Fighting in New York
You know how it is. Things develop their own momentum, one crazy decision leading to the next, events spiralling out of control. That was how, last Friday, late in the evening, surrounded by cameras and a film crew from Brazilian TV, I came to be standing in the ring at Gleason’s , the most famous fight gym in the world, about to make my debut as a boxer.
I am not a born fighter. I had my last fight when I was seven. Thirty-five years between bouts may be some kind of record.
It all started two months ago, when I saw a notice at a boxing gym in north London advertising a “white-collar” boxing tournament at Gleason’s. Alan Lacey, a sport promoter with a passion for boxing, was looking for recruits for a UK team to take on the Americans in their own backyard. On the strength of one boxing lesson with Jim McDonnell, the former European featherweight champion, I thought I was a natural and applied.
One reason for the new-found interest in boxing was the film Fight Club. Its premise is that life is dull and ritualised, that we have lost our spirit and freedom, that society is a machine which enmeshes us. Its message: take control. Gleason’s gym anticipated Fight Club by a decade: it has been running white-collar boxing competitions since the early 90s, attracting men (and, latterly, women) who want to exercise and, perhaps, to exorcise some personal demon. “Many people who come here are trying to prove something to themselves,” says Bruce Silverglade, who has run Gleason’s for 18 years. “Many of them have an agenda.”
Gleason’s, a huge gym housed in an old warehouse beneath New York’s Brooklyn Bridge, has more than 800 members: 200 professional boxers, 200 amateurs and more than 400 white-collar boxers. Silverglade stresses that it remains first and foremost a fight gym. More than 100 world champions have trained at Gleason’s and the walls are adorned with their photographs – Jack Dempsey, Jake LaMotta, Joe Frazier, Muhammad Ali, Mike Tyson.
Silverglade admits the white-collar crowd helps pay the bills. The gym is an interesting exercise in democracy: everyone pays $45 a month to use it and no one gets priority on the equipment. If I am using the heavy bag and Mike Tyson is next in line, he has to wait. But maybe not too long.
Gleason’s holds white-collar tournaments every month – for boxers who have never fought pro or amateur fights. The white collar label was adopted because it tends to attract lawyers, doctors and Wall St bankers and brokers. The boxers are graded according to weight and experience, and fight three two-minute rounds under the supervision of an experienced referee. I was strictly in the novice category, and Bruce did his best to reassure me: “My referee can’t stop the first punch, but he’ll be there to stop the second.” I was not reassured.
In the run-up to the fight, I had had boxing lessons with Keith Wilson, a former US State Champion. He had shown me how to jab with the left (the key punch in boxing, dictating everything else), throw a right cross, use the uppercut and left hook, tuck my elbows in to protect myself, spread my hands over my face if under attack, and keep my feet spread wide to plant myself on the canvas. The techniques were beginning to make sense if only I had started 30 years earlier, I could have been a cont . . . well, maybe not.
My training had been exhausting, but far from exhaustive. My left jab was flimsy I couldn’t punch and dodge counter-punches at the same time, so presented a static target. I did some sparring at a gym in Camden and took an instant dislike to being punched, especially on the nose, which ached for days. I had wobbled in mid-training and tried to pull out, but pro-middleweight Adrian Dodson, who was to be our cornerman in New York, said he’d come looking for me if I backed out. Rocks and hard places sprang to mind.
One aspect of the sport which did appeal to me was the gear: shiny shorts, nylon vest, high stripy boots. Dressed up, I looked like an ice cream sundae – and had the punch to match. I bought the outfit at the Lonsdale Shop, a boxing mecca in London’s West End. The assistant, spotting my unboxerly shape and manner, wondered why I wanted gloves and boots. “Is it for a photograph?” he asked, rather cruelly.
I was fighting in New York with three Brits – Alan Lacey himself, Craig Ashcroft and Simon White. Lacey, 47, took up boxing three years ago. “It was just after my 44th birthday,” he told me, when I asked how this strange odyssey had begun. “I was running for a bus – two stone overweight, smoking 30 cigarettes a day, taking absolutely no exercise – and I missed it. It was a number 68 I felt about 68. I was on the slide and could see myself with a heart condition in five years. I had to do something drastic, so I went to a boxing gym.” He swapped fags for bags, trained, sparred and, having heard about the monthly Gleason ‘ s tournaments, came to fight last year, going head to head with Jack Gruber, a Manhattan dentist. Lacey enjoyed it hugely and set about spreading the word back home.
Ashcroft, 33, and White, 23, had been training for several years but were fighting for the first time. They used strikingly similar language when asked why they were here. “Life’s about pressure and you find a lot out about yourself in these situations. You hope something will come out,” said Ashcroft. “I’m doing it to prove something to myself,” said White, “to see if I can handle the pressure of being in a boxing ring. Climbing between those ropes takes a lot of balls.”
On the morning of the fight, I paid a visit to the writer George Plimpton, at his house overlooking the East River. Plimpton is now in his 70s, but once, as a fit and ready-for-anything reporter for Sports Illustrated, he had challenged Archie Moore, light-heavyweight champion of the world from 1952-62, to a fight, a contest Plimpton described in the book Shadow Box. Plimpton, a champion of what might be called participative journalism, had been inspired by the example of the sportswriter and novelist Paul Gallico, who a generation earlier had taken on the world heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey. Dempsey knocked him out 48 seconds into the first round. “I didn’t have much to write about the next day,” said Gallico. “I couldn’t remember anything.”
Plimpton hoped to do better. He gave up smoking, trained hard and spent six months running round the lake in Central Park. He showed me a photograph of the fight, which took place at the now defunct Stillman’s gym in Manhattan. In the picture, he looked lean and business-like. “The audience thought it was a joke, but I didn’t treat it as a joke,” he told me. His cause had not been helped by a friend (friend?) telling Moore that Plimpton was a college boxing champion who believed he could win in reality, before he issued the challenge, he had done virtually no boxing.
Plimpton got his nose busted in the first round, and the pain caused tears to run down his cheeks. This at least had the effect of confusing Moore: “It was the first time Archie had been in the ring with someone who was bleeding and weeping at the same time.” But Plimpton gamely got through the fight, helped by his trainer ringing the bell halfway through the third and last round when he sensed Moore was cranking up to finish it, and he and Moore later became firm friends.
My preparation was now almost complete, but I had to do one more thing – get a haircut. In my close inspection of pro-boxers I had noticed one common feature: they all had very short hair. After the haircut, I strolled along Fifth Avenue, ate a bowl of chicken noodle soup, and went back to the hotel for a lie-down.
A minibus took us to Gleason’s in the evening. There were four world-class boxers in the van: McDonnell, Dodson, former British light-middleweight champion Gary Stretch, and current Commonwealth heavy weight champion Danny Williams, who had been sparring at Gleason ‘ s during the week. Unfortunately, none of the four was actually on the card that night the fighting was being done by four pensive occasional boxers.
I was on in the 11th bout – there were all-American contests as well as the international event – and didn’t watch much of the preceding action, though I was fascinated by a New York psychiatrist (inevitably nicknamed Psycho) who fought a tough bout with a huge opponent. As well as Psycho, the US contingent included a judge, a cardiologist and Gruber the dentist – so, in the event of problems in the course of the evening, all eventualities seemed to be covered.
Simon fought first and looked exhausted by the end of the contest. I hid in a small office and gauged what was happening from the crowd noise. Craig boxed well against a fit young architect and the ringside expert reckoned he had shaded it (though officially there are no winners and losers). Alan and Jack Gruber renewed their acquaintance in a ding-dong scrap. And then it was my turn.
Adrian had wrapped my hands (a precaution against breaking your fingers when you punch), pulled on the gloves, and given me my pre-fight pep talk. My opponent was Tony Pellegrino, who took up boxing 10 years ago and had fought around 50 of these white-collar contests. Happily, unlike with Archie Moore, no one had whispered in Tony’s ear that I had pretensions as a boxer, and he didn’t try to bash me on the nose (“A typical white man’s nose,” as Plimpton’s assistant had described it, “easily broken”).
Tony tapped me on the stomach, cuffed me on the head guard and let me go through my limited repertoire – jabs that he blocked with his hands and rights that rarely got within a foot of the target. I pushed forward without conviction and did trap him in the corner on one occasion, but I had no idea what to do then and was fearful that a solid punch might provoke retribution. My main moment of concern came at the start of the third round, when I thought I detected a sinister gleam in his eye. He threw one overhead punch that brushed the side of my head (you see the advantage of cropped hair). “Did you deliberately miss with that punch?” I asked him later. He didn’t answer but gave me a wry smile.
I tried to pace myself through the rounds – the worst thing you can do is go crazy in the first minute and have nothing left in the second – and lasted the course better than expected. During the one-minute breaks between rounds, Adrian poured water down my throat and encouraged me on. There were perhaps 120 people watching, but in the ring you are oblivious to everything beyond the ropes: this is the world.
When the final bell rang, I collected my trophy, embraced Tony and felt like a million dollars. Danny Williams said I’d looked good and fought a disciplined fight Jim McDonnell shook me by the hand. I bit on my gum shield, tried to look mean, and for the rest of the evening posed in my beautiful blue boots and pretended I was Lennox Lewis.
I had intended to announce my retirement after the fight, but a Wall Street banker in a pinstripe suit came up to me at the end of the evening, handed me his card, and said how much he would like to fight me (who wouldn’t?) when Gleason’s brings a team to the UK for the return fixture that Lacey is planning to stage at London’s Broadgate Arena on July 13. I told him I was flattered, gave him my number and said I looked forward to seeing him. Whether I will actually fight him is another matter; a bout every 35 years suits me just fine.
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