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

by Carlo Rotella

  Right then, though, I could see his father in him. Mayweather is remarkably unlined for a man of 31 who has been hit often, and when he smiles he looks literally half his age, but seen up close in profile, the lines of his skull seem to press against the skin as if Floyd Sr. were emerging from within. The small gap in his left eyebrow and other signs of scarring around the eyes remind me that he has been boxing since he could walk. It’s as if he has been worn smooth by the blows. His supremely capable body, too, bears the marks of the nearly three decades of training and fighting that produced it. The shots, the situps, the miles all accrue. He has the look.

  After the nail salon, Mayweather, who lives in Las Vegas, visited a commercial property he was thinking of buying, and stopped by a jewelry store. He and his crew traveled in a caravan of SUVs, like elephants marching trunk to tail. By the time we got to the Fashion Show mall, he had changed into a colorful long-sleeved T-shirt and jeans with “PB” (for Pretty Boy) in silver on one back pocket and “$” on the other.

  Mayweather spent the next few hours trying on clothes and accessories, examining himself minutely in store mirrors. When strangers asked for an autograph or a picture, he obliged. Two shapely young women he knew showed up along the way, each departing with a gift or two in a shopping bag. His entourage of eleven watched him, ate food-court junk, and carried his purchases. By evening, some of his bodyguards had three or four bags in each hand.

  Mayweather and his crew went off to dinner and whatever came next. He likes to stay up late and go out, but he doesn’t drink, so he can train whenever he wants. He’ll run or drop by the gym at 3 a.m. if he feels like it. Sometimes he feels like it.

  Afterward, I thought, So that is what Floyd Mayweather Jr. will do with his life and his millions if he can’t find a matchup that “makes sense”? That’s what he’s going to do with a boxing talent that might, if he insists on fighting the best, still transcend the limitations of his era and produce a career of all-time significance? He’s at the peak of his powers right now, and it won’t last forever. When he retires, he’ll have all the time in the world to shop, wrestle, and dance on TV. The boxing fan in me wants to tell Mayweather to get busy and fight Cotto. If it’s close, fight him again—fight a trilogy. Fight Mosley and whichever young contender emerges next from the pack. If you clean out the welterweights, move up and try a bigger man. I want him to be true to his craft, to deliver in full on his talent and training. On the other hand, nobody got hurt during his circus turn at Wrestle-Mania or his marathon shopping session, and he owed me nothing more than the on-message patter he’d been feeding me. By what right did I wish more hard fights upon a man who has given and taken so many blows already?

  Two weeks later, Mayweather and his crew, in formal attire, occupied a couple of big round tables in a banquet room at the Millennium Biltmore, the grand old hotel in downtown Los Angeles that decades ago used to host the Oscars. He was there to pick up the fighter of the year award from the Boxing Writers Association of America at its 83rd annual awards dinner. You could argue that other fighters deserved the honor more and that Mayweather really should share self-promoter of the year with De La Hoya, if such an award existed, but his fame and riches had dazzled the voters.

  In addition to fighters, cornermen, matchmakers, and other guests, there were scores of boxing writers in attendance, but no more than a handful made a full-time living at it anymore. Even more than boxing itself, writing about boxing has receded into a niche market.

  So the gathered writers, lacking mainstream clout, could not help make Mayweather famous famous. But their opinion still matters to him, in part because they play a role in determining his place in the sport’s history. “There’s only two reasons to fight,” Ellerbe told me more than once. “Business and legacy.” Business comes first, but legacy counts, too, if only because it affects the brand. Members of the BWAA will vote Mayweather into the International Boxing Hall of Fame on the first ballot when he’s eligible, but they will also take the lead in debating whether and where he belongs in the unofficial rankings of the top fighters of all time in his weight class and the exclusive canon of pound-for-pound greats.

  Sugar Ray Robinson tops both lists. To understand just how high a standard he set, consider that he fought the indestructible middleweight Jake LaMotta, a bigger and stronger man, six times. They met twice within three weeks in February 1943, and between those two bouts Robinson beat “California” Jackie Wilson, who was no slouch. That single month was tougher than any entire year Mayweather has had to date, and Robinson’s all-time standing does not suffer from his having lost once to LaMotta by decision. Going 5–1 against LaMotta means infinitely more than beating Ricky Hatton or the faded De La Hoya once or twice.

  I recently asked LaMotta what he thought of Mayweather. (Robinson died in 1989.) He said, “I fought thirteen years, 106 fights, and I made $750,000, total. Fighting all the time keeps you strong, makes you able to take a shot better, but I would have fought less if I made more money.” He added that he would have wrestled, danced, whatever, if anybody had asked him to and paid him for it. The old-timers and all-timers I talked to were divided in their opinion of Mayweather. Some, like Sugar Ray Leonard, thought he would do well in imaginary matchups against the best of previous eras. Others, like LaMotta and Carmen Basilio, who are both now in their 80s, thought he didn’t have enough experience against strong competition. “He would have been in a lot of trouble,” Basilio told me.

  When the fighter of the year award was announced, Mayweather mounted the stage. He had shed his tuxedo jacket. His white shirt and boyish smile were brilliant. Flashbulbs went off. All the attention in the big room flowed to him. He seemed bigger than the event, stooping down to it from somewhere higher up the celebrity food chain.

  The writers, sentimentalists who think they’re cynics, oozed gratitude. A significant minority of them believed that Cotto is the best welterweight and that the Filipino super featherweight Manny Pacquiao is pound for pound the best fighter in the world today, but they loved Mayweather for his outsize persona and the reminder it carries of the sport’s past glories.

  When he got to the podium, Mayweather thanked everyone imaginable, even his dad, and noted that he had made $100 million in the ring, which he termed “a blessing.” It was the usual song and dance, but there was a gentleness to his manner that I hadn’t seen before. He was like a movie star at his high school reunion, muting his arrogance and trying to be a regular guy for old times’ sake. He seemed to genuinely appreciate the honor.

  He and his entourage hung around for a while, then moved on. There was a big world out there, a fan base to expand and a brand to elevate, and the night was still young.

  * * *

  Original publication: “And Now, the Biggest Entertainer in Entertainment,” Play: The New York Times Sports Magazine, June 1, 2008.

  Shannon vs. the Russians

  “THE RUSSIAN DOMINATION OF the heavyweight title is finis, over and done,” Shannon Briggs declared in an open letter last fall. Briggs, who referred to himself as “the Black Hope, the American Hope,” had recently won the WBO’s championship belt by knocking Sergei Liakhovich entirely out of the ring in the closing seconds of the bout. Now Briggs was calling out the champions recognized by the other three major sanctioning bodies: Wladimir Klitschko, a Ukrainian, and Oleg Maskaev and Nikolay Valuev, both Russians. “I am made in Brooklyn, USA,” he announced, “and I am definitely in the heavyweight-title house.”

  In his next fight, Briggs will defend his belt in Atlantic City on June 2 against Sultan Ibragimov, a southpaw from Dagestan, in the northern Caucasus. As Briggs says, “It does seem like Shannon versus the Russians, doesn’t it?”

  Tradition holds that the heavyweight boxing champion is the baddest man on the planet. For most of the twentieth century, that man was an American. From 1937 on, he was usually black. The honor roll includes Jack Johnson, Joe Louis, Sonny Liston, Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier, George Foreman, Larry Holmes, and M
ike Tyson. Even though rival organizations have turned one title into several, and even though boxers in the lower weight classes are almost always more skillful than the big guys, ruling the heavyweights has been a special point of pride for Americans in general and African Americans in particular.

  But in 2006, for the first time, the world’s baddest man was in effect an Eastern European, a composite of the four principal titleholders. Briggs reclaimed one share last November by beating Liakhovich, a Belarussian based in Arizona, but American heavyweight primacy had clearly slipped away. It went first to Lennox Lewis, born in London to Jamaican parents, and when Lewis retired in 2004, it passed to the rising cohort from the former Soviet Union known as the Russians (even though they’re not all Russian and Maskaev is, in fact, a naturalized American citizen).

  The eclipse of the American heavyweight echoes the recent string of American failures in international basketball and baseball competitions and the continuing influx of athletes from around the world into these and other sports here at home. Formerly American-ruled games seem to be becoming like hockey and soccer, in which the United States is just one competitor among many, no more fearsome than Sweden or Spain. Jingoistic fans should worry that soon the only sport that homegrown Americans can count on dominating will be football, which almost nobody else plays. And those who believe that certain aspects of sport qualify as Black Things—like basketball or the heavyweight title—might even suspect a conspiracy.

  Briggs played on these anxieties when he called himself the Black Hope, the American Hope. Joe Louis became such a contradictory hero, simultaneously representing African Americans and a nation that did not treat them as equal citizens, when he fought his rematch with the German champion Max Schmeling. That was in 1938, during the buildup to World War II. How did we get to the point where we need a Black Hope now?

  “I think we’re a little spoiled,” Hasim Rahman said last August. “We make too much money too quick. We lose sight of the grand prize.” Rahman, who preceded Briggs as America’s heavyweight Black Hope, had just surrendered his belt to Maskaev, who completed the Eastern European sweep of the four titles. The new champion, for his part, said, “This is a message to everyone: European fighters are tough.” Or, as Vyacheslav Trunov, Maskaev’s former manager, once put it, “We fight like it’s Stalingrad in 1942. We never surrender, and take no prisoners.”

  You hear this kind of talk these days in the fight world and beyond. It’s not really just about boxing; it’s about what used to be called national character. Eastern Europeans, the story goes, are tougher than Americans, who, spoiled by money and comfort, have gone soft in their gated community of a nation. The former Soviet bloc, by contrast, is like a vast gray housing project, stretching from the Balkans to the Bering Strait, from which issue streams of do-or-die strivers: fighters, basketball players, musicians, dancers, writers, hustlers, beauties, entrepreneurs, gangsters, all flowing toward the big money in the decadent West. Both halves of this story, the American decline and the rise of the Russians, are more mythic parable than serious analysis, but they’re widely repeated and accepted, even by American boxers.

  Larry Holmes, for instance, calls the post-Soviet heavies “ordinary fighters” but rates them well ahead of their American counterparts. Our guys, he says, exhibit “no dedication, no sacrifice. They want to party, be a star, play all that in limousines. That’s not only in boxing, but in other sports, in society, and that’s what’s happening to young athletes—to fighters, too.”

  Like most Jeremiahs, Holmes makes a moral crisis out of a structural problem. Football, basketball, and baseball (which has also become a big man’s game) snap up the quick, strong, determined 200-plus-pounders in this country. The decline of boxing into a niche sport during the latter part of the 20th century coincided with the growing hegemony of the major team sports, with their high-profile professional leagues and school-based amateur networks. A big kid who likes to bang is likely to be shunted into peewee football, and from there he can work his way up through the sport’s well-regulated layers without ever coming near a boxing gym.

  Meanwhile, the American boxing network has continued to shrink since its heyday in the first half of the last century, when no prize in sports rivaled the heavyweight title. Industrial society honored men who were good with their hands, and almost every working-class neighborhood had at least one gym. But in postindustrial America, a would-be boxer has to go well out of his way to find one of the few remaining gyms. The underfinanced national amateur system regularly comes up short in international competitions and produces few prospects who live up to their signing bonuses.

  Boxing offers a path of greater resistance for American big men. (It’s different in the lower weight classes, where participants have fewer opportunities in team sports and where there are still some dominant American champions.) Only a handful of boxers make the kind of money that thousands of professional ballplayers do. Why get beat up for nothing?

  In Eastern Europe, by contrast, there’s no football to claim the hard-nosed big guys, no baseball, less basketball, a lot less money, and a superior institutional apparatus for turning big men into competent boxers.

  The Soviets and their client states strove to excel in boxing, as they did in gymnastics or swimming, exploiting enthusiasm for physical culture to propagandize the virtues of Homo Sovieticus. They set up extensive state-sponsored networks of gyms, combing the schools for promising kids and patiently teaching them balance, footwork, and other fundamentals. “The athletes do what they’re told,” says Eric Bottjer, a veteran matchmaker. “They go to the gym like other people go to work. Americans don’t always do that.”

  The fall of the USSR allowed Eastern European amateurs to take the professional opportunities that opened for them in the West. German promoters and managers set up a pipeline to connect the farm system in the East to the money in the West. “The Russians” are not particularly good or tough when compared with heavyweights of other eras, and (Trunov’s Stalingrad bluster notwithstanding) they have demonstrated a tendency to play it safe in the ring, but they also tend to be big, dutiful, schooled in the rudiments, and around in large numbers, and that’s enough to rule the division in the wake of the American collapse.

  How did Shannon Briggs, at the age of 35, come to be the lone American standing in their way? Brooklyn, he says, and asthma.

  He came up hard in Brownsville. His mother worked and sacrificed to put him through parochial schools, but she became a heroin addict, then got into crack. She was “in and out of institutions” until her death in 1996; his stepfather, Briggs says, “died in prison, but he made me who I am, in some ways. He was a tough guy. My first fight, he made me fight the kid.” Briggs was often on his own, staying with relatives or friends, drifting, out on the street and in charge of himself. “I had a lot of fights. I was an only child, a hardcase kid, in a rough neighborhood. But I always fought my battles.”

  When he was fifteen, he found a copy of a boxing magazine in a Brooklyn subway station. He read it to tatters and went looking for a gym, where his chaotic life began to take on structure. Hopes were high for him when he turned pro in 1992.

  Briggs’s professional career, long and mostly victorious though it has been (48–4, with one draw), has not quite borne out his youthful promise. He’s a big hitter with very fast hands, and a deceptively clever tactician, but he has a reputation for wavering in his commitment to training and winning. He acknowledged his critics in his open letter challenging the other champions: “Underachiever. Asthmatic. Excuse-maker and fistic faker. My opponents and some other haters have called me all of those things.”

  Asthma has dogged him all his life. “I missed a lot of school,” he says. “I was always sick. I was in the hospital a lot. Asthma kicked my butt.” But if it wasn’t for asthma, he might not be a boxer at all. How did a strapping specimen like him escape being recruited for football? “I couldn’t play, nothing aerobic. Nobody picked me.”

  So he wa
s “saved,” as he puts it, to become “the first asthmatic heavyweight champion.” He has learned to control his condition with diet, training, and medication. When I went to see him in January at his house in a gated community outside Fort Lauderdale, he said, “They say I’m taking steroids,” acknowledging another common accusation. “Let me show you something.” He got up from his living-room couch and went to a cabinet in the kitchen, returning with an armful of meds, which he dumped on the wooden chest that serves as a coffee table. “Singulair. Advair. Servent. Albuterol.” He had pills, inhalers, nebulizers, even Zaditor drops for itchy eyes. “Somebody told me these eyedrops can help, so I got some. You want to talk about steroids? I’m taking steroids”—by which he meant the kind not banned by boxing commissions. “If you want to become heavyweight champion of the world and you got asthma, you’ll do whatever it takes. You’ll go to Africa and suck a cow’s dick if it would help. All these pills, I can’t sleep, too hyped up. And depression, and you get hungry, eat too much.”

  On fight night, the tension, adrenaline, and anxiety about having an asthma attack often bring on a crisis. The resulting chronic shortness of wind, made worse by spotty training, has shaped his fighting style. He comes out bombing, looking to overwhelm his opponent early. “My mother said, ‘You gotta knock him out first, ‘cause you gonna get tired,’ and that’s been my motto since Day 1.” By the third or fourth round, he slows down, picking his spots, sometimes visibly laboring to fill his lungs. An opponent can win rounds by simply outworking him but still has to guard against the ever-present threat of a sudden knockout—as Liakhovich, who was ahead on points in the final round when Briggs launched him through the ropes and left him swooning on the ringside scorer’s table, can attest.