A Fighter's Heart: One Man's Journey Through the World of Fighting (33 page)

“The closer we get to your fight,” he said, “the narrower our focus becomes. Training gets easier. We try to do just a few things right, and if you show you can do them, we’ll advance a segment for your next fight, until you string ten or twelve segments together, and you get to be complete, and then we start volume two.”

I finally got to start sparring again, and it was as if I had been asleep. I had forgotten how much
fun
it is. It’s the point of everything. I sparred a couple of guys at Joe’s who were smaller than me, and not very good, but I had a great time.

Back at Virgil’s house, Andre had come to work out a little bit. He couldn’t stay away; he just had too much youth in him to rest for more than a few days. He and I went downstairs and opened up the garage door on a dry, cool, sunny Oakland day, the city stretching away below us, down the steep driveway to the sea. We started stretching and warming up, and then Andre said, “You want to hear something that will really fire you up?” and he dashed upstairs like a kid. He came back with a CD and threw it in, and he looked at me and said, “Here’s the white boy in me,” and he played his favorite song. It was the
Rocky IV
soundtrack, and the song was “No Easy Way Out,” which is maybe the silliest, cheesiest song ever recorded. He blasted it as we shadowboxed, and Antonio stuck his head down and looked disgusted and left. The clear blue sky was shimmering outside, and the sun was warm, and the shade was cool.

I shadowboxed while Andre worked the heavy bag, and I focused on not telegraphing, being ready with the right. Andre worked his conventional and southpaw stances. We played through “Eye of the Tiger” twice, and as that guitar started, that nearly funk hard crunch, Dre yelled, “Here we go!”

Virgil popped his head in once, looked around, and withdrew. The sun and wind through the open door felt good.

We put some reggae on and stretched and talked quietly. Andre was developing a theme that he thought about often, how boxing is perceived.

“There’s a stigma attached to boxing, some of which is warranted and some isn’t. The other day, I shook this guy’s hand, and he asked me how my day was, and I said, ‘I woke up this morning, so it’s a good day.’ And then he said, joking around, ‘You didn’t have to use those hands this morning, did you?’ Implying that I didn’t have to beat nobody up.” Dre gave me a look that said,
C’mon, man.

“I understand that they don’t understand. Slowly, we’ll change all that, with what comes out of my mouth, how I carry myself, and what happens outside the ring. We’re going to change the game, and by ‘we’ I mean myself and Antonio and my little brother, Shimone, and whoever else God puts in our circle, they’re going to change the game.” He gave me a little look—God had put me in his circle, however briefly, and he was aware of me as a writer and how I could help him change the game.

“Why do team sports hold all the attention today? In boxing, you have a man putting his life on the line, and in basketball you can ride the bench and still make millions. It’s up to the fighters, too, though—why should I be on TV if everything that comes out of my mouth is ‘m-f’ this and ‘f’ that? We’re role models, like it or not. In the public eye, you got to carry yourself a certain way. A lot of guys don’t know better. If they knew better, they’d do better.”

We went upstairs, where Virgil had cooked eggs and veal and Antonio was already chowing down. I ate a plateful too, and afterward talked to Virgil a little bit, just the two of us. He was a little disappointed that Antonio hadn’t gone downstairs to work with us.

“I knew you guys were good down there—you were better just working out with Dre. You don’t need me every workout yelling at you; sometimes you just got to work on the things I yelled at you for last time.” He was absolutely right; sometimes you need to be left alone as a fighter to focus on your interior world, to let your concentration become total and to live in that imaginary fight and try those things again and again that you need to get right.

We talked about getting older, how being a fighter is not something that happens in a few months—it means years of study and toil, mindless conditioning and mindful practice. It is never finished. As soon as you let it slide, you are not a fighter but an ex-fighter, still dangerous but inhabiting a different plane, the regular-person plane.

Virgil said, musing, “When you retire from fighting, you become the best fighter you could have been,” and he meant that your understanding of the game reaches its deepest level.

I had one more day of sparring at King’s before I would start resting for my fight. There was a trainer at the gym who disliked Virgil, who envied his success and always wanted to fight any of his guys with anybody he could find. The trainers’ egos came out and dueled each other through their fighters. Virgil sort of ignored the guy, as Virgil had much bigger fish to fry; but the other trainer would go around the gym looking for people my size. He wanted to spar with us. He had a kid, a tall, thin, light-skinned black kid, who could hit a little, especially if you stood in front of him—I’d seen him do it. He hit hard. The kid was only nineteen and 175 pounds, but he could hit if you let him get set. He was athletic, confident, with smooth, shelling punches like artillery. He was better than me and had a few years in the gym, and his trainer badly wanted me to spar him, because he thought he could beat me up. I had thought I could spar with him when I watched him earlier, if I kept moving.

Virgil surprised me when he asked me if I wanted to spar the kid, as a few weeks earlier the trainer had suggested it, and Virg had quickly said, “But Sam doesn’t have any fights and your boy has fights.” The trainer had said, “C’mon, my guy’s only nineteen. Sam is thirty—he has man-strength. He’s a man.” Virg had replied, “But in the gym, we measure age in boxing time, and Sam only has a couple of months in the gym,” and so on. Virgil had obviously liked what he saw in my last sparring session, and he wanted me to work with the kid.

I had run that morning and done hill sprints the day before, so my legs weren’t fresh, but I thought that I could get through three rounds. The kid and his trainer were in back, and I knew that the trainer was telling him to kick my ass, to light me up.

Virgil was talking quietly to me. “Just use that jab, and move, move in and out, don’t stop. His trainer is telling him all sorts of stuff, but you just move and use your jab.”

The first round went pretty well. I moved constantly and hit him and even caught him once with the right. He caught me but not bad at all. His punches to the head were nothing, and I found myself scrambling all over the ring, but it was working beautifully. I even had him bleeding a little, although he wasn’t hurt.

But for some reason, I wasn’t breathing right through my mouthpiece, because when the round ended, I was way out of breath. This had happened when I sparred those kids in Hayward, too; I just wasn’t breathing right or was moving too much and I got winded.

The second round, he came out leaping, on the attack, and he started to hit me a little bit, but the head shots were fine, nothing at all. He didn’t even give me a bloody nose. I felt a little cowardly always moving away from him, letting him chase me all over the ring, and I started to slow down. I wasn’t moving as fast or as crisply, and he leapt in and dug a good right hand to the body.

Do you even need to hear what happened next? The shot landed right on that same sweet spot on the crest of my left rib cage—the same spot I had busted at Pat’s, and it felt like lightning came out of his punch, like he was driving a boiling-hot dagger through me. I cried out and almost doubled up, and from then on he clubbed me around. My mind cried out against the injustice of it all as I recognized the fact of what had happened, the shooting pains all through my body from that spot. He even went back to the body a couple of times, but nothing like that first one. Then Virgil said between rounds, “Go back to what you were doing. You got to trust in your conditioning—you were beating him.” Virgil was confused. None of the kid’s shots had been that good—why was I suddenly struggling? I tried in the third round, but the kid knew he had me. I heard his corner saying, “Go back to the body,” and I waved it over. I said
no más.
If I took another good body shot on the same spot, I would probably have died.

He made me quit. That’s the worst thing that can happen, for someone to make you quit. It’s a domination that is so total it becomes mental as well as physical. I felt ashamed, but far worse, I had felt that rib go, and I knew in my heart it was broken, it was worse than it had ever been. Virgil shook his head and said, “You were kicking his ass that first round.” The punch that had killed me hadn’t been a big shot. Virgil hadn’t seen it, but it had been right in the worst place.

I climbed out of the ring and felt miserable. Not only had I let Virgil down, but I had quit in front of these guys who didn’t know and didn’t care about my rib or my story. They just didn’t like me. I walked over and said thanks to both of them afterward, and they barely acknowledged me. I wanted to explain to them about my ribs, how this had first happened in Antarctica, I’m not a pussy—but they didn’t care. I really felt the difference from MMA. There is a cold dislike in boxing for everyone else, which blossoms into a savage hatred in the ring, carefully cultivated by everyone involved. Nobody’s really friends, although there is family in boxing.

Henry, another wizened black trainer who’d been around for years, came over and said, “You did pretty good until you got tired.” I said, “It’s gotta be broken again,” to Virgil, and he said he didn’t think he’d hit me that hard.

I walked out with Virg, and I was convinced, down in my heart, that I was fucked again. No question. The pain was worse than when I broke it the first time. I couldn’t believe that this was happening, but in a sense it also felt inevitable. I knew it was going to happen. I knew without any more doubts how terribly, terribly vulnerable I was. I was like a video game character with one ridiculous weakness. I absolutely
cannot
take a punch on the point of my left rib cage. At the end, he’d teed off on me, hitting me a bunch of times to the head, and they hadn’t bothered me at all. Please hit me in the head.

I could feel a funny notch on the ribs—some crepitus, I thought—so I went to an emergency room and got an X-ray. I didn’t even want to know how much it cost. But when the results came, I was so surprised I had them double check it. Not broken? But it hurt worse than when it
had
been broken. How could that be? I showed the young doctor the spot. I had him feel the big notch, but he looked unconvinced and went back to the X-ray and said, “No, it’s not broken, although you might want to get it X-rayed again in a few days.”

I had trouble sleeping for a few days and couldn’t breathe or twist or flex. I would take more Advil in the middle of the night and lie there taking shallow, gasping breaths.

Virgil and Andre were concerned, and both of them wanted me to get my ribs thoroughly checked out, as I hadn’t been hit hard enough to do the damage I had sustained. I was so depressed from the pain and from the shame of being made to quit, in front of Virgil, after all he had done for me, that I didn’t even want to eat. I had made plans to return to Thailand a month earlier, and was still going, but I was so heartsick that everything seemed impossible.

My reasons for going back were still valid, however. I was curious about the dogfights and there were some active dog men in Thailand I had become aware of, so I thought I would finally get a chance to see a real dogfight. Perhaps the dogfights would shed some light on the entertainment of violence, and the entire picture of human fighting. I had to see it.

Apidej had always meditated, and I felt as if I should try to figure out what he was doing. The old martial arts traditions all had meditation as a part of them, a sharpening of focus. The tai chi had given me a little taste of the internal, and Virgil talked about the concentration that was so important for boxing. I was curious to see whether meditation would help.

And finally, if I was really going to fight in Myanmar, fight
lethwei
(bare-fisted with head butts), then I could tune up for a while at Fairtex, get my conditioning back—and
then
go train in Myanmar. Myanmar (formerly Burma) borders Thailand, and was under a totalitarian military dictatorship. They still had slavery in Myanmar, and parts of the country were under rebel control. It was a whole different story from Thailand, a universe away. I wasn’t feeling too confident about being able to get a fight there; the three or four contacts I had for Myanmar were all silent. The fights there were seasonal, and I was out of season. I sent out e-mails, but no one responded.

I had laid these plans, but now I doubted I would ever fight again, because how could I fight if I couldn’t spar? Even days later, the pain hadn’t diminished, and I was just so
tired
of being hurt. The most chilling part of it was that it just didn’t get any better, day after day.

Virgil and I had coffee one last time at Coffee with a Beat, out in the sun. Virgil smiled at me. “Sam, you look like your dog died or something,” he said with a laugh. He told me he was proud of me, how far I’d come, and how much farther I could take it on my own. “You’ve got an understanding now. You can develop yourself.” He was a little surprised I was leaving. “You’ve been building bridges out here,” he said.

He told me the story of Corinthians, and of the Apostle Paul, who had this terrible thorn in his side. Paul asked God to remove it three times, and God didn’t remove it, because he wanted to show Paul that his own strength was greater than his weakness. Virgil repeated that, and we both sat silently contemplating that line. A woman walked by, and Virgil talked about the sound of her footsteps. “I listen to people walk,” he said. “That can tell you a lot.”