Get Her Off the Pitch! (3 page)

So one man was symbolised by an oversized pumping vital organ; the other by a curly punctuation mark invented at the time of Charlemagne. You can see why Lewis felt this wasn't fair, and why he kept making the point - quite patiently - that having a reputation for ‘heart' comes from foolishly getting into situations where ‘heart' is desperately required. Lewis did not intend to get into such situations. His ‘sweet science' would prevail; then he would ‘reign supercilious'. ‘At age fifty,' he said, ‘I want to be able to get out of bed. At age fifty, Evander Holyfield won't be able to speak.'

Clearly there were significant differences between the fighting styles and capabilities of these men. And as the sparring-day passed, everyone talked about fighting on the ‘outside' and the ‘inside'. I was surprised at how open each camp was about their fighter's relative strengths and weaknesses, but I suppose such things are impossible to hide. Lewis, the taller and heavier man, with a much longer reach, could control the outside as a matter of course. In training with Emmanuel Steward (leader of a famous gym in Detroit, and trainer of umpteen champions, including Holyfield), he had been working on his left jab, and on blocking the kind of counter-punch that poor old Oliver McCall (in better days) had knocked him out with. When we watched him sparring later that day, though, I'm afraid I got distracted from the jab, being overwhelmed yet again by matters of sheer anatomy. It was like the moment Piglet gets all overcome at the sight of Christopher Robin's blue braces. I think I had my fingers in my mouth for most of the afternoon. ‘Look. Look at that flesh,' I whispered to anyone who would listen. ‘Admit it, wouldn't you like to give that a little push?' Later in the week, we would get all the comparative vital statistics (they call this pre-fight ritual ‘The Tale of the Tape'), but basically, Lewis was just enormous, six foot five, over seventeen stone, with shoulders like beach balls and arms like young trees, and skin so richly velvety that it surely has to be lovingly brushed each morning in the same direction. The parading of these men like prize cattle may be a bit distasteful, but it's also honest. If you're going to see them get into a ring and try to beat the living daylights out of each other, you need to know precisely what they've got to lose.

As the day of the fight approached, I tried to keep track of things, and to remember what I formerly hated about boxing. It was getting difficult. There's that very funny thing in Douglas Adams's
The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy
, when Arthur Dent finds out how unpleasant it feels to be ‘drunk' - and it turns out this doesn't mean what it feels like to be inebriated, it means what it feels like to be swallowed in liquid form, and it's very unpleasant indeed. Getting close to sporting events, I often felt drunk in exactly this Douglas Adams sense; it was extremely disorientating. The world beyond the event shrank to a dot; I felt my perceptions flipping inside out; time expanded so that a week seemed like a month; I got hotly impatient with loved ones at home who said on the phone, vaguely, ‘Is it over? Did I miss it? Did anyone win?'; I danced in sidelong manner around my hotel bedroom practising my feeble left jab and making ‘Toof, toof' noises; and most weirdly of all, I read the work of Norman Mailer, nodding wisely, and even underlined it with a pencil.

In short, I was a different person. A few weeks before, the name ‘Lewis' would have made me think of maybe C.S. Lewis, Sinclair Lewis, the John Lewis Online customer services department (damn them), or Lewis Carroll. Now I wanted to chant that there was only one Lennox Lewis, and I wanted him to keep his hands up, use his jab, block Holyfield's left hook, keep breathing, protect that lovely skin, and above all remember what chess teaches you about controlling the centre. On the day before the fight, I did something completely out of character, and it makes my heart-rate accelerate just to recall it. I phoned the office in London from my mobile - furtively, outside on 34th
Street in the face-shrinking, slab-like cold - and said that, come what may, I must see this fight. I think they were a bit surprised by my vehemence, but the Garden had been prevaricating about press tickets; they kept promising and then delaying, and I had started to get very anxious. What if they gave
The Times
only two seats? There were three of us in New York! Oh no, not again, I said. Not this time, buddy. I'm not getting bumped this time. The problem was, the office always liked the sort of ‘colour' piece I wrote about being banished to some nasty sports bar, to watch an event on TV with the locals. But they could whistle this time, I said; they could whistle up their god-damned
ass
. ‘If we only get two tickets, you've got to send Rob to some bar, not me. He hates boxing. He keeps writing pieces about the death of Joe DiMaggio instead. He doesn't attend the press conferences. He's spending all his time with Pelé. His heart's not in this the way mine is!' (Rob was the chief sports writer, and he outranked me in every way. There was no possibility they would accede to this demand.)

Luckily they didn't quarrel with me; they just said, ‘Why don't we wait and see what happens?' But had they taken issue, I fear I would have quoted Joyce Carol Oates at them: ‘Like all extreme but perishable actions, boxing excites not only the writer's imagination, but also his instinct to bear witness.' What a genius this woman was. She was reading my mind. Because, yes, yes, I must bear witness to this extreme but also perishable action. I
must
. This fight might not be dedicated to women (or if it was, it was never mentioned again), but this woman was now totally dedicated to
it
. On the Thursday night, with the ticket situation still unresolved, I briefly entertained the idea of pushing
Rob under a cab, or paying someone to lure him to a lonely dock on the East River and blow him away. It also occurred to me that the lobby of my fashionable hotel was so absurdly dimly lit, Rob's lifeless body could lie undiscovered for quite some time amid the trendy Philippe Starck chairs, so the sleeping-with-the-fishes option might not be necessary. But on Friday, finally, I got my fight ticket, and so did he. We had seats together, as it happened, and we went on to have a very interesting and remarkable evening in each other's company, marred (for me) only by crippling feelings of guilt and shame. I never told Rob that, had it come right down to it, I'd have done anything to get him out of the picture, or that being present at the Holyfield-Lewis fight on March 13, 1999 now meant so much to me that I'd considered it worth committing murder for a ticket.

It turned out to be a famous night in the history of boxing, all right, although the atmosphere in this world-famous arena was, at first, profoundly disappointing for a girl who had relished the idea of a Saturday off from British football fans. All week, the news hounds in our midst had been telling us that ‘six or seven thousand' British fans were travelling to New York to support Lennox Lewis, yet it somehow never occurred to me that this was a coded warning to make for the Adirondacks. I never guessed the British fans would bring their usual boorish British-fan manners with them to
MSG
. But here they were, many in England football shirts, and all in full-throated away-game mode, in an enclosed place of entertainment well past bedtime (the fight didn't start till after 11 p.m.), chanting that Don King was a ‘fat bastard' - which was fair enough actually - and also roundly booing everything American in sight.

I had mixed feelings. These fans were funny, but they were also incredibly depressing. They booed the ringside celebrities; they booed ‘The Star Spangled Banner'; they couldn't pipe down even for the tribute to the just-deceased
American hero Joe DiMaggio. All those old boxing movies had not prepared me for the reality of this particular fight crowd. True, I'd seen scenes of angry fight-goers jeering, whistling and throwing folded programmes, and sometimes even uprooting furniture and trampling defenceless well-dressed women underfoot - but that was usually after the fight, not before. Why such animus towards the inoffensive Paul Simon?
Bridge Over Troubled Water
was not only an enduring classic album, it included that sensitive song ‘The Boxer' which we would surely all do well to remember this evening. ‘Why do they hate Donald Trump so much?' I asked Rob. ‘Do they even know who he is?' When the presence of Jack Nicholson was announced, however, they stopped booing and gave a big cheer. Perhaps they were scared of him. It was a mystery I never got to the bottom of.

On the plus side, however, it's a big arena, holding over 21,000 people, and there was plenty of salt popcorn. Rob and I had seats quite a long way back from the action, but we had taken our binoculars, and there were large screens suspended above the ring. I felt really, really bad about how I'd been planning to murder Rob and dispose of his body, but I won't go on about it. I was now quite glad he was there. And I have to say, the build-up was horribly prolonged for someone already near to a state of hyperventilation, privately fretting about what might unfold within the next hour. Boxers have been known to die in the ring, you know. They have also died in hospital afterwards, without recovering consciousness. The crowd goes crazy, I was informed, at the first sight of blood. Holyfield was predicting a knockout in the third. Although Joyce
Carol Oates insists in her book that boxing is statistically less dangerous than other mainstream sports such as horseracing, motor-racing and American football (and that therefore liberal middle-class hand-wringing about boxing is less straightforward than it looks), it's still true that boxing is all about efficiently biffing someone on the head, which is the most violent thing you can do to another person without resorting to weaponry (or to crime).

It's all to do with how soft the brain is, and how little protection it has inside the brain box. If the boxing authorities could only find a way of packing the fighters' cranial cavities with little polystyrene balls, or kapok, or feathers - just for the duration of a fight - a lot of squeamishpeople in the wider world would definitely relax more. But no one has ever come up with a suitable material (or indeed, even tried to), so the brain is left to slosh about inside a hard casing, which isn't such a good idea when organised biffing is going on. Basically, if you carefully place a nice wobbly milk jelly inside a biscuit tin and then kick it against a wall for half an hour, you get a fair idea of what happens to the human brain during a heavyweight fight. A wellaimed blow from a professional heavyweight carries the equivalent force of 10,000 pounds, says Oates - and you can't help wondering whether boxers themselves are deliberately cushioned from this kind of information.

As an
ersatz
sports writer, I loved the drama of all occasions. I never felt it was my job to testify to greatness, as some sportswriters do; it was my job to see how an unwritten story ineluctably formed itself, in front of my very eyes, from quite unpromising basic ingredients - such as a flat rectangle of grass with lines on it and twenty-two
men in shorts; or an undulating landscape with flags and sand pits at intervals, and dozens of individual men, dressed in natty knitwear, each with a small white ball and a bag of sticks. Waiting for the start of my first heavyweight fight was a moment of reckoning. The basic ingredients here were a spot-lit ring with ropes, and two very large men wearing padded gloves, with designs on each other's sense of physical well-being. A heavyweight fight was completely different from all other sporting occasions I'd encountered because this ineluctable drama contained in it the potential for ineluctable tragedy, and this was the first time I'd ever had to address anything quite so serious. As Joyce Carol Oates kept reminding me, this was not a metaphor for something else.

I still wished they would get on with it, though. Even when the fighters finally made their appearance in the arena the suspense was terrible, because it took them such a bloody long time to reach the ring. The Lewis entrance (first) was a shambles, with his ragged entourage having to shove its way through a crowd that appeared to be shoving back. Laid-back reggae was the incongruous accompaniment to this disgraceful near-riot, involving Garden security staff, fans, bodyguards, and a chap with a flag, and it would have been quite funny if it hadn't been so dreadful. ‘Whose fault is this?' I wanted to know - but then I've already established how I feel about things being badly organised. Still, Lennox looked focused and unfazed by the turmoil holding up his progress, possibly because the mellow music was working so well for him, but also possibly because he towered literally head and shoulders above everyone else, and all the aggro was taking place
about a foot below his eye-line. I ought to mention that in the thick of the mêlée was the tiny figure of Frank Maloney, Lewis's boxing manager, tastefully dressed up as a parody of the Artful Dodger in a Union Jack suit with a Union Jack cap. This fact alone, perhaps, kept Lewis's eyes fixed resolutely on the middle distance.

Holyfield entered - with considerably more ease - to a warm gospel song that was probably about how incredibly big his heart was, but I couldn't tell, there was so much cheering. And then, with just enough time for me to get used to the almighty size of the shorts they were both wearing (‘What enormous shorts!'), there was the announcement of the two men, the belts they already held, the three ringside judges (one from South Africa, one from Atlantic City, and one from London), mention of the referee being the son of another referee, twelve rounds of three minutes, and ding-ding, blimey, before I could worry too much about how many synonyms for ‘horrified' I was going to require before the night was out, it had started, amid roars from the crowd, and thousands of cameras flashing at once. Lewis came out very positively, left arm horizontal, left fist level with Holyfield's face, delivering smart, straight-arm jabs every few seconds, with Holyfield largely back-pedalling and evidently trying to figure out some way of getting to the ‘inside'. Lewis was clearly in control, as Rob and I sagely agreed. We had decided to keep personal point scores according to the proper system - i.e., 10 points to the winner of a round and nine to the loser, unless there's a knock-down (then it's 10-8), or a draw (10-10). In the event of a knockout, it's still technically a win on points, apparently, but I never quite mastered
the maths of that. I merely knew, as everyone does, that a knockout means it's all over. Meanwhile marks out of six for artistic interpretation and technical merit don't come into it at all, which was a shame because, by my calculations, Lennox was doing quite well on those counts as well.

At the end of round one, I felt pretty good. True, I needed a spongeful of water on the back of my neck, and a respite from the gum-shield, but I wasn't out for the count. Lennox also looked as if he felt ok. Holyfield was mainly looking a bit thoughtful, like someone who's been punched in the face non-stop for three minutes while concentrating on walking backwards. At the end of the round he had suddenly lowered his head between Lewis's legs and, bizarrely, lifted him off his feet rather in the manner of a trainee fireman - an unconventional, not to say desperate-looking and ungainly move that had earned them both a reminder from the ref about keeping it clean. In the second round, Lewis again efficiently kept Holyfield at arm's length, but also landed a couple of classy blows with his right. But Holyfield's prediction that he would knock out Lewis in the third was probably uppermost in both their minds during those first two rounds; it was certainly uppermost in mine. The fight would be won or lost, surely, in that third round - and if the drama were to be cranked up a bit now, to be frank, most people wouldn't complain.

Although I felt guilty about it, I had begun to see what people moaned about in Lewis's fighting style, and why his trainer got so short-tempered with that travelling chess set of his. Even when in control, you see, Lewis had the air of someone manifestly
thinking
, pondering his options,
eyes narrowed, as if deliberating whether the Budapest Gambit would leave him too exposed, eight moves down the line, to the classic Schleswig-Holstein Defence. Holyfield, by contrast, with his head forward and sweat pouring off him, seemed to be simply more engaged in a bout of fisticuffs (as seemed fitting in the circumstances). Finding himself on the back foot in the more explosive third round, Lewis did stop calculating for a little while - Holyfield had charged out of his corner at the bell and started throwing serious blows, including two solid rights to the side of Lewis's head. But a temporary shifting of Lewis's rock-like centre of gravity was all that Holyfield had achieved by the end of a heroic and exhausting three minutes, and Holyfield walked back to his corner with his shoulders down, and his head down, too - or, at least, his head bent forward as far as it would go, given how firmly his prodigious neck muscles are attached like splints to the back of it. Was it all over for Holyfield? Lewis seemed to have been shaken, though, because the fourth was quite even. Only in the fifth did Lewis look back in control again.

Obviously, I've watched this fight again recently. By an absolute fluke, while I was researching and making notes for this book, I ransacked the house for my video of
Raging Bull
, and found at the back of a drawer a forgotten tape with ‘Lewis fight' written on it in small letters. I couldn't believe my luck. It was in among my Jeff Bridges collection, behind such unforgettable classics as
Tucker: The Man and His Dream
(1988) and
Thunderbolt and Lightfoot
(1974). I turned it over in my hands, wiped off a layer of dust, and thought, this is exactly the sort of invaluable resource
that usually turns up just after you've finished your book, or just after it's gone to press. So what a miracle. The week after my return from New York, it turns out, Sky Sports had re-shown the fight, in full, with in-studio analysis, and I'd recorded it (and then, for whatever reason, hidden it to be found after my death by the house-clearers). If I had found this tape at any other moment in the intervening eight years, by the way, I would undoubtedly have recorded
University Challenge
,
Pet Rescue
or an even lesser-known Jeff Bridges film on top of it. I still can't get over this domestic miracle, as you can tell.

What I had remembered from the fateful night was that Lewis had a good fifth round and that thereafter he seemed to be coasting, confident of winning on points. What the tape showed was that the first half of the fifth round had some terrific boxing from Lewis, but that old fight hands (including Lewis's animated trainer) were in despair that he didn't finish off Holyfield there and then. Later, Don King would say, ‘When you have a man on the ropes, you're supposed to finish him, not play chess with him.' Lewis would reply, as always, that there was no sense in exposing himself unnecessarily to counter-attack, which is a perfectly defensible point of view. As far as Lewis was concerned, he was winning this fight and doing it his own way, by anticipating and frustrating Holyfield's moves, while landing a huge number of blows. Holyfield was bruised, puffy and in manifest need of a long lie-down (with his trousers on). My own impression at the time was that, ‘While working Holyfield relentlessly with the famous left jab and openly dominating him, Lewis was like an angler teasing a fish on his line. Just because he didn't bang
the fish on the head with a mallet doesn't mean he didn't catch him.'

But now I don't know. The rest of the fight was, in reality, not so one-sided as it seemed on the night. Lewis landed vastly more punches than Holyfield, but he didn't have a clearly brilliant winning round again until the last, while Holyfield rallied in the tenth. At the arena, however, we had stopped scoring quite a long time ago, and were convinced Lewis had won it comfortably, and won it in style. When the final bell sounded, Lewis raised his arms in triumph, and Holyfield just breathed heavily. It had been a thrilling fight, and the great thing for me was that there had been no excessive violence to be sickened by. The sense of relief was fabulous. The jellies were largely safe in their biscuit tins, after all - and at no point had I jumped up and screamed, ‘Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!' (which was what I had secretly feared). Everyone in the ring congratulated Lewis on his brilliant fight. Rob and I congratulated each other on our outstanding professionalism in the face of this historic triumph. Because it
was
historic, by the way: not only because it temporarily united the titles, but because no British man had held the undisputed heavyweight championship of the world in the whole of the 20th century until this moment, in 1999, in the very last tickings of the millennium. From Lewis's point of view, his wait was over, he had silenced his critics, and his question mark could be changed forthwith to an exclamation point. A transparently legitimate fight had been transparently won. Lastly, those world-weary boxing commentators could at last start reaching for synonyms for ‘hallelujah' and ‘coming up smelling of roses'.