Fighter's Heart, A by Sheridan Sam

Author:Sheridan, Sam [Sheridan, Sam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781848872660
Publisher: Atlantic Books

5

A COLD GAME

Virgil Hunter and Andre Ward, Oakland, March 2005.

Kings Gym, Oakland

It takes constant effort to keep the slippery, naked, near-formless fact of hitting swaddled in layers of sense and form. Because hitting wants to shake off all encumbering import and just be hitting, because boxing incompletely frames elemental chaos, the capacity of the fights to mean is rivaled by their incapacity to mean anything at all.

—Carlo Rotella, Cut Time

I drove cross-country to Oakland in the spring. I was going to see Virgil Hunter and Andre Ward. Andre had won a gold medal at the Olympics in Athens and was 3–0 as a pro.

My shoulder was feeling better. The endless pulling on rubber bands seemed to have had some effect. I had talked Virgil into taking me on as a student. “Just imagine I’m a cruiserweight prospect,” I said to him. He laughed. Virgil would never be able to pretend I was anything other than what I was. It’s part of what made him a great trainer. I told him I wanted an amateur fight—having a fight focuses the training and clarifies the mind; it gives you a sense of urgency that helps you learn. I wanted a different kind of relationship with a teacher, more than I’d had in Rio or even Iowa. I wanted the one-on-one attention. If I was going to fight bare-fisted in Myanmar or MMA again anywhere, I better do it right. If my true love was hitting and getting hit, I figured I should have the best instruction available, at least for a while. And I was fascinated by Andre’s story, the life of a red-hot young prospect with all the advantages, being groomed for greatness. Finally, I thought it would be good for my understanding to take a look into the big-time world of professional boxing, from the inside.

The amount of literary material on boxing is staggering. World-class writers have fallen in love with “the sweet science,” from Hemingway and Mailer to Joyce Carol Oates; far, far better writers than I have addressed the issue. In general, they fall into all kinds of hyperbole, all kinds of difficult and complicated constructions and emphatic descriptions, in attempts to describe the visceral. Boxing writing often veers from the sublime to the ridiculous.

So I was going to get some one-on-one attention with a world-class trainer and fight an amateur fight. It almost seemed a step backward, to fight an amateur fight at this point (four two-minute rounds, headgear—are you kidding me?), but the fight was just an excuse to train hard. And I wanted to see Andre in depth, close up. People didn’t realize that although Andre had won gold at light-heavyweight, 175 pounds, he’d fought most of those fights weighing under 170 pounds. He beat a European champion and a huge (six-five) Russian world champion and gave up seven pounds. The critics were sniping at him for turning pro at middleweight (“Didn’t he have the power for light-heavy?”), or 160—but he had never been a proper light-heavyweight.

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