5 punches Jab, right cross, hook, uppercut, and overhand right, and that’s pretty much it. Those are the five punches in boxing. It seems simple but it is not. How many moves are there in chess? As an amateur I can remember sparring with pros. Because I was strong and awkward and because I had heavy hands as long as they were at five or six fights, pro fights then I was okay, I could hold my own, but what happened is these guys would get too experienced and they would read me way before I made my move. They knew what I was going to do before I did. That’s what experience is about. I would also get outstripped by amateurs. Manny Sobral had 40 fights in one season, to my nine fights. Decker took him everywhere. He was fighting once or twice a week and make no mistake about it, fighting is what you grow from. Sparring is not the same. Plus he was outgrowing me. He got bigger. I started taking a licking in the gym from Manny. I talked about it one night to Jamie and Joe Martin, and Joe was laughing but not in a really mean way. He says, “I started on Jesse, did you start on Jesse?” And there was a kind of pathos about it. That’s what happens when you start late. I was asked to spar with the Junior Olympic Team at the old training center and I was there as a foil to help these kids get ready. I was inexplicably even clumsier than usual. But also these kids were sharp. Getting close to the box offs. I was proud to help. When I went to the Golden Gloves Tournament the guy at the door told me to keep my money. I got in for free for training with those kids and my name was mentioned. Sometimes you would see regular sparring partners and one of them has come off a fight or fights and the other guy would be getting outclassed. We’d tell him, “Don’t worry about it, he’s sharp, he just came off a fight.” I have thought that it would be interesting to do some kind of physiological study, to see if there are biochemical changes that happen with the huge dump of adrenaline that you experience in a fight. Speaking of guys reading me, the trouble is that I never learned how to feint, and feinting isn’t just random movement, you want to create the opening and it takes time to learn to do that; you’re selling the guy a story, a lie. Because that’s what boxing is about at the higher level. It’s about tricking guys. Most fans love a guy like Gatti, who just got a questionable seat in the Hall of Fame—they don’t think and they don’t want to think. Gatti was an exciting face fighter, that’s true. I wonder what his future would have been like had he lived. I read a quote from Archie Moore, and he said that the trouble with Marciano is that Marciano didn’t care about feints, he didn’t care about boxing, he just wanted to hit, that was his game, relentless pressure, and he wore Moore down, walked him down and finally beat him down. I met Moore in 1987 when I was working my first Vegas job at Bally’s. I shook his hand. I don’t collect autographs I just want to shake hands. He was a very nice man, very alert and friendly. He was there with Foreman as his advisor on his comeback. This was early on. George fought in the upstairs ballroom for Top Rank. He fought Rocky Sekorski, scoring a third round knockout. Foreman was awkward and powerful. His punches came from strange angles. Foreman was very shrewd on his comeback, he was very careful about who he fought. I can remember seeing a local kid on one of Manny’s cards, Jeremy; it was his first pro fight. He had a respectable amateur career but he hadn’t had any fights for something like two years. The thing that sticks in my mind is him moving his head when he was out of range and then walking straight in anyway. I mean, that is—that’s not—that ain’t smart. Boxing is about constantly drilling, you have to keep correcting and eliminating bad habits. There is no way I could overemphasize what a difficult discipline it really is. The better you get the better your opposition gets. It never ends. In fact, and this is what Jamie told me, in fact, that it is a way of life. It is a martial art and maybe the oldest. I can remember that I made a promise to the cosmos that if I were allowed to have it, to be a fighter I would pay any price. I said it, in my mind that I was willing, in my mind, I was fired up about it. I wanted badly to get respect and I knew instinctively that people respect the sport. I know, because I did. My heroes were not CEO’s and team players, my heroes were fighters. I did make that promise and I found out that it was harder, harder than that. Harder than what I thought.
Posted on: Sat, 28 Sep 2013 06:14:17 +0000
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