"Busy" Louie at the Golden Gloves
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"Busy" Louie at the Golden Gloves even weeks of preparations. Fifty days of labor and sweat, of gri- Smaces, of mingled doubt and enthusiasm, of "monastic devotion," as Joyce Carol Dates puts it so well.1 Six miles gobbled up each morn- ing, in the arctic cold of a Chicago winter; billions of gestures, sometimes minute, simple or complex but always painstakingly executed, assidu- ously repeated and polished; and oh so many punches—thrown, absorbed, taken in and dished out. Tonight, I'm stepping into the ring. The moment of truth. The Chicago Golden Gloves has arrived, the most prestigious amateur tournament in the city. Proud of its seventy-something years, carrying in its wake the legend of the glory days of the Sweet science, when Chicago Stadium vied with Madison Square Garden in New York City for the pugilistic limelight. Tony Zale, Ernie Terrell, Sonny Listen, Cassius Clay first honed their skills there, first wreaked havoc there. Anx- iety, impatience. Come on, let's do it! Becoming a boxer, training for a fight is a little like entering a reli- gious order. Sacrifice! The word comes up time and again in the mouth of the old coach DeeDee, who knows what he's talking about: a half- century devoured pacing the backstage corridors of the rings of Chicago, Los Angeles, Osaka, and Manila, in the course of a life with as many ups 1. Joyce Carol Dates, On Boxing (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1987). 235 236 • Body & Soul and downs as a roller coaster. He learned his trade under the watchful eye of Jack Blackburn, the trainer of Joe Louis, who used to do his daily roadwork in the same Washington Park where I go running every morn- ing. He knocked around from one gym to another on the South Side before going into exile in Asia for several years to mend a broken heart. Back in Chicago, in the poverty of the black ghetto, or what is left of it, after having had his moment of glory, brief and intense: two world cham- pionships with the Filipino Roberto Cruz and the American Alphonzo Ratliff. Forgotten before they were ever even known by the mainstream public. The boxing gym of the Woodlawn Boys Club will be his last port of call. Today, DeeDee gets by as well he can, keeps things together as best he can. He opens the gym every day at one o'clock sharp, closes its twisted iron gate at seven on the dot. "This damn gym, some days I cain't stand it." But nothing could keep him away. This is where he is; it's as simple as that. Including on those Sundays before a fight, when his boys perform at Park West, at the International Amphitheater on the corner of Halsted and 43rd Street, or in some suburban movie theater. His life is but one long sacrifice to this science of bruising, to which he has given everything and which has given him back so little and so much at the same time. "My life's been one great big waste, but what a beautiful waste!" he says slyly to me, smiling. He has no regrets. Or so he says. Sacrifice! The word bounces off the yellowish walls of the gym, rolls along the peeling ceiling, slides off the heavy bags swaying at the end of their chains, echoes inside the metal lockers where the regulars put away the tools of their trade at the end of the day: well-worn gloves, handwraps drenched with sweat, high-top shoes, headgear, faded sweatsuits in once-daring colors. Training for a fight is subjecting one- self, day after day after day, to a ritual of mortification. I understand bet- ter now why DeeDee always grumbles that "boxin's a job that keep you busy twenty-four hours a day. You gotta have it on your mind every minute. You cain't do nuthin' else if you do it right." Indeed, it's not so much the brutality of the fights that leads pros at the end of their careers to hang up their gloves as the uncompromising and inevitable rigors of training, the wearing away of the will and of the body that it slowly but surely produces. No one escapes time, especially not boxers, those men who daydream of immortality. The life of a boxer in the ring resembles that "nasty, brutish and short" existence of which Thomas Hobbes spoke when describing the state of nature. By comparison, the life he leads in the gym seems woven "Busy" Louie at the Golden Gloves • 237 with langour and sweetness.2 It has its own time, stretched out to infin- ity; its rituals stamped with precision; its rhythms that aim, paradoxically, as much to make the fighter forget the upcoming bout as to ready him for it. It feeds not on inflicted, unpredictable and feared violence, but on violence willed, planned for, self-inflicted, and consented to because it is controlled. Domesticated. Forget the ring: it's in the anonymous and prosaic obscurity of the training gym, both refuge and workshop, that a fighter is forged. The gym is first and foremost made up of sounds or, more to the point, a symphony of specific noises, immediately recogniz- able among a thousand others: the panting and hissing of the boxers, the slap of gloves on the heavy bag, the clicking of the chains, the rhyth- mic gallop of a jumprope, the inimitable "rat-tat-tat-tat-tat" of the speed bag. All of this in a giddy, staccato tempo. Next, it's the smells: pungent, tenacious smells. It's a microclimate, a dense atmosphere, nearly suffo- cating, intoxicating with its very monotony. These sounds, these smells, this atmosphere impregnate the body through every pore, penetrate it and shape it, invest it and excite it through every nerve ending, mold it for combat. "You win your fight in the gym," the old-timers repeat time and again. Because the gym is a factory. Gray, closed in on itself, rudimen- tary, where the high-precision machineries that are boxers are manu- factured, according to methods that appear archaic but are in fact so very time tested and nearly scientific. To work on the bag is to craft a product, as you would on a lathe, with the crude tools that are gloved fists. And the tool and the product meld into that same body that serves as weapon, shield, and target.3 Finding your distance, breathing, feint- ing (with your eyes, your shoulders, your hands, your feet), sliding one step to the side to let the bag swing by, catching it again on the fly with a left hook right to the midsection. Not too high and not too wide, so that the move can't be seen coming. Double it up, to the head, with a short, sharp movement. Follow up with a straight right, taking care to turn the wrist over like a screwdriver in order to align your knuckles horizontally 2. It has frequently been pointed out—correctly, according to my experience—that boxers are often people full of gentleness outside the ring, as if eager to display the kindness forbidden to them in the ring; see, for example, George Bennett and Pete Hammill, Boxers (New York: Dolphin Books, 1978). 3. This work of corporeal fabrication of the pugilistic habitus is dissected in LoTc Wacquant, "Pugs at Work: Bodily Capital and Bodily Labor among Professional Boxers," Body and Society 1, 1 (March 1995): 65-94. 238 • Body & Soul at the precise moment of impact. "The left hook and the straight right, they go together like husband and wife," explains Eddie, the assistant trainer of the gym. The back foot pivots slightly, transfering the weight of the body onto the other leg. The hips swivel back just enough to posi- tion your body at an angle that minimizes the area left open to your opponent. One step to the left and you follow with a jab, the straight punch with the forward arm around which everything revolves, as it serves alternately as foil (defense) and as gun sight (offense)." Pump that jab for me! Give 'im the stick! Make him eat some leather with your left! Double up on d'jab and follow up with a right, that's it." Make no mistake about it: working on the bag is every bit as much mental as it is physical. The distinction itself dissolves in the acrid sweat that streams into my eyes. "Move yo' head, damn it! That's not a bag you got in front of you, Louie, tha's a man!" DeeDee's voice thunders. "How many times do I gotta tell ya that ya got to think? Think! You box with your mind." And yet, everyone knows intimately, from having suf- fered it in his own flesh, that you hardly have time to step back and reflect in the ring, where everything takes place based on reflex, in frac- tions of a second. The head is in the body and the body is in the head. Boxing is a little like playing chess with your guts. The gym is also a lair. Where you come to seek refuge, to rest up from the harsh, cruel light and looks you get from people outside your world: white people, cops, "bourzois" blacks (as my buddy Ashante calls them), bosses and supervisors, and all the respectable folks who veer out of your way with a shudder when you get on the bus. Being young, poor, and black in America is no bed of roses.