The Boxer's Heart

200 Pages·2012·1.15 MB·English

by  Sekules

Copyright
This edition published in paperback in the United States in 2012 by Overlook Duckworth, Peter Mayer
Publishers, Inc.
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Previously published in 2000 by Villiard Books and in 2002 by Seal Press Copyright © 2000 by Kate
Sekules Afterword copyright © 2012 by Kate Sekules All rights reserved. No part of this publication may
be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy,
recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without
permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in
connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.
ISBN 978-1-46830-178-6
F S
OR COTT
All life lies in the movement resulting
from the clash between the two polar forces,
love and conflict.
—Empedocles
CONTENTS
Copyright
Prefight
1. How Did I Get Here?
2. From A to B (Aerobics to Boxing)
3. Here We Are Now
4. Let Her Come Forward
5. The Punch That Counts
6. I Spar How You Spar
7. I Am a Contender
8. Fight Time
9. Big Belts
10. My Heart
Postfight
Afterword
About the Author
Bareknuckle
The Book of Martial Power
The Overlook Martial Arts Handbook
The Way of the Warrior
A Woman’s Guide to Martial Arts
Among Warriors
PREFIGHT
HELLO my name is: BOXER/HANDLER. That is what my chest reads
tonight, the night before Valentine’s Day 1997. I am not feeling romantic,
because in about four hours’ time I’m going to become a professional fighter, the
first woman—well, one of a pair—to step through the ropes at Philadelphia’s
Blue Horizon. Tonight’s card is titled the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. I hope
I’m the side with the guns, but I have no idea what arsenal I might be holding,
since I’ve never done this before. This is not only my professional boxing debut,
this is going to be my first fight. Ever. As they slap the decal on my coat, I’m
having serious and pointless second thoughts. Perhaps I was a little too blithe.
Perhaps it wasn’t so clever to sign that contract, the one from which one phrase
echoes in my brain: “I understand and appreciate,” it goes, “that participation
carries a risk to me of serious injury including permanent paralysis or death….”
Perhaps my opponent is better than I’ve been led to believe. She does, after
all, look like a tree. Perhaps I have done something quite stupid in agreeing to
fight a six-foot-three Division A basket-ball player with a six-win, three-
knockout record. One who weighs twenty-five pounds more than I, is thirteen
years younger, and whose reach extends eight inches farther than mine. Oh—and
whose manager is the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre promoter.
Such thoughts are crowding in, but I refuse to dwell on them. I can’t afford
to. Instead, I take refuge in a brand of gallows humor that, fortunately, is coming
naturally, with an assist from the surroundings. The Blue Horizon is the oldest
prizefighting venue in the land, as its full name—the Legendary Blue Horizon—
suggests. Those serious Philadelphia fight fans are legendary, too: they love their
boxing, and the bloodier the better. The Blue’s part of North Philly is never
going to be gentrified, I think. Maybe it’s my circumstances, but all I notice on
the drive from the Best Western (by cab, no limo for my corner) is barbed wire,
broken glass, and ripped pavement, all bathed in jaundiced streetlight.
I have two handlers—my trainer and my corner. They know me pretty well,
the Boxer Me at least, but I wonder if they know exactly how hard I’m leaning
on them, experts in prefight choreography though they be. My trainer must
know, since I’ve spent the last ten hours peppering him with questions: Am I
ready? Can I handle this? What if I’m not mean enough? How do you know I’ll
know what to do? What if she’s better than we think? What if I get really hurt?
What if I forget everything/freeze up/cry? Only the other week, there was a
dreadful little news item where a well-known heavyweight collapsed in tears on
the canvas, and this guy was a veteran with a record as long as his reach. I’d
have assumed these crazy nerves get blunted over time, but maybe the opposite
is true, since every fight shortens the odds of your receiving the punch that
counts. Everything that’s happening is novel but also familiar, as if my
immersion in gym life had prepared me for a night like this one, in which I am
an essential player, but in a minor role. I watched Rocky for the first time this
week (so that’s why everybody’s telling me to run up the Art Museum steps),
and the temptation to identify with the boxing cliché of our time is strong; yet
I’m resisting.
My dressing room is suitably vile. I’ve even had to bring my own makeup
and costume guys because the directors provided only a very basic trailer
without staff. It is up two flights of creaking mildewed stairs, a roughly
partitioned doorless closet furnished with a wooden table. An embarrassed
scuffle follows our arrival, as a filthy sheet is procured and secured to protect my
modesty, at the orders of the local boxing commissioner, who needs visual
evidence that I really am female.
It is four hours until the first fight, and I learn that my bout is scheduled fourth
out of nine, a prime place on the undercard, billed thus on account of my
opponent, Raging Belle, who has a large dressing room with lackeys and
bouquets. Her manager, the promoter, whom my trainer calls the “Big-Nose
Guy,” keeps doing the rounds of the dressing rooms, spending long minutes in
hers, bouncing along the row of contenders, finally poking his nose behind my
sheet wearing a terribly worried expression and asking if I’m okay. Of course
I’m bloody okay. Shouldn’t I be okay? Does he think I’m going to back out
now? He should save his concern for his skyscraper girl, Raging. Illogically,
Raging wants to become a model after she’s finished with pugilism, and the Big-
Nose Guy is not above exploiting her pretty face for his purposes, billing her as
“the cover girl of women’s boxing,” and attempting to preserve her pulchritude
by permitting her to fight in headgear. When I signed the contract, he and his
sidekick shared a joke: since her face is his fortune, they decided, they’d be sure
to stop the fight at the first sign of her blood. I digested that grim information,
both sides of it—evidently, my face can bleed and bruise all it likes; but all I
need do for the TKO (technical knockout) is smash up the Raging Belle’s nose.
Curiously, the shabby treatment feels good tonight. I am comfortable assuming
the underdog position, or as comfortable as I can be with a helter-skelter of
raging butterflies trapped inside me.
The past two weeks have been the least comfortable of my life. I had no
precedent for the scale of those nerves, nerves with teeth and claws that never
left me alone except to sleep the sleep of the brave—a phrase I suppose I
understand now—and to train. The effects of my gym work have alternated
between soothing my anxiety and pouring gas on the fires of my fears,
depending on whether I had a good day, with everything coming together and
my bravado high, or a bad day of imposter syndrome. One of the latter
accounted for my busted nose and the pair of black eyes I’m still sporting at the
Blue, a little faded, but noticeable. When the fight physician examined me this
morning at the weigh-in, he paused over those.
“Hmmm. Is this discoloration normal for you?” he asked.
“Yes.” I lied. Luckily, Pennsylvania is notorious for its perfunctory medicals.
More disturbing to me than my dodgy nose was how a big part of my heart
leaped when I had that fleeting shot at disqualification.
The physician now appears again for the prefight routine, with its special new
component: I have to prove I am not going to be a mother any time soon.
Tonight’s good doctor is dapper, in a long black Nehru-collared jacket that
makes him look half downtown hip, half undertaker, so, needless to say, we dub
him Dr. Death. It makes a surreal picture, Dr. Death and me poring over a pink
plastic stick I just peed on, as men at their testosterone zeniths mill about,
snorting air humid with warm-up sweat. Raging Belle and I are not pregnant.
The day has consisted mostly of what I would normally call wasted time. I spent
it in my room, failing to nap, watching The Hudsucker Proxy on HBO, getting
one of my trainer’s famous rubdowns with the green embrocation he concocts
from Ben-Gay, eucalyptus oil, and rubbing alcohol, and reciting my litany of
questions. After the lurid tension of the week, this day has been the eye of the
storm. I woke up and wrote in my journal: “Today I can’t be bothered to be
nervous. If I don’t know it now, it’s too late…. Like cramming for exams.”
Consequently, the weigh-in was fun. In a downtown high-rise, next to the
Office of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services, the Athletic
Commission was crawling with officials, trainers, managers, and their half-
dressed charges, most of them getting their first look at the guy who’d soon be
inches away, trying to bury his glove in their face. The loudest things in there
were the jackets—SMOKIN’ JOE, PRINCE CHARLES WORLD CHAMP, Tommy Hilfiger
—until the Big-Nose Guy arrived, escorting Raging Belle, and a muffled
commotion ensued as she was installed in a private room to insulate her from the
effects of her outfit, a ridiculous short lime-green tank dress and high heels. As
far as I could see, the attention Raging reaped was more resentful than
lascivious. None of the other St. Valentine’s Day Massacre fighters has an HBO
crew on their tail like she does, or a private waiting room, or a paycheck from
the promoter, or a generous purse balanced on a minuscule record. They have
paid their dues. The stupid girl! Haughty poseuse—acting like a starlet, giving
women a bad name! I wanted to beat her up.
The weigh-in business done, lunch at a backstreet diner with the two other
fighters from my gym and all our corners was a simple fueling pit stop, but for
me the tang of solidarity was pungent. Eating chicken in my leather coat, I felt
special, marked out for something. Then came the afternoon, the loose time
folding itself away, carrying in the fight, incipient panic. An hour before we left,
the phone started to ring. Would I mind the HBO cameras in my dressing room?
They need “B-roll.” Could I be interviewed by the local news channel before the
fight? When? Just before? I don’t know. I don’t know how I’ll be feeling. Oh,
okay, but be gentle with me.
Channel 6 has set up its camera in the arena, so three hours before fight time
we are paraded ringside, where I get a preview of the battleground. The Blue is a
gorgeous cliché. It looks just like the oldest fight venue in America should, like a
bombed-out church, with the ring where the altar used to be, pews of folding
metal chairs, and a peanut-gallery choir.
“There isn’t another sports arena in the country remotely like the Blue
Horizon,” wrote Bill Barich in a Sports Illustrated paean to the place. “It’s the