he was in there he’d fight as if they were his last, ‘cause that’s what y’do.
When I’d do something he liked, Freddie would dip into the pocket of the ancient cardigan he always wore and hand me a piece of hard candy. “Fighters are like race horses,” he told me, “They do somethin’ good, you give ‘em somethin’ sweet.” “Kill the body, and the head will follow” was another one of his truisms. “Punches in bunches” was a good one, too. But the best? “Don’t think about what he’s gonna do to you. Think about what you’re gonna do to him.”
So, one day Freddie agrees to a match-up between me and a guy 15 years younger than me prepping for a professional fight. I was not a pro, just a gym rat who happened to like being around boxers. In fact, when I first met the woman who would become my wife, we were talking about it – this was not something she could fathom - and I found myself on the defensive stating that I didn’t do it for money. “Why else would you do it?”, she wanted to know. Good question. Forty years later she continues to ask good questions. “Because it’s there,” still seems to be about the best answer I can come up with.
This kid’s face, I swear, displayed all the tenderness of a concentration camp guard. OK. Let’s do this. Bell rings.
Guy rips from his corner, immediately clips me flush on the chin, sending me flying backwards and off-balance. “Don’t fall,” I kept saying to myself. “Just get to those ropes, balance, bounce back.” Do it. An act of will. I stayed on my feet, hit the ropes, balanced myself, sling shot back out there. It was raw survival. Adolph comes at me. This was it. He’s doing his Joe Frazier – hunched low, bobbing, weaving, coming forward, both hands cutting loose. Get killed, or…I began firing jabs at him, jab after jab, jab after jab – bam, bam, bam – Keep him away. Don’t let him get close. Jab. Jab. Jab. Because if he does he’ll kill me. Jab! Jab! Double up on that jab! Bam. Bam. BamBam. What right hand? Just keep jabbing. Bell rings. I’m still standing. He looks disgusted. I walk back to my corner. Tough.
Lesson’s learned?
MARINES=ASSAULT TROOPS
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.
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