by Mark Dapin
He gave me his card, which said he was a professional boxer and personal trainer, then walked through the crowd shaking hands with his public, asking if they had enjoyed the show.
Back at Joe’s gym, Raff put Brad’s defeat behind him, and returned to his favourite pastime of insulting fighters while they were sparring.
I checked the world ratings and discovered that, at a professional level, I would not be classed as heavyweight. I was something called ‘cruiserweight’, which sounded like a division where a man could cruise along smoothly, occasionally stopping off to toss out a slow, relaxed punch. I threw a few cruiserweight jabs at the speedball. It nodded lazily and swung back into position.
When I started training, D and I were living in Redfern, in a new Meriton apartment building named, with deluded pomposity, ‘Windsor Chambers’. Redfern was in transition from the dump it used to be to the middle-class inner-city suburb it still has not quite become. It was a good time to be in Redfern.
It was safe to walk around at night, up to a point, and in one particular direction. We stayed in a lot, arguing about Marxism, existentialism and my apparent inability to keep anything clean. D wanted us to get married, I wanted to be murdered. Every time Jo rang from the UK, to ask how I was, to try to understand what was happening, I cried for half an hour, which made me feel callous, because I was not crying enough. D was baffled by my tears, which she thought of as a form of insubordination.
The day we moved into the unit, the woman in the corner shop gave D flowers because she was so beautiful. We kept a cat called Captain, talked a lot about writing, and sometimes sat in the spa together, but the waters always bubbled with the same questions. From D, ‘If you love me, why won’t you marry me?’ From me, ‘If you love me, why did you finish with me?’
She said she could not believe in me when I was gone, that she was suffering too much, exhausted by the secrecy, angered that she should have to bear the pain – but that was all over, and now we were together, and I should get divorced and marry her, as I had said I would.
I was divorced within eighteen months of coming back to Australia, but I could not say I would marry D because she had hurt me so much, and I could not forget it, could not forgive it – and she kept on hurting me, forcing me, fighting me. For D, the proof that I wanted her would come when I married her. For me, the proof that she wanted me would come when she accepted me, befriended me, and asked nothing from me.
D was my muse, and she kept me together even as she tore me apart. I had to show her that I was valuable – even when I felt I wasn’t – that I could not be dismissed like a salesman from the doorstep.
My grandad, Jimmy, had died the week I left England in 1988. I had written a short story, recasting him as an Australian former-POW in Burma, living with my senile grandmother in a shabby fibro in Bondi. When I finished it, I cried, as I had never cried for my grandfather. When I showed the story to other people, they cried too. I submitted it to Meanjin, which was then Australia’s most respected literary magazine, and the editor bought it. I sent a copy to British actor Warren Mitchell, who was in Australia doing rep. Mitchell looked like my grandad, and my grandad loved to watch him as Alf Garnett in Til Death Us Do Part. I asked Mitchell if he would take the role of grandfather if I turned the story into a film script. He immediately replied that the story had made him cry – and yes, he would. I started an MA in journalism at the University of Technology Sydney. I took screenwriting as an elective, completed a first draft of the script, and won $10 000 development funding from the Australian Film Finance Corporation to take it a step further.
D and I lived in East Redfern, ten minutes from Eveleigh Street, Australia’s most famous slum. Waiting for a lift outside Redfern railway station three years before, I had been befriended by a big, caramel-coloured railway guard. He warned me to take care, especially around Eveleigh Street. ‘You must go there with a Koori,’ he told me.
I had just come out of England, and had never heard of a Koori. I assumed it must be some kind of attack alarm.
When I lived in Redfern, I saw the guard often. He still had time to be personable, because he never took anybody’s ticket. People who got off at Redfern station – whether black, white or brindle (although I’ve yet to see a brindle person anywhere) – tended not to pay the fare. If the back gates were closed, they climbed the fence, but the back gates were usually open and the booth was never manned. The banner saying ‘no exit’ might as well have read ‘no talking’.
There was always somebody in the Commonwealth Bank trying to draw on pension money they did not have. One afternoon, I watched a pale young man trying to deposit a cheque made out to ‘Richard H Wilkins’ into his account. The cheque was meant for him, he said, but he had changed his name. ‘I’ve kept the same initials,’ he assured the teller.
‘And what is your name now?’ asked the man behind the window.
‘Rhinoceros H Wilkins,’ said the boy. His burning eyes cast a challenge to further debate.
I did not see whether Rhinoceros got his cash, but many customers left the bank disappointed. More money changed hands in the street, in not-very-furtive drugs deals, and in the pawnshop across the road.
There were two theatres close by, the Belvoir Street Theatre, Surry Hills, and the Independent Commission Against Corruption. (Why stop at corruption? Why not ‘Against Lust’ or ‘Against Sloth’?) D took me to a Shakespeare play at the Belvoir Street, I dragged her to watch crooked cops roll over at ICAC. It was fascinating to see the way the New South Wales police service had worked. The Drugs Squad sold drugs, the Armed Robbery Squad performed or sanctioned armed robberies, and the Gaming Squad protected illegal casinos. It was as if they had accepted their job titles as their job descriptions.
In Redfern, I learned that whenever a man calls you ‘brother’, he is after something. (This is even true if the petitioner is your biological brother.) Brothers in the street often pulled me up for cigarettes, more rarely for money, and only once for a bite of my doner kebab. The most concise pitch I ever heard came from a weather-beaten professional. ‘Look, I am black and you’re white,’ he said, without fear of contradiction. ‘Give us forty cents.’
I handed over a fifty-cent piece.
‘Give us a dollar,’ he demanded.
I bought my groceries from the self-styled ‘supermarket’ opposite Windsor Chambers. Behind the till sat Saleem, a Lebanese giant with a single, aristocratic facial expression. Saleem communicated with barely perceptible movements of his eyelids, and for a long time I assumed his only words of English were, ‘Small plastic carrier bag?’
He surprised me with a concerned frown when I came to buy flowers for D. ‘You in trouble?’ he asked.
I smiled and shook my head (although I was) and rushed home to tell D about our communications breakthrough.
A week later, I went in to buy two kilos of potatoes.
‘You in trouble?’ he asked.
Raff’s plan for my meeting with Kostya Tszyu was seductively simple. ‘You can take him out with a good right,’ he told me. ‘Wait until he goes to shake your hand, king-hit him, then throw yourself on the floor. He won’t kick you.’
Tszyu was a Russian fighter who had recently moved to Australia. He had fought 270 amateur bouts for 259 wins, and 11 professional fights without a loss or a draw. He was widely tipped to be next junior-welterweight world champion – and, in fact, he eventually became one of a fistful of undisputed champions of his generation.
Boxers like Tszyu are not often seen in Australia. He is a performing artist, a trick puncher, a canvas dancer. He chooses his marks and he hits them – midriff, ribcage, cheekbone, jawbone – as if he were punching buttons on a console. He punches without taking punches, often without appearing to make any effort to defend himself. He has the power of a heavier man and the speed of a lighter man. Tszyu is an impossibility. In 1993, he was one of the best boxers in the world, and I was one of the worst. Somehow, I got it into my head that I was going to
fight him.
Born in Serov in the Urals, Tszyu is part Siberian, part Korean. At twenty-four years old, he was timeless and unplaceable. He had the body of a schoolboy, the face of a pixie, and the smile of a despot. He wore a pigtail that began at his crown and fell to his shoulders, like a young Genghis Khan. He trained under Johnny Lewis at Newtown PCYC, and inspired a small fan club of adoring young fighters who grew Tszyu-style pigtails and strained to keep pace with his ferocious exercise routine. Tszyu was handsome, charismatic, restrained, polite and clinically tough. Everybody in the gym wanted to be him. Nobody wanted to be me.
All kinds of idiots, has-beens, madmen and losers turn up at boxing gyms hoping to go a few rounds with a real contender, to earn a story they can tell at closing time for the rest of their lives. They quickly get hustled out the door – unless they are in the media.
With great courtesy, Tszyu and Lewis allowed me to interrupt their training, pull on the gloves and move around the canvas with the man who was two fights away from his first successful world title shot. Tszyu leaped into the ring, like he always does, bounding over the top rope. I carefully separated the bottom two ropes and crawled through them.
‘You should be confident if you go to fight,’ he told me. Pointing to his head, he said, ‘You win here. If he’s good fighter, you should respect him, but not scare. Never. My coach teach me never to scare. I remember when I was young, I lose a fight. I cry. My coach say, “You lose today, he lose tomorrow” . . . But I think you know about this,’ he said. ‘I think you know.’
Tszyu did not understand what I wanted from him. His English was fractured and incomplete. At first, he posed for a photograph, and I lunged at him. When he saw I was really trying to hit him, his raised his arms above his head and let me bounce a couple of gloves off his levelled abdominals. After he had amused himself like that for a while, he caught me with one of his hands – I could not actually tell which one it was – and sent me flying across the ring and into the ropes. He winded me with something that might have been an uppercut, or it might have been a train. Either way, I did not see it coming and I felt as if I had been run over. Within ninety seconds, I collapsed, exhausted.
I asked Tszyu how I could improve my style.
He said, ‘You have to learn to punch.’
I stopped for a cigarette in the PCYC car park, and felt a stabbing pain in my side. I checked for bruising, but there was none. The next morning, I still had the pain as I sat on my balcony breakfasting on Winfield Blue. I found I could only take the smoke down to my throat. If I tried to pull it into my lungs, it felt like Tszyu was nailing me again.
I kept nicotine patches in case I had to take long non-smoking flights, or short flights that were hijacked by terrorists. I pressed a patch onto my biceps, drank a cup of tea while my bloodstream recharged, then felt brave enough to go to a doctor.
Like Tszyu, my doctor jabbed me around the body until I yelped with pain. ‘You’ve cracked your second rib,’ he said. ‘I could send you for an X-ray but it would be academic. We can’t do anything about it anyway.’ He told me I could not train for six weeks.
What does he know? I thought. He has never had the smell of leather and blood send his nostrils flaring. He has never felt the thrill of a fist raised in victory over the battered body of a senseless opponent. He was a bit like me, in this respect.
I will go to the boxers’ doctor, I thought. I will consult Dr Lou Lewis, the ringside physician at nearly every fight night in Sydney. Lewis told me I could not train for eight weeks. He gave me some anti-inflammatory tablets, told me to take it easy, and sent me home.
A few days later, I had a couple of drinks (well, eight) and tried to smoke again. It was pointless. It hurt too much even for a dedicated cancer-chaser like me. I had to return to the nightmare world of the non-smoker, where every loud noise sends your heart pounding, every conversation is a conspiracy to betray you, and every woman standing up on the bus is looking at your bald patch.
The only exercise that did not hurt was a short sit-up. I threw myself into sit-ups with a success that startled me. Every night I draped my towel over the bench and performed my one-exercise workout. At first, I could only do 60, but I soon pushed it to 100, then 150, then 300. By the end of the fortnight, I was doing 600 sit-ups each session. After a month, I could do 1240. A distinct pattern developed between my waist and my chest, blowing bubbles under my beer gut. I was growing abs.
My roadwork needed a boost. On the occasional morning when I did get up in time to jog around Redfern Oval, I was about as fleet as the average pallbearer. I figured I might pick up speed and fitness if I ran with a partner. Kon Pappy, Brad’s opponent in his last fight, had told me he was a personal trainer specialising in overweight old ladies. That seemed to be my pace.
On his first visit to Windsor Chambers, Kon brought a briefcase full of instruments like the ones Nazi doctors used to measure Jewish skulls. He pulled at me with his calipers for a while, then pronounced me 23 per cent fat – ‘borderline obese’.
Kon was a great guy to run with as he never stopped talking. He was bursting with dubious stories, instant opinions and boxing gossip. He also taught me a number of wise old Greek sayings – such as, ‘The Spaniard shits in the sea and gets it back as salt’ – which have never yet come in handy. Most of Kon’s stories had Kon as the hero, and a lot of them took place in South-East London, where he played out his amateur boxing career. They were two-fisted tales in the life of an inner-city boxing club dominated by wild West Indians. Kon – small, dark, and thinning on top – usually gave as good as he got.
‘You and me, we’re not so different,’ he told me at the end of one long London memory. I thought that, like him, I came to the boxing game late in life. Like him, I faced tough odds against being accepted. Like him, it would all come together for me once I stepped in the ring.
That was not, in fact, what he had in mind. ‘We’re both going bald,’ he said.
We ran together most mornings, and we sparred and did padwork in the apartment block gym. One morning, Kon arrived with some body armour. ‘This is so you can hit me without it hurting,’ he said.
The armour – basically a big, ribbed pad – protected him from waist to chest. ‘Crouch down and throw an uppercut,’ Kon commanded.
I did, and I hit him in the balls.
Kon took a deep breath, turned away from me, squatted like a kind of garden statue, and did not say anything at all. It was his longest period of silence ever.
Between Kon and Raff, my boxing habit was costing me about $120 per week. On the other hand, I had not bought cigarettes in months, and I dared not drink even one beer on the nights before Kon came, or else I could not get up. With all my extra training, and the fact that my muscles were firming up a bit, I felt pretty confident when Raff put me in the ring with an English bloke to do some body-boxing.
‘Use your jab, Mark,’ Raff shouted.
Since we were both called Mark, we both did, and our jabs met in the middle.
I waddled around the ring with my guard open as wide as Mark’s oddly fanatical eyes. I planted a few limp-wristed punches, but I was soon out of breath. Was I ever going to get any fitter?
Mark and I got in close, throwing rips in the clinch. Suddenly, zing went the strings of my ribcage, and I was back to square fucking one. This time I had cracked one of my lower ribs. When I had fully recuperated, I celebrated the recovery of my ribs by immediately tearing some ligaments in my hand. I wanted to give up. My original plan had been to spar with several great Australian fighters – Jeff Fenech, Jeff Harding, maybe an old-timer like Lionel Rose – and write a series of columns about their different styles, and how it felt to be hit by them. After Tszyu, I lost my nerve. I knew how it would feel. It would hurt, but not the way I wanted to be hurt. I was cruising for a slam like a medicine ball in my face, flattening my features into anonymity, turning me into somebody else. What I got were body punches like steak knives, administered in great, sawing thr
usts, that only served to remind me who I was.
I bought a brace for my arm, went to the office to see Phil Abraham and asked if I could give up the assignment. He told me I couldn’t. Four columns had already gone to press. I had to continue.
The new pain in my hand meant I could have only limited punching practice, so I looked for a way to improve my elephant-like footwork while the ligaments healed. The answer came in a piece of junk mail: ‘Learn to dance,’ it said. Dance, I thought, like Muhammad Ali in Madison Square Garden.
Dance, thought the dance teacher, like Paul Mercurio in Strictly Ballroom. Anyone who has not been to a dancing class probably thinks a bunch of dorks stumble on polished floors while some screaming queen chants, ‘Slow, slow, quick-quick slow.’ In reality, a bunch of dorks stumble on polished floors while some screaming queen chants, ‘Slow, slow, quick-quick, slow.’
I went with D, who loved to dance. It was one of those inevitably disastrous attempts to cultivate a common interest, and ‘do something together’. Although I could never seem to get my sparring partners against the ropes, I found it very easy to steer my dancing partners into walls. This, like the ability to hold and hit, is not considered an asset on the dance floor. I blushed and tripped and I could not keep time, and I stuttered and I stumbled and I waltzed with the screaming queen, and I hated it more than anything I have done since drama classes at school. It was a horrible, fearsome, humiliating mistake, but at least I knew nobody would recognise me. The whole episode could be a sorry little secret between me, D, and the lady at the door. I was not even going to write about it.
At a break in the class, a friendly, stocky bloke put his face close to mine. ‘Don’t you do that boxing page in Penthouse?’ he asked.
