Million Dollar Baby (16 page)

“We go to win, not just to fight, Lord,” Con reminded God. “And we ask your blessing that we might be victorious. We know that only one corner can win, and that you love both, so if it is your will that the African wins …” Con hated to lose, despised it, but he also knew that how you lost was as important as how you won. He whispered Christ’s words in the garden of Gethsemane:
But let be as You would have it, not as I.

Con crossed himself at the end of his prayers and then again with holy water when he backed out of the church. He walked up Green Street to Twenty-second, crossed himself again in front of the Roman Catholic Chapel of Divine Love, and then turned down the hill toward the hotel. While crossing the street at Spring Garden, Con and several other pedestrians had to pull up short because of a car that illegally pulled through the intersection. They had the green light, but the driver yelled at them to hurry up. A female pedestrian yelled back, “Asshole! I got the right of way, you colon breath!”

The car continued on, and the yeller strutted across the street on dumpy legs, a bitter woman with a face like a lawn dart, who acted as if she had just done something grand. Con wondered how she’d handle a broken nose, or maybe a few shots to the liver.

They were driven through parched neighborhoods to get to the Blue Horizon, which was already packed to standing room only.

“You got pizza in Philly?” Mookie asked the driver.

“You want pizza before the fight?”

“No, but after I’m buyin everybody a big pizza, the whole-thang special. You one, too.”

“You like anchovies, too?”

“Hell no!”

Parking was forget it, and cars were jammed along North Broad Street, parked down the middle of the street. The crowd was milling out front of the old building, boxing’s remora feeding on what was available—a free ticket, a pocket to be picked, lies. Mookie and his corner ran up the stairs of what appeared to have been a theater or maybe a dance hall. Fights were already in progress, and Con noticed how small the arena was, that there were balconies on three sides of the ring. The ring was lit brightly for the TV cameras, and the light carried out into the crowd, which was packed in closely to the ring. The crowd was eight out of ten white. Almost all of the fighters and their fight guys were black or Puerto Rican.

The arena reminded Con of New York’s old St. Nick’s Arena before TV took over the fights, there where Lincoln Center is now, when neighborhoods had their heroes and backed them with money they earned with their hands. In those days, most of St. Nick’s fighters were Italian, and there were hard-eyed Italian guys in bib overalls carrying lunch pails—men who paid to see fights, Irish guys, too, who stopped on the way to work or on their way home from work, wearing caps and with cigar stubs stuck in their teeth. The Irish and Italian fighters were the tough ones, fighters who would take shots to land shots, the bangers who could take you out with one shot from either hand. The black fighters were quick and slick and pretty and didn’t like getting hit, but would hurt you like the Inquisition. The Puerto Ricans were still coming up, but the great Jewish fighters like Benny Leonard and Barney Ross were from another day and time.

That night at the Blue Horizon there were two white fighters, one Irish and one Italian. The rest were Puerto Rican or black, and except for the semimain and the main event, Con’s fight, they weren’t that good—they were tough, but they weren’t smart fighters, not tactical fighters who fought like Hannibal or Rommel or Robert E. Lee, who thought in terms of hitting but not getting hit, fighters who made you miss and then made you pay with shots to the solar plexus that made your eyes bug out, made you think you were going to die.

Most fighters fought cleanly, others not. Refs were mostly right guys, but others could be got to, like some of the zebras in football. And who knew what would be going on in the heads or the pockets of the judges. Money was the name of the game, any game, and that made for corruption somewhere along the way. Most thought the game was corrupt because of the money. Con saw it otherwise, that there was money because of the corruption.

Half the fighters were sent to the blue dressing room, the area designated for fighters fighting out of the blue corner. The rest were sent to the red dressing room. In the old days, there was the white corner and the black corner. It was changed so no one would be offended by the color of the corner. Con had snorted, wondering how anyone white or black could be pissed because of the color of a corner.

Mookie was assigned to the red dressing room. All the chairs were already taken, either by prelim fighters getting ready or by others just finishing up. Gear bags were everywhere, as were factions with as many as six guys, some half drunk and rootin and tootin for their boy. These were four-round fighters and many didn’t last that long; the room was mostly cleared by eight-thirty. Mookie would go on at ten.

Con liked to set up early. But he had to wait for the other factions to clear out. There were tables lined end to end along one side of the long room, but he couldn’t set up there because they were covered in plastic sheets and crusted with fallen plaster that had mixed with drippings from the plumbing or the roof. Sound echoed harshly in the dimly lit room, and people squinted without realizing it. A gummy shower held a hundred-pound plastic bag of chipped ice that corner men like Con would draw from while setting up. One toilet was allotted. It had a sprung wooden door, the design of its geometric woodwork blurred over the years from rainbow layers of paint. The one shower didn’t matter because most fighters didn’t shower after a fight unless it was held in an upscale arena that housed pampered basketball players and such. Con had fought in worse than the Blue Horizon. Pissing could be a problem. There was lots of pissing.

Con filled his ice bucket and bags from the shower, and he filled his water bottles with distilled water and enough ice to chill it. He always had two bottles of water to make sure he and Odell could cool Mookie down if they needed to. As soon as some chairs cleared, he set up at one of the free tables, where he laid out his gauze and tapes. He tore six 9-inch strips of half-inch tape. He stuck one end of each strip to the side of the table, allowing the strips to hang free. The crowd was either booing or cheering, and after Mookie got his fighting shoes on, he began to stretch and move. There was no pain in the leg, and it wouldn’t bother him during the fight—but at that point they still didn’t know. Before Mookie began to sweat, Con wrapped his hands, hands never made by God to support the terrible force fighters could deliver. Con was always careful to support and protect the eight bones in the wrist, the fragile bones across the back of the hand, the thumbs and the knuckles. The wraps had to be tight, but not so tight as to cut off circulation. Con had seen blue hands, had seen fighters miss punches because they couldn’t feel their hands. He’d seen fighters shatter bones for the same reason.

Once Mookie’s hands were wrapped, he began to move with purpose, to get his legs moving, to sweat, to prepare his body for shock. He stepped up the pace and began to shadowbox, shooting punches like bullets. As his time came near, the Commission guy came in with Mookie’s gloves, which Mookie had chosen at the weigh-in and which his white manager had signed to guarantee Mookie got the right gloves at fight time. Con helped get them on Mookie. He wrapped Mookie’s hands, but Odell had a killer way of taping the outside of the gloves at the wrists, wrapping the tape as far below the wrist toward the thumb as the inspector would allow. Both Odell and the African’s trainer had gone too far, and the inspector made them force the tape back up. Both trainers had tried for an edge, to compact the stuffing in the gloves. You tried for every edge, tried to tip things for your guy.

They heard the crowd go native, signaling a kayo ending to the semimain. They’d be up soon. Mookie put on his cup and his fighting shorts. Odell put on the punch mitts, slapped them together, made them crack like a bull whip. Mookie took his stance, moved to his right as southpaws are supposed to, but he was trying too hard to be too fast and Con talked to him like in the gym, low and easy.

“Slow down, get your balance first. Get your balance and the speed will come.”

Mookie nodded once. He tucked his chin next to his shoulder by lowering it, not by raising his shoulder, and laid back a fraction on speed until he had his feet under him right. With balance came his timing and speed, and then he was punching in combinations an untrained eye could never follow. He did it for a solid five minutes, sweat streaking his oiled body, his movements liquid.

“Yeah, that’s it, you got it, that’s pretty!” shouted Con. “Yeah, it’s pretty fighters what make that money!, and my Mookie’s a pretty fighter!”

Mookie’s eyes were set deeply behind his lowered brows, his eyes focused like the eyes of a big cat on a gang of hyenas. “He can’t stay wif me, no good, uh-uh!, gonna teyh ’im up!”

The TV sound guys came in and wired Odell for sound. The TV announcers would be able to pick up what Odell’s instructions were between rounds. They’d wired the African’s trainer as well. What went on in the corner would be on record for the Boxing Commission as well.

Mookie was dazzling under the hot lights, all tassels and sequins and shine. The African wore white, which was incandescent against his ebony skin. His face showed no emotion. He was a good 172 by fight time, outweighing Mookie by at least 7 pounds. The weight differential was bad enough, but it was the height and reach of the African that also worried Con. What troubled him even more was the size of the ring—seventeen feet square, if it was that, and Con wondered if it had been scaled down by the promoter to allow the African, the promotion’s fighter, to make use of his size and reach to bulldoze Mookie into the ropes and the corners, where the African could bang away. Con worried that Mookie would have to kayo the African in order to win.

In the audience was a large contingent of Ugandans, some in African garb. All were chanting, some in haunting counterpoint, and Con wondered if it was in one of the Bantu languages, or in another of the many tribal languages of Uganda, even though English is Uganda’s official language.

The action moved swiftly once the fighters were in the ring. Con watered Mookie, removed his mouthpiece from the ice bucket, and slid it into his mouth. To the crowd, Mookie, Odell, and Con looked peaceful enough, but inside they were on fire. The ref had phony hair, weighed maybe 145, and stammered as he gave his instructions. The fighters touched gloves, the chief seconds left the ring, and the bell rang for round one.

The African came out swinging, thinking Mookie would be easy to stop in the first round, but Mookie wasn’t there and the African stumbled. The African looked to his corner and Mookie hit him six times, all power shots. Then it was stick and move and Mookie danced the African to death, slipping punches and sliding away like a mist in the wind. The African managed to clip Mookie from time to time, but Mookie was moving side to side or backward and at an angle and the glancing blows had no effect. The Ugandans chanted from the crowd for the first round or so but then grew silent as Mookie continued to score. The African’s corner was screaming at him.

“Get off first, goddamn it! Don’t wait! Get off, get off!”

But since he couldn’t set, he couldn’t punch, and Mookie ate him up. In the corner, the African’s trainer slapped him between the third and fourth rounds, but it did little good. Near the end of the fourth, Mookie unloaded a nine-punch combination that had the crowd on its feet. It nearly dropped the African, who looked like a lost child. Between rounds, while dousing him with ice water, his trainer leaned close to his ear. Too close.

The bell rang for the fifth, and the African came out with his legs spread unnaturally wide. It looked like he was trying to get into a crouch so he could punch straight into Mookie instead of down, which would ordinarily be to the taller man’s advantage. Getting low didn’t work, and it didn’t make sense to Odell or Con, unless it was maybe an act of desperation. Mookie pivoted, turned, spun, all the while staying even lower than the African and sticking his jab into his face and gut. When the African tried to straight-arm Mookie and force him back into a corner, Mookie nailed him with a right uppercut to the left elbow that made the African stop that shit. Mookie won the fifth round as easily as the first four. But when the timekeeper banged on the canvas to signal the last ten seconds of round five, the African skipped twice and charged directly into Mookie, his left forearm jammed up under Mookie’s chin, forcing him against the ropes. As Mookie struggled to slide free, the African dropped even lower, his legs spread wider still. Con saw it coming, so did Odell. The African hit Mookie with two uppercuts below the belt. He cranked both with all his might, the punches connecting at the very bottom of the cup and driving it upward and directly into Mookie’s nuts. One shot landed at the bell, the second shot landed after the bell. Now Con and Odell knew why the tall African had gone to a crouch. Not only do low blows hurt a fighter, they sap his strength and can tire him in later rounds.

The ref jumped in and warned him. The African’s face showed no shame. Bent over and wincing, Mookie limped to his corner and sank to his stool. Odell pulled the protective belt away from Mookie’s waist, and Con scooped ice down to Mookie’s balls.

The ref angled over. “You got up to five minutes if you need ’em.”

It was a rule that was aimed to compensate for any immediate pain and to forestall a possible delayed reaction that might force an end to the fight.

“What we need is points deducted for low blows,” Con snapped. “There were two of ’em, for Chrissakes, one after the fuckin bell, ref, come on!”

The ref acted like he was the injured party. “I already warned ’im, okay?”

If Mookie was to get another shot at a big title, there was no way he could quit, so they were between a rock and a hard place. If they toss in the towel, they lose and all their work and dreams were for nothing; if they hang and Mookie weakens from the foul, they lose anyway, and a bad hurt could be put on Mookie besides. Con understood that his kid now had pain for a second opponent in the ring and fretted that Mookie’s age would let him down—it was a matter of heart and what kind of condition Mookie was in. So maybe, if they could fight one more round, or two or more, who could tell? Angie Dundee had said it best: Anything can happen in boxing.