bipin (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} bipin) wrote,@ 2008-06-09 00:44:00 |
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boxing bits
The stark cold austerity of boxing is, I think, one of the reasons if I find it irresistibly appealing. There are no titanium rackets, no entangled rules of what constitutes fair play, no conferred machoism that comes with loud bikes, shoulder-pads or which cheerleader you're dating. There are no time-outs, no audience gasps, no half-time shows.
Instead, sparring bouts are soaked in eerie silence. Just the staccato of leather meeting body, drowning out the occasional muted groan. Pap pap papp .. silence .. pap pap papp pap.
By design or by chance, the silence plays its bit in the magic - it sets the scene for some surprisingly laconic remarks. As you wade through characters who seemingly have materialized from boxing movies - the hard-as-nails trainer who everyone loves to hate, his blind-in-one-eye dog, the beat-up champion drifting on clouds of his glorious past - your memory is etched with their reticent retorts, distilled pure of platitudes you're so accustomed to in everyday conversation.
*
Achilles
I've always found it difficult to submit to the male authoritarian. In Freudian retrospect, I think it might have to do with my father's absence as a parental figure as I grew up, which in turn failed to create a wedge in my character to accommodate such a role. I grew up with pent-up defiance, spending most of my youth brawling with my brother who was always eight years, and forty kilos larger than I; refusing to pander to the martinet of our school - the legendary Iqbal Ahmed; and taking part in my share of skirmishes in an all boys school.
So it was no surprise that I stepped into the ring with Paul - the guy who used mockery and derision like an awl when training us for the past six weeks - punch-drunk with a need to dominate. After six weeks of passive submission, listening to him emasculate your efforts, you seethe with a primitive need to tower above him, and have him implicitly accept your standing.
(That's him on the right, by the way)
What I've failed to mention however, is that Paul is a Golden Gloves champion. Which can mean only one thing - I'm going to have my ass handed to me.
"Open sparring", he thunders in his thick Irish accent. We aren't going to be pinioned by a drill today. Instead, it's an open fight where everything goes - hooks, jabs, straight-rights, upper-cuts, clinching, biting. Everything. I circle around him, dancing on my toes, looking for my first opening.
"Put you fucking head chin down, maan!", he growls beneath his guard, alluding to the basic defensive posture in boxing. You tuck your head into your chest, making no room for your opponent's investigating fist. He's told me the same thing a thousand times when we trained. I pay no heed - I hate defense. I close in.
I find his right arm just a little short, and throw my first strike: a double jab. He isn't expecting a combination first up - he catches my first jab, but doesn't intercept the second one thrown a fraction of a second later. I get through his defense and graze his face.
"Achilles puts his head down for no man", I stare proudly at his piqued demeanor.
My pride is short-lived - the fight goes downhill steeply from there. Of the tens of punches I throw, I land none, while he breaks my defense at will. Two minutes into the first round, as I hold back, completely spent, he nears in on me, negating any advantage my height offers, and opens an array of body blows. Paul's known for his body blows - his 'shoe-shine' - where he swivels on his hips and repeatedly pummels alternate sides of your body. Today, I've been honored with the royal variety - he really wants to polish me off. I cringe, arch my back, and lower my elbows to parry the rain of blows.
All of which, unfortunately, leave my head completely unguarded.
That's when he really hits me: with a sharp upper-cut - a move where you pretend you're lifting a bucket - you bend your knees every so slightly, push from your thighs and thrust your curled right arm upward with all the force you can muster. And oh, make contact with your opponent's face on its way skyward.
I've never been hit so hard in my life.
I feel like my head's being ripped off my neck - corroborated by the fountain of blood that's spouting out of my nose. I reel back from his clinch, tottering on my heels as I head toward the ropes.
He bares his teeth at me. "Achilles never did bleed, did he?" he seems to say. Then, sadistically, he steps on the drops of blood on the floor, and follows the trail to the ropes.
*
The rest of the fight's a travesty - he constantly toys with me, laughing even - poking my defense and getting to my nose, tapping it as I recoil in pain. The bell sounds, and I prepare to leave the ring.
My face is a mess. As I climb out through the ropes, I look at his overconfident aloofness one last time. One day I'm going to stab him in the heart. One day I'm going to hit him so hard his brains are going to come splattering out of his ears. One day, I'm going to push his nose into his brain.
I'm aware though, that hidden beneath that mask of callous indifference is his uneasy cognizance of one fact: he's past his prime - he can only get worse. And I can only get better.
*
Fear
I clamber out of the ring, to the unexpected smell of cheap alcohol. We've been forced to a rather spartan regiment during the course of our training, so I'm rather surprised that someone would have the gall to come into the gym drunk. I turn around - it's not one of us. It's Carlos.
"You should keep your head down bro'", he notes getting a little too close to me for my comfort. "Uh-uh", I respond, undoing my gloves. He helps loosen my guard.
"You know, that's the problem with you - you don't use a man's greatest gift. I was a champion. I have the gift. I know the gift. Do you want the gift?", he slurs.
We're all used to Carlos. I'm in danger of another two-hour talk of his title-fight from 15 years ago. I'm trying to think up an excuse quickly, but Paul's blows have taken their toll.
"Fear", he announces, as if he were a magician who just produced a white-rabbit.
"Fear?", I ask incredulously.
"Yes, fear! You're endowed with it by Nature - it tells you when to fight, and when to flee. That what makes sure you don't get burnt when you touch fire. That you don't run into a moving bus. Don't stand there taking his punches, like a fuckin' dumb bag. If you can't hit, at least don't stand there and be hit, bro!"
I grin at him, and prepare to leave. As I walk away, it all begins to make sense - Paul's pedantic insistence that we direct blows at our partners' faces while training, his inability to articulate how he managed to stay just out of our reach when we fought him. We were doing a disfavor to our training-partners by being gentle to them. We never did learn an integral part of boxing - in our empathetic measures, we gave up honing each other's instincts, our fear.
Rivers of testosterone in the gym wash away words like 'fear' in their wake. It makes sense then, that only champions know where to find it and tap into its energy.
*
Bad intentions
It's surprising how quickly the novelty and romanticism of bleeding noses turns into a petty annoyance, something that you curse rather than preen about in front of the morning mirror. Boxing's no longer this Palahniuk-ian version of retrogressive machismo, it's no longer how many crunches you can do, or how many flights of stairs you ran up. Because, in the back of my mind, I know that all of that's going to evaporate once I get into the ring for my first fight this Friday. There's going to be no drill, no well-thought out combinations, no textbook defenses. No one's gong to ask you how you lost 12 pounds, or whether you can do fifty pushups right after your run.
It's just going to be two of us trying, quite literally, to inflict pain on each other.
Because, as Cus D'Amato, trainer extraordinaire of people such as Patterson and Tyson instructed - to win you need to "throw every punch with bad intentions".
Ominously, the fight's this Friday. The 13th.
*
Your right arm
Their witticisms aren't restricted to philosophy though, as was evident in my first week. Simon, Paul's partner in crime, was taking class, showing us the basic punches. He pulled me up in front, hoping to use me as a prop to demonstrate how he'd defend each of them. "Extend you right arm parallel to the ground", he instructed.
Now if you've been with me for more than two hours, you'll know that I have a tendency to retardedly get my right and left mixed up. But yeah, it was crucial that at this juncture, that I make it evident to the rest of the class. With the confidence bestowed only upon the idiotic, I extended my left arm.
Simon looked at me for a second, and then, with the nonchalance of a seasoned stand-up, remarked "No, not this one. Your other right arm."
The stark cold austerity of boxing is, I think, one of the reasons if I find it irresistibly appealing. There are no titanium rackets, no entangled rules of what constitutes fair play, no conferred machoism that comes with loud bikes, shoulder-pads or which cheerleader you're dating. There are no time-outs, no audience gasps, no half-time shows.
Instead, sparring bouts are soaked in eerie silence. Just the staccato of leather meeting body, drowning out the occasional muted groan. Pap pap papp .. silence .. pap pap papp pap.
By design or by chance, the silence plays its bit in the magic - it sets the scene for some surprisingly laconic remarks. As you wade through characters who seemingly have materialized from boxing movies - the hard-as-nails trainer who everyone loves to hate, his blind-in-one-eye dog, the beat-up champion drifting on clouds of his glorious past - your memory is etched with their reticent retorts, distilled pure of platitudes you're so accustomed to in everyday conversation.
Achilles
I've always found it difficult to submit to the male authoritarian. In Freudian retrospect, I think it might have to do with my father's absence as a parental figure as I grew up, which in turn failed to create a wedge in my character to accommodate such a role. I grew up with pent-up defiance, spending most of my youth brawling with my brother who was always eight years, and forty kilos larger than I; refusing to pander to the martinet of our school - the legendary Iqbal Ahmed; and taking part in my share of skirmishes in an all boys school.
So it was no surprise that I stepped into the ring with Paul - the guy who used mockery and derision like an awl when training us for the past six weeks - punch-drunk with a need to dominate. After six weeks of passive submission, listening to him emasculate your efforts, you seethe with a primitive need to tower above him, and have him implicitly accept your standing.(That's him on the right, by the way)
What I've failed to mention however, is that Paul is a Golden Gloves champion. Which can mean only one thing - I'm going to have my ass handed to me.
"Open sparring", he thunders in his thick Irish accent. We aren't going to be pinioned by a drill today. Instead, it's an open fight where everything goes - hooks, jabs, straight-rights, upper-cuts, clinching, biting. Everything. I circle around him, dancing on my toes, looking for my first opening.
"Put you fucking head chin down, maan!", he growls beneath his guard, alluding to the basic defensive posture in boxing. You tuck your head into your chest, making no room for your opponent's investigating fist. He's told me the same thing a thousand times when we trained. I pay no heed - I hate defense. I close in.
I find his right arm just a little short, and throw my first strike: a double jab. He isn't expecting a combination first up - he catches my first jab, but doesn't intercept the second one thrown a fraction of a second later. I get through his defense and graze his face.
"Achilles puts his head down for no man", I stare proudly at his piqued demeanor.
My pride is short-lived - the fight goes downhill steeply from there. Of the tens of punches I throw, I land none, while he breaks my defense at will. Two minutes into the first round, as I hold back, completely spent, he nears in on me, negating any advantage my height offers, and opens an array of body blows. Paul's known for his body blows - his 'shoe-shine' - where he swivels on his hips and repeatedly pummels alternate sides of your body. Today, I've been honored with the royal variety - he really wants to polish me off. I cringe, arch my back, and lower my elbows to parry the rain of blows.
All of which, unfortunately, leave my head completely unguarded.
That's when he really hits me: with a sharp upper-cut - a move where you pretend you're lifting a bucket - you bend your knees every so slightly, push from your thighs and thrust your curled right arm upward with all the force you can muster. And oh, make contact with your opponent's face on its way skyward.
I've never been hit so hard in my life.
I feel like my head's being ripped off my neck - corroborated by the fountain of blood that's spouting out of my nose. I reel back from his clinch, tottering on my heels as I head toward the ropes.
He bares his teeth at me. "Achilles never did bleed, did he?" he seems to say. Then, sadistically, he steps on the drops of blood on the floor, and follows the trail to the ropes.
The rest of the fight's a travesty - he constantly toys with me, laughing even - poking my defense and getting to my nose, tapping it as I recoil in pain. The bell sounds, and I prepare to leave the ring.
My face is a mess. As I climb out through the ropes, I look at his overconfident aloofness one last time. One day I'm going to stab him in the heart. One day I'm going to hit him so hard his brains are going to come splattering out of his ears. One day, I'm going to push his nose into his brain.
I'm aware though, that hidden beneath that mask of callous indifference is his uneasy cognizance of one fact: he's past his prime - he can only get worse. And I can only get better.
Fear
I clamber out of the ring, to the unexpected smell of cheap alcohol. We've been forced to a rather spartan regiment during the course of our training, so I'm rather surprised that someone would have the gall to come into the gym drunk. I turn around - it's not one of us. It's Carlos.
"You should keep your head down bro'", he notes getting a little too close to me for my comfort. "Uh-uh", I respond, undoing my gloves. He helps loosen my guard.
"You know, that's the problem with you - you don't use a man's greatest gift. I was a champion. I have the gift. I know the gift. Do you want the gift?", he slurs.
We're all used to Carlos. I'm in danger of another two-hour talk of his title-fight from 15 years ago. I'm trying to think up an excuse quickly, but Paul's blows have taken their toll.
"Fear", he announces, as if he were a magician who just produced a white-rabbit.
"Fear?", I ask incredulously.
"Yes, fear! You're endowed with it by Nature - it tells you when to fight, and when to flee. That what makes sure you don't get burnt when you touch fire. That you don't run into a moving bus. Don't stand there taking his punches, like a fuckin' dumb bag. If you can't hit, at least don't stand there and be hit, bro!"
I grin at him, and prepare to leave. As I walk away, it all begins to make sense - Paul's pedantic insistence that we direct blows at our partners' faces while training, his inability to articulate how he managed to stay just out of our reach when we fought him. We were doing a disfavor to our training-partners by being gentle to them. We never did learn an integral part of boxing - in our empathetic measures, we gave up honing each other's instincts, our fear.
Rivers of testosterone in the gym wash away words like 'fear' in their wake. It makes sense then, that only champions know where to find it and tap into its energy.
Bad intentions
It's surprising how quickly the novelty and romanticism of bleeding noses turns into a petty annoyance, something that you curse rather than preen about in front of the morning mirror. Boxing's no longer this Palahniuk-ian version of retrogressive machismo, it's no longer how many crunches you can do, or how many flights of stairs you ran up. Because, in the back of my mind, I know that all of that's going to evaporate once I get into the ring for my first fight this Friday. There's going to be no drill, no well-thought out combinations, no textbook defenses. No one's gong to ask you how you lost 12 pounds, or whether you can do fifty pushups right after your run.
It's just going to be two of us trying, quite literally, to inflict pain on each other.
Because, as Cus D'Amato, trainer extraordinaire of people such as Patterson and Tyson instructed - to win you need to "throw every punch with bad intentions".
Ominously, the fight's this Friday. The 13th.
Your right arm
Their witticisms aren't restricted to philosophy though, as was evident in my first week. Simon, Paul's partner in crime, was taking class, showing us the basic punches. He pulled me up in front, hoping to use me as a prop to demonstrate how he'd defend each of them. "Extend you right arm parallel to the ground", he instructed.
Now if you've been with me for more than two hours, you'll know that I have a tendency to retardedly get my right and left mixed up. But yeah, it was crucial that at this juncture, that I make it evident to the rest of the class. With the confidence bestowed only upon the idiotic, I extended my left arm.
Simon looked at me for a second, and then, with the nonchalance of a seasoned stand-up, remarked "No, not this one. Your other right arm."
