Get Her Off the Pitch!: How Sport Took Over My Life

Later, we would watch Lennox sparring in a much nicer space at the Garden, but hanging about in that dank, unlovely gym brought things home to me in an important way, and at an important moment. Sometimes people come into my office and say, politely, ‘So this is where it all happens?’ and I get all uncomfortable, because, obviously, nothing happens here at all except a lot of impressive teadrinking, and I assume they’re just trying to avoid saying, ‘Oh my God, what a mess’ in any case. But anyway, my point is, you go into an old, battered, smelly Skid Row gym like that, and suddenly this upcoming fight is nothing to do with the HBO pay-per-view millions, or the international diplomacy success of the promoter, or the trading of hollow physical threats by besuited fighters on podiums with fireworks in the background. Because this is where it all happens. This is where men build defences, and learn by getting hurt. This is where they sweat and learn and concentrate, and - in Holyfield’s case - acquire neck muscles like anchor chains. Of course, I knew that Holyfield didn’t use this scuzzy gym every day of his life: a multimillionaire, he lived in considerable luxury in Texas, with a swimming pool shaped like a championship belt, and had fathered nine children by twelve women (or something like that), while also being strenuously devout, which some people saw as not quite adding up. Holyfield once said in an interview that all men had to get out of their trousers from time to time, and the interviewer said, ‘But not as often as you.’ But that’s not the point. By the time I got my chance to go through the little door and see the sweating, shaven-headed and massively muscular Evander Holyfield - sparring energetically in a darker, smaller, and even sweatier space - I was so sensitised to the idea of boxing’s sheer physicality that I almost fainted at the sight of him.

I hadn’t been prepared for this sudden powerful interest in these two men’s bodies. It came as a shock after three years in the trade. Every week of my life, I routinely heard about injuries of one sort or another - footballers with fractured metatarsals; tennis players with strained hamstrings - and the information didn’t impinge very much. The chaps’ bodies were just the tools of their trade. One of my treasured football press conference questions was, on the subject of a chronically injured star player, ‘Anything new on the groin?’ (My next favourite was golfer Justin Leonard saying that he’d taken his bogeys with a pinch of salt.) I admit that casual mention of footballers, in multiples, ‘on the treatment tables’ conjured a too-vivid image sometimes, because I pictured them naked and at rest, face up, expectant, lightly oiled, under sheets describing suggestive contours; and I also remember with great clarity a moment when the then fabulously dreadlocked - and very beautiful - Henrik Larsson, playing for Celtic, celebrated a goal with his shirt off and took me completely by surprise with what was underneath. But by and large, I regarded sportsmen as hairy-kneed yeomen whose flesh, skin and muscle were their own affair, and certainly nothing to do with me.

It helped to be reading Joyce Carol Oates at this juncture - and there’s a sentence I never thought I’d write. But her book On Boxing is a small masterpiece. A great fan of boxing, she is in love with the plain fact that it’s not a metaphor for anything else. While organised games are metaphors for war, and tennis (say) is a metaphor for hand-to-hand combat, boxing isn’t. ‘I can entertain the proposition that life is a metaphor for boxing,’ is as far as she’ll go (and is as funny as she gets, by the way). ‘Boxing is only like boxing.’ Boxers, she says, ‘are there to establish an absolute experience, a public accounting of the outermost limits of their beings’. People who attend fights because they like seeing blood spray about probably don’t think about it this deeply, perhaps; but that doesn’t make it untrue. A fight is a culmination of training, a moment of truth, a supreme form of reckoning, and the bottom line is that most of us will never experience anything remotely as testing as a public accounting of the outermost limits of our being. I once went the full twelve rounds with John Lewis Online customer services, and I won’t say I wasn’t bruised by it, but I would never claim it was the real thing.

For these two men to measure up to one another in a ring on Saturday night was not just a contrivance for the sake of entertainment; it was a magnificent, if still horrifying, necessity. Their job, I now saw, was not so much to hurt each other as to protect themselves and emerge with honour. I didn’t want to see it happen, but at the same time I couldn’t miss it. If they were going to risk so much, the least I could do was watch. Oates makes one outstanding claim for boxing: ‘It is the most tragic of all sports because, more than any human activity, it consumes the very excellence it displays - its drama is this very consumption.’ Or, as everyone kept saying in relation to Holyfield (aged 37) in the week before the fight, ‘Sometimes you see a boxer age in the ring, right there in front of you.’

However, at this point, Holyfield himself was not anticipating such a transfiguration. He was predicting he would knock out Lewis in the third round. He said it at the gym, and he said it later. The American press were very grateful for this uncharacteristic prediction, as it supported their rather simplistic sales pitch on Holyfield, which was that he had tons of ‘heart’. We heard an awful lot about Holyfield’s heart in the week before the fight. I started to think we should demand to see an x-ray, or at least have it weighed in separately. Lewis, meanwhile, was characterised as a kind of cowardly lion because - by contrast to Holyfield - he made no bones about preferring not to be hit. The American press were very unfair to Lewis, but you could see why he confused them, with his languid, sleep-walking manner, his unblemished good looks, and his unhurried, unemotional common sense. Lewis said that everyone asked him, all the time, about his supposed inferiority in the ‘heart’ department; meanwhile, he never saw a picture of himself in the American press that didn’t have a question mark next to it.

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.

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