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

by Carlo Rotella

  Still, sports commentators and editorialists, when they noticed the upcoming Holmes-Butterbean bout at all, generally took the position that it was meaningless, or worse: a farce, a joke, meaningful only to the extent it proved that people will pay to see any freak show. These pious responses made me all the more curious about what the fight might actually mean to Holmes, who appeared to have relatively little to gain and much more to lose.

  In the days before the bout, he was still trying to talk himself into believing that whupping Butterbean would matter to him and to others. When I asked him, on the phone, why he was fighting Butterbean, he said, “A carpenter don’t have to retire when he’s 52. Why do I?” A good question, but not a satisfying answer to mine. He was sitting in his office in the L&D Holmes Plaza, a pair of brick-and-glass office buildings with a fine view of the riverfront, on Larry Holmes Drive in Easton. He was rich and comfortable and accomplished enough to suit almost any son of the working class made good. Why, really, was he fighting Butterbean, and why was he fighting at all at his age?

  To begin with, Holmes stood in line for government cheese as a boy, which means that he always finds it hard to pass up a payday, even when he doesn’t really need the money. And, while earning a quarter-million dollars for an hour’s work, he wanted to show people that he was still good at his job. He had been having trouble finding anybody to fight, though. Titleholders, contenders, and those with even an outside chance of becoming contenders would no longer have anything to do with him, since he could only make them look bad. Holmes could still find an opponent’s flaws, and getting beaten by a 52-year-old would ruin a career. A good fighter could probably defeat him just by staying busy in every round, but there would be little glory in it for the victor. That left one potential big-money opponent: George Foreman, a contemporary who—like Holmes—had fought on into middle age. Foreman had made a fortune and—unlike Holmes—achieved ubiquity on television as a boxing commentator and a pitchman for cooking implements, car repairs, and fast food. Holmes had been trying for years to coax him into the ring, but it appeared that Foreman had grown too rich and fallen too far out of shape to take the risk. If Foreman wouldn’t fight, Holmes would settle for Butterbean.

  Finding a notable opponent was part of Holmes’s continuing effort to extract his due from a public that, he feels, has never offered it in full. His comparing himself to a carpenter, a steady working man, was telling. He has always been a businesslike worker, rather than a crowd-pleasing showman, in the ring. His pragmatic boxing style, founded on the left jab and good defense and the timeless premise of hitting without being hit, never made much concession to popular tastes. Posterity unfairly tends to reduce him, perhaps the finest technical boxer on the short list of heavyweight all-timers, to the champion who, in one writer’s words, “made boxing seem strictly an act of commerce.” Bracketed in history by the two premier celebrity boxers of the television age—Ali, who made boxing seem like political theater, and Tyson, who makes boxing seem like nonconsensual sex—Holmes has been partially eclipsed.

  For Holmes, a respectable payday for an easy fight and a chance to show his skill at center stage in front of 7,000 fans in a packed arena and a pay-per-view television audience were reasons enough to take the fight, but he offered yet one more. While I was asking him about how much money he would make, he blurted out a seeming non sequitur: “Let me ask you this: Who do you think is the greatest of all time?” I asked if he seriously thought that fighting on into his fifties against increasingly unimpressive opponents would eventually place him above Muhammad Ali and Joe Louis on all-time lists. Holmes said, wonderingly, “I didn’t even know I was going to say that. It just came out.”

  But he did have a point, sort of. He has held up much better than Ali and Louis, both of whom faded badly in the twilight phase of their careers. Ali, at the age of 38, was barely able to defend himself when Holmes put him out to pasture in 1980; Louis, comebacking at 37, was knocked through the ropes and into retirement by Marciano in 1951. Since turning 40, by contrast, Holmes had won twenty fights and lost only three. In 1992, at the age of 42, he fought consecutive twelve-rounders in which he first scored a prodigious victory over Ray Mercer, who was at the time the most feared heavyweight contender, and then lost a closely contested title fight by decision to Evander Holyfield. In the latter fight, Holmes wore a contact lens to protect his right eye, on which he had recently had surgery for a detached retina. Always confident of his defensive ability, he had the gall to be genuinely exasperated—like a guy on a big date—when it popped out in the third round.

  Butterbean would indeed gain some credibility as a boxer if he beat Holmes, but he had almost no chance of winning. For Holmes’s part, beating Butterbean was certainly not going to leapfrog him past Ali and Louis in the all-time rankings, and it wouldn’t remove him from the media shadow of Ali and Tyson. Holmes enjoyed unimpeachable legitimacy; Butterbean enjoyed growing celebrity. Each craved what the other had, and each saw beating the other as a way to get it. In that sense, both were probably fighting in vain.

  The gloves, red Everlasts, arrived in Holmes’s locker room. Holmes said, mostly to himself, “Better get myself together.” He stood up, stepped into his foul protector, and stripped off the red polo shirt. He had weighed in at 254 pounds, 30 to 40 pounds above his fighting weight during his reign as undisputed champion. Even in his prime, Holmes always had a can-do working man’s build, not an ultradeveloped anatomical model of a body like Holyfield’s or Ken Norton’s. Now, well into middle age, his chest and stomach sagged and there was a broad layer of suet around his middle, but his comparatively slender legs were still strong, and he still had the labor-thickened shoulders and arms of a plasterer. The muscles, big but not cut, moved smoothly beneath the skin.

  Holmes, still standing, put on his white trunks. Ransom applied Vaseline to his torso and then his face. One of his cornermen was intoning a mantra: “Take control. Take control. In the ring. Take control.” Even if Butterbean was not a real boxer, Holmes had a fight to win in front of an audience.

  Somebody opened the locker room door for a moment to call out, “Five minutes.” Time to put on the gloves—left first, then right, with white tape at the wrists to cover the laces and secure the fit. The neutral party signed the tape. Ransom put on a pair of practice mitts and Holmes banged them for a while, getting the gloves properly settled onto his hands, then went into a familiar shadowboxing sequence: left jab, left jab, right cross, more lefts, grunting and circling first one way and then the other as he threw punches. He looked so utterly competent, sagging middle and all, that it was hard not to sympathize at least a little with his complaint that he could still fight and nobody worthwhile would fight him.

  In the ring, a woman was singing the national anthem with the requisite soulful flourishes and quavers. Strains of it echoed down the backstage hallways and filtered through the closed door of Holmes’s locker room. Inside, Holmes’s crew collected near the door, readying themselves for the ring walk. Holmes, still warming up, did a tricky crabwise shuffle and threw a combination. He reached down with a glove to adjust his protective cup. “Got to protect my future,” he said, grinning. “Oh, I forgot. I don’t got no future.”

  The national anthem was over, and Butterbean’s ring-walk music, “Sweet Home Alabama,” was playing. The door opened, and word came from the hallway that Butterbean had made his entrance. Holmes left off warming up, slipped into the red-and-white robe that someone held for him, and went through the doorway without breaking stride, his crew stepping aside to admit him into their midst and then gathering around him in motion. In a tight mass, the group went down the hall to the heavy black curtains that masked the entrance to the arena proper. They paused here, waiting in the backstage twilight, eager to enter the loud brightness on the other side. Smoke from a special-effects machine drifted in thick skeins, catching stray bars of light that stabbed through small gaps where the curtains did not meet flush.

  Now Holmes’
s familiar ring-walk music began: “Ain’t No Stopping Us Now,” the old Philadelphia soul anthem. Everybody in the crew stood up a little straighter. Functionaries pulled aside the curtains, and Holmes and his people went through into the light and the roar of acclamation that greeted his appearance. This might be the last time.

  After the usual prefatory huffing and puffing, the bell rang and the combatants got down to it.

  In the opening minutes of a fight, Holmes looks as if he is in trouble. He backs away from an advancing opponent, stiff-legged and blinking, arms extended in what seems like a desperate attempt to save himself from incoming blows. Far from denoting a steely determination to prevail, his manner seems to say, “Hey! Watch it with those fists!” A naive spectator would think that Holmes, realizing he can’t cope with his opponent, has panicked. Actually, Holmes is taking measurements of the other man’s style, using his long arms as calipers to calculate the distance between them at which he can hit without being hit in return. The more straightforward the opponent’s style, the sooner Holmes gets inside it and figures it out. Then he settles down to the grind of winning rounds.

  It took Holmes less than one round to parse Butterbean. That done, he ceased retreating and set himself up at medium-long range, jabbing and making small, well-timed changes in the space between the fighters to maintain his advantage in leverage. He began landing punches with the straight-and-true authority of a master carpenter driving nails. His arm-extended defense now revealed itself as a form of command rather than submission. He does not wait for punches to be thrown before he blocks them, preferring to reach into his opponent’s space and smother punches before they take final form. When he had found his defensive rhythm against Butterbean—when he had figured out and entered Butterbean’s rhythm—he stymied developing punches like a parent taking food out of the hands of an enormous baby who is rearing back to throw it.

  Butterbean, by contrast, comes out for a first round as if he could punch a hole in the universe. His size and fierce demeanor can briefly distract a spectator from recognizing that he takes forever to load up leverage for a punch and then bring it around his keg-shaped torso in a wide arc, that he has a rudimentary understanding of footwork and feinting and self-defense, and that he doesn’t know much about how to hit somebody who knows how to defend himself. In the first round he charged Holmes a few times, stamping and throwing outsize blows, a couple of which landed, but not flush. Holmes shook them off.

  By the second round, the two men had tacitly worked out the terms under which they would contest the rest of the bout. The pace was steady, if slow, and there was very little clinching. Holmes stood in the middle of the ring in his characteristic fighting posture, head cocked, frowning intently, like a dog catcher extricating a foaming stray from under a porch. Butterbean tried to get at him, but not with the sustained free-swinging gusto he typically displays in four-rounders. Feeling the pressure of having to go ten rounds for the first time, facing a skilled boxer who would make him pay for his mistakes, he tried to pace himself and grew overcareful. He threw left hooks, but Holmes smothered them or swayed out of their path. Butterbean had trouble getting into position to throw a right, and when he did manage to throw one, it fell short. Holmes, seeing it coming, had already stepped away. While Butterbean was thinking of what to do next, Holmes would step in and jab him a couple of times, perhaps following up with a right. Sometimes, Holmes would throw the right hand all by itself, a crisp shot that jarred Butterbean’s big head back against the roll of flesh that padded his squat neck.

  Butterbean, frustrated, did not land many punches. He hurt Holmes only once, by accident, when the fighters clashed heads near the end of the fifth round. Butterbean’s head, which resembles a marble dome, makes an ideal instrument for butting. When the bell rang to end the round, Holmes, in a daze, mistakenly visited a neutral corner and was headed for Butterbean’s when he finally located his own. It took him most of the minute between rounds to recover, but he came out clearheaded for the sixth.

  By then, both men already knew how the fight would turn out. Butterbean’s left eye, the one closer to Holmes when they were in boxing position, had been reddening and swelling as Holmes pounded it with jabs, and in the middle rounds a cut opened in the eyelid and began to bleed. The blood on Butterbean’s face seemed to be satisfying to both men: Holmes was outboxing a man seventeen years his junior; Butterbean was taking his medicine, going the distance against the odds.

  Murray Sutherland, Butterbean’s cut man, yelled at his fighter to keep his left hand up and punch to the body—to protect the eye and take away Holmes’s legs—but Butterbean, who flinched whenever Holmes feinted a left jab, wouldn’t or couldn’t do what he was told. Expecting Butterbean to suffer a terrible beating, Sutherland had brought along an extra-large supply of cut solution, topical thrombin in a 1/1000 mixture, to control the bleeding. Sutherland, who was a light heavyweight contender in the 1980s and who now supervises Toughman competitions, understood the difference between the combatants.

  Holmes, with a good sweat going and the fight well in hand, made in-the-rhythm whooping noises when he punched—Yoop! Hughgh! La-yoop!—and let his gloves drop down out of defensive position. He was now dismissing Butterbean’s punches with slight head movements and nuances of footwork. This was disheartening for the younger man because it seemed that Holmes no longer needed to bother blocking his punches or even to think about them. Butterbean’s best shots were minor distractions from the more engrossing task of punching Butterbean in the eye.

  Before the tenth and last round, Butterbean’s seconds told him—as they had been telling him all evening—that he had to turn the boxing match into a brawl. “Three minutes,” said one. “You stay right on his case. You’re gonna get hit, but . . .” There was no other way to get inside Holmes’s long arms.

  Butterbean rediscovered his abandon and did what he could to make the fight messy, hoping to create a chance to land a lucky knockout punch. He had no success until, in the round’s waning seconds, he threw a left hook that glanced off the outside of Holmes’s right shoulder. It looked like nothing, a missed blow, but Holmes stumbled backward and sort of sat on the lower strands of the ropes for a moment before getting up. The referee called it a knockdown. Holmes stood, looking disgusted, while the referee counted to eight.

  The final bell sounded a few seconds later. Functionaries and cornermen climbed through the ropes and filled the ring as Holmes grimaced into a ringside camera to indicate his displeasure with the referee. Butterbean went around with his right glove raised high to the crowd until Sutherland corralled him. Sutherland smiled as he tended to Butterbean’s mangled left eye. His boy had gone the distance with Larry Holmes, and the record would show for posterity that he had scored a knockdown. That was something.

  The judges all scored the fight in Holmes’s favor by a wide margin, and most people in the crowd saw it the same way, but there were exceptions. A young couple in ringside seats repeated the usual two-syllable protest in unison, giving it their shouting, red-faced best, as if they were only two among thousands of enraged chanting partisans. A curiously archaic-looking fellow—dark suit, slicked-back hair, pencil mustache—wandered along press row saying, “Holmes won that fight? He just walked around.” Somebody else yelled, “You da man, Butterbean,” but the sentiment hung awkwardly in the air. Butterbean was clearly not the man that night.

  When I called Butterbean three days after the bout, he still didn’t understand exactly what Holmes had done to him. He hesitated and second-guessed himself on the phone just as he had in the ring. “If we done it over,” he said, “I’d go all-out in the middle rounds, just go at him and keep going at him like I used to do.” Then, as if disagreeing with something somebody else had just said, he added, “Yeah, but maybe if I’d gone out in my old way, I’d a got knocked out.”

  He was certain, though, that fighting Holmes had been a mistake. “I took the wrong guy for my first ten-round fight. He’s too slick.” But
terbean wanted to fight another real boxer, but he wanted to fight one who wasn’t so slick, a brawler who would consent to stand directly in front of him and trade punches.

  Why had Butterbean made the unwise leap directly from four rounds to ten, and against a great technical boxer? Because, he said, he had been in a hurry to prove that he was a real heavyweight. “I wanted to prove the critics wrong. I wanna be taken serious. There’s always that little bit in me that says, ‘I’ll show you.’ That’s the move I’m making now. It’s the path that’ll quiet a lot of the people who say I’m not a real boxer.”

  I asked if perhaps the most insistent voice Butterbean was trying to silence was in his own head. “Yeah,” he conceded, “it might be that I want to prove it to myself. It may not be nothin’ to prove but to myself.” There was a pause in which I could hear him breathing into his phone, then his marketing instincts returned to him in the way that a fighter’s senses return to him after a hard shot scatters them. “Hey, when I write my book, it’ll make a good chapter.”