Sparring With Hemingway: And Other Legends of the Fight Game (20 page)

[February 1972]

A
S MUCH AS I LOVE
boxing, I hate it, and as much as I hate it, I love it. Every sensitive
aficionado
of the sport must bring to it this ambivalence. For make no mistake about it, at its worst, professional boxing is a cruel sport, just as, at its best, it is exhilarating, artistic, and, yes, ennobling. A natural rivalry for the championship of the world between two gifted professionals, tuned to perfection, is, in this opinion, a sporting event surpassing all others, from Super Bowls to Kentucky Derbies. No wonder it has had a grip on our imagination from the original Greek Games to the most recent Olympics, with its crop of new
Wunderkinder
hoping to replace Sugar Ray Leonard and the other overnight darlings of Montreal.

Write this off as macho nonsense if you will, but from his primordial beginnings man has fought with his fists—as he came later to club, dagger, sword, gunpowder, and, finally, atomic bombs. With gloves and seemingly civilized rules, the dual instincts of throwing punches and smartly defending against them has been recognized and ritualized as a sport, even a “science”—the “Sweet Science” being no misnomer for a game that has produced such master boxers as Willie (The Wisp) Pep, uncrowned welterweight king Billy Graham, and the two Sugar Rays, Robinson and Leonard. Those who abhor the fight game see it as a brawl between two mindless brutes trying to bash in each other’s skulls. And it is sadly true that a fight between
two stiffs who are all muscle and no talent illustrates just what is base and heartless about boxing in general, and maybe the human race in particular, just as a dramatic confrontation between Sugar Ray Leonard and Thomas (Hit Man) Hearns (as well as Hearns and Marvelous Marvin Hagler) brings into play a chess game of mind and body that may make boxing the most thoughtful sport of them all—in which moves are thought out as far in advance as Willie Mosconi’s at the billiard table.

Still, this year, when boxing in our international satellite society is reaching larger audiences than ever before, the game that has fascinated writers from Hazlitt and Byron to Hemingway and Mailer is on the ropes—and at least one organization, the American Medical Association, would like to count it out. At its recent convention in Hawaii, the AMA called for a ban on boxing—amateur as well as professional—on the basis that “boxing is the only major (so-called) sport in which the intentional purpose is the physical harm of the opponent, and that chronic brain damage is the almost inevitable result of a ring career.”

Devoted friends of boxing rushed to the attack. Asked Bert Randolph Sugar, former editor of
Ring
magazine, “Why have they singled out boxing, making it the litter box of sports, when football has a weekly casualty list that looks like a Vietnam body count and auto racing possesses the charming aspect of having spectators catch the car instead of the ball?” Quick to answer his own question, the irrepressible Mr. Sugar suggests that boxing is made a whipping boy because it has no recognized spokesman, no national commissioner, no Pete Rozelle who can defend the weekly double column of football injuries, no Blue Book breeders of thoroughbreds to defend the fatalities and injuries to horse and rider that make horse racing a sport as dangerous to life and limb as automobile racing, another of the eleven sports listed ahead of boxing both by the ESPN cable network and the National Board of Insurance Underwriters on the index of injury, violence, and death.

Lack of a commissioner, a Peter Ueberroth, a Federal
Commission of Boxing to establish and enforce rules of safety and preventative “medicine” through thorough pre- and post-fight testing, is one of the reasons—and an authentic one—for the prevailing “open season” on boxing. José Torres, the articulate and intensely human ex-champion who headed the New York State Athletic Commission, was only half kidding when he said that “more human suffering may be caused by doctors’ malpractice and failure to make house calls than from boxing per se.” And knowing opponents of the AMA, such as Dr. Ferdie (Fight Doctor) Pacheco, may accurately describe the AMA as a political organization representing less than 50 percent of the American medical profession, with a reputation for furthering economic self-interest rather than socially beneficial medical programs. Still, while accusing the AMA of overkill in urging prohibition of both amateur and professional boxing, Pacheco acknowledges that brain damage can be a consequence of prolonged activity in the prize ring and that the reports of the
Journal of the American Medical Association
should be studied and heeded. But Pacheco also views the AMA as “political, opportunistic, and manipulative.” Why didn’t they look into other dangerous sports? Like Torres and other well-informed critics of the AMA, the Fight Doctor believes the answer to his challenge lies in the fact that the medical lobby is taking on a sport that can’t fight back. It is vulnerable for reasons both legitimate and illegitimate. If it had a reputable body that could fight back, that body would also be overseeing a sport that cries out for policing, that is now a plunder ground and sometimes a killing ground, a multimillion-dollar sports business run without rhyme (now that Ali’s gone) or reason, ethics or long-range plan. Instead of a single authoritative body, there’s a bunch of fistic politicos: the WBA, the WBC, the IBF, the USBA, the NABF … with rival champions and conflicting top-ten contenders, with rival safety rules and jurisdictions, all pretending to preside over the one sport to attract nearly all its participants from ghetto America, the
favelas
of South America, the slums of Mexico, the Philippines, and the
Far East. Football, baseball, basketball, hockey players would never tolerate the anarchy in which the boxer is asked to practice his exacting, exciting, and sometimes dangerous profession.

Without boxing scholarships to lever him into at least a minimal college education, the average fighter is a young hopeful from Spanish Harlem or the mean streets of Detroit or the gang-hardened alleys of Chicano East Los Angeles. With dreams of becoming an overnight millionaire like Sugar Ray Leonard, Larry Holmes, and Thomas Hearns, he eagerly accepts the rigorous dedication of mind and body demanded of a professional boxer. Or, we should correct ourselves,
should be
demanded. For every careful, caring Cus D’Amato, who taught his boys (like champions Floyd Patterson and José Torres) to protect themselves both in the ring and outside the ropes, there are the “meat merchants” ready to take healthy, hungry boys and throw them to the wolves. In contrast to ringmen in the class of Ray Arcel and Gil Clancy are “brave” managers who beg ringside doctors not to stop a contest in which their “boy” is suffering deep cuts and near-concussion, and greedy promoters who not merely promote their spectacles but own the champions. This includes the seemingly respectable television networks that sign potential stars such as the recent Olympic champions to lucrative long-range contracts, and then fatten their records on set-ups, tankers, greenhorns, or washed-ups who should either not be licensed at all or never be allowed in the ring with gifted and protected opponents who cuff them about at will. With the exception of NBC, which at least has the ring-wise Pacheco making the matches and calling most of the shots, the networks are as guilty of “meat merchanting” as the most cynical of the old-time managers with their “Get-in-there-they-can’t-hoit-us.” And even Pacheco was heard to mention on a recent “show” that one of his contestants was hopelessly outclassed.

“Fighters are a dime a dozen, but managers go on forever,” is the slogan of this hardened tribe who go on managing kids who
get knocked out six times in eight fights—and if you think this is exaggeration, thumb through a Ring Record Book.

Threading through the pages full of power and glory are records like that of Marcus Dorsey, a Houston middleweight, knocked out ten times in seventeen fights, winning only his very first fight. Or Al Byrd, a North Carolina heavyweight, knocked out in eighteen fights in twenty-four starts. Or Irving Booth, knocked out in all seven of his first seven fights, in the first or second round. Where are the commissions, the promoters, the managers who should be telling these sacrificial lambs in wolves’ clothing to go home and forget it—the world of Holmes, Hagler, and Hearns is not for them?

In this climate of neglect—with too many meat merchants and not enough Cus D’Amatos and too many no-talent “Christians” thrown to the lions—the public cry for abolition or reform comes only when an exhausted Duk Koo Kim is inadvertently beaten to death by Ray (Boom Boom) Mancini, or a drug-abused Willie Classen, stopped in two of his previous fights, is allowed one more, fatal round with then-undefeated Wilford Scypion. Instead of waiting for tragedy to strike again, it behooves defenders of boxing not to shrug off but to take a good, hard look at the charges of the AMA.

According to its high-sounding Council on Scientific Affairs, its own study of thirty-eight boxers, as well as a study in the British medical magazine
Lancet
of fourteen Finnish boxers, and a further study by six physicians published last May in the AMA
Journal
—all based on CT (computed tomographic) brain scans, electroencephalograms, and neurological tests—a significant number of those boxers suffered from chronic encephalopathy, cerebral atrophy, and, in about one-third of the cases, a condition described medically as
cavum septum pellucidum.
This abnormality has been discovered in tests both of Muhammad Ali, and of the best white heavyweight in recent years, Jerry Quarry, who fought all the tough ones of the sixties and seventies, Joe Frazier, Muhammad Ali, Ernie Shavers, Ken Norton. … Jerry is not at all the punchy
stereotype with which enemies of boxing like to belabor the sport. He’s not walking on his heels, and his speech isn’t slurred. Articulate and responsive, he’s an effective TV colorman at ringside. But when he volunteered to participate in a series of tests sponsored by
Sports Illustrated,
along with Tex Cobb, who took an unmerciful (and needless) beating from Larry Holmes, and a club fighter named Pacheco (no relation to Dr. P), his CAT scans and psychoneurological results were subnormal.

Without overloading readers with statistics and medicalese, it’s the AMA conclusion
that boxing is deleterious to the human brain.
But not all experts agree. Dr. Bennett Denby, the neurosurgeon at New York University Medical Center who advises the New York State Athletic Commission, studied 125 CAT scans of fighters knocked out last year and found no evidence of brain damage caused by boxing. While the jury is still out, there is no point in denying the
possibility
of brain damage, especially from the accumulation of blows over a number of years. Just as there is little point in defending the boxing status quo by citing the number of fatalities in auto and horse racing, tobogganing, hang-gliding, and so many other dangerous sports. Yes, Pat Ryan, the starting quarterback for the Jets, was sidelined for the rest of the 1984 season after serious concussions suffered in two successive games. Of course, the 280-pound linemen blindsiding a star quarterback are trying to do more than stop the passer; consciously or subconsciously they’re trying to whack him out of the game. Nor is it of any value to a brain-damaged veteran of sixty or seventy fights to argue that Ron Turcotte, a little gem of a jockey, is paralyzed from the waist down, as is Daryl Stingley of the New England Patriots. Or that major automobile races are advertised on TV by featuring again and again deadly crashes with cars rolling over, slamming against walls, and trapping their drivers in fires. Bodily harm, intended or accidental, attends every sport of violent contact. But we who follow boxing have an obligation to deal with our own sport. If a jockey keeps falling off his horse, he is disqualified. But for the fighter who gets knocked
out almost every time he climbs through the ropes or shuffles through his bloody career as a hopeless loser, there is no Thoroughbred Racing Association to rule him off the track.

It is not the findings of the AMA—alarming if still inconclusive—that we question, but its conclusions: to abolish both amateur and professional boxing. In the first place, these are two different sports, the first limited to three rounds, with headgear, and the referee ready to step in practically with the first sign of a bloody nose. The professional main bout goes anywhere from ten to fifteen rounds and is a test of endurance as well as courage and skill. This kind of prizefight has been banned again and again.

A fight to the finish was outlawed in England throughout the bareknuckle days of the nineteenth century but flourished just the same with such natural rivalries as champion Tom Cribb vs. the American slave champion, Tom Molineaux, and Richard Humphries vs. Daniel Mendoza, “the Jew,” drawing tens of thousands, from bluebloods to scalawags. Forbidden in the United States as well, the Manly Art responded to an insatiable urge all over the country. “The Great” John L. Sullivan had to go all the way to rural Mississippi to face a major rival, Jake Kilrain. If Gentleman Jim Corbett had to meet San Francisco rival Joe Choynski on a barge to avoid police interference, so be it—they fought it out. Wherever boxing was banned, there was always some state or territory beyond the law where natural rivalries were settled with impunity.

After winning his bareknuckle championship from Paddy Ryan in the wilds of Mississippi, Sullivan went all the way to France to defend his title against Charley Mitchell. Only the oldest of old-timers remembers that New York banned boxing completely about eighty years ago. And what were the results? Did boxing disappear? No, like booze in the twenties, it flourished in speakeasies—only they were called boxing “clubs.”

Instead of a ticket, you bought a “membership”—oh, man’s ingenuity is endless when it comes to something he (and she) is unable to resist. In the years of boxing’s “banishment” there
were many more fight cards in New York than there are today. Every borough had its club or clubs, with professional boxing every night of the week. But it was totally without supervision. There were no weigh-ins and no safety precautions. Lightweights were thrown in against middleweights. There are grim stories of battered bodies being found in the river or abandoned in alleys after brutal club matches that mindless referees never bothered to stop.