by Huskyteer
He’s the type of guy who still calls boxing the “sweet science” without a trace of irony, and between mouthfuls of soup, he expounds on the value of species diversity in the sport. “You watch the international markets right now, it’s all this new mixed-martial-arts stuff. Mark my words, that’s going to be big in a decade’s time, once they tighten the rules up so it ain’t just ugly brawling and too many injuries. Won’t never have none of the grace and discipline of boxing, not until it tightens up, but inter-species sports means better competitions, and broader appeal.”
Balus talks a lot about his concern for injuries in sport. After all, his working life now revolves around resolving the consequences of wounds and broken bones. “Lot of people get broken in boxing. More of them come to the sport broken. Ain’t never been no mistaking, wherever you’ve got poor, desperate, angry people, you end up with boxers. Philadelphia, Boston, Detroit, Brooklyn, Mexico City. You see it everywhere around the world.”
When I ask how Balus got started in the sport, his eyes turn pained. I catch him turning his head to look out the window, at the snow that’s turned to rain. The streaks the raindrops leave on the glass are reflected in his eyes. “My daddy was a bricklayer; he came over as a boy from Vietnam. He didn’t like it in Texas. Never did. Didn’t like not fitting in, not knowing much English. He used to drink, and after he’d been at the whiskey he went at my mama. About the time I was eight years old, I started getting between them.”
His gnarled hands rise from the lunch bill he insists on paying to touch the puffy mask of scarring around his cheekbones and occipital bones, common to old boxers. “Vietnamese culture puts a father at the head of the household, even when he’s doing wrong. So when my grandfather asked me who I was getting into these fights with, and I told him, he couldn’t do much. It wasn’t his place to call Dad out over it, but he took some of his pension and he put it and me into the hands of the local boxing gym.”
* * * *
A few weeks later, I had a chance to visit that gym. It was the Vanero Boxing Gym where Balus would spend the entirety of his boxing career, under the tutelage of Fort Worth boxing legend, George Vanero. I met him for a chance to watch old fight tapes, and Balus’ championship fight. George is a ratel who wears his eighty-five years like he’s ready to throw off fifty of them at a moment’s notice, his eyes restless and sharp as he talks boxing. As he loads and racks the tapes into the old and yellowed VCR, he tells me of his initial impressions of the boxer, and his early years.
“When Balus would fight, he came to the gym like a middleweight fighting heavyweights, that boy. You don’t usually see a man so big fight so small. That was what made him great. When he first came to the gym, you could tell he wasn’t interested in taking anyone’s head off. But he’d drill for hours in slipping a punch, sliding one off, taking them off his horns legal-like, so the referee wouldn’t call him on it. All he wanted to know was how to slip the punch, how to take it.”
I ask Vanero if he knows why. “Sure. His dad was a mean drunk, pretty nasty in a bar fight back in the day. Everyone around the block knew he smacked the boy around, and his sweet mama too. When his grandfather showed up to put that twenty dollars in my hand the first day, he told me: ‘Teach this boy to survive his father’. So I did.”
“The first year at the gym I think that boy barely threw a punch, but I had fighters five-years-seasoned in the ring that couldn’t slip and roll as good as Balus. And that really saved him for his tougher fights down the road. He had the size and strength to be a knockout puncher already, but he was frustrating for his opponents to fight. You could land twenty good punches on him and he’d feel maybe two or three. The rest, piffidy-paf.” George’s arthritic hands fly about in the air, miming ineffectual rebounds slipping away.
George plays the first tape. Balus is no older than twelve, and he is circling in the ring around a similarly-aged brown bear. There’s no missing the marks of bruises Balus is wearing, that are older than the night. There is a bandage on one cheek and bruising gone green showing, as the young bull tentatively approaches the bear. Blows are traded, young boxer blows, children on the cusp of manhood practicing techniques, headgear and gloves looking still comical and oversized on their bodies.
On the old television, Balus slips a hook and parries a jab off the front of his horns, tapping the bear’s gloves up. He doesn’t throw much, I note aloud. George nods. “Never did. He’d come in tight, bully-fight on the inside, or else he’d lunge in from the outside for power. Counter-punching worked his way. Hit and roll, hit and roll.”
The next tape shows a bull of fifteen or so, losing at the hands of a larger steer. Balus keeps slipping and rolling blows in a way that does look out of place on his large frame. But the shots are clearly hurting, and in the third round Balus goes down briefly, before springing back up to his feet. The referee allows the fight to go on.
George gestures at the screen with a clandestine cigarette. “He had heart, that boy. Didn’t get knocked down often, and always scrambled right back up. I used to tell him, Balus, take the eight, take the eight.” George shakes his head and smiles. “He never did.”
We watch to the end of the fight. When the last bell rings, the two boxers embrace, broad smiles on their faces.
* * * *
It’s later in the afternoon on the day of our interview, and Balus sits with me in the bleachers of the Portland Dunkers as the team practices. The slap of sneakers and basketballs sounds off on the hardwood court, and Balus’ eyes watch the injured prospects going through their warm ups. I ask him about his fighting record, having never lost by KO to a fighter. What made him always get up?
“Well, the fact is, when you’re a boxer, you’ve got to have something feeding the fire. For me, when I started, I was thinking of my dad’s hand. That if I didn’t get up, he’d go hit ma again. Or my little brother.” He pauses for a moment, his right hand fishing his old dog tags out from under his shirt. The chain carries two of them, and he shows them to me: one reads Balus Bubalis, and the other, Ben Bubalis. His grieving silence forestalls any questions.
Balus clutches the chain to his lips, and speaks over his deceased brother’s dog tag like a catholic saying rosary:
“So I always got up. Stood up. Took another belting, another licking. Learned to always look him in the eye. Get up before the count of eight. Every man I ever fought in the ring, in my mind, was my pa. Was the same for the guys I was fighting too. They all had someone. Brothers. Dads. Bullies. Priests. Sometimes that was the worst part of winning: knowing in someone else’s head they’d just lost to someone else, someone worse, someone who wasn’t even you. You’re both just stand-ins.”
He smiles when I ask about boxers embracing their opponents in the ring, after the fight. “Every one of them,” he says, and he says it proudly. “I hugged every last goddamned one of ’em. There’s an intimacy in the ring. You’re fighting the other fighter, sure, but you’re fighting your pain, really. And you’re helping someone else fight theirs. There’s an intimacy in that.”
The pain is evident in his eyes, and in the clutch of old, arthritic hands around the dog tags. Like all old fighters, his knuckles are sunken and worn. They bear a patina of scars like numbers on an odometer, every mile they’ve been on display. I ask him what he’s done with those hands in his life.
“I’ve been a bricklayer alongside my pa. Boxer, won the Texas Golden Gloves. Mechanic for the army,” Balus says. “Took up motorcycle repair. Sister-in-law got me back into physiotherapy, so a lot of massage and moving folks around. Helping people back up.”
* * * *
Helping people back up proves to be a theme of Balus’ life. The next day after our interview, I have a chance to sit down with his sister-in-law. Stella is a fruit bat born with congenital albinism, as white as an angel and with a sweet smile to match. She lost her sight to albinism-related retinal degeneration at the age of fourteen, though she asserts: “I was functionally blind by ten, but it took a few more years for the
last cones and rods to go.”
She hands me a framed picture of Balus and her sister, a brown fruit bat, on his arm on a pier. They’re both smiling widely; the bull looks ten years younger in the photograph. “That’s my sister, Sarah. They were together for four years, until she passed on suddenly. That was eight years ago. Undiagnosed heart condition,” Stella explains. “The first thing I remember my sister telling me about him was: ‘I just met this guy, and you’re never going to believe it, but he doesn’t lock his doors. He took the locks right out!’”
Stella shakes her head and smiles as she touches the frame around the photo. “But that was the kind of guy he was. He left his doors unlocked and told people, if something ever happened, come to his place. He kept a room for them. No locks. People would come and go, he kept a guest room for just anyone who needed it. Street people sometimes, sometimes friends, or just folks around the neighborhood. Word got around, I guess, but I never heard of anyone stealing anything.”
I ask about how she got Balus back into physiotherapy, and she breaks into a beaming smile. “Well, when my vision started to go, the doctors told me it wouldn’t be safe to fly. Fruit bats don’t echolocate so well, not nearly as well as bug bats do. So I believed them. Wings started to atrophy without flying, and after a couple of years the ligaments tightened up so much that just stretching them hurt, so I just stopped. When Balus asked about it, the first words out of his mouth were: ‘Well, we’ll just have to do something about that’.”
The results are, famously, captured in a video gone viral, that Balus now uses to promote his physiotherapy work. It shows fifteen months of daily physiotherapy compressed into six minutes, beginning with stretching and weight-work, to wing-swimming. The latter half of the video shows a steady progression of Stella taking trampoline-launched glides over a foam pit, and then a gymnastics floor.
The video ends with Stella’s first flight, her white wings spread proud and strong as she circles over a lake, all to the cheers of her husband and Balus. The photo of her gliding to a landing on strong wings, brilliantly grinning, hangs alongside the picture of her and her atrophied wings in contrast.
“He had me catching nickels out of the air, or getting me to land on them. Just kept using smaller and smaller coins, until I really could stop on a dime. Turns out all that brain-space I used to use for vision worked just fine for echoes.”
As for boxing? “I never saw anything about his boxing, of course,” she says, waving a hand in front of her eyes. “But he said everything he knew about caring for his hands translated to wings. Same bone structure, I guess. When we were working together, he sounded like a boxing coach. Gruff and wry and demanding, but always ready with the praise. It made it a lot of fun, even though a lot of the months were agonizing.
“You couldn’t ask for much more in a potential brother-in-law. He was kind, he was warm, and he believed in you. I never saw him on a bad day, but Sarah did. She told me he still worked the heavy bag every day he could, and you could hear the thump of it all the way from the garage when he was mad. But they really loved each other. She said he never raised his voice at her, never hit her. If he was angry, he’d go take it out on the bag. Boom boom boom. That’s how he broke the cycle he grew up with, I guess.”
* * * *
When George rolls the tape of Balus’ championship fight, I’m looking at the confident, solemn energy of a young bull. George Vanero’s in his corner, decades younger, and no less energetic for it: bouncing around the ring, finger stabbing in the air to illustrate points, talking a mile a minute. Trainers check his blue shorts, blue gloves, mouthpiece, and abdominal guard. Balus weathers it all with short, focused nods, his eyes never wavering from the corner his opponent occupies.
“Randall Ronmo. Had some stupid nickname at the time, ‘The Smoking Hammer’. What’s that even supposed to mean?” grouses Vanero. “Kid went pro for a few years, I guess. One more mid-lister grinding it out.”
The ‘kid’ in the video is a monster of an okapi in gold trunks; probably six foot seven and toned mean, a young warrior as stern in his stare back at Balus through the cloud of trainers and coaches, ring officials, and announcers. “So this Ronmo kid, he’d been tearing up anyone who wasn’t an elephant, hippo, or rhino, right? Ducking them, but fighting anyone else. Good management. Never had a ghost of a chance in his weight division. If they could have dropped him twenty pounds, he might have gone somewhere,” Vanero explains, as the crowd starts to clear from the ring.
“Balus though, bull’s all bone and horn, and there’s no way you’re ever going to talk a bull into chopping the horns for the sake of his sport. So he has to go in looking like that, and twelve pounds heavier for it.” Vanero gestures to the thick wrapping of foam and tape around Balus’s horns. He’s not allowed to strike with them, of course, but they present a parrying and guarding feature that can’t be ignored. “He’s not allowed to parry intentionally with them, but the only way they ever rule that is if his hands don’t move to defend himself when he does it.”
Mixed-species boxing, evidently, featured a great deal more mismatches in times past. Vanero’s more ambivalent to the reformation of the sport than Balus is: “Kind of like rhinos or turtles, some defenses, they just aren’t ever going to be equal, so you lived with it back then. But it’s never for free, you see. Horns are weight he’s got to carry, strain on his neck, on his heart. A savvy puncher knows if he lands a good blow on the tip of a horn, he can twist the head and neck, force a concussion without the punch landing anywhere near the head.”
Ronmo knew that. According to his amateur record, Ronmo’s fight not a month prior had been a first round KO against Sonyan Dimensi, a guar with a hundred pounds on the okapi. Balus’ prior fight had been against a Jim Mennison, a saltwater crocodile who had folded to body blows by the third round.
We watch the tale of the tape. Balus comes out of his corner as the bell sounds, and the fighters touch gloves, and they box. Balus’ style is an unusual hybrid of bully-tight arms and loose, flowing upper body. He has a habit of rolling his shoulders up to backstop his horns, preventing Ronmo’s punches from pushing his horns around. Vanero points it out: “That’s a habit from his young days. He always fought like everyone was twice his weight-class. His neck was strong enough to take the hit, but he’d still backstop his horns anyway. Easy to make a boxer break a hand on those horns doing that.”
The first round shows two promising talents circling, feeling each other out; Ronmo’s punches coming early and hard, but evaded with that tight upper-body work of the bull’s. Three hooks are slipped in a row, and the crowd roars approval, a solid counter-punch to the liver making the okapi’s ears flick back. “So Balus, he tags Ronmo in the first round. Nothing heavy, but it’s the wake-up call, right? Like, hey, pretty boy, you might have the head for boxing, but I’ve got the heart and the body,” asserts Vanero.
Having Vanero at my side as we watch the tape reminds me of hours behind the commentary table. Vanero’s up and down, on his feet and off, jumping up every five seconds to point something new out, his excitement making the old ratel’s tail frizz. “Now that pretty boy Ronmo, he’s good, alright? He’s good. Didn’t get to the finals against my boy without being good. Not dumb. But he wants the head because he know he can’t take the body. He’s got the big-time reach and he wants to fight the outside, score the points, keep the judges happy. Only that’s not my boy’s game.”
It shows, quickly. The second round shows Ronmo keeping Balus at a distance, backing away, tapping and scoring over and over with jabs precise enough to cut through the bull’s block. But it’s all, as Vanero says, ‘piffidy-paf’. The bull takes the punches off the boss of his horns, that thick knot of keratin atop his forehead, and deflects them. The referee can’t call it a horn defense foul, because it’s technically a hit. But while it might earn Ronmo a point on the scorecard, the judges won’t be impressed. Meanwhile, Balus keeps slipping, rolling, and ducking the taller okapi’s blows, and every t
ime he can lunge in close, another fist pressures the body.
“Ronmo, and his corner, they can see this one coming. Third round and they give up on the outside, because if this goes the distance, pretty-boy is going to have pâté for a liver, right? He might be up in the cards come round ten, but he’ll be lucky if he can get up off his knees. So they change it up. Pretty boy there has really accurate hands, keeps cutting the guard, so that’s what they go for. If they can open my boy up, get the ref to stop the fight, it’s a TKO. Whatever brings the belt.”
The third round catches Balus off guard, initially. After a round spent fighting at a distance, Ronmo’s opening blow catches the bull square in the snout, with a sharp twist of the glove that torques his nose. The pain must be blinding, and for the first time in the fight, the bull stumbles back, bullying up his arms and lowering his horns, keeping his arms tight to the body. It offers Ronmo the chance to drive a painful-looking combination of hooks to the bull’s ears, but it buys Balus the time he needs to recover. The crowd is roaring through the dingy old speaker of the television, and Vanero’s cigarette is spilling ash into the air as he gesticulates and barks at the screen.
“So I’m shouting at him from the corner: ‘Explode, boy, explode! Get out of that shell!’ And he does! Slips the right hook and parries it—”
On the screen, the moment is boxing beauty and tragedy all at once, depending on who you’re rooting for. Ronmo’s fist comes sailing in like a wrecking ball, and the bull’s hand reaches up to grab his own horn, and gives it a tug. The opposite horn catches the Okapi’s wrist and knocks the glove high. It happens fast, but the whole crowd sucks in a breath at once, every fight fan knowing, as Ronmo does, the consequences of his mistake. The bull rolls under the deflected hook and comes up with a right uppercut that buckles Ronmo’s knees. Vanero makes a point of rewinding the tape, pausing it at the moment Balus rolls under the punch.
“There, you see it? Right there.” Vanero’s cigarette taps against the screen, at Ronmo’s eyes. “You can see it in his eyes, that awful moment every fighter has, when he knows he just got caught. Look, his coach has his hand on the towel already. Good guy, Barry Louis. Protects his fighters. He’d throw it in if he had to. He doesn’t, today, but it’s good that he would.”
