Boxing Shadows

By Tom Callahan

The bittersweet science

At the base of boxing, there is something so great and so grotesque, so pure and so corrupt, it stirs you and makes you shudder. It is undefinable as a passion and indefensible as a sport. The only way boxing can be discussed is in the context of a caveman's sport, and the only way it can be understood is if you love this sport, God help you.

Beyond all the square rings and vicious circles, beneath every blob of nose and billow of scar tissue, there is a common majesty, a simple valor--so basic, so appealing, so appalling. Probably every game or type of conflict has it, but the others are not stripped to the waist or the bone. "Kill the quarterback" is mostly a figure of speech. Randall ("Tex") Cobb, a plain-speaking heavyweight, says, "If you screw up in tennis, it's 15-love. If you screw up in boxing, it's your ass, darling."

By Ring magazine's count, 439 men have been fatally injured in boxing matches since 1918. South Korean Lightweight Kim Duk Koo is the latest. His body was unhitched from a hospital machine last week and allowed to join his brain in death four days after a left-right combination by Ray ("Boom Boom") Mancini flattened him 19 sec. into the 14th round outside a casino in Las Vegas. In the background of a wirephoto showing Kim lying still, a striking number of the Caesars Palace spectators are balling their own fists. More than 50 years ago, Writer Irvin S. Cobb described the fight fan: "He is a soft-fleshed, hard-faced person who keeps his own pelt safe from the bruises, but whose eyes glisten and whose hackles lift at the prospect of seeing someone else whipped to a souffle."

Mancini wept, prayed and fretted that he might be next, but made sure that no one got the idea he was retiring. Sugar Ray Robinson spoke for all of the survivors in 1947 at the inquest for Jimmy Doyle. Before the knockout, did Robinson know he had Doyle in trouble? "Sir," Robinson answered softly, "getting people in trouble is my business."

"Boxing is a most vicious business," said Mack Lewis, a Baltimore trainer. "Mr. Mack" is one of the least vicious men in boxing. So many fight people are gentle. That's part of the paradox. "It's vicious," he repeated, "but I just happen to be a person who likes boxing. I can't explain it. No, I don't mind talking about Ernie, because I never for a moment forget Ernie anyway."

Kim Duk Koo started to die on television, but Ernie Knox went in a more usual way, before 869 people in a crumbling coliseum in Baltimore. That was about 20 years ago. Recalled Mr. Mack: "I said, 'Ernie, we better go to the hospital.' Water was pouring off him like a spigot. Ernie didn't have a mother or father, just brothers. If Ernie got into trouble, the phone rang here. But it didn't ring much. Ernie was good. He went into a coma at 2:30 in the morning. I stayed with him in the hospital two days, and then he just died."

Most, like Ernie Knox, just die. Cleveland Denny fell in an early preliminary before the first Roberto Duran-Sugar Ray Leonard fight in Montreal two years ago. Most of the ringside seats were empty, and many people who were there did not look up. The men who fight are not the kind people look out for. Nobody really cares.

Only the poorest kids from the toughest circumstances are bold enough to try this way out and naive enough to like their chances. Most fighters are strangely vulnerable. So wishful and sincere, they are eternally easy marks for the users, the chiselers, Frankie Carbo, Blinky Palermo and all their current counterparts. Yet many people regard boxing's corruption as its charm and find the scoundrels colorful and delightful. Nobody really worries.

When Kim or Benny ("Kid") Paret or somebody else noticeable dies, there is always a momentary call for stricter regulations, fewer rounds, lighter gloves. And headgear, though one of the six boxers killed this year was wearing one. Naturally, some people also talk of abolishing boxing. But when boxing was illegal, men fought in back rooms and on barges. Men fight. Some put courage with skill and make art, not that boxing is justified even as art (though Muhammad Ali in his prime surely made it seem so). Boxing will exist as long as what it reflects in men exists. Maybe the only thing to do is try to control it better--and try not to like it so much. --By Tom Callahan

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