A Fighter's Heart: One Man's Journey Through the World of Fighting (30 page)

While Glen and Goossen were in the good hotel in downtown Memphis, in the Airport Ramada with us were the rest of the Goossen team: a strikingly good-looking British woman named Rachel Charles with her pretty seventeen-year-old daughter, a photographer, and Gabriel Ruelas, a three-time world champion who now worked for Goossen. When I first met them, I was impressed by Rachel’s good looks and flashing charm, but I almost didn’t notice Gabriel. He was so slight and quiet, a slender Mexican man with glasses and a crew cut and a mustache. His face was unmarked, with a slight thickening around the brows and nose, but he didn’t look like a fighter. When Virg murmured to me that Gabe was a three-time world champ, I did a double take. His body was rail thin under a short-sleeved collared shirt and shorts. The only hint, the only ostentation, was a giant gold WBC ring with diamonds dripping off it. He had killed a man in a title fight in 1995.

Andre’s whole week had been planned out, like a politician’s, and the next morning we were scheduled for St. Jude’s Hospital to meet children with leukemia and other forms of cancer. It was a boiling hot morning, and as we loaded up a van, Rachel rather imperiously ordered Gabe around. I saw Virg out of the corner of my eye ever so slightly shake his head, bemused.

We drove through the flat jungle of Memphis, AC blasting, crowded freeways and construction everywhere. St. Jude’s was not a hospital; it was a complex, a massive campus with a $1.5-million-a-day budget, run entirely on donations. Everything was clean, groomed, manicured, big gates and stone sculptures; it felt like a law school. We pulled up at one of the front entrances and waited for half an hour, since Glen Johnson was on his way, and chatted to the St. Jude’s media crew. They had thirty-five full-time employees in the media crew, with their own cameraman and photographers. We stood around chatting in sunglasses, looking cool, Rachel and her daughter in designer clothes with lovely, movie-star ankles, while Gabe and I carried boxes of T-shirts and pictures for Andre to sign and give away. The T-shirts were plain white with the Goossen Tutor emblem across the front.

There were children all around, under the eyes of very, very long-suffering adults. The adults were suffering through the normal trials of children with warm, weary indulgence, because somewhere they had acknowledged the death of their own child. Yet they were finding themselves enjoying life and a semblance of normality.

Inside it felt more like a hospital, but very relaxed and warm and friendly, with large bright murals and colors and statues and gift shops. There was an easiness of passage, a casualness with which the kids—bald and stick-thin and pale, sometimes with strange discolorations or bandages—roamed with their friends.

Andre was guided by the hospital media people, and we all followed in a kind of constellation, Virgil and Don, Rachel and her daughter, and the Goossen photographer and Gabe and myself. One of the media guys laughed at the size of the entourage. “It’s always boxers who have the biggest crews.” There was local TV there, and St. Jude’s own TV, and three or four photographers. I tried to stay out of the way.

Andre sat down with some small children around a fake fire to read a few stories. Some of the kids seemed normal; some were in trouble, bald and blue-veined with soft eyes staring from their skulls. It was a circus, with seven or eight people standing around watching Andre be a nice guy, and Virg and myself in the deep background, watching the whole choreographed situation.

The iconic image for me that day was a tiny little girl, maybe five, walking past us with her little sneakers that had the flashing lights in them, wearing a pink shirt that said “Hope,” bald from the treatments. She had huge, anonymous blue eyes behind a white mask that covered her face. She was followed by her mother and attached to an IV machine on rollers that she pulled herself, trailing it with one firm, determined hand. The little girl was just wandering, pushing her way between us, and her mother—patient, overweight, loving, tired, resigned, wise, and proud—said smiling, “She’s a big girl,” like any of a million moms might say.

Glen Johnson arrived, with his wife and his strength coach, a white guy with bullet-hole eyes and corded forearms and braids who looked like a pro wrestler. Glen and Andre made the rounds, greeting children in beds, signing photos and T-shirts. People didn’t really know who they were, because nobody followed boxing anymore, but the kids were happy to be touched by celebrity and attention, to have the monotony broken, to feel something different. Glen’s manager, a white guy in a green shirt, walked alongside Glen for a few minutes and said to a kid, “You want to see his muscles?” while tugging on Glen’s shirt, like Glen was a prize dog that he was showing off. The manager quickly went outside and sat with his trainer and their respective wives, all in sunglasses and looking hungover, and I heard him say convincingly, “Well, that was very moving” when he left.

In contrast to all of this were Andre and the kids, who were graceful. So what if it was free advertising and branding for Goossen Tutor? It was making these kids happy, and they needed it. Andre just enjoyed the kids, a big brother and a father. He wasn’t thrown by the cameras, he wasn’t thrown by the fact that many of these kids were dying. He made the best of their time together and the kids responded. The kids don’t want to know that they’re dying either. Andre calls himself “Son of God” and even has SOG on his fight shorts, but it’s not a messianic complex, it’s a loving, grateful thing: We are all sons and daughters of God, he’s reminding himself and others. He’s toeing the line, he’s staying right with God.

Somehow Andre and I lost everybody, and he sat in the front lobby on some seats with kids who just kept coming and coming, patiently lining up. He was clearly enjoying himself, and they were enjoying his company. And then the press corps found us, and the cameras.

We left the hospital later in the afternoon, hours after Glen and his entourage had left. Andre said as we sauntered out, “I don’t let anyone rush me. They’ll say, ‘No more signing,’ but if there is anyone left who wants an autograph, I’ll stay and sign it.” I thought of Rodrigo in Japan, signing away despite the Pride executives watching, who finally sent a lackey over to make him stop.

Virgil said to me quietly, “I learned a lot today.”

There was a public workout in downtown Memphis that afternoon, and we headed over around five. It was hot and sweet that evening, the sun slanting redly over the buildings through the lazy, summery weekend air, even though it was a weeknight. The workout was at an outdoor stage called the Pepsi Pavilion, right next door to the stadium where the fights would be held a few nights later. It wasn’t crowded, but there were a few hundred people milling around, drinking beers, with a band on the side, and an armada of black bicycle cops in blue shirts. Up on the stage was a boxing ring, and the fighters and corners with all their friends and entourages were hanging around on the stage.

It was hot and hazy, almost dreamy, and the crowd seemed bemused and befuddled, drinking beer from plastic cups and listening to the rock-jazz jam music over the loudspeakers. Dan Goossen (a large, red-haired man with an Irish complexion) was perched on the lip of the ring apron, doing his promoter thing in designer clothes and lightly tinted sunglasses, like all promoters acutely fashion conscious, since part of what they do is promote themselves.

Ann Wolfe was just starting her workout. She was a black woman, maybe five foot nine but heavy, with slab-sided muscle, powerful shoulders and arms. Her face was beautiful but hard and worn and so sad, the history of the world on it. “Ann Wolfe had a hard life,” said Virgil, and he knew her trainer, Pops, well. Pops had found Ann sleeping in cars and on the street with her baby in her arms, and she had come to boxing late, in her late twenties. Now she was a seven-time world champion, but her face was still etched with sadness. I had seen her on TV once when she fought a very tall, strong white woman, and Ann had nearly killed her with a wrecking-ball right hand that put the woman down with her eyes crossed and open and her legs jackknifed beneath her.

Andre worked out next, and he and Virgil had discussed what they were going to do. Rachel had said, “It’s just for show, do whatever, dance around a little,” but Virg said, “Let’s get a good workout in while we’re at it, and give them what they want to see.” We were three days out from the fight, and some fighters wouldn’t do much, but Andre was so young and full of energy that he needed to go hard and brief.

Andre was in a different category, even from Antonio Tarver, the main event. His movement was quick and powerful as he shadowboxed, his speed deceptive. He was graceful; there was a sublime quickness, his body daring and shifting, his feet drifting and touching, slips and slides and feinting with his whole body. Of course he was fast, but speed comes from many places. Andre was as still as stone and then he moved in unexpected ways—and he didn’t telegraph, which made him that much faster. His control over his body, his link between body and mind, was the most complete thing I had ever witnessed; his feints were with his whole body, not just his head or hands, and this made them irresistible. Whatever his mind could imagine, his body could do, flowing and skipping, bounding and bouncing.

There is a tendency, which I succumb to, for “normal” men who encounter good professional fighters whom they like to wax poetic, and fall gracelessly into silly hyperbole. Mailer wrote about Ali as if he were the second coming of Christ, and other writers went even further regarding the Greatest. Andre Ward, to me, a regular guy with regular reflexes, was an incredible, sensational fighter—but at the top level there are a lot of guys who are incredible and sensational and more. Andre had a shot at being up there—but he hadn’t proved himself yet, not in the professional world.

Virgil joined him for pad work and was working almost as hard as Andre, pushing him around, walking quick in steep, dizzying circles, Virgil’s eyes intense and boiling. It was a performance, but the genius of Virgil was knowing that it was good for Andre to perform like this. He was young and needed a hard workout with only three days before the fight. Over the loudspeakers, there was a long drum solo on the jazz jam and Andre and Virgil slipped into the rhythm, probably without even noticing.

To cool down, Andre stripped off his shirt and skipped rope, which energized the female attention in the crowd. He skipped effortlessly in the blazing heat, muscled and sleek. He wasn’t bothered by the crowd—his gracefulness extends in that direction. He plays to it without uneasiness or ego. He stayed onstage until he was ready to leave and said a few words into the microphone without faltering, just that Memphis had given him the key to the city and now Memphis was his second home. He existed in a state of grace.

Antonio Tarver was doing his workout when we left, and Buddy McGirt, a three-time world champion and now a great trainer, was holding pads for him with his flip-flops on, barely moving around the ring at all. Compared to the frenetic dance that Virgil had led Andre in, it seemed strangely static.

We talked about this in the van on the drive home, Virgil holding forth on why Andre was different, why he was, as Roy Jones had said, a throwback to the golden age of boxing: because Andre had the killer work ethic. It was why Ali and Frazier were still going at it hammer and tongs in the thirteenth and fourteenth rounds of the Thrilla, and why current fighters like Tarver and Johnson (in their first fight) were both exhausted in the ninth and stood in front of each other and didn’t even punch. Neither Tarver nor Johnson would even be near the level of Holyfield if he were still around as the light heavyweight champion. He would have been too talented for Johnson and too hardworking for Tarver. “Tommy Hearns was only a slightly above average fighter, but he would put himself through such a hellish camp that he could put
things
on you,” said Virgil, talking to Andre. That may have been true, but Hearns seemed to me to have been pretty talented, with his big right hand.

“They can’t do what you do,” Virgil said, encompassing all current fighters, and Andre listened impassively, staring out the window. Part of what a trainer does is manage his fighter’s mind—more than any other sport, the trainer controls his athlete’s perception of the world and of himself.

We bought an electronic scale. Andre planned on having a “flush” later that night; he would fill the tub with ice water to flush the lactic acid out of his system, and then get a rubdown. It was a trick he’d learned in the Olympic camp.

We ate a little at the hotel and then walked in the turgid night, bugs swarming in the pools of light and everywhere the thrum of the freeway and hum of wires and planes and technology.

The next morning, I sat down with Gabriel Ruelas for an interview. Don Clark wanted to tag along; he had seen the fight where Jimmy García died and wanted to hear what Gabe would say. Gabe was eager to talk to me, he wanted to talk. He knew that despite all his world championships and great fights, what everyone always wanted to know about was Jimmy García.

“There’s an article you should read,” he said, “‘Dream of Life, Dream of Death,’” by Gary Smith for
Sports Illustrated
in ’95. I have a lot written about me, but this one is very different. The best thing about me, it gave me chills. He really touched me.” I have since read it, and it is a great piece of boxing writing, and an excellent look into the kind of man that Gabriel Ruelas is.

The short version is that Gabriel Ruelas, the WBC super-feather-weight champion, fought Jimmy García, the Colombian champ, in 1995, and after the fight García went into a coma and died three weeks later. Ruelas was the heavy favorite going in and outclassed García for the whole fight but never managed to put him away, and García’s corner—his father and brother—kept sending him in for more punishment. If we look at boxing deaths the way we look at firefighting deaths, where we look for common denominators of “tragedy” fires, one of the common factors of “tragedy” boxing matches is the father as cornerman—strange, frightening, but true. Also, García had taken a bad beating six months earlier, from Genaro Hernandez.