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Book Review – War & Peace, by Ricky Hatton

24 Thursday Apr 2014

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A commissar in one of post-revolutionary Russia’s regions once proudly told a visiting dignitary that, thanks to the glorious victory of communism, the area now boasted over 200 published writers, whereas previously there had been only one.   Oh really, responded the dignitary: and who was the lone pre-communist exception? The commissar gave an embarrassed shrug and said “Well, .  .  .  Tolstoy”.

There was only one Leo Tolstoy, but, thanks to the putatively similarly unique Ricky Hatton, there is now a second War and Peace.  On reading Tolstoy’s original, Flaubert famously exclaimed “What an artist, and what a psychologist!”.  Readers of the present work are unlikely to echo these sentiments.

First, the “artistry”.  Ricky Hatton’s immense popularity rested on two things.  Firstly, he was tremendously exciting to watch: an all-action, face-first, hyper-aggressive fighter with a tough chin, willing to take on the very best, who was notorious for knocking opponents out with spectacular bodyshots.  His 2005 home-town victory over Kosta Tszyu remains one of the greatest achievements, and one of the greatest nights, in UK boxing history.  It is hardly a criticism (though, as we shall see, Hatton himself does not agree) that when he came up against the absolute elite, in the shape of Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao, he was comprehensively pancaked.  It certainly did not impair his public appeal: when Hatton announced his ill-fated comeback fight, three and a half years after being knocked out by Pacquiao, 19,000 tickets were sold within hours, even though no opponent had been named.  Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, his fans could see that he was, indisputably, one of them.  War and Peace attests to this repeatedly in its content – so, here’s Ricky, holidaying in Marbella, Tenerife and on cruise ships; here’s Ricky, playing practical jokes on his mates from the gym; here’s Ricky, ignoring invitations to fancy showbiz events in favour of a night playing darts and downing endless pints in his local; here’s Ricky, enthusing wildly about the ghastly Las Vegas.  But more obviously and more often, indeed in almost every sentence, it is embodied in the book’s style.  Hatton is clearly determined to underscore his status as the People’s Champion, and ghostwriter Tris Dixon, editor of Boxing News, is equally clearly under strict instructions to stick, as far as possible, to Hatton’s uneducated Mancunian vernacular.  So, Hatton’s brother Matthew is described as having “a right mouth on him”; Hatton himself does not wish to be seen as a “head-up-my-own-arse big-time Charlie”.  This is unfortunate, for a number of reasons.

An author who is stuck with an inarticulate narrator faces a formidable challenge in remaining linguistically inventive enough to retain the reader’s interest.  Irvine Welsh managed it in Trainspotting, as did Martin Amis, triumphantly, in Money.  Dixon addresses, and comprehensively fails, this test, with a combination of Olympian swearing and endless clichés.  A big fight is “an acid test”; an upset Hatton has “lost the plot”; at the announcement of his comeback he is “bursting with pride”; and so on, and so on.  However, like most writers who lean heavily on dead metaphors, Dixon sometimes doesn’t even get these right: Hatton describes being “put through the ringer” in training.  Martin Amis this is not.

One consequence is that whenever the register does rise above the plebeian, even if only as far as the mildly polysyllabic, the effect is as jarring as – at the risk of delivering another cliché – a left hook to the floating rib.  Hatton claims, wholly implausibly, to have addressed the following post-fight encouragement to an early victim: “I don’t want to sound patronizing .  .  .  but I was quite shocked you’d only had eight fights .  .  .  Don’t be disheartened.” Patronizing? Quite shocked? Disheartened? Is this the same person who supposedly wrote the sentence “When you get cut in the first round of a twelve-round title fight you think ‘Fucking hell’”?

Worse still, this man-of-the-people style too often simply becomes a licence to write badly.  Whatever the restrictions placed on an author, there is simply no excuse for sentences as lazy as this: “Then, in the ninth round, I suppose I got that frustrated that I had not been able to nail him flush that I took a run-up as if to say ‘Fuck it’ and I flew at him with a left hook, and it was probably the hardest punch I ever threw.  It’s a wonder he’s still not there now”.  This being Ricky Hatton’s own version of his own story, rather than a guess at what someone else might have been thinking, there is no warrant for the use here of the qualifier ‘I suppose’; the self-conscious use of the colloquial ‘that’ instead of ‘so’ (i.e., ‘so frustrated that .  .  .’) is clumsy and ugly in written English; if you are pretending to be transcribing written speech, ‘had not’ (rather than ‘hadn’t’) is completely out of place; and there is no way of construing ‘it’s a wonder he’s still not there now’ to mean what it is supposed to mean (viz., presumably, ‘it’s a wonder he’s not still there now’, strangled as that formulation would have been).   The same sort of wearying analysis could be applied to many similar sentences.

The indolence is not restricted to syntax.  A young Hatton describes himself watching Manchester City’s lavishly talented Georgi Kinkladze and thinking “how great it would be to be a sportsman that excites people”.  Then, later – mirabile dictu! – “whenever I put an opponent up against the ropes, I could hear the crowd take a sharp intake of breath .  .  .  it’s .  .  .  how it was at Maine Road all those years ago when I was on the terraces and Georgi Kinkladze picked up the ball”.  So cheap is this device that the reader almost fails to register the ugliness of “take a sharp intake of breath”.  Almost.

Some may think it unfair to expect a punch-drunk recovering alcoholic and substance-abuser to maintain tolerable standards of literacy.  I disagree.  Firstly, that’s what ghostwriters (and editors) are for.  Secondly, it wasn’t beyond, say, Jake La Motta & Rubin Carter.  And finally, where the offences against grammar and style are as egregious as this, a book becomes almost unreadable.

This is a shame, because there are some good things in War and Peace.  The account of rising through the UK’s amateur and then professional worlds, facing opponents from juniors, to journeymen, to “crossroads” fighters, to the absolute elite, is entertaining and informative.  And the book really comes alive whenever Hatton is in the ring: the depictions of the fights are often exciting, and usually reasonably objective.  Hatton is good on explaining how a top-level fighter approaches a particular opponent, developing a strategy and, where necessary, improvising improvements in the ring.  Even when he fights poorly (by his own estimation) Hatton rarely fails to tell us something worth hearing about the experience and its aftermath and effects (in one memorable scene Hatton goes for treatment on facial scar tissue that repeatedly opens during fights: on investigation, it turns out that the Vaseline applied to the original wound is still there under the skin).  And of course, few fighters have been in the ring with both Mayweather and Pacquiao, the two outstanding stars of the present generation, making the insights Hatton provides into their styles truly compelling.

So much for the artistry.  What of the psychology?

It was Leon Festinger who first coined the term “cognitive dissonance” for the mental distress experienced by an individual who holds contradictory beliefs, ideas or values.  On the basis of War and Peace it is clear that Hatton’s capacity for cognitive dissonance is as impressive as his appetite for ale and pies.

Some examples are relatively harmless.  It is a common peculiarity of people who come from the North West of England that they can, like Hatton, casually mention that they grew up 200 yards from the house where the Moors Murders were committed, went to school with the son of Harold Shipman (the UK’s worst mass murderer), then immediately aver, without the barest hint of irony, that “[s]ome of the nicest people in the world come from the area but sadly it’s not known for that”.    Also not uncommon among British working class young men is Hatton’s account of his career in football.   Taken on as a junior by his beloved Manchester City, then dropped because he spent too much time at the boxing gym and not enough at the training ground, he writes “it always makes you wonder, could I have done it?”, but immediately answers his own question: “there were some players in my class who stood out a mile .  .  .  and I wasn’t one of them”.

Other examples of this phenomenon are less amusing.  Hatton was notorious for gaining a great deal of weight, sometimes as much as ninety pounds, between fights (so much so that he claims his doctor warned him about heart attack risk[1]), then enduring impossibly hard training camps in order to get it all off.  Hatton says he would never let a fighter he was training get away with this, and also that if he could change one thing about his career it would be his behaviour between fights, even blaming it for his defeat against Senchenko.  However, he bizarrely also says that he was “quite proud of being called Ricky Fatton”, even claiming it as a sort of strength: “to do what I did and get my body from where it was to what it became on fight night, I think that showed the ultimate dedication”.

Perhaps this is not that unusual.  Many fighters are prone to self-delusion of one kind or another: after all, how many convince themselves that they have a chance against a palpably superior opponent, or that they still have it when they are clearly shot? And how many would agree with Hatton when he says of his son that “if I had a choice, I would rather he didn’t box, but .  .  .  it’s the best sport in the world”?

Less commonly, indeed perhaps uniquely among fighters, Hatton seems unable straightforwardly to report his own achievements, or attempt a positive evaluation of his abilities: instead, even after all these years, and all his successes, he endlessly reports what others (“people”, “observers”, or “writers”) say or said about him.  It is as if he can’t believe anything, even about himself, unless someone else says it.  “As a schoolboy, people were saying ‘There’s this kid from Manchester who can’t half body punch’ .  .  .  more people had started talking about me: I wasn’t just steamrolling people, I was doing it in a certain manner, and with moves that were impressing observers .  .  .  one writer even said I was ‘showing the footwork of a young Roberto Durán’ .  .  .  I could get nasty if I had to.  The guys at Sky Sports would say they could see it in the changing rooms before my fights”.  He records apparently every instance where someone of note mentions him as a prospect, from George Foreman to “Scotland’s former world lightweight champion and Sky Sports commentator Jim Watt”.  And it is not enough for him to complain that Joe Cortez didn’t give him a chance to fight Mayweather on the inside: he has to add that “Oscar de la Hoya .  .  .  and Bernard Hopkins at ringside were incensed”.

Where he does not have an authoritative third party opinion on himself, he instead offers an excess of justificatory evidence.  So, on turning professional, he can’t simply say “I was good enough to go straight to the major promoters”: instead, we get “[a]s a ticket-seller who had boxed for England, won about seventy of seventy-five fights, had won the ABAs and was turning professional as the number one in my weight class in the country, I had earned an audience with the country’s biggest promoters”, even though he has just spent the whole of the book thus far telling us precisely this story.

Why does Hatton do this? Firstly, there is his acute self-consciousness, which manifests itself in a chronic fear of being seen to be big-headed or arrogant.  He just cannot bring himself to say “I was good”: rather, it has to be “look – these people think I am good”.  It is, I suspect, the same self-consciousness which is at the root of his obsession with his “critics”, who for example, “had been asking ‘Well, he’s all right, but has he got any boxing ability?’ I’d ticked those boxes against Tackie, now demonstrating I could fight and win with bad cuts .  .  .  and that I was not just a body puncher .  .  .  I not only proved I could stand there and have it out with him, punch with him, but at times that I could outbox him, jab and move and display my boxing ability”.  Does Hatton really believe that he proved all this in a single fight, but had never adequately done so in the thirty-three professional wins he had before meeting Ben Tackie, or in becoming “the number one in my weight class in the country” as an amateur?

Secondly, Hatton obviously doubts that readers will trust his judgment without independent verification (after all, he doesn’t appear to trust them to know who Jim Watt is).  But as the book goes on it becomes ever clearer that Hatton also has no faith in his own judgment.  His obsession with “critics”, and in particular with repeatedly proving them wrong, betokens a broader lack of self-confidence, which is only ever temporarily ameliorated , but apparently never eroded, by positive assessments from third parties of his achievements in the ring.  Even after handily beating Tszyu, widely regarded at the time as one of the best fighters in the world, he imagines his critics saying “‘Oh, he’s beaten Tszyu? That was a fluke.’ ‘He’s a one-hit wonder.’” Revealingly, he goes on to add that, as a result, for his next fight, “[t]here was no lack of motivation”.  Similarly, on visiting the Kronk gym in Detroit he says “I think some of the fighters there were quietly taking the piss out of me.  Then Billy and I got in the ring on the bodybelt .  .  .  afterwards all of the other fighters came up to me, asking me my name and what my record was.  It had gone from ‘Who’s this little, pale-faced white kid grunting like an idiot?’ to all of a sudden thinking ‘Fucking hell.  That’s not bad, is it?’  That was quite pleasing.”

In other words, Ricky Hatton’s psychology comprises the following elements: a lack of self-awareness so complete that he is able to answer his own questions without realizing it; a self-consciousness so crippling as to make him incapable of expressing a positive opinion about himself without adducing extensive corroborating evidence; a resultant complete lack of self-confidence; and, therefore, an obsession with the views of other people so profound that eliciting positive opinions and disproving negative ones are his principal sources of, on the one hand, self-esteem, and on the other, motivation.

Any sportsman with this outlandishly fragile psychological profile is likely to react badly to defeat.  But the issues are multiplied a thousandfold in boxing, where public outings are relatively rare, where undefeated records are so highly prized, and where the physical as well as moral consequences of a single defeat can be career-ending.

It is against this background that Hatton entered the ring to face Floyd Mayweather, where he lost every round before being dispatched head-first into a cornerpost by a perfectly-timed check hook.  The psychological consequences of that defeat become particularly murky, not to say Freudian, when Hatton subsequently decides to abandon long-time trainer and supposed “best mate” Billy Graham in favour of none other than Floyd Mayweather Sr.  Hatton explains this decision by reference to Graham’s declining physical ability, citing in particular his inability to work the pads without painkilling injections to his hands.  Given everything that has come before, it is no surprise when it becomes clear that the idea of dumping Graham was put into Hatton’s mind by “some members of the team”.  Hatton himself seems characteristically confused about his own motivations for going with Mayweather, Sr.  in particular: “There was no rhyme or reason behind my going with Floyd; I wanted to add a few new facets to my game.” So, there was no reason; but here’s the reason.

At any rate, subsequent less-than-entirely-convincing victories over Juan Lazcano and Paulie Malignaggi achieved little beyond qualifying Hatton and his psyche for an even more spectacular two-round battering at the hands of Manny Pacquiao (following which he is, in turn, abandoned by Mayweather, Sr.).

What follows is a journey (documented extensively on the pages of the UK’s tabloids) into alcoholism, substance abuse, depression, and (allegedly[2]) infidelity that is deeply unsavoury even by the low standards set by other boxers.  Worse still, despite his repeated protestations to the contrary, it is not clear that Hatton is or ever could be equipped to deal with his demons.  Finding himself in the Priory, he refuses to accept that he is an alcoholic, insisting rather that he drinks so much because he is depressed.  This is obviously nonsense, not only for the implication that other alcoholics are any more cheerful, but because, by his own account, he remained depressed after leaving even though he (and, presumably, the Priory staff) managed to bring his drinking under control.

The true basis of Hatton’s malaise surely lie in his own longstanding emotional weaknesses, which, as detailed above, are visible on every page of War and Peace.  Having based his entire self-image on remaining undefeated in the ring, in order to silence the “critics” and thus cope with his own low self-esteem, he was utterly destroyed by his comprehensive losses to Mayweather and Pacquiao.  This is clearly what is behind his complaints that no one at the Priory understood him because none of them “had been embarrassed in front of millions like I had”, and his melodramatic claim that “[m]y sense of invincibility had now gone, having been an unstoppable force for so long, and I was forced to think about how I had let a nation down”.

Hatton claims that alternative therapies (from Tony Adams’ “Sporting Chance” clinic) have helped him: if so, they have done nothing to address his utter lack of self-knowledge.   This much is clear from two topics addressed at the end of this long book.   Firstly, in his lengthy discussion of his embarrassing falling-out with his parents and other relatives (mainly due to unspecified money problems) Hatton never considers the difficulties his family may have had dealing with a drunken, suicidal, substance-abusing, grossly overweight son.   And secondly, in his ponderings on the possible impact his career in boxing may have on his future health, it never occurs to him to wonder whether his current and historic emotional problems may have been caused, or at least aggravated, by the fact that he has spent so much of his life being punched in the head.

In these latter stages of the book there is a strong echo of the ending of Mike Tyson’s Undisputed Truth, in which Tyson waxes lyrical about the new sober life he has found through therapy and the love of a good woman – then admits, in a self-pitying epilogue added at the last minute, that nothing could be further from the truth.   So far Tyson seems to have found a way to stay alive and achieve some sort of peace, mainly by distancing himself from the man he used to be.   The reader of this sometimes unreadable, sometimes compelling, multiply flawed autobiography cannot help but fear that Ricky Hatton will lack the emotional strength to achieve even this uneasy settlement with himself and his past.

 

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/sport/2012/nov/23/ricky-hatton-vyacheslav-senchenko

[2] Hatton admits to all the listed failings except this one, though he has apparently taken no legal action against his accuser, Emma Bowe.  http://www.mirror.co.uk/3am/celebrity-news/ricky-hatton-had-11-month-affair-with-me-251286

Book Review – Sound and Fury, by Dave Kindred

10 Thursday Apr 2014

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Boxing, perhaps more than any other, is a sport of double acts.  The status of Mike Tyson will always be questioned for the simple reason that when he was at his peak, there was no one around who could live with him, and he only fought truly great opponents when he was obviously past it.  Roy Jones, Jr. was perhaps the most lavishly talented and entertaining fighter of all time, but his career is widely regarded as unsatisfactory because he spent so much of it fighting people he could easily beat.  Joe Calzaghe and Rocky Marciano left the stage unbeaten, but left the public cold: likewise, among today’s active fighters, the Klitschkos and Floyd Mayweather.  It is, in short, not enough for a fighter to have immense talent, to put together a long string of wins, to dominate a division for years on end, to retire undefeated, or even to appear unbeatable: in boxing, greatness can only be measured against greatness.  This is why none of these boxers will reach the fabled status of Marvin Hagler, Sugar Ray Leonard, Roberto Durán or Thomas Hearns: or, for that matter, Erik Morales and Marco Antonio Barrera, or even Antonio Gatti and Mickey Ward.

Muhammad Ali featured, along with Sonny Liston, Joe Frazier and George Foreman, in some of the greatest double acts in boxing’s long history.  He and Howard Cosell were a double act of a different kind, but no less significant, and no less well matched.  One tall, young, handsome, athletic, and black, the other short, middle-aged, dumpy, and Jewish, the comic potential was obvious, and rarely underexploited, with Cosell an indispensable part of Ali’s big fights, there to ask the questions before and afterwards, and to absorb Ali’s jokes about his toupee and his love life. But the similarities between them were more important than the differences.  For one thing, besides being immensely talented originals, both were immensely watchable.  No one had ever seen a heavyweight with Ali’s combination of, on the one hand, extraordinary speed and athleticism, and on the other, technical flaws and apparent vulnerability: and no one had heard a broadcaster like Cosell, with his bombastic, aggressive style and his nasal Brooklyn accent.

Together with their huge egos and cartoonish characters, this made them perfect for what Dave Kindred’s remarkable dual biography calls “the hyperbolic demands of television”.  Their forebears had tended to be deferential.  Joe Louis never spoke a word out of turn, and never even smiled after knocking someone out for fear of being accused of getting above his station.  Previously, sports leagues were permitted to approve broadcasters before they went on-air, a practice ended by ABC Sports President Roone Arledge specifically to accommodate Cosell’s unmissable inquisitions.  Raised in Brooklyn and trained as a lawyer, Cosell brought an unprecedented aggression and intellectual rigour to sports broadcasting.  Not seeing himself as in any way inferior to, say, Walter Cronkite, he also brought great seriousness, and a high-minded attitude to journalistic integrity.  But even Cosell’s lack of deference couldn’t compete with Ali’s.  Referring to himself as “the greatest thing that ever lived”, he was the first high-profile black man of the television age to express such pride in himself and his race: he may not have invented the phrase “black is beautiful” but he expressed the sentiment, and embodied its truth, better than anyone.  And it wasn’t only the white establishment to whom he displayed no deference: he essentially invented “smack talk” specifically in order to rile no less a figure than the terrifying Sonny Liston.  So, besides being made for television, they were made for each other.  Cosell liked to stick a microphone in sportsmen’s faces and demand they account for themselves in a way they had never had to before, and Ali liked nothing more than to oblige.

Made for TV, made for each other: but they were also made for their times.  In refusing the draft Ali made perhaps the first high-profile protest against the war in Vietnam.  Uniquely, Cosell was willing to give Ali a platform to express his anti-establishment, anti-white views, and argued consistently for his right to hold them.  Their voices were as new and different in their own way as those of the Beatles and Dylan, and only in the 1960s could they have reached such a massive audience.  Furthermore, only in that extraordinary age could public opinion on an American war have moved so far as to bring it into line with Ali.  Only then, also, against the background of the civil rights movement, could so much of America come to sympathise with a black separatist when, with his case still under appeal, and in direct contravention of the U.S. Constitution, the authorities took away his titles, refused to sanction his fights in the US and then took away his passport so he couldn’t fight abroad either.  Indeed, with the passage of time his stance, which meant public vilification, and cost Ali millions in endorsements as well as three years of his career, came to seem heroic.

Having taken on and beaten the United States, when he returned to the ring he was already more than a sportsman: but following his immediately mythical victories over Foreman and Frazier, with his extraordinary character and unmatched profile now embodied in the Undisputed Heavyweight Champion of the World, Ali made the unique journey from first and greatest sporting iconoclast to ultimate sporting icon.  For this reason, too often he overshadows those whose lives intersected with his own, because you cannot tell their stories without telling his, and his tale is so extraordinary.  For example, it was their brief meetings with Ali that left Joe Frazier so bitter, that made Henry Cooper so beloved in the UK, and that ultimately entirely defined both men.

The signal achievement of Kindred’s book is to give us the human reality of both Cosell and Ali, and the relationship between them, without underestimating the symbolic importance of either man.  This is clearly a function of the unique access Kindred enjoyed.  He literally travelled on the young Ali’s bus as he toured the country from fight to fight, and he was close enough to Cosell to be asked to help write the fourth volume of his memoirs.

Kindred’s intimacy with the lives of both means he can provide some wonderful anecdotes.  According to one, Cosell once stopped a fight in the street by leaping from his limo and delivering a burst of unmistakeable commentary, to the delight of the immediately disarmed pugilists and their audience.  On another occasion, hearing a construction worker criticize the draft-dodging champion, Cosell returned to the site shortly afterwards with an apparently incensed Ali, causing considerable consternation before revealing the gag.

More importantly, however, it allows Kindred to illumine their faults alongside their shared talents, egos, and symbolism.  Kindred paints each one of them as a sort of savant, brilliant at the things they are good at and childishly inept at everything else.  Cosell was effortlessly expert both in front of and behind the camera – notoriously, he could improvise a note-perfect voiceover to any footage and finish it in exactly the number of seconds available, yet he could also script and produce an entire documentary more or less single-handed.  But when his wife died he was helpless in the face of the realities of life, having never so much as paid a bill.  Ali may have shown no deference to the white establishment, but he swallowed every piece of nonsense the Nation of Islam produced, apparently honestly believing that the white race had been created by a big-headed devil called Yacub and that divine spaceships were circling the earth.  The Nation was not afraid to renounce and reject him when it suited them, its head Elijah Muhammad even preaching at times that all sports were wicked; and they appear to have taken even more of Ali’s money than Don King (a figure who, like Bob Arum, who also promoted Ali fights, features surprisingly little in the book).  But Ali never questioned Muhammad’s authority, and even after Muhammad’s death in 1975 his son Herbert continued to mismanage Ali’s affairs until as late as 1988.

This much of Ali’s career has, of course, been well-covered before.  Nonetheless, Kindred has a mastery of detail that manages to make even the most familiar parts seem fresh.  (An example is the story of a triumphant Ali being driven away from the ring in Zaire along roads lined by thousands of locals, holding their children up in the early morning light to see the champion).  He also has no difficulty in showing how charismatic and irresistibly likeable Ali could be.  However, Kindred does not hesitate to bring out themes that are visited less often.  In particular, it is clear that Ali was capable of extraordinary cruelty.  He delayed knockouts of both Floyd Patterson and Ernie Terrell so that he could prolong their punishment for personal slights.  His insulting of Joe Frazier was, if anything, worse – at one time calling him an Uncle Tom, at another deriding him as subhuman in the crudest of racial terms.  His treatment of women was no less callous.  While in Manila for the final Frazier fight, so badly did he treat his second wife, the statuesque Belinda, that during the fight she willed Frazier to inflict on him the same pain to which she had been subjected.  And Ali’s acquiescence in the ostracism and eventual murder of Malcolm X, once his closest supporter, is truly shocking. The strong implication of Kindred’s book is that these forms of behaviour too were another consequence of Ali’s childish self-obsession and limited intelligence, and on the evidence here it is not difficult to agree.  (When someone later impersonated Ali in a series of bizarre telephone calls to prominent politicians and journalists, the hoax was obvious not from the speaker’s voice – by all accounts the similarity was uncanny – but from his ability to discuss issues of public policy in a way the real Ali never even approximated.)

More original still, and more powerful, is Kindred’s treatment of Ali’s life after retirement.  Having lost his money, his fame, his wife, his retinue and his health, Ali could find nothing to fill his days, which he spent sitting alone and quiet, sometimes in the little office he rented, sometimes just in his car.  This being so, and with his naivete and his ego undiminished, he was a ripe target for further exploitation.  He was taken in by at least two convicted swindlers, and was even prevailed upon by the very US government that had tried to destroy him to make a disastrous trip to Africa to attempt to drum up support for a boycott of the 1980 Olympics.

It is some measure of Howard Cosell’s ambition, even hubris, that when he gave up his legal practice to become a sports broadcaster, sports broadcasting didn’t even exist.  It is, equally, some measure of his determination and talent that this didn’t stop him: he simply went ahead and invented it.  Initially lugging a 17-pound tape recorder on his back wherever he went, sometimes using it as a weapon to barge past competitors on his way to securing interviews, Cosell was the perfect man to fulfill Arledge’s vision, which has since become the blueprint for all sports on TV: “Heretofore, television has done a remarkable job of bringing the game to the viewer – now we are going to bring the viewer to the game!”.  Arledge & Cosell took techniques from news, political coverage, travel and adventure series, in order to “add showbusiness to sports”.  They were the first to add colour shots of girls in the crowd smiling, and of coaches cursing: they were also the first to cover the background of sporting events, interviewing players and coaches before and after the event, building up to matches and fights and making the participants familiar to the nation.  Cosell also helped set the standard for matchday coverage, bringing intelligence and scepticism into the booth at Monday Night Football alongside the professional insights of ex-players Frank Gifford and Don Meredith.  Cosell was not cowed by their purported expertise, and the resultant banter, often with an antagonistic edge, took MNF from nowhere – football hadn’t been shown on prime-time US TV in 15 years – to first place in the Nielsen ratings.

But Cosell’s biggest achievement was to treat sports in general, and boxing in particular, with the respect and seriousness it deserved, being the first to examine its cultural, political, economic and sociological foundations.  It is hard to imagine any other sports commentator, before or since, matching his documentary on the achievements of Grambling College (an all-black school that produced numerous NFL stars), his interviews with Jackie Robinson, or his on-the-spot coverage of both the Black Power salute given by Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Mexico games.  At the same time, he knew the limits of his subject: after breaking the news of the assassinations of both Robert Kennedy and John Lennon he simply refused to continue talking about anything so trivial as sports, instead, in each case, improvising a moving eulogy.

As he aged, Cosell increasingly felt those limits, and tried to graduate from sports to a bigger stage.  To support his attempt to become the new Ed Sullivan, Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell, he suggested to John Lennon that the Beatles reform for the show (he was reduced to booking the Bay City Rollers instead, who he pathetically introduced as “the next Beatles”). Despite this apparent hubris, the show was cancelled after just eight weeks, a victim of – in Kindred’s telling – Cosell’s total and uncharacteristic failure of nerve, failing to prevent Jimmy Connors singing, refusing to criticize the unprofessionalism of no-shows (most notoriously Patti LaBelle), and relying on a script, rehearsals and cue cards for the first time in his career.  After that debacle, his further suggestion that he be moved to current affairs (and finally achieve the Cronkite status he always thought he deserved) was never taken seriously.  He gradually faded from the screen, half resigning in exhaustion, and half pushed out following, among other things, performances clearly impaired by alcohol.

Besides setting out his remarkable and unique achievements, Kindred does a brilliant job of bringing out Cosell’s curious blend of arrogance and insecurity, and of bravery and cowardice.  Largely dismissive of the intellectual capacities of ex-players, he was nonetheless afraid of devilish conspiracies between them and network management.  While he was willing to give Ali a platform to speak, and to use the name given to him by the Nation (a courtesy not extended by other boxing journalists for some years after the change, who continued to refer to him as Cassius Clay), he never himself took a position on any of the issues.  When other boxing journalists tried to persuade him to come out in favour of Ali, on the basis that he was the only one with a national audience, he declined, claiming that to do so would potentially be suicidal in the face of such violent, racially-based hostility among the general populace.  While Cosell indeed routinely received hatemail calling him a “nigger-loving Jew bastard”, the strong impression given by Kindred, surely correct, is that Cosell would have seen that the risk in explicitly defending Ali was limited to professional suicide: this was enough, however, for him to rule it out completely.  Only in his final years, freed from network pressures, did he feel entirely free to investigate sports, and especially the business of sports, with a cynical eye.  It is perhaps partly for this reason (though also because towards the end his criticisms became so aggressively personal) that opinions on his legacy are so divided.

Ali’s “legacy”, by comparison, appears settled.  Kindred does an excellent job of tracing the reversal in his fortunes, triggered largely by Ali’s fourth wife Lonnie, boosted notably by Thomas Hauser’s epic biography, and culminating in his sanctification at the Atlanta Olympics.  It is once more to Kindred’s credit, however, that he doesn’t simply go along for the ride, giving plenty of space to alternative views, and expressing a few of his own.  He questions the attempts of those around Ali to make money from his name, though given the way others have done the same thing for the whole of his life, such remarks appear churlish at best.  He even finds space for a typically dissenting quote from Mark Kram, author of the controversial Ghosts of Manila, who paints Ali’s personality in much darker colours both there and here.

But Kindred’s book succeeds where Kram’s fails.  Without playing down his many shortcomings, Kindred refuses to present Ali in such simple and mean-spirited terms.  Rather, he lays out both Ali and Cosell in full, never refusing to offer his own view, never falling for history’s hyperbole, but always leaving room for the reader to draw his own conclusions.  Too often painted in black and white, both men benefit from the many shades of Kindred’s treatment.  It is hard to imagine a biographer of either man could combine sympathy and honesty to greater effect.  And the decision to present both together is triumphantly justified on every page, since each tells us so much about the other: and their stories tells us a lot about America, and about the twentieth century they illuminated in their own ways.

If there is a failing in this book, it is perhaps Kindred’s failure fully to explore Ali’s refusal to leave the limelight (difficult enough for any boxer at any time) was not just down to a need for money and attention.  This is not to whitewash, much less glamorize, the beatings of Ali’s later years: rather, it is to stress that if his resilience and determination also led him to fight on when he should not have, and it certainly did, then Ali himself is not solely to blame.  In 1977 Ferdie Pacheco, Ali’s personal physician, famously wrote to Ali, trainer Angelo Dundee, Herbert Muhammad and Ali’s then-wife Veronica Porsche to report evidence of widespread internal damage, to warn them of the dangers of continuing, and to recommend an end to Ali’s career.  None responded.

This resilience was an essential part of Ali’s nature, and indeed a large part of what made him so great.  He accepted defeat in the ring, particularly his first defeat by Frazier, with remarkable magnanimity.  Elsewhere he was the same.  When asked if he would sue the government for the loss of his prime years, he said no: “They only did what they thought was right at the time. I did what I thought was right. That was all.”  It was this same equanimity and determination in the face of impending or actual disaster that allowed him to beat Foreman, and to come back from defeat to beat Frazier, Norton and Spinks, sealing his legend: indeed, it is just this sort of response to adversity and defeat, and not simple dominance of his weight class, or an undefeated record, that can make a fighter great.

There are questions here with which all of us who love boxing must wrestle.  It is no criticism of this magnificent book that Kindred has no better answers than the rest of us.

 

 

 

 

On Ending One’s Career

26 Wednesday Mar 2014

Posted by in Philosophy

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Last weekend, in Monterrey, Mexico, the little-known[1] Vivian Harris (31-9-2 prefight) fought and beat one Jorge Paez, Jr. (37-4-1).  Several writers have expressed their shock and outrage, not at Harris’s win, but at the fact he was allowed to fight at all.  Harris had previously retired following an ugly series of knockout losses, saying he no longer had the “desire and hunger” to be a fighter, and since his comeback he had been denied a licence to box in the UK[2].

So, Tim Starks, writing at http://queensberry-rules.com, said “Harris should not have a license to box in Mexico or anywhere else”[3].  Dan Rafael of ESPN worked himself into a positive frenzy, declaring that the fight was “everything that is wrong with boxing . . . Harris is damaged goods”[4].  Steve Kim of MaxBoxing declared “Harris [is] a fighter that should be put down. If he were a horse, he’d either be taken to stud or the glue factory”[5].

This being boxing, others have taken a contrary view.  Paul Magno of http://theboxingtribune.com called this “canned outrage” and “blind grandstanding”, quoting with approval Sam Geraci of http://www.fightnews.com, who said he could not understand “how any person with ethics can write something that harms the earning potential of a fighter without having verified information on why a fighter may have been denied a license in one region and granted one in another ”[6].

This is an unedifying debate.  I cannot be the only one who finds something distasteful about suggesting a fighter is fit only for breeding or the glue factory, or describing him as “damaged goods”, especially when the writer professes a sanctimonious concern for the same fighter’s welfare.  Nor can I be alone in detecting a whiff of condescension, or even colonialism, in the bald statement that “in Mexico, where suspensions in the United States or England are usually ignored, the standards are lax”.  Some pretty questionable fights are sanctioned, and licences granted, in other places, the UK and US not excluded.  On the other hand, I am not convinced of the “ethics” of saying a fighter should be allowed to go jurisdiction shopping in the interests of making a buck.  But there are some important, more general issues here that are worth airing.

The boxer who won’t quit when he should, or comes back when he shouldn’t, is a dreadful cliché.  Boxing writers, podcasters, et al, tired of the same old stories, groan and roll their eyes.  Of course he can’t quit: the idiot spent all his money, and he can’t bear to leave the limelight! But there is more to it than this.

From the beginning, a fighter is taught that the decision to stop a fight is for his trainer, or the referee, or the doctor, but not for the fighter himself.  His job is to keep going, to keep punching, to defend himself at all times (and, not coincidentally, there is perhaps no worse insult in all of boxing than that of “quitter”). The quid pro quo is that he trusts his handlers to take the tough decisions and look after his best interests.

This being so, it is asking a lot of a fighter that he alone make the judgement to end his entire career once and for all. However, due to boxing’s usual grotesque conflicts of interest – that is, absolutely everyone else’s interests exactly conflict with those of the fighter – often there is no one for him to turn to for help[7]. A retired fighter isn’t going to make any money for anyone. What’s more, a rich fighter is much likelier to retire: yet another reason, in case they needed one, for unscrupulous handlers to screw boxers out of their earnings and – a point less often noted – to encourage fighters to blow what money they do get their hands on.

There is another respect, less obvious, in which boxers are different.  In most elite sports, and especially team sports, and most especially of all sports that are very physically demanding or where performance is very objectively measured, the absolute demand for positive results and the economic imperatives that accompany such demands generally ensure that players who are past their best are kept well away from the action.  Enthusiasts may wax nostalgic about big names from the past, and sports clubs may like nothing more than to trumpet their history and tradition, but no one, from the fans, to the other players, to the managers, to the team owners, wants to see a has-been step up to take a last-minute penalty, bowl the final over of a one-day international, or (perhaps most relevantly) attempt to block a charging defensive tackle.  But one of the many perverse facts about the economics of boxing is that the opportunities and rewards available to a fighter may increase after his peak.

It takes time and money to get to, or near to, the top in boxing.  Having reached it, a guy may only stay there for a short time. But having made his name, especially if he has won one of boxing’s worthless “titles”[8], he can often make good money by hanging around (or coming back) to fight against, and polish the records of, young prospects.  This is how a 35-year old Marco Antonio Barrera ended up in the ring with the 22-year old Amir Khan, and why a 38-year old Larry Holmes met Mike Tyson when he was 21 and terrifying.  More recently, a badly faded Erik Morales fought & lost to Danny Garcia twice, despite giving away eleven and a half years, and Zab Judah (who once held WBC, WBA and IBF welterweight titles simultaneously) has become a sort of specialist celebrity loser, having now succumbed to Paulie Malignaggi as well as both García and Khan.

But let’s say our fighter does have the strength of will to stop. Let’s say he isn’t tempted to come back. And let’s assume he doesn’t have enough money to “retire” in the good way. What is he going to do with himself? And what is he going to live on?

Many retired sportsmen go on to a career in the sports media. But this requires a certain public profile. The historic decision to shift the most important fights to subscription-only channels or pay-per-view may have meant sustainable boxing revenues for broadcasters & promoters, because it ensures that the core audience ponies up, but it is a disaster for individual fighters trying to make a name for themselves in the wider world. There are people outside boxing’s hardcore support who have heard of the Klitschkos, Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao, but how many have heard of such extraordinary athletes as Sergio Martinez, Tim Bradley, Andre Ward, or Guillermo Rigondeaux, all of whom are regularly listed among the pound-for-pound top ten fighters in the world? What chance do they have of presenting a boxing show on TV, much less getting a gig in the wider sports media?

Of course, there are other qualifications for a job of that kind.  A presentable appearance, a degree of literacy and a civilized manner are three of them. These are not areas in which retired fighters typically excel.  It would be easy, but lazy and wrong, simply to put this down to their backgrounds: plenty of retired sports stars have had high-profile public careers despite humble beginnings.  Rather, in their own short-term financial interest, promoters always permit and often encourage boxers to remain essentially feral, their public appearances often comprising little more than sullen misbehaviour and graphic and obscene threats of violence.  A recent low point came when Adrien Broner and Paulie Malignaggi publicly destroyed the reputation of one of Malignaggis’ female conquests.  It is impossible to imagine a young soccer, baseball or NFL star, carrying the reputation of his club and also of his sport, being allowed to carry on like this with impunity.  In boxers it appears to be the norm.

And this limits boxers’ opportunities in other ways than stopping them getting a gig on Fox Sports.  Many retired sportsmen become coaches: but who wants to be trained (and which parents want their kids to be trained) by someone like that?  Some become “spokesmen”, or travelling salesmen, for companies: but what business is going to want a boxer’s “endorsement” if he doesn’t know how to speak, dress or behave?  For the same reasons, and others besides, what employer is going to hire him?

It isn’t hard to see why we admire fighters: they step into the ring alone, almost naked, armed only with their talent, their conditioning and their determination, and put their lives at risk in the name of glory (and our entertainment).  But if we expect these lone warriors to be superhuman outside the ring, too, I suggest we expect too much.  Fighters, by temperament, training and culture, are ill-suited to determine when to end their careers.  The people around a fighter are incentivized to extend his career as far, and make retirement as unappealing, as possible.  Economic forces encourage him to box on past his prime.  Fighters are encouraged to develop antisocial personas making them ill-suited to life, especially working life, after boxing.  And this is before we consider the difficulty anyone might have in “leaving the limelight” (or just something they were good at) at an early age.

Perhaps, then, when they find it difficult to leave the ring for good, fighters deserve a little more understanding and compassion than they get from the likes of Rafael and Kim. Equally, before we trumpet a fighter’s right to seek out a regulator with low standards so he can make a living, we might like to reflect on why that might be necessary.

[1] This is another way of saying I’d never heard of him.

[2] http://www.boxingscene.com/fighting-words-vivian-harris-danger-success–75950

[3] http://queensberry-rules.com/uncategorized/weekend-afterthoughts-on-vivian-harris-health-face-off-manny-pacquiao-vs-timothy-bradley-ii-more.html

[4] http://espn.go.com/blog/dan-rafael/post/_/id/8068/harris-should-not-be-fighting

[5] http://www.maxboxing.com/news/max-boxing-news/requiem-for-a-repeat

[6] http://theboxingtribune.com/2014/03/vivian-harris-and-the-licensing-lynch-mob/

[7] Of course, this isn’t always true, and as the always-readable Steve Bunce points out (http://www.espn.co.uk/boxing/sport/story/187155.html) managers & promoters often intervene, even against the fighters’ wishes, to protect their charges by suggesting their licence be withdrawn. This does not change the point, which is that fighters are too dependent on the goodwill of people whose economic interests are opposed to their own.

[8] Vivian Harris is a former WBO light welterweight champion.

On Making Weight

15 Saturday Mar 2014

Posted by in Philosophy

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This week I built on my proud history of needling world-famous sports writers by exchanging tweets with Nigel Collins, former editor of The Ring magazine and all-around good guy, who recently wrote a typically scholarly yet entertaining article on the topic of making weight.  This subject has been in the news a lot lately, as there have been several occasions where a fighter, usually but not invariably the “A”-side, has failed to achieve his target weight by the time of weigh-in.  Floyd Mayweather, Saul “Canelo” Alvarez and Julio Cesár Chavez, Jr. have all been guilty of this.  In each case the culpable celebrity fatty has paid his opponent cash from his share of the purse: Floyd, for example, paid $600,000 to Juan Manuel Marquez in return for being allowed to weigh in two pounds over the limit.

Of course, in a fight the odd pound doesn’t matter.  The issue is the impact on the body of making weight in the first place.  Fighters struggle and sweat hard to lose the weight, mainly by dehydration, and the last couple of pounds are inevitably much the hardest.  So if one fighter makes the effort and the other doesn’t the latter will likely recover from the effort much more quickly, giving him a physical advantage.  He will also have got away with it, potentially giving him a psychological advantage.  Theoretically his opponent could refuse to fight and have the whole thing called off: but after months of training, and possibly a lifetime of preparation for a unique opportunity (e.g., to fight Mayweather), at the risk of being called a ducker, and under pressure from all the interested parties (promoters, broadcasters, managers, fighters on the undercard, and so on) who is going to do that?  Big-name fighters like Mayweather and Chavez know this perfectly well, and are clearly taking unfair advantage.

So, bad things happen before the weigh-in.  But equally bad things happen thereafter.  Some fighters add enormous amounts of weight, 15lb or more, in the 24 hours between the weigh-in and the actual fight.  (Some fighters specialize in it: Chavez reputedly comes in at as much as 180lbs for the fight despite fighting in the 160lb middleweight division.)  Size isn’t everything, but this amount, much more than “the odd pound”, potentially can give a fighter a big advantage in the ring.

And some combine the offences.  In a case already discussed on this blog Orlando Salido weighed in for his recent featherweight fight with Vasyl Lomachenko more than two pounds over the contracted 126lbs, then gained an amazing nineteen further pounds by the time of the fight, making him in reality a welterweight, four whole weight classes higher, and meaning that by the time he entered the ring his bodyweight was one-sixth higher than the featherweight “limit” at which he had agreed to fight[1].

This sort of carry-on undermines the whole point of weight limits, which is to ensure that fighters are physically fairly matched, and that the fight is decided by performance rather than poundage.  More importantly, dehydrating then rehydrating the body – the principal means of losing then gaining weight rapidly – is dangerous at the best of times, never mind the day before volunteering to get repeatedly punched in the head.  As with most of the safety aspects of boxing, objective scientific evidence is dismayingly hard to come by, but it seems possible that such drastic weight loss and gain may contribute materially to the risk of brain injury.  Certainly, it is noteworthy that heavyweights, who punch (and so receive punches) hardest, but who do not have to make weight, appear to suffer fewer serious injuries or deaths in the ring than lighter fighters (though anecdotally they do seem to be particularly prone to longer-term issues like Parkinson’s, dementia pugilistica, frontal lobe syndrome and so on).

So what is to be done?  Part of the problem lies in the decision to move the weigh-in to the day before the fight.  This was intended to make things safer,  but as usual with boxing, this doesn’t seem to have been thought through all that carefully.   After all, the longer you have to recover, the more you are going to try to “boil down” to a weight that doesn’t really suit your physique.

Nigel Collins suggests we go back to the old way of doing things, namely, weigh-ins on the day of the fight.  This might stop fighters adding back quite so much weight between weigh-in and fight, but it doesn’t seem to me to address the safety problem: we’ll still have people sweating hard to get the last pounds off.  Here’s the conversation:

Nigel Collins ‏@ESPNFNF  Mar 13

@DabberMatt Less is more. Make weight on the day of the fight. It’s simple and honors the concept of weight classes.

 Matthew Bailey ‏@DabberMatt  Mar 13

@ESPNFNF But the aim is to match fighters by weight, not lead to a dangerous weight-loss & gain contest. Regular weighing is simple & fair.

Nigel Collins ‏@ESPNFNF  Mar 13

@DabberMatt We disagree.

We certainly do, though in the most civil of terms[2].

Enough namedropping: here’s what I think.  With the greatest of respect to Nigel Collins, here less is not more.  To me, the problem lies with the very idea of “the” weigh-in, that is, with only having one.  Instead, for a contracted period before the fight, say four to six weeks, the fighters should be weighed regularly – for big fights, maybe even daily.  Over this period they have to stay within some reasonable margin over the contracted weight for the fight (somewhere around five per cent of bodyweight is probably about right).  Then they are weighed on the day of the fight, when they actually do have to make weight.  This would ensure that the guys fighting at the given weight are, normally, round about that weight – which, to me, “honours the concept of weight classes” much better than a once-and-for-all last-minute check.  It would mean no more massive dehydration and rehydration (and consequent weight loss and gain) before a fight.  And if a fighter is clearly not going to make the weight, he can be warned, sanctioned and even disqualified well in advance, helping to avoid the dilemmas of a possible last-minute cancellation.

Secondly – and I know this will be unpopular – it is clearly time to consider changing the weight classes.  People are generally significantly bigger and heavier now than they were a century and a half ago, when the original classification was introduced.  The average adult male in the UK now weighs about 85kg[3], making him a cruiserweight.  His counterpart from 1870 was 70kg[4], just barely a middleweight (as one might intuitively expect for the average or “middling” man).  And there are precedents: Olympic weightlifting has changed its weight classes numerous times to reflect exactly this phenomenon, with the heaviest class having changed from over 82.5kg between 1920-48 to over 105kg today.

Finally, it seems to me that this is yet another reason to lament boxing’s complete and utter lack of a central governing body with a responsibility for fighter safety.  This isn’t just a technical debate, nor can it satisfactorily be solved with money.  Most importantly, for the fighters, there is a lot more at stake than “honouring a concept”.

[1] Lomachenko gained weight before fighting too, but was still about 12lbs lighter than his opponent on entering the ring.

[2] David Walsh could learn a thing or two from this exchange.

[4] http://www.nber.org/papers/h0108.pdf?new_window=1 – p.35.  Figure given is for males, 36-40.