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

by Carlo Rotella

  With less than an hour to go before his bout, Zbikowksi started shadowboxing at half speed in his dressing room. He was wearing white boxing shoes with no socks, shiny white shorts with a gold number 9 in a blue shamrock on one leg, and a T-shirt bearing a Polish eagle and the legend STO LAT, which means “a hundred years” and translates roughly as Good luck.

  Lance Armstrong, who had been invited to visit, came in with his manager in tow. Zbikowski, emerging slightly from his darkening prefight mood, smiled with one corner of his mouth and interrupted his half-speed moving and feinting to say, “Hey, you’re the guy from Dodgeball.” After an exchange of pleasantries and an obligatory dukes-up photo op, he went back to work. One of the other fistic characters made an egregiously off-color remark about the availability of Sheryl Crow, Armstrong’s former girlfriend. Armstrong took it all in stride. He seemed excited; he was the celebrity in the room, but he’d never been to the fights before.

  Word came in from the hall that Kevin Kelley, an old favorite at the Garden who was in the deep twilight of his career, had just been KO’d with a liver shot. Only one more fight to go. A functionary came in with Zbikowski’s boxing gloves, custom jobs in Notre Dame gold. Colonna and Nieves put them on their fighter under the scrutiny of the blue-blazered officials.

  A hush fell over the dressing room. Time for Zbikowski to break his prefight sweat. The other men moved closer to the walls to give him more space to work. Danny Nieves put on padded mitts and Zbikowski started banging them. He threw a combination, slipped the counterpunches that Nieves sketched with the mitts, then stepped to the side and popped the mitts with another combination, a complicated, liquid sequence. Nieves said, “Put a hole in him.” Zbikowski paced between bursts of punching.

  The pacing brought him close to Armstrong, who extended his cupped bare hand palm-down in imitation of Nieves with the mitts and said, “Let’s see it.” Before the words were even out of his mouth, Zbikowski set his feet, pivoted, and whipped an uppercut into the hand with a loud gloved smack. See the target, hit the target, kill the target. It happened much faster than Armstrong expected. He made a big deal of shouting, “Wow!” and cradling the smacked hand, making everybody laugh, but something else moved beneath the comedy, as if he had dangled a hunk of meat into a tiger’s cage and been startled by how murderously the big cat took it.

  Zbikowski went back to banging the pads. Nieves said, soothingly, “Blind him and cut him with the jab.” Pacing, Zbikowski took deep breaths, feeling himself growing tighter. Having played football on national TV, he’d had plenty of experience in trying to relax under pressure, but, as he had said earlier, “It’s not the same thing. When it’s just you, it’s different. And it’s not like a fight in a bar, when it happens all at once. Knowing the night before that you’re going to fight. Waking up, knowing it. It’s just you, and it’s different.”

  Somebody said, “Got everything?” Nieves said, “I got the mouthpiece and the rosary. That’s all we need.”

  Eddie Zbikowski said, “You don’t need me, right?” Tom nodded. Eddie kissed his son on the cheek and left to find his seat. Other nonessential personnel followed. Soon only the cornermen—Colonna, Nieves, and Dundee—and the officials were left. One of the officials handed out clear latex gloves for the cornermen to wear during the fight.

  Word came that the bout immediately before Zbikowski’s had ended, another knockout. The crowd noise filtered in through the cinder block walls, louder when somebody opened the door.

  Colonna smeared petroleum jelly over Zbikowski’s upper body and face, then Nieves put a shiny hooded white robe on him. The cornermen wore matching jackets. Angelo Dundee had a folded towel over one shoulder. How many hundreds, thousands of times had he done this? How many of his prospects had panned out? How many had disappeared into the half-world of marked-up guys who used to be pretty good with their hands?

  Word came from the hallway that it was time for Zbikowski to make his ring walk. He went out the door into the narrow hallway, which was lined with a couple dozen of his clapping, shouting football teammates, who had come to New York to support him. He went out through the crowd to the ring, where the gospel singer Bebe Winans was singing a sly rendition of the Notre Dame fight song. In this setting, the rah-rah tune sounded precious, rather than inspiring. Zbikowski had argued for not using it as his ring walk music, but he had lost that argument to the promoter’s marketing people, who saw it as an opportunity to brand a potential moneymaker.

  Ideally, you insulate a promising fighter with sound training, good management, and people who care about him, and you bring him along by peeling back the insulation bit by bit in settings as controlled as you can make them, exposing him to a wider and deeper assortment of hard knocks. You gradually introduce him to better sparring partners and opponents, a broadening variety of fistic problems: booming punchers, tricky technicians, southpaws, tall guys, short guys, granite-headed hardcases. You start him out in four-rounders, and, if all goes well, work up to ten and then twelve rounds, the championship distance.

  You want each new test to make him a little more capable, rather than doing harm to his body or his fighting spirit. If he’s going to be confounded, you want it to happen in the gym. In a bout, with only the relatively thin cushion of the referee and the rules to protect him, anything can happen: a watershed beating, a blot on his record, a permanent crack in the foundation of his self-confidence. The possibilities for life-changing catastrophe seem nearly limitless. So, since you can’t kidproof the world, you do your best to worldproof the kid.

  “Angel Manfredy caught me with a body shot when I was thirteen or fourteen, the worst I ever felt,” said Tom Zbikowski. “That was right around when he beat Gatti.” One body shot from an accomplished professional, delivered in the gym under the right conditions, can teach a kid a great deal about boxing and about himself. The same shot in the ring could wreck him for good.

  Zbikowski was talking about it while tucking into a plate of pasta and meat, drinking only water, in a restaurant in Fort Lauderdale. It was late May, two and a half weeks before fight night, and he was in town to train under Angelo Dundee. He wanted to keep his weight up around 215 for the fight, so he needed to eat at least 5,000 calories per day to keep from being whittled down to a stick figure by a daily triathlon of training. In the mornings, he sparred at a boxing gym; in the afternoons, he did speed workouts at a boutique gym, sets of jumps and lunges against resistance to build explosive quickness for football; at night, he worked out in a weight room, but not every night. After all, he didn’t want to overdo it. During the leftover portions of his day, he made appearances at charity events, ate, and slept whenever possible.

  Zbikowski was training for two careers, not just a four-round fight. But he only had one body, which at 5–11 was considered smallish for a pro safety and very small for a contemporary heavyweight boxer, and the two kinds of training had different objectives. Football requires bulk, agility, and strength expressed in furious all-out bursts lasting only a few seconds. For boxing, he should squeeze his power into the smallest possible package, emphasizing supple quickness and the endurance to sustain a high workrate for three-minute stretches. His prime fighting weight looked to be no more than 195, which would make him a cruiserweight (and he could possibly make 175 and fight as a light-heavy), but there was much more money to be made as a heavyweight, so the extra football beef wasn’t entirely dead weight.

  The difference between boxing and football goes much deeper than physical demands, of course. The fight world is a loosely regulated Hobbesian scramble for the money, each against all. Football, closely managed at every level by legitimate governing bodies, is almost Confucian in its systematized order. “With football, it’s a process,” said Zbikowski. “High school, college, pro, you get evaluated at each level and move up.” They time you in the forty and fractions thereof, measure your body fat, grade your decision making, crunch your statistics, and out pops a rating. If it’s high enough, you move
up to the next level, like a civil service job. “There are still a lot of busts, a lot of things can happen, but there’s more of a process. And if you’re not in the NFL you can go to Europe or the Arena League.” Nothing’s ever 100 percent sure when anterior cruciate ligaments, teammates, and a bouncing oblate spheroid are involved, but football offers a much more certain future than boxing.

  “I’ll try the NFL first,” he said. “If it doesn’t work out, I’ll box. I set myself up pretty good by getting an education, but I’m not saying, ‘If I fail, here’s my backup plan.’ I got a lot of drive to box.” It was unlikely that an NFL team would allow him to fight in the off-season, but he wanted to find one that would. Off-season boxing would keep him in terrific shape, he pointed out, and it’s not as unhealthy as nightclubbing, riding a motorcycle, or playing football, for that matter. (Mike Joyce’s preferred scenario went like this: “The average NFL career is, like, three years. Say he goes double that. If his team lets him fight a couple times a year”—a very big if—“I could have him maybe 12–0, 15–0, when he retires. He’ll be twenty-eight, twenty-nine, in his prime; I could have him in line for a title in two or three fights.”)

  While Tom plowed through the calories, the two older men across the table, his father and a broken-nosed orthopedic surgeon named Hackie Reitman, tossed off drinks and animatedly discussed Tom’s appointment with destiny. The Reitmans and Zbikowskis met at the Mayo Clinic many years before, when Hackie’s daughter and Tom’s older brother, E. J., underwent treatment for cancer. Both kids made it, and as the friendship between the families grew, Hackie’s taste for boxing rubbed off on Tom, a little boy already looking to test himself. Hackie agreed with Eddie that Tom had been marked for greatness. They understood his talents to be a gift to the world, not just to Tom, and insisted that he make time for charity work no matter how busy he got.

  The older men wouldn’t settle for anything less than greatness on any score, including service to others. To that end, and because Eddie thought that Tom should have another layer of career insurance, Tom would be flying to Chicago the next day to take the firefighters exam. Eddie saw even this possible future in heroic terms. “If he pulls people from burning buildings, after being captain of the Notre Dame football team and fighting in the Garden, I’ll be happy with that.” Tom, a matter-of-fact fellow with an uncomplicated inner life who mostly just likes to do things that scratch his inbuilt itch for bruising, received this grand pronouncement without comment or change of expression. A few minutes later, though, when Eddie became distracted by a couple of swag-bellied gents from Chicago who stopped by the table to reminisce about Outfit guys and the old neighborhood, Tom said, “I hear the test’s not that hard. They say you need to bring a pencil, but not an eraser.”

  When Tom Zbikowski got to the ring on fight night his opponent, Robert “The Disciple” Bell, was waiting for him. Taller and heavier than Zbikowski, but nowhere near as fit, Bell was a self-assured guy from Akron, Ohio, with a knockaround curriculum vitae—soldier, bouncer, bodyguard, martial arts, toughman competitions—but no particular gift for boxing. He was officially only 2–2 as a pro at the age of 32, and all his fights, losses as well as wins, had ended in knockouts. He could perhaps hit some, but he could be hit and hurt by someone who knew how. The matchmaker had done his job.

  For $3,000 and a chance to fight in the Garden and on TV, Bell played the role of villain, even wearing an Ohio State jersey to stir up Notre Dame fans still smarting from the previous year’s drubbing by the Buckeyes. “I’m in it to make money,” he said a few days before the fight. “I may not ever get a world title from boxing, but I may get the titles to some nice cars. In the boxing game, if you’re not a big prospect then you’re pretty much on your own,” and he thought he was doing all right for a guy on his own.

  Bell understood his subordinate place in this drama, but the fight’s outcome was not foreordained. It happens often enough that the knockaround guy with no future and nobody special in his corner gets the best of the prospect with the big-name trainer in his corner and the multi-fight deal with a major promoter. Plenty of bright futures have clouded over when the bell rings. In such cases, fight people say that the prospect was exposed, meaning not only that his flaws were revealed but also that his handlers miscalculated, exposing him to naked force in a quantity or from an angle that he was not ready to handle. It happens more frequently that the prospect wins, but looks bad doing it. Usually, he’s overeager and botches the job by rushing in headlong, spoiling his own leverage and timing in his haste to impress. The judges award him the decision anyway, but he and his supporters go away relieved rather than satisifed.

  This time, however, the prospect did everything exactly right; when the bell rang, the tightly wound mechanism unwound with startling force and precision. Zbikowski jarred Bell with his left jab, taking his measure. Bell, for his part, overloaded his leverage to favor his right hand, with which he had little chance of hitting Zbikowski. Bell missed twice with ponderous rights, ate Zbikowski’s jab in return, and then tried the same right again, one time too many.

  Zbikowski countered swiftly and decisively with a left hook to the body and another to the chin that badly hurt Bell, who instantly assumed an oddly inappropriate look of raptness, as if he had suddenly become aware of a fugitive strain of music threaded under the surging crowd noise and had stopped fighting in order to attend to it. This happens, sometimes, in the pregnant moment after a punch hurts a fighter badly enough to render him defenseless. His opponent, now punching at will, seems to accelerate to triple-time as the fighter in trouble lapses into undersea slow-motion.

  Zbikowski kept punching until Bell subsided to one knee. Bell shook his head to clear it and rose at the count of six. Zbikowski walked across the ring from the neutral corner with an air of suppressed impatience and hit Bell with a single straight right that spun him around and sent him to the ropes in a bent-forward posture of open submission. The referee leaped between them to stop the fight, which had lasted just 49 seconds.

  Zbikowski raised his gloved fists high as his teammates at ringside gave a deep-voiced exultant shout. The other 14,000-plus in attendance made noise, too. Bell stood blearily by the ropes, one glove on the top strand to steady himself, looking as if he couldn’t hear the secret music anymore and was waiting for the world to stop spinning so fast. Like a guy who’s too drunk and has been too drunk before, he knew that, as awful as he felt right then, he would feel bad only for a while; eventually, he would feel almost entirely well again.

  The prospect’s debut had been a success. If the opponent did not pose much of a test, the occasion did, and Zbikowski had aced it. After he got through with the postfight press conference, collected his check, and enjoyed a rollicking victory party at a bar across the street from the Empire State Building, he would go home, rest up for a week, and switch to football. Boxing would recede to the margins of his life for at least the next seven months, but he hoped to squeeze in a fight or two between the end of the season and the predraft combines. He also had a college degree to finish up, with a double major in sociology and computer applications, and he was waiting to hear how he did on the firefighters exam. Possibilities extended around him in all directions, although he was only interested in those that led to hitting.

  Something in him craved the shock of contact. He wanted to know what he could do, what he could take, who he could take. Football and the cushion of the middle-class life his parents had made for their kids might yet keep him from finding out how good a fighter he could be, or it might work the other way: if he went deep enough into the fights to realize his true potential, he risked foreclosing his other options. The fight world has ruined promising and well-protected young men before. But, if everything broke just right, he might yet have the chance to take both football and boxing to the end of the line, where his talent and preparation would come up against the limits imposed by nature and other men’s ability. That was where he wanted to go.

  He
wouldn’t go any farther that night. As soon as the bout ended, the ring filled up with cornermen, handlers, friends, family, officials, TV types, and others, a living buffer of bodies pressing around him, faces alive with passion, voices telling him how special he was. His cornermen were cutting off his gloves.

  As of this writing, in December 2011, Tom Zbikowski was in his fourth year as a safety and special teams player with the Baltimore Ravens. His professional boxing record stayed at 1–0 until the NFL lockout in the spring of 2011, which gave him an opportunity to fight again. Leaner but rusty, he quickly recorded three victories. Two were first-round TKOs, but he struggled in a decision over Caleb Grummet, a journeyman and MMA fighter who could take a punch. “My biggest worry,” Mike Joyce told me, “is he has to get back to boxing basics, fundamentals, everything off the jab, not slugging. Guys aren’t gonna always go down.” Trying to destroy Grummet with one shot, Zbikowski punched himself out and became so exhausted that he nearly failed to last to the end of the four-rounder. “The aggressiveness,” said Joyce, “some of it is football. He’s playing with guys who weigh 325 pounds, so a heavyweight who’s only 225 seems like he’s not that big.” But good defensive football logic—get there as fast as you can and put everything you’ve got into one decisive shot—makes poor offensive ring logic. Boxers must pace themselves through three-minute rounds, not six-second plays, and there are plenty of fighters with mediocre records, professional opponents who will never be regarded as special by any fan or promoter but who have been exposed to all kinds of advanced punishment, who can take Zbikowski’s best shots and still keep giving him that hard little smile that says, “Nice one, pal, but that took more out of you than it did out of me.”