On the Chin Read online

  And the internet told me how to make this dream possible. They called it the seefood diet: you see food, you eat it. According to the armchair dietitians on the forums I surfed, a skinny person needed to consume a huge surplus of energy to build muscle. The best way to get big, they claimed, was not by eating chicken breasts, rice and broccoli. It was by stuffing your face with pizza, fried chicken, mee goreng noodles and Double Quarter Pounders washed down with gallons of full cream milk.

  Well, I saw a lot of food over the next few years, and I ate it all. And inevitably I achieved my dream of getting huge. By the time I was twenty-one, I weighed a hundred kilograms. But (and this may not come as much of a surprise) I did not look healthy.

  I had a gut, not cover-model abs. My neck was notional. My back and arms were so covered with lilac stretch marks I looked like the victim of a bear attack. Any confidence I had developed was gone. I felt clumsy, lumpish, embarrassed. I was great at picking up heavy things and putting them down again, but I couldn’t walk around the block without getting out of breath.

  David, who had not succumbed to weight-gain mania and only had twelve hours of other commitments and activities to keep him busy each day, said he’d come with me while I did some sort of cardiovascular exercise, and suggested everything from indoor soccer to squash. I canvassed and weighed the options at length, a process which chiefly served to delay the moment when I would actually have to start exerting myself.

  We were talking over this topic yet again when we walked into the gym on a rainy August morning. Too heavy for running, it’s bad for your knees. Too late in the season for soccer. Too cold for swimming; anyway it involves taking your shirt off.

  ‘What about a gym class? Spin or yoga or something,’ I suggested breezily.

  ‘Oh yeah, let’s do aerobics while we’re at it, I brought my leotard,’ replied David as we stood at the turnstiles, looking through our wallets for our entry cards.

  The gym front-desk attendant, a bright-eyed, gangly young guy called Jake, had been listening in. ‘What kind of class do you guys want to do?’

  ‘I dunno, something that’s good cardio, I guess,’ I said, gesturing morosely at my own expanded body.

  ‘Well, all the classes are good, but if you really want to get fit?’ He leaned forward conspiratorially. ‘You gotta do boxing. Nothing like it.’

  ‘You’re a boxer?’ I asked in disbelief.

  I knew virtually nothing about boxing at this point and had never met a boxer, but whatever I expected a boxer to look like, it wasn’t Jake. He had a delicate nose, large brown eyes and straight white teeth. The word that came to mind was wholesome.

  He shrugged. ‘I don’t like to make a big thing about it because I don’t want people to think I’m, like, big-noting myself.’

  Despite this, he looked quite satisfied by the impression his revelation had made.

  ‘Do you, like, punch people and everything?’ I said dumbly.

  ‘Yeah, I spar and stuff. I haven’t had a proper fight yet but I will soon. Just gotta get into better shape. I weigh about eighty now and my coach says I need to get down to seventy-five to fight at middleweight.’

  Everything was silent except for the sound of the rain outside and the quiet pounding of someone heavy on a faraway treadmill. We’d stopped trying to find our cards.

  ‘You’ve got, like, a proper boxing trainer?’ asked David.

  ‘Yeah, he’s great,’ said Jake. ‘You guys should come train with us some time.’

  SOMETHING TO PROVE

  YOU DON’T HAVE to be a devout follower of prize fighting to know that boxers generally don’t have lawyers for parents. I’m lucky to have led an easier life than many people in the boxing world, especially fighters, and I try to keep that in mind when I discuss their decisions and their lives.

  Speaking generally, the middle and upper classes have never quite worked out what to feel about boxing: revulsion or fascination. For most of the last 150 years, as the forces of respectability have waged campaigns to ban the sport across the Anglosphere, the primal allure of fist fighting has attracted countless writers, artists, broadcasters and intellectuals.

  Some converts have been very high class indeed: no lesser light than King George IV patronised the prize ring across the turn of the eighteenth century. He even found jobs for leading bruisers as ushers at his coronation. Then there’s Donald Trump, who used his Atlantic City casinos to become a player in the boxing business for a while in the late 1980s. He managed to develop a reputation as an untrustworthy operator even among boxing promoters—which is a bit like a Komodo dragon telling you about your halitosis. Even today, a glance at the ringside seats at any big fight night will reveal plenty of kids from the right side of the tracks, all hoping some of boxing’s dark glamour will rub off.

  And while most who can afford to stay on the safe side of the ropes do just that, there have been middle-class success stories in the ring. Recent Australian world titlists Jeff Horn and Daniel Geale came from privileged backgrounds, at least compared to many of their opponents: they had a roof over their head, went to school and were never at risk of falling into a life of crime. Horn even worked as a high school teacher during the early part of his professional career. I bet you nobody threw the blackboard dusters at him.

  Among other tertiary-educated fighters, Caleb Truax, who briefly held a super middleweight title, started boxing to pay off his student debt after studying sociology. Junior welterweight titlist Lovemore N’dou is now the principal solicitor at his own law firm in Sydney, and 1920s lightweight Leach Cross was nicknamed ‘The Fighting Dentist’ not as a macabre joke but as a reference to his studies at NYU.

  So not all successful fighters are children of deprivation. But as a general principle, it sure helps and always has. Fighting is a hard way to get your exercise, let alone to make a living. It selects for people with something to prove and no other way to prove it.

  Humans have been punching each other since we stopped using our fists to hold onto branches, but it’s probably not a coincidence that the earliest evidence of fist fighting as an organised spectacle dates from around the time social hierarchy emerged in the Bronze Age civilisations of Egypt and Mesopotamia. Though nobody can tell from the few surviving sculptures and reliefs that depict them, it’s entirely possible the first boxers were the lowest of the low: slaves forced to fight against their will. This wasn’t the case in ancient Greece, where boxing was an Olympic event, but it certainly was in Rome, where gladiatorial fist fights to the death took place alongside more inventive entertainments such as slaves being stabbed, slaves being eaten alive by lions and slaves drowning in full-scale imitation naval battles.

  Fast forward to the emergence of bare-knuckle boxing as a popular sport in England and the participants, while not typically enslaved, were almost always drawn from the lower orders. One of the first recorded bare-knuckle brawls took place in 1681, when the second Duke of Albemarle pitted his butcher against his butler. (The butcher won.) You’ll note that the duke himself didn’t deign to get involved, and you have to suspect he wasn’t the greatest guy to work for.

  Early in the eighteenth century a brief period of interest in women’s boxing confirmed the rule of humble origins applied to both sexes. In June 1722 Elizabeth Wilkinson, of whom little is known except that her husband, also a prize fighter, was hanged at Tyburn for robbing a Chelsea pensioner, challenged Hannah Hyfield to ‘meet me on the stage and box with me for three guineas, each woman holding half-a-crown in each hand, and the first woman that drops her money to lose the battle’.

  The threat of jail time put a stop to the bout but it seems to have gone ahead eventually, because Wilkinson took to calling herself ‘The City Championess’ and went on to beat a basketwoman, a fishwoman and an ass driver.

  The fellows, few of whom were full-time professionals, tended to come from the same milieu, and a look at the nicknames of notable bare-knuckle fighters reveals many worked in manual trades: Wells the Lamp
lighter, William the Coachman, Swansey the Butcher, Harry the Clogmaker, Harry the Coalheaver, and a personal favourite, Dogget the Bargeman, to name but a few.

  A compilation of the grim origin stories of famous boxers would span many leather-bound volumes and remain nowhere near complete, so I’ll content myself with an illustrative example that presented itself, entirely by chance, during the writing of this book.

  I was in Mexico City on holidays with George and David. When they went home I was left alone in our Airbnb, a wood-floored apartment in the trendy Roma neighbourhood filled with stylish but deeply uncomfortable mid-century modern furniture—the kind of place designed more for Pinterest than people.

  After two weeks of eating large quantities of Mexican food and drinking large volumes of Mexican beer I was in a state of more or less constant digestive distress and would have happily stayed home except that the couch gave me back spasms. I decided I would make the most of my last day in town and walk to the centro historico, grab some lunch, take some photos, maybe go to a museum. It was a stunning day: twenty-five degrees and sunny, with only a light smog. Heading out the door and down the tree-lined Avenida Alvaro Obregon, I ran straight into a forest of red tarpaulins, the unmistakable sign of a tianguis, or street market.

  Wandering around foreign flea markets is always a joy—look, their headless dolls are completely different from ours! Is that a cat’s skull?—and soon I was dawdling behind smartly dressed antique shoppers under the nuclear glow imparted by the tarps. I’d gone halfway around the market when I spotted, amid the jumble of rococo candlesticks and bakelite torches, a red boxing glove. A pile of boxing merchandise lay on a plastic drop sheet: old posters and faded photos; a carved wooden figure of a boxer, gloves raised; dozens of copies of The Ring magazine and more obscure Mexican publications, some with faint signatures on the cover in black marker. Basically, a pile of junk. I bent down to get a closer look at a kinetic black and white photo of two skinny young Mexicans flailing at one another, their skin bleached white by the flash.

  ‘Cuanto por la foto?’ I asked, casting my eyes further down the path to see if there was anything else of interest for sale.

  ‘Five hundred pesos, a thousand signed,’ said an old man standing behind the plastic sheet dressed in a windbreaker, checked shirt and pink baseball cap.

  ‘Signed by who?’ I asked, doubtfully.

  ‘Signed by me.’

  I glanced up and realised who I was looking at. He had put on a bit of weight since his fighting days, but looked remarkably well preserved for a person who’d spent more than two decades getting smacked in the face. He hardly even had wrinkles. It was Ruben Olivares, the greatest bantamweight of all time. I was in the presence of a living legend.

  ‘Sorry. You…you are Ruben Olivares,’ I said, with the cutting-edge insight for which I am renowned.

  He just stared at me. Maybe he was nervous about the grinning simpleton he saw before him, although I don’t suppose much makes you nervous after winning eighty-nine professional boxing matches, seventy-nine of them by knockout.

  ‘I know who you are,’ I said, still awestruck and struggling to put together a coherent sentence in Spanish. ‘I am Australian. You beat Lionel Rose for the bantamweight championship in 1968.’

  ‘August 22, 1969, the Forum in Los Angeles,’ he corrected me.

  ‘I’ll take the signed photo,’ I said. At this, he brightened noticeably and his face cracked into a huge grin, revealing a front left tooth capped in silver. It lent him a roguish air that fitted well with what I knew of his life story, a story that will do as an illustration of the circumstances that create, and sometimes undo, boxers.

  Ruben Olivares was born in the state of Guerrero but moved with his parents to the capital aged three. The Mexico City of his childhood was not one of mid-century furniture and strolls down tree-lined streets. It was positively Dickensian. Dirty and overcrowded, it was growing at a near exponential rate as families like his left the countryside, lured by the promise of jobs and a brighter future in the city. In the first two decades of Olivares’ life, Mexico City tripled in size, from a population of three million inhabitants to more than nine million. Imagine Brisbane swelling to the size of Hong Kong in less than a generation and you have a rough idea of the scale of the transformation. The infrastructure, unsurprisingly, lagged.

  The Olivares family settled in Bondojito, an area that remains one of the poorest neighbourhoods in the city. Essentially, it was a slum, full of hastily constructed bare concrete houses. Healthcare was limited and schools were overcrowded. Six of Olivares’ twelve siblings died before reaching adulthood. His father left the family to find work in the United States before Ruben turned five.

  Olivares started running the streets and smoking marijuana, selling newspapers and petrol to bring in money. When his father came home he helped him as a labourer and worked in a timber workshop, but the work was hard and the days were long. Fist fights were common in the barrio, and Ruben found they were the one thing he did have a talent for. His primary school headmaster, clearly a pragmatic type, was so exasperated with Olivares’ habit of fighting other pupils that he offered him a first-of-its-kind deal: he would receive his diploma, but only if he promised to stop coming to school. He left secondary education after a month, and by the age of fourteen had done a brief stint in prison for getting into a fight at a party he gatecrashed.

  At this point, I think it would be fair to say that Olivares’ prospects in life were not dazzling. The best-case scenario was a lifetime of manual labour. You can take your pick for the worst: crime, prison, addiction, homelessness.

  Everything changed for Olivares when, at fifteen, he walked into the Jordan boxing gym and found his vocation. He had the perfect build for a bantamweight—short, with a barrel chest and skinny legs—and was possessed of a left hook that resembled a construction accident.

  Six years later, after knocking out most of the bantamweights Mexico had to offer, which was an awful lot of bantamweights, he met Lionel Rose for the championship of the world. Rose was a boxer of rare quality, but the fight with Olivares looked like the nasty end of a nature documentary, with Ruben playing the lion and Lionel the gazelle. There was simply nothing the Australian could do to deter ‘El Puas’, and Rose was knocked out in five.

  Olivares went on to earn millions of dollars, setting records for the weight class. Over a series of three ferocious fights with his countryman Chucho Castillo—one of them captured in the photo I was holding—he would defend, lose and regain the bantamweight crown. He was an idol.

  Flush with cash, he bought houses for his brothers and sisters and businesses for his father. He helped out people in the neighbourhood. And he partied as hard as he fought, with one Mexican newspaper labelling him ‘the undisputed champion of the bender and the cabaret’.

  I particularly enjoyed reading his explanation of a shock knockout loss to Canada’s Art Hafey in 1973. Olivares told The Ring he knew he was in trouble when, stumbling back to his hotel at dawn, he crossed paths with the bright-eyed and bushy-tailed Hafey, just leaving to do his roadwork.

  The loss focused his mind for a while. He went on to beat Hafey in a rematch and win titles as a featherweight, but he never regained the terrifying form he showed in the late 1960s and early ’70s. He retired for good after a failed comeback in 1988. By then the drugs and alcohol, greedy hangers-on and bad business decisions had eaten up most of the money. It’s a well-worn story, and it’s almost certainly why he was there, in the tianguis, selling memorabilia and posing for pictures.

  But standing before him, struggling to understand his rasping, slang-laden Mexican Spanish, watching as locals whispered ‘El Puas!’ and rushed to shake his hand, I was in awe of a life lived to the full. I didn’t entirely comprehend everything he said to me there, but I got the bit about the Rose fight. ‘He was a beautiful boxer and a great champion. He had a strong jab, but he couldn’t hurt me, that was his problem,’ said Olivares, tapping his fist on
his substantial jaw.

  After a few minutes standing around grinning like an idiot, I became aware that I had exhausted my Spanish and was possibly scaring away other customers. His son, who had been fussing around the stall, took a photo of us together. I struck the same serious, clenched-fist pose that every dude in the world does with a famous boxer, and Ruben signed the photo ‘to my friend Alex’ in looping cursive as I happily handed over my thousand pesos. He needed it more than I did, and had certainly worked hard enough to earn it. Then the former bantamweight champion of the world farewelled me with a piratical grin and a meaty handshake. I stumbled away to look at more bric-a-brac, shaking slightly from excitement.

  Olivares’ life works as an example of a typical boxing background not just because he was poor, but because he was a poor second-generation immigrant to a big city. These are the not-so magic ingredients in the making of a prize fighter. The late Peter Corris, who wrote not only Australia’s best hardboiled crime fiction but also its best boxing history, argued that prize fighting, which really took off in the eighteenth century, when London’s population swelled with migrants from the English countryside, is a phenomenon of urbanisation. Like Olivares, many great fighters have come from the slums of the third world: Manny Pacquiao from General Santos City, Érik Morales from Tijuana’s Zona Norte, Azumah Nelson from Accra, Ghana, and Roberto Duran from Panama City, where, according to legend, he knocked out a horse for a bottle of whiskey.

  The list goes on, but I must pause to relate the improbable tale of Thai junior bantamweight world champion Srisaket Sor Rungvisai, whose humble beginnings put even Olivares, Duran and Pacquiao’s tales of woe in the shade. Almost like one of Monty Python’s four Yorkshiremen, the fighter left home at age thirteen to travel to Bangkok on foot with his few belongings. Once established in the Thai capital, he got a job at a grocery store—a hundred-kilometre walk to and from work each week.