Million Dollar Baby (2 page)

There’s no magic in street fighting. Street fighting may be lethal, especially when one guy is bigger and stronger than the other. But boxing is designed to be lethal, designed to test lethally the male will of both fighters, designed to see who’s boss, who will stake out and control the magic territory of a square piece of enchanted canvas.

The magic of the fighter is also part of the mix, the magic that attracts people from around the world to him, the magic of seeing him play Cowboys and Indians for real. The prettier the fighter—and I’m not talking pretty as in girlie-boy movie-star pretty—the harder that fighter has worked. The prettier the fighter is, the more money he’ll make, too. But what you must understand is that fighting and boxing are as different from each other as hitting is from punching, as different as a wild dog from a Chihuahua. By definition, boxing and punching are lethal. So being able to box pretty and be lethal—that makes the magic that drives the whole world wild.

Ring magic is different from the magic of the theater, because the curtain never comes down—because the blood in the ring is real blood, and the broken noses and the broken hearts are real, and sometimes they are broken forever. Boxing is the magic of men in combat, the magic of will, and skill, and pain, and the risking of everything so you can respect yourself for the rest of your life. Almost sounds like writing.

Real magic, the real McCoy, imagine! To be a part of that! Whether in the gym or during a title fight. Or standing beside the canals of Picardy at five in the misty morning while your fighter is doing roadwork. It’s magic to hear frogs plop into the water as your fighter jogs by, to smell apples in the air. And it’s magic to see your fighter stretch himself on the rack of his lungs and legs, his goal to take his opponent’s heart as mercilessly as an Aztec priest, to leave him blinking up into the lights with his will so shattered he will take the pieces to bed with him every night for the rest of his life.

It’s magic to hear your boxer gagging in the dressing room after losing a title fight. It’s magic because your fighter had sweated himself dry and he’s drinking fluids for maybe an hour, and he’s waiting for his kidneys to kick in so he can pass his piss test, because if he pisses drugs, he doesn’t get paid. It’s magic because this same guy had the fight won, except he tried to trade punches with a puncher he’d nearly knocked out—magic because in the split second of that mental error he got himself flattened, like Billy Conn did, but this time with an uppercut that traveled no longer than half the distance from wrist to elbow. And it’s magic because his life will never be the same, magic because he would have been champion of the world, and now he will never be. This is the magic of winning and losing in a man’s game, where men will battle with their minds and bodies and hearts into and beyond exhaustion, past their second wind, through cracked ribs and swollen livers, ruptured kidneys and detached retinas. They do it for the money, to be sure. But they do it for respect and for the magic, too.

And it is magic of the mind as well, because each thing they do with their whole heart and soul takes them to a new level of understanding. The higher they climb, the wider the horizon, and they begin to see and understand combinations they never dreamed of. Like the writer, the more the fighter knows of his game, the greater the magic for him and for us.

And then there’s magic of stopping blood that maybe another cut man couldn’t, the magic of maybe using stuff you shouldn’t use, but you keep your guy in the fight so both of you can go home winners. But it’s also magic to see a fight you’re winning end in the time it takes to blink, when a left hook cranks your boy’s jaw into the second balcony. Even though you’ve lost and your guts are churning, it’s still magic. And to be robbed, whether in the ring or with a gun while you are tending bar, even that’s magic—magic because it’s all real, every bit of it, and it’s happening now and lasting forever in your mind and heart. And it’s magic because it’s a war you’ll go back to every chance you get. And I’m still looking for the gentleman who pulled that Magnum on me, who made my heart hit the roof of my mouth, who showed me disrespect. Prior to that experience, I wasn’t sure if I could kill another human being. I know now.

Respect is part of the magic of boxing. Most outside the fight game expect the victors to denigrate the vanquished. That would destroy the magic. Ali was yappy before, during, and after a fight, but we always knew he was playing the fool, was a pup so full of life that he had to yip and yap, prance and dance. There are imitators, to be sure, but there’s no fun to what they do.

But even if one fighter thinks he was robbed, and regardless of the trash talked before the fight, fighters will with few exceptions congratulate each other afterward, will say
Good fight
at the very least. There is a kinship between winner and loser that outsiders don’t understand because boxing, after all is said and done, is about respect. When a fighter doesn’t get respect, say when he’s a ham-’n’-egger and someone says, “Get a job!” his skin turns to flypaper and dreadful things stick to him all the way to his grave.

Remember the humility of Mike Tyson at the press conference after his loss in the first fight with Holyfield? How he wanted to
touch
Holyfield, how Holyfield smiled and allowed him to shake his hand? When a fighter gets his ass whipped in a round, you don’t tell him to go beat up the son of a bitch that did it to him. You tell him to go out and get respect. Besides, it’s a small family. The members of it—the members of the fancy—need each other, not only for the money, but they need each other so they can, ultimately, test themselves against themselves.

And there’s the magic that breaks your heart. You’ve got a kid with a bloody nose. If it’s broken, forget it, it’s going to keep bleeding. But just a bloody nose you can usually stop. So you wipe the boy’s face clean, shove a swab soggy with adrenaline into the nostril that’s bleeding. You work the swab around, and you close the other nostril with your thumb. You tell the boy to inhale, so the adrenaline will flood the broken tissue and constrict the vein and widen the blow hole. But the boy doesn’t inhale. You say,
“Inhale!”
Nothing. You say it again,
“Goddamn it!”
Time is running out, and then you see the boy looking at you like you’ve been speaking Gaelic or Hebrew. So then you understand, and you say,
“Breathe in!”

He breathes in through the adrenaline while you put pressure above his upper lip. The adrenaline gets to the tear, and the blood stops coming, and he’s ready to fight again. Blood is pumping in your neck because you almost didn’t stop the blood. But part of you has traveled to the place where the boy lives, to the place where no one uses words like
inhale.
That’s magic, too, but it’s the kind that hurts you, the kind that makes you better for hurting.

Today in the U.S., for the most part, the white boys of boxing are gone, though the percentage of white fighters who fight well is quite high. In fact it surprises me that more midsized white athletes don’t come into the game.

White trainers, with some exceptions, are faded memories as well. Angelo Dundee, of course, still hangs with the big kids, as do a few others. My situation is unusual: 95 percent of my friends and associates are of a different color than I. I recently gave a rubdown to a 240-pound Ugandan who speaks English, Swahili, and Japanese. By the time I spread extra-virgin olive oil over him and then worked wintergreen liniment into him, he was black and shiny as a berry. He has a temperament sweet as a berry, as well. He’s a polite and gentle Catholic boy—outside the ring. He lives and fights out of Japan. His regular trainer is Hawaiian Japanese.

Several years ago I was working with another heavyweight, was giving him a rubdown. He was a rubdown whore, wanted one every day. Said his wife gave good rubdowns, among other things, but hers couldn’t compare with mine. Always had some little pain or pull. But he was a good guy with heart, so it was worth it. He was berry-black as well. His problem as a pro was that he only wanted one big fight so he could buy a house. He went sour along the way because he never had the drive that would take him through the pain of boxing, both in and outside the ring. He never got that house. If he had aimed for the title, even if he never won it, he would have had several houses.

Anyway, there I was, sweating my ass off on the guy, and about half looped from the alcohol fumes. It takes forty-five minutes to work the tissue in a heavyweight. Into the gym came a recently paroled featherweight two days on the street, broke and hungry and begging quarters, who had fallen in love with “that shit.” He was high on it and talking about how he was framed by the muhfuh white-racist power structure, that he had been a victim of the boot of white oppression, that the pig was out to get the brothers, that white was shit. What he left out was that he had been convicted of robbing, beating, and raping a crack-head street whore from South Central.

So there he was, going on about pigs. I should mention that my heavyweight had a white wife. When he asked the featherweight if he couldn’t see that I was white, and that maybe he should watch his jive-ass mouth, the featherweight didn’t miss a beat.

“Yeah, I see he white, but Toole be different.”

Magic. It’s why I’m in it. For the voodoo.

I
STOP BLOOD
.

I stop it between rounds for fighters so they can stay in the fight.

Blood ruins some boys. It was that way with Sonny Liston, God rest his soul. Bad as he was, he’d see his own blood and fall apart.

I’m not the one who decides when to stop the fight, and I don’t stitch up cuts once the fight’s over. And it’s not my job to hospitalize a boy for brain damage. My job is to stop blood so the fighter can see enough to keep on fighting. I do that, maybe I save a boy’s title. I do that one little thing, and I’m worth every cent they pay me. I stop the blood and save the fight, the boy loves me more than he loves his daddy.

But you can’t always stop it. Fight guys know this. If the cut’s too deep or wide, or maybe you got a severed vein down in there, the blood keeps coming. Sometimes it takes two or three rounds to stop the blood, maybe more—the boy’s heart is pumping so hard, or he cuts more. Once you get the coagulant in there, sometimes it takes another shot from the opponent right on the cut itself to drive the blood far enough from the area so the stuff you’re using can start to work. What I’m saying is there are all kinds of combinations you come up against down in the different layers of meat. When a good cut man stays ahead of the combinations, he can stop most cuts, but not every one.

Fights can be stopped for a lot of reasons. A football eye swollen shut can stop a fight. But fights aren’t stopped just because a fighter is cut. It’s where he’s cut. Below the eye, or alongside it, that won’t usually stop a fight. Neither will a cut if it’s in or above the eyebrow, or up in the forehead, or in the scalp. Broken nose? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. A cut in the eyelid, because of possible damage to the eyeball and the threat of blindness, that can stop a fight quick. So will blood pumping down into a boy’s eyes. Blood can blind a fighter, maybe cost him the fight, or worse, because when he can’t see he starts taking shots he wouldn’t otherwise take, and now he ends up on his ass blinking through the lights and shadows of future memories.

Boy gets cut, I always crack the seal of a new, one-ounce bottle of adrenaline chloride solution 1:1000. When it’s fresh, it’s clear like water but has a strong chemical smell. The outdated stuff turns a light pinkish color, or a pale piss-yellow. When that happens, it couldn’t stop fly blood. I might pour adrenaline into a small plastic squeeze bottle if I need to use sterile gauze pads along with a swab, but I never use adrenaline from a previous fight. I dump it, even if three quarters of it is left. This way it can’t carry blood over from another fight, and none of my boys can get AIDS from contaminated coagulant. I’d give AIDS to myself before I’d give it to one of my boys.

Trainers and managers and fighters call me. They know me from when I used to train fighters. But I got too old and was walking around with my back and neck crippled up all the time from catching punches with the punch mitts. Boxing is a game of half steps and quarter inches, a game where old men belong as much as the young. Without us, there couldn’t be fights. Fans think boxing is about being tough. For members of the fancy, the fight game is about getting respect.

My first fight working the corner of Hoolie Garza came after his trainer talked to me, Ike Goody. Ike was a club fighter in the fifties, but like most first-rate trainers, he was never a champ. With the exception of Floyd Patterson, I don’t remember another champ who ever made a champion. Hoolie Garza is a twenty-six-pounder, a smart featherweight Mexican boy who thinks he’s smarter than he is. He was born in Guaymas, a port on the Gulf of California inside Baja. He was raised illegal in East Los Angeles, where he fought with his big brothers for food. His real name is Julio César Garza, but as a kid he was nicknamed Juli—in Spanish it’s pronounced
“hoolie.”
Juli was Americanized to Hoolie, the way Miguel, or Michael, is sometimes Americanized into Maikito.

After the Korean War, I went to school in Mexico City on the G.I. Bill. I wanted to learn Spanish, maybe teach it. So I hung around with Mexicans rather than other Americans. Some of my friends were bullfighters. I had a fling with the daughter of the secretary to the president of Mexico, a natural blonde who drove a car with license-plate number 32. She, God bless her, was one of the ways I learned Spanish on several levels and in different accents. I usually keep my Spanish to myself, like a lot of Latinos in the U.S. keep their English to themselves. But if they find out and ask about it, I tell them I was a student in Mexico and Spain both, and I say,
“Hablo el españo sólo si me conviene
—I speak Spanish only when it’s to my advantage.” They always smile. Some laugh out loud and wag their finger. A lot of Latino fighters coming to fight in L.A. use me in their corner; some fly me to Vegas. I’m as loyal to them as I am to an American, or to an Irishman, which is why I never bet on a fight I’m working—not on the boy I’m working with, and not on the other fighter. This way, if I somehow screw up and cause my boy to lose, it can never be said that I did business.