Playing in Time: Essays, Profiles, and Other True Stories

by Carlo Rotella

  If Holmes did not think Futch and Arcel had anything to teach him back when he was 32—and since then he had accumulated a decade and a half of additional experience—then he could not expect a college boy with exactly one amateur fight to his credit to offer a useful critique of his jab. So what was Holmes saying? Maybe it was I know I’m old, but I think I have enough left to win one more title. You’ve been around the gym, you’ve seen me train, you know my style and you’ve seen the top heavyweights out there. You know I can do it if things break my way. Or maybe Holmes was saying Are you paying attention and learning anything while you’re here? This is the best jab you’ll ever be this close to. Study it. Or maybe he was just saying Mirror, mirror. . . .

  Mirror, mirror . . . works the other way, too: a gym’s most celebrated fighter also serves as its most polished reflecting surface. The lesser fighters who trained next to and against Holmes, keeping an eye on him even when they jumped rope or ran on the treadmill, made him a mirror in which they could see their ideal selves in action. They looked to his example, the best available embodiment of fistic virtue, when they wanted to imagine themselves mastering technique, achieving more perfect discipline, moving more confidently in a world of hurt. When I’m better at that, the lesser fighter could say to himself, I’ll be more like Larry, but I’ll still be the same me I see in the mirror every day.

  Sometimes the pressure of a fight can force this mostly unconscious internal monologue into plain view. Take, for instance, the matter of Holmes’s jump jab, an esoteric move that turns up tellingly in the repertoires of other boxers who train at his gym. Throwing a jump jab, Holmes leaves his feet entirely, in profile to his opponent, legs together and torso bent toward the target as he snaps a hard punch from the shoulder. There is no leg drive, so it is not a crushing blow, and it is riskier than throwing a regular jab, since he takes longer to return to defensive posture, but the very confidence of the move tends to dishearten the other guy. The jump jab says I’m flying, my arm is a thunderbolt, here I come from the sky. Holmes only uses it when he is deep in the rhythm of a round, usually in a training session, occasionally in an actual fight, and he rarely uses it in more than one round. Its appearance indicates that he feels himself to have established command, that he can land a punch whenever he wants. Suddenly it seems to the opponent that no matter what he tries to do, he finds himself walking into yet another perfectly timed and aimed blow. Holmes does not give in to exuberance and overuse the jump jab; having thrown two or three to show he is in charge, he puts the move away in his toolbox and gets back to throwing regular jabs and one-twos.

  The sense of command implicit in Holmes’s jump jab is so strong that it rubs off on other fighters, who take it with them when they leave the gym. Once I saw Richie Lovell, the son of Holmes’s business manager at the time, land a series of recognizably Holmesian jump jabs in the second round of a four-round bout with a squat, hirsute guy named Eduardo Rolon. Lovell had been emulating Holmes in fine style, nullifying Rolon’s uncomplicated attack with footwork and parries, jabbing, crossing off the jab, circling and moving. Holmes, the master and model himself, yelled instructions from his ringside seat.

  Lovell threw the jump jabs in the second round, as if to celebrate the fact that he was boxing so well and to place a stylistic bow atop his imminent victory, but then, curiously, all the fight seemed to drain out of him. He began acting as if, having already won the bout, he would be satisfied to just get through the mere formality of the rest of it. He spent the third and fourth rounds moving more and fighting less, eventually abandoning offense altogether and just bouncing off the ropes to clinch. Rolon, fighting in his hometown, kept moving forward and punching, and the judges awarded him a victory by split decision. Lovell deserved no worse than a draw, but he could not complain: he had made possible the bad decision by fighting so poorly in the last two rounds.

  Lovell forgot, or never learned, that the jump jab and the mastery associated with it are two separate things that only appeared to be inseparable when he watched Holmes throw the punch. Holmes concludes that he is in command when he sees that his opponent has been worn down by an accrued beating—outboxed and frustrated, yes, but also tired, addled, and hurt, and therefore unlikely to produce a late-round surge. Lovell had not beaten his man—he had just boxed better—so Rolon still had the wherewithal to exhibit just enough sustained aggression to give two judges an excuse to award him the fight.

  Now, Art Baylis, one of Holmes’s sparring partners, had watched Holmes throw jump jabs at other men, as Lovell had, but Baylis had also been hit by Holmes with enough jump jabs in the gym over the years to inscribe the move’s import on his very flesh and bones. Once I saw Baylis throw a couple of jump jabs of his own in a fight, seemingly out of sheer joy, just at the moment when it became plain to all that he was going to win. Baylis, a small heavyweight who also fought as a cruiserweight, appeared to swell with power when he threw the jump jabs, as if expanding to conform to the ideal embodied by his boss. His opponent seemed to shrivel up, acquiescing. Holmes, watching from ringside, nodded and smiled, like a man pleased with what he sees in the mirror.

  * * *

  Original publication: Shadow Boxers, Stone Creek Publications, 2005.

  The Prospect

  ON THE EVENING OF June 10, 2006, an hour and a half before making his debut as a professional heavyweight, a ruggedly built young man named Tom Zbikowski sat on a reversed folding chair in a dressing room in Madison Square Garden, having his hands wrapped. Sam Colonna, who had trained the 21-year-old Zbikowski since he was thirteen, sat on another folding chair facing him, doing the job with unhurried care. The gauze bandage, the tape, the pad over the fingers but not the knuckles, more tape over and under and around, a standardized and regulated routine that every practitioner does just a bit differently. Two blue-blazered officials from the New York State Athletic Commission stood over Colonna, watching him work with the theatrically intent look of boxing officials everywhere.

  Like most of the fight world’s habits, hand wrapping is both practical and ritual. Done properly, it protects the hands from damage without giving a fighter an unfair advantage. Like boxing gloves or a football helmet, wrapping functions as both armor and sword, a protective measure that allows you to hit harder and more frequently than you could without it. One of the officials murmured, “That’s beautiful.” Colonna said “Thank you” without looking up from his work.

  Boxers all over the world wait out the last anxious stretch before a fight in rooms like this: pale green cinder block walls, gray floor, a drop ceiling with fluorescent lights, some folding chairs and a folding table. Through a metal door there was a cramped bathroom with a shower that nobody ever used and a toilet that altogether too many people had used.

  Men, most of them large, crowded the dressing room. In addition to Zbikowski, Colonna, and the officials, there was Zbikowski’s other longtime trainer, Danny Nieves, and his flexibility trainer, his lawyer, his father, his brother, his neighbor, his roommate, a half-dozen middle-aged tough guys with various connections to his family, and Angelo Dundee, a grand old man of 82 best known for having trained Muhammad Ali. Dundee lent his largely decorative presence to Zbikowski’s corner to mark him as a young fighter worth watching.

  Zbikowski was making his debut on pay-per-view TV and in the Garden, rather than in the ballroom of a chain hotel somewhere, because he played football for Notre Dame. He was a captain and star of the team, a playmaking safety who specialized in getting his hands on the ball one way or another—intercepting a pass, mugging an opposing ball carrier, delivering a teeth-loosening third-down hit that forced the other team to punt (he also returned punts)—and then taking it back the other way, shedding the tacklers he didn’t outrun. He had just completed his junior year, in which he was named a third-team All-America, and fans and expert observers alike expected big things of him and the Fighting Irish in the fall, after which they expected to see him drafted sometime in the first three rounds by a
n NFL team. He was not the biggest or the fastest safety in the nation, but knowing that he could beat the hell out of everybody else on the field gave him a quality of sheer physical command that mere players of ball games can rarely match.

  Novelty acts have on occasion fleetingly crossed over from football to boxing, some football players incorporate boxing routines into their fitness regimens, and a couple of NFL players have had actual boxing careers after retiring from football, but this was different. Zbikowski, a boxer who played football, had his first official amateur fight when he was nine years old, weighing in at eighty pounds, and he ran up an amateur record of 68–13. Boxing had made him better at football, but football had kept him from devoting himself fully to boxing. Now the NCAA had cleared him to fight professionally, with certain restrictions on publicity, while retaining his eligibility as an amateur. He had a three-fight deal with Bob Arum, a leading promoter, and he hoped to fight again in February—ideally, about six weeks after he ran back a punt to win the national championship game.

  It would be most unfortunate, then, for him to get knocked on his ass in his debut that night.

  The referee, Arthur Mercante Jr. came in to give prefight instructions. He said, “Your first pro fight, right? Things are a little different up here.” Zbikowski nodded. Amateur boxing may be a lot rougher than other sports, including football, but compared to pro boxing it’s a full-contact form of tag, like fencing in comparison to a real swordfight. Pros have more opportunity to take their encounter to its logical conclusion. They fight more and longer rounds, referees let more damage accrue before stepping in, fair judges reward punches that hurt rather than those that merely land, and pros do not wear the amateur’s protective headgear. Less padding, literal and figurative, shields a pro from life-changing doses of elemental force. Then there’s the primacy of money—purses, promoters’ self-interest, TV profits. Money can protect a fighter, but it can also deposit a near-naked man in the path of serious harm.

  After Zbikowski peed in a cup and handed it to the official who watched him do it, his flexibility trainer fastened a white belt around Zbikowski’s middle, just above the hips. Wires connected the belt to a car-stereo-sized machine that sent electrical impulses deep into the fighter’s thick torso. He was carrying a lot of football muscle, which looks impressive but can get in the way of efficient fighting, so he had to take extra care to stay flexible, a cardinal boxing virtue. The trainer stood behind Zbikowski, put his hands on his shoulders, and pushed to twist his trunk, gently but firmly, much farther around than you’d expect a serious weight lifter to be able to go.

  Zbikowski resembled a tight-wound mechanism receiving the final increments of tension. The winding-up had gone on for the better part of eight weeks, ever since the end of spring football practices. Zbikowski had sparred 150 rounds during an intensive stretch of training, some of it in Florida under Dundee’s supervision, more appropriate for a title fight than a four-round debut. The final week, in New York, had been a grind of open workouts, press conferences, photo ops, medical tests, and waiting around, all the while making sure to eat right and get plenty of rest. Zbikowski was not a big talker and not happy to sit around doing nothing, and he had to put up with altogether too much of both. It would be a relief to get in the ring and do something to somebody.

  Eight weeks before fight night, on a bright, warm Saturday in April, over 41,000 people, many of them wearing jerseys bearing Tom Zbikowski’s number 9, showed up to watch Notre Dame’s football team play its annual spring scrimmage, the Blue and Gold Game. Notre Dame’s football prospects appeared to be on the rise again after a long stretch of disappointment that had been hard on its fans, who only pretend to accept that the Fighting Irish can’t win every game and that other teams may actually be better than theirs. Other teams might play better on a given day, but they’re not, you know, better. After all, as Jerome Bettis and other distinguished returning alumni would say at the postgame press conference, Notre Dame football is special.

  Up in the stands, Eddie and Sue Zbikowski watched the youngest of their three children play ball. Eddie, a barrel-chested extrovert with close-cropped white hair, squinted into the sun and talked about “all this,” by which he meant not just Tom’s nimbus of heroic promise but also the glow of good fortune and accomplishment that came with having a son at Notre Dame and, more generally, with having achieved a suburban middle-class life, “with the bermuda shorts, the barbecues, the whole thing.” All this seemed like a kind of Valhalla to Eddie, who played with relish the role of an old scrapper from Chicago’s West Side. “Where I grew up,” he said in the clipped accent of white-ethnic Chicago, “usually when we’d say our friends were in college we didn’t mean they were at Notre Dame.” They were in the joint, he meant. He spun tales of Outfit guys he grew up with, of beatings, shootings, a bloody-knuckled regular-guy golden age receding into myth. Sue, a petite woman in an oversize white number 9 jersey, leaned over to say, “Don’t encourage him. He’ll go on like this all day. I call him the Embellisher.”

  Tom’s passion for boxing, said Eddie, took them from the suburbs to the West Side in search of good trainers and opponents in Chicago Park District gyms and on the Catholic Youth Organization circuit. These were surviving remnants of the neighborhood network in which young men of Eddie’s and previous generations learned the manly art. Eddie said, “I said, ‘Tommy, please, don’t make me go back to the city,’ but Tommy learned a lot from the other kids—their problems, their toughness. It made him a man fast. He learned not to be a bully, not like these rich kids in the suburbs who think they’re tough and don’t know what it is.”

  On the field, Tom patrolled the middle, looking to hit somebody, but the offense seemed to be avoiding him, denying him a chance to make a big play. A waterbug of a running back juked past him; a few plays later, Tom found him near the sideline and squashed him.

  After the game, after Tom had said suitably captain-ish things for the reporters who collected around him, and after he had smiled and signed his way through the mob of kids waiting outside the stadium’s gates, he put on a Chicago Police ball cap and crossed the emptying parking lots to a stretch of grass near the stadium where the players’ families were having a cookout. A couple of hundred people—current and former players, awed-looking high school recruits, parents, siblings—milled around in the late afternoon sun, drinking beer and pop, eating burgers and the extra-tender Italian beef hauled down from Chicago by the Zbikowskis.

  In the air here, in addition to the smell of burning meat, was the specialness of Notre Dame and its football tradition, the jacks-or-better sense of sitting pretty. The well-established middle-class families take all this as their due, and those from working-class backgrounds can feel the upward trajectory delivering them to the good life. Tucked within the multiple cushions of middle-classness, Notre Dame, and the sports elite, they can’t help but feel secure, and they let it show. At Ivy League schools, you’re supposed to act like it’s no big deal to be there, but Notre Dame families don’t affect to hide their satisfaction at having made it to South Bend, and that goes double for football.

  Mike Joyce, the lawyer from Chicago who handled Tom’s boxing business, stood off to one side with a beer in his hand, a raven at the picnic. He was telling a typical boxing story about a promoter stealing purse money from a fighter on the eve of a major bout. The promoter had a reputation in the fight world as a pretty good guy, not a monster, but hey, he saw an opening and he took it. Promoters, officials, managers—almost everybody in the fight world except the fighters—go around with stingers on the ends of their tails, and every once in a while they just have to sting somebody; not because they’re evil, but because that’s what they do.

  Joyce, who also ran political campaigns, had to do business with such people to launch Tom’s boxing career, while also protecting his charge and taking care not to interfere with his football career. So far, so good: Tom would make $25,000 for a four-round bout, slotted in a choice spot ju
st before the main event, Cotto-Malignaggi, on a pay-per-view card. “If Tommy wasn’t making his debut on TV,” said Joyce, “I’d put him in the sticks in Indiana somewhere, just to break his cherry, and put him in with a complete stiff. But you can’t do that on TV, in the Garden. Everybody would say, ‘Look at the pampered Notre Dame kid.’” Bob Arum’s matchmaker needed to come up with an opponent who at least appeared to be able to fight a little, but without overmatching Tom. It was one more thing to worry about.

  Anybody who genuinely cares about a fighter worries all the time. Sure, other athletes can blow a bright future by performing poorly, and any athlete can get hurt; as Tom often pointed out, football offers many opportunities to get hurt, with so many highly motivated big men flying around on every play, slamming into each other’s ankles and knees and hips. But in the fight world, they’ll hurt you on purpose. Fighters do it in the ring to win fights, and fight people do it outside the ring for profit, or just because they’ve got that stinger and can’t help noticing that your sleeping bag is unzipped.

  Joyce believed, though, that he could shelter Tom from business as usual in boxing. “He’s got good people around him, a rock-solid family, protection. And he’s white, and there’s the Notre Dame thing,” which meant not only that alumni would support him but that casual sports fans and the major-sport media apparatus would be interested in him, making for more pay-per-view buys and bigger gates, all making him worth more to promoters, who would therefore protect their investment with greater care. “And if he’s in the NFL first, too, that’s more interest in him. The business will come to him. He can dictate terms to it. I’m already getting requests from big-name companies for endorsements,” which of course NCAA rules precluded him from acting on. Maybe Tom was sufficiently insulated by race, by class, by football and the association with Notre Dame. Maybe he was just too special.