Chapter 1
Fighting is a natural thing. But professional fights, prize fights, twelve rounds of championship boxing bound by the Queensberry Rules, any sort of rules, those types of fights are unnatural. They’re packages of planning and promotion and pomp and ceremony; they’re stage shows, some small and some big and some worthy of any of the great residencies that have gone before in the hotels and casinos of Las Vegas. Like the fight down the lane ten minutes after the school bell sounds for the final time of the day, it has to be engineered into place not only to make sure that the chosen two, willing or otherwise, uphold the first part of their end of the bargain by showing up at the right time and the right place, but also to guarantee that they have a crowd, a bullring, an amphitheatre, a coalition of eyes that lend the whole scene its legitimacy and ensure that the second part of the bargain, the violence itself – sometimes tame, rarely skilled, and often brutally frenzied – follows as agreed, because what is the point of this type of fight if there is nobody there to watch it and whoop and cheer and bay? But a real fight doesn’t demand an audience. It isn’t trailed neatly by a prelude of trash talk and exaggerated storylines. It happens in an instant, a reflex action as old as human nature itself. Fight over flight as the only response because someone has injured you or hurt you or upset you in some way, and the only retribution that can bring you any compensation or consolation is a physical one. That kind of fight in its most pure, raw, unconstrained, maniacal form – not brought to you by Bob Arum’s Top Rank Incorporated in association with DiBella Entertainment, not sponsored by Tecate con carácter or sanctioned by the Nevada State Athletic Commission along with the World Boxing Organisation with its referee and its three scoring judges at ringside from Nevada, Nevada and Connecticut. A fight without the interminable build-up, the lights, the TV cameras, the posters and packed arenas and purses worth a million dollars or none – that fight is inherently natural. Sometimes it’s instinctive, from the slightest spark to fully ablaze in an instant, and sometimes it’s premeditated, bubbling, festering, waiting for its moment of maximum impact, but it’s always driven by emotion. Well, nearly always. It can happen at any time or in any place, because total strangers fight and best friends fight and sworn enemies fight and families fight, and the fallout can rarely be predicted and the consequences are rarely the same, because some fights are easy to mend and move on from, but some fights endure and worry at the loose threads of what remains of a relationship for evermore. But for two men to meet and sign contracts to fight and arrange a time and date maybe eight, ten or twelve weeks in the future, and then hold a press conference to try and help sell tickets, it’s unnatural. It’s absurd. Where is the emotion? Where is the instinctive response that you didn’t even know you possessed until it has already overcome you and drawn you into the first dice roll of a physical confrontation that until that split second only existed in your thoughts and your imagination? That’s not how it works, because when two fighters agree to fight it’s not personal, or at least most of the time it’s not, but that doesn’t mean that there’s nothing at stake. No, quite the opposite. For some fighters everything is at stake: sums of money that can change a life and sums that would barely sustain a life until next Saturday night and the next small hall. Your health prized away as collateral every time you step through those ropes. Your reputation too – it’s all on the line. So just because there’s nothing personal doesn’t mean that there’s no anticipation, and once that date is set it takes up residency at the forefront of your mind. It becomes the reference point through which all time and events are now understood. Everything in your life moves towards that date. Every decision you make every day is to benefit you on that date. Every pad you hit. Every meal you eat. It all trickles down to one moment in time when the talking is over and the seconds are out and the crowd has transformed into a wall of white noise. That’s the moment when you need to be at your mental and physical peak. It’s understandable that the date occupies a permanent space in your thoughts, and it might expand or it might contract, but it will never totally disappear. It’s always there. Even when the fight is over and your hand is raised or left limp by the referee’s side, it will still be there. Because once a fight happens it exists forever. Duran and Leonard on 25 November 1980. Hagler and Hearns on 15 April 1985. Every time you look at your professional boxing record from now until the day you die the fight will be there, and it will be a part of history, and it will be a part of you. No matter how much you wish you could have that moment again to throw a punch or take one back, you never will. You have to live with the consequences, tied to your name and tied to your identity in neat and tidy numbers, the messy reality obscured by each one: pain, sweat, sacrifice, incomparable happiness and utter devastation that no single digit can ever encompass. The accumulation of those digits over the course of a career can’t paint your picture in anything more than the broadest brushstrokes, and yet it’s the first thing that people ask you. What do you do? I’m a boxer. What’s your record? And when they learn the answer, no matter how big the first number might be, everyone’s thoughts are instinctively drawn to the second, because one of the small cruelties of human nature dictates that you might have been a world champion once upon a time, but people will inevitably ask you about the night you lost your belt, not the night you won it. Even with a fighter like the great Rocky Marciano, who never knew what it was like to be confronted with his defeats as he walked down the street or grabbed a quick coffee or ate his dinner, even with a legend like that, it’s the impenetrable zero that people fixate on, not the many heroic deeds that it took to construct the forty-nine. So when all of the hard work is done and the date is near, your body knows that its time has come again. If you’re lucky, the rhythm of your days matches the rhythm of fight night: when you wake, when you sleep, when you eat, when you go to the toilet. Then you go to this place where you agreed to be at the time you agreed to be there, to stand opposite the man you said you would fight. And the bell rings.