On the Chin Read online

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  The first thing that impressed me about Fritzy was his collection of boxing maxims, which he deployed continuously and without regard to their relevance: ‘Ya don’t play boxing’, ‘Don’t hook with a hooker’, ‘Kill the body and the head’ll die’, ‘Move ya head or the other guy’ll move it for ya.’

  Fritzy was Jake’s trainer. I had got his mobile number from Jake, but put off dialling it for two days, afraid my voice would betray me as soft, privileged and generally unsuitable for instruction. When I did finally work up the nerve to call, I half-hoped nobody would pick up. But on the fifth ring, a voice, broad and rasping, answered: ‘Fritzy here.’

  ‘G’day,’ I said, affecting the same kind of matey, flat-vowelled intonation my dad uses when talking to his mechanic. ‘I was calling about getting some boxing lessons for me and a mate?’

  The sport of boxing provokes love, loathing and sometimes lust with equal intensity. It’s a ticket out of poverty, a middle-class fascination and a promoter’s goldmine; it can hook people with a primal burst of adrenaline and clinch them tight, or repel them utterly from the first jab.

  In On the Chin Alex McClintock uses his own unlikely progress through the amateur ranks as a springboard to explore the history, culture and contradictions of the sweet science—with detours through some of its notable characters, including: Benny ‘The Ghetto Wizard’ Leonard, ‘The Boxing Barista’ Luigi Coluzzi, the immaculately named Trenton Titsworth, and the great Ruben Olivares, once described as ‘the undisputed champion of the bender and the cabaret’.

  Informative, insightful and effortlessly entertaining, On the Chin is your essential guide to the art of hitting and getting hit.

  CONTENTS

  COVER PAGE

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  TITLE PAGE

  INTRODUCTION

  SAY OUCH

  SOMETHING TO PROVE

  BANG BANG BANG

  BARSTOOL PHILOSOPHER

  TO ENCOURAGE SWEATING

  BLIND PENGUINS

  TRAINING HERE DAILY

  TWO POINTS FOR KISSING

  THE FIGHT(S) OF THE CENTURY

  CLARET

  THE LATE REPLACEMENT

  PICKETED BY EQUITY

  DAVID VS GOLIATH

  THE ALPHABET GANG

  CHINNY

  AT THE ALTAR

  PUNCH DRUNK

  YEAH RIGHT, JEFFREY

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  FURTHER READING

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT PAGE

  For Mama

  INTRODUCTION

  WRITING A BOOK about prize fighting after having a few amateur fights is a bit like writing a book about marathons after going for a jog around the block.

  But I didn’t write On the Chin because I achieved a lot in the ring. Nor did I write it to share my insider knowledge of the fight game—I don’t have any. I wrote this book because boxing changed my life, and because there’s no point having a passion if you can’t tell people all about it.

  Growing up, I never thought of myself as the sort of person who would enjoy seeing people hit each other, let alone enjoy hitting people myself. The sport was not passed on to me by my dad or uncle. I didn’t box at school. There was no gym in the quiet suburb where I grew up. Like a lot of people, I assumed that boxing was the simplest sport imaginable. Hardly even a sport at all.

  Then, by chance, I scratched the surface and learned the truth: boxing is really, really complicated. Not just in the ring, but outside it too. The contradictions are difficult to reconcile. Discipline vs debauchery. Sophistication vs grit. Uplift vs exploitation.

  Boxing is confusing and problematic because humans are. For better and for worse, its extremes reveal what we’re capable of. My own experience in the ring taught me that I’m stronger than I ever thought possible, braver, more resourceful. But it also revealed a lot about my shortcomings.

  If you’re disgusted by combat sports, this isn’t the book for you. Your reaction is rational and understandable, and I won’t try to convince you you’re wrong.

  If, however, you’ve watched the odd fight and felt the primal thrill of combat, but can’t be bothered with the confusion, deception and greed that make it so hard to follow: read on. This book is an attempt to cut through the bullshit and make the sport a little less confusing.

  If you’re not sure whether you’re interested in boxing, I’d say this: stories about boxers are not just stories about people punching each other in the face. They’re stories about class, race, migration, urbanisation, politics, history, sex, gender, the body—about what it means to be human.

  They are mainly stories about men, though. Things are changing, but through history few fields have been as male-dominated as the busted-beak business (which is really saying something). I’ve attempted to include fighting women, but I should say upfront that they’re outnumbered.

  On the Chin is also a story of home and away—because I’m from here and most historically significant boxers are from over there, especially the US, which has dominated the sport for the last 140-odd years. Still, I’ve managed to sneak in the stories of a few Aussie fighters.

  I’ve tried to write it all from the starting point that most people, even most sports fans, have little knowledge of boxing beyond Muhammad Ali, Mike Tyson, Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao. If you’re already an aficionado, what follows will not all be new to you. I hope you enjoy it anyway.

  A NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY

  Boxing is infested with a whole alphabet of organisations (the WBC, WBA, WBO, IBF, IBO and so forth) that hand out world title belts. Some of these bodies are more credible than others, although it’s a relative matter because they’re all crooks (see ‘The Alphabet Gang’ later in the book).

  But regrettable as it is, these sanctioning bodies do exist and do have influence in the sport. That’s why this book refers to winners of their diluted titles as ‘titlists’, ‘title holders’ or ‘belt holders’, while the word ‘champion’ is used only to refer to the owners of legitimate, lineal championships, i.e. the guy who beat the previous champion, who beat the previous champion and so on back to the introduction of the Queensberry Rules—which introduced gloves to the sport, among other innovations. If that doesn’t make sense now, I hope it will soon.

  SAY OUCH

  I HAVE A single childhood memory involving boxing. I am lying between Mum and Dad on the waterlily-patterned cushions of the bamboo couch in our living room. We are watching the evening news, which the whole family—me, my parents, my twin brother George and my younger sister Rose—did every night: it was one of our rituals. I think my parents considered it educational.

  Tonight: the opening theme, which I always found oddly thrilling; the intro graphics swooping low over the pages of an atlas; the newsreader’s voice describing the day’s goings-on in federal politics, all as normal. Then he adds, in tones of mock outrage, that Mike Tyson has bitten off a chunk of Evander Holyfield’s ear in a fight for the WBA heavyweight championship.

  At the time I had no idea what this meant, but the accompanying footage, which you have probably seen, shows two gleaming, herculean African-American men wearing bright red gloves punching each other, then hugging, while a small bald man with a bow tie fusses about nearby. One of the men seems to kiss the other on the side of the head. Then, in slow motion, a different picture: Tyson sizes up Holyfield’s lobe, closes his eyes and bites down hard, as if into an apple. Holyfield screams and jumps around like a child in a puddle.

  Dad sucks air between his teeth. ‘Oh, that is foul,’ says Mum, squirming and looking away. Both are disgusted but also, I think, a little amused. They are not boxing people. They are lawyers.

  Anyway, that’s nothing compared to
what happens next. Tyson turns slowly to his left and expectorates an unmistakeable—even on an old wood-panelled, standard-definition CRT television—chunk of ear. He does it with the mild disgust of a flu patient coughing up an unexpectedly large piece of phlegm. I imagine it had a similar texture.

  I’d never seen anything like it. Holyfield looked pretty shocked too. Years later I would read that after the arena emptied, a twenty-eight-year-old MGM Grand employee named Mitch Libonati found the chunk, wrapped it in a latex glove and returned it to Holyfield. ‘It was just a matter of doing the right thing,’ he told the press.

  I don’t want to ascribe undue significance to this recollection. After all, it’s probably the one bit of boxing news that everyone who was alive in the ’90s remembers. I bring it up because it’s the only time I recall boxing being mentioned when I was a kid. While Australian boxing was going through a purple patch in the 1980s and ’90s thanks to Jeff Fenech, Jeff Harding and Kostya Tszyu, the news never reached the respectable bayside suburb of Drummoyne where I grew up.

  For Dad, sport meant rugby union and cricket, which he’d played at private school as a boy. Everything else was either boring (soccer, Aussie Rules) or barbaric (rugby league). Mum didn’t care about sport at all, except to veto the idea that George and I would play rugby union, which was too barbaric, or cricket, which was too boring.

  That’s not to say that I wasn’t interested in sport—like most Australian kids, my wardrobe featured the usual abandoned soccer shorts and swimming goggles—but I was too uncoordinated and asthmatic to take much joy in it. Instead, I obeyed my parents’ exhortations to ‘express my feelings’ and ‘be myself’, which mostly involved remaining motionless with my head in a book.

  The only real fight in my childhood took place when I was seven. It was with my brother, and I lost. I don’t remember what started it. Disputes between us were rare, low-key and almost never serious enough to descend into fisticuffs. This was because we were good boys who loved each other and also because, being twins and the same size, we knew that any dramatic escalation of hostilities would mean mutually assured destruction.

  So, on this afternoon, one of us must have done something quite terrible to provoke the other and it was on for young and old on the floor beside the dining table. Specifically, it was on for young, as George and I charged at each other, heads down, bellowing. White hot with unhinged prepubescent anger, I lashed out at my constant companion and best friend in the world, hoping to strike him dead. He windmilled at me, deranged, craving the meaty thump of seven-year-old fist against seven-year-old head.

  Have you ever seen two young children fight? They suck at it. They’re uncoordinated and all out of proportion, either so scared of getting hit back they put their head down and look at the floor, or so apoplectic they fly in with their chins pointing at the ceiling. Straight punches are not a natural motion, so kids tend to kick each other with their stumpy legs and do this weird jelly-armed chopping thing where they bring their bunched hands down like ineffectual little hammers.

  At least that’s what George and I were doing. We may even have landed a few blows before our limbs got tangled and we crashed to the floorboards.

  Taking it to the ground, as they say in mixed martial arts, was a major tactical error on my part. My brother got his knees on my shoulders. I was pinned to the floor, gazing up at his snarling mouth. From my vantage point he looked enormous.

  I begged pathetically for mercy, but his cold blue eyes were unmoved as he cocked his left fist and smashed it into my nose. Then he stood up and casually walked away. I lay on the floor and wailed, my nasal cartilage aching down to the sinuses. My nose still hurts when I think about it.

  George no doubt got in big trouble but it was me who learned the lesson: violence doesn’t solve anything, especially when you’re the one on the receiving end.

  In primary school, however, George was my protector.

  I needed one. It turned out that many of the behaviours involved in ‘being myself’—an oddly comprehensive knowledge of current affairs, an obsession with ancient Egypt, reading the encyclopaedia for kicks and always putting my hand up first in class—were not as endearing to my classmates as they were to my parents.

  So no, I did not have a lot of friends beyond George. I was hurt and confused when he was invited to parties and sleepovers without me, and lonely when I wandered the playground alone. But I would have been physically picked on a lot more if George hadn’t been around. He once rescued me from a group of kids who were dragging me around the playground by my feet.

  He couldn’t always be there, though. I called the fracas that ended in his knuckle sandwich my only real fight because the word ‘fight’ implies a kind of reciprocal arrangement. Everything that happened to me at school was one-way traffic.

  An incident behind the school dumpsters stands out, but only because of my tormentors’ cinematic choice of location. I knew them: two boys in the year above, one of whom sported a luxurious and much-envied rat tail. The other had freckles and a stud in his left ear. That was crucial: the right ear was said to be the ‘gay ear’.

  I could not tell you why they had chosen to torture me. I doubt they could have told you themselves. In a broader sense they were helpless in the face of the deep, atavistic knowledge that boys who have rat tails and play footy have always picked on boys who have large collections of Star Wars Expanded Universe novels and do debating.

  What I did know was that behind the bins was not a good place to be, and not only because of the general odour of rotting banana peel. It was also out of sight of any teachers who might have been out patrolling the bare bitumen playground.

  The joyful shouting of the other children receded as my tormentors advanced on me, pushing me back until I could feel the chipped green paint of one of the bins through my polyester shirt.

  Ear Stud reached forward and pinched me on the shoulder.

  ‘Ouch,’ I said, outraged.

  ‘Ouch?’ said Rat Tail, who was the brains of the operation. ‘Nobody actually says “ouch”.’

  Ear Stud hit me in the stomach.

  ‘Ouch,’ I said again, prompting an explosion of delighted laughter followed by more blows, more laughter, and more ouches.

  ‘Say ouch!’ cried Rat Tail as he loomed over me. It was a vicious cycle if ever there was one.

  Hot tears burned in my eyes. I didn’t fight back, but I didn’t stop saying ‘ouch’. That would have been letting the bullies win.

  From a social point of view, things got better as I got older, mainly because I got into the local selective high school. Overnight I went from being a lone strange, precocious child to being one among hundreds of strange, precocious children, sitting on a spectrum of strangeness and precocity that left me looking if not cool, then at least relatively normal.

  Otherwise, high school was nothing like the movies had led me to believe. There were no jocks, no cheerleaders, no kids getting stuffed in lockers. Instead there was band practice and homework and jigging fourth period to buy Portuguese chicken burgers. In six years I never saw anything even remotely resembling a punch-up. George was experiencing a more hostile environment at the local comprehensive school, where a fellow student threatened him at knifepoint, so I knew mine was a privileged existence. Still, I was happy. For the first time in my life I had a group of friends. We hung out together after school and slept over at each others’ houses. Our idea of fun was mostly to go to internet cafes to play Counter-Strike and Command and Conquer for hours over a local area network. Perhaps ‘going to LAN’ and shooting virtual versions of each other was an outlet for frustrated boyish aggression. Perhaps we were just nerds. Who can say?

  We once played for twelve hours straight, right through the night, in an unsavoury gaming lounge located under a McDonald’s in the city. We stopped only to go to the toilet, refill our drinks and buy more McNuggets. When I emerged at dawn, bleary-eyed and smelling of deep fryer grease, I felt like the embodiment of dissolut
ion.

  Things improved still further when I met David Frishling over a Bunsen burner in third period science. A plug of muscle with dark eyebrows, a Roman nose and a wide grin, David was our high school’s Renaissance man. Not only did he play violin, listen to classical music and read Russian literature, he was a soccer player, representative swimmer and long-distance runner. He was awarded a Pierre de Coubertin award for being the school’s most accomplished all-round sportsman, although admittedly it was not a crowded field.

  Dave was the son of Georgian Jews who’d fled the Soviet Union in the 1980s. The fact they were often away added to his popularity, as it allowed him to throw parties on the back lawn of their house. These usually involved the consumption of large amounts of his father’s homebrewed moonshine, followed by much pathetic teenage retching and passing out.

  His energy was, and is, boundless. It’s almost comical. Since high school he has worked as a chef, handyman, barman, tutor, barista, structural engineer and courier—often doing several of these jobs simultaneously. After uni he became a fly-in, fly-out labourer in copper and gold mines, bought a house with the proceeds, then decided engineering wasn’t for him and started a medical degree. He’s now a doctor, working at a hospital in Melbourne. He rides and repairs motorcycles in his spare time and has more friends than anyone I know.

  We were an odd pair. David was spirited and athletic where I was skinny and asthmatic. But we got along, and it wasn’t long before he asked if I wanted to come to the gym with him. He already had biceps like tennis balls from lifting a rusty pair of dumbbells in his parents’ garage, but wanted to start ‘pumping iron for real’.

  I was flattered just to be asked, and within a few months I had transformed from a five foot eleven, sixty-kilogram beanpole to a five foot eleven, seventy-kilogram near-beanpole. If I’d stopped there, I wouldn’t be writing this book. But I was mad with power, drunk on popularity and protein shakes. If gaining ten kilos was good, surely gaining twenty, thirty, forty kilos would be even better? I wanted to be huge.