Life as a Standing Eight Count

a harvard astrophysics major reaches critical mass--fighting in the golden gloves

I saw it as an innocent obsession. My colleagues, my friends, the American Medical Association, the press and this aging, frustrated wrestler from the Y.M.C.A. all disagreed. "Ahhh, the boxer," said the wrestler in his nasal voice, after accosting me on Broadway. "I'd get out if I were you. Boxing is a serious sport for blacks, not for whites. Better quit; otherwise, you're gonna get that Jewish nose of yours busted up." He reached up, tweaked my nose and disappeared down the street, cackling.

When I began boxing at Harvard in the mid-Seventies, I was considered eccentric, not crazy. An astrophysics major who appeared to have a penchant for violence seemed somehow romantic, a perverse Seventies version of a renaissance man. I boxed for emotional therapy between football seasons and, with a few friends, had informal workouts at the Indoor Athletic Building, a five-story brick gymnasium that took up a small city block near the Charles River. On the third floor was the special exercise room, which doubled as the boxing room because hanging from its plaster ceiling was one of two heavy bags on campus. I had made a deal with Pat Melendez: I would teach him how to lift weights if he would teach me how to box. Pat was a Puerto Rican street fighter from Manhattan, a psychology and social-relations major at Harvard. He looked like a comfortable cross between Burt Reynolds and Ken Norton, and he was charming. After four years at Harvard, a good portion of the students seemed to consider him a best friend. I was one of them.

Our workouts began with that heavy bag. Pat would do hard, fast rounds, throwing hooks, crosses, combinations. I would do slow rounds, breathing like an asthmatic. Pat would try to teach me defense: Left hand blocks the right cross; right hand blocks the left jab. His hands would barely move, but still his glove would catch my jab and glide it by his face. He taught me to jab with my left and cross with my right instead of vice versa, the natural tendency for a right. Nothing was worse, he explained, than repeatedly whacking someone with your best punch, noticing that he hadn't felt it and then realizing that all you had left to surprise him with was your second-best punch.

In our senior year, Pat trained at a gym in downtown Boston and cut his weight from the 220 he carried for football down to 178 to fight light heavy. His first bout since high school was that March, at a hotel in the half-dead industrial town of Lowell, Massachusetts. Behind the hotel's lobby was a seedy night club and bar that could hold a couple of hundred if there were something to see. A boxing ring was set up for amateur night--maybe 20 fights on the card, and Pat was near the bottom.

His opponent was a stringy, awkward Italian kid from Boston's North End. Pat was putting on a show for all of his Harvard friends, who were sitting in the audience wearing three-piece suits and acting as if a Harvard I.D. meant we should get preferred seating and drinks on the house. He was dancing like Muhammad Ali, up on his toes, flicking the jab out and moving to his left. Outclassing his opponent. Then he danced into a right hook and went over backward in slow motion, stiff, as if all his nerve endings were firing at once. His head hit the mat first and bounced and bounced. All I can remember is the referee and the ring doctor struggling to get his mouthpiece out and failing because his jaw was clenched tight, and we left quickly, because we were frightened and embarrassed and we didn't know how to help him or what else to do except get home and wait and hope. He died a week later.

•

"Whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul ..." says Ishmael in the opening of Melville's Moby Dick, "and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street and methodically knocking people's hats off--then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can."

At such times, I box. In 1981, Pat had been dead more than four years when a damp, drizzly November and boredom sent me back to the gym. I was a science writer with a windowless office in Rockefeller Center and athletic ambitions five years behind me. And I was bored. I went back to boxing with no realization that I was headed for the Golden Gloves and no thought that in some ass-backward way, I was doing it because I owed it to Pat. Amateur boxers fight for a lot of reasons, but for most of us it comes down to--and you don't know how it pains me to admit this--machismo. I may decide to box because I'm bored, but there's a lot more to it. Many things could keep me busy without threatening my face, my brains or my life. Boxing is an easy way to take reality and add a good dose of Conan the Barbarian and Robin Hood and Philip Marlowe and Rick Blaine, and on and on.

In New York, I worked out sporadically with a cadre of intellectual jocks led by Norman Mailer and former light-heavy-weight champion José Torres, who rent out the century-old Gramercy Gym On 14th Street on Saturday mornings. I had been invited as a friend of a friend of a cousin of Mailer's. The other fighters included some struggling writers, a few half-successful actors, a fanatical TV news producer, the founder and editor of a magazine that bills itself as the nation's most pornographic and an occasional big-name friend of Mailer's, such as Ryan O'Neal, who would show up when he was filming in the city. A few years ago, the group dubbed itself the Raging Jews.

It was a pleasant way to spend a Saturday morning, with the cold rain falling gently over the sleaze and the zombies on 14th Street. The sessions were spent rope skipping, watching Mailer bull around the ring trying to set up his only punch, a surprisingly good right hand. And my own nine minutes of imitating Ali and trying not to hurt anyone while imagining the damage I could inflict on O'Neal if he should ever show his face.

The Ali imitation was fairly effective against anyone who'd never boxed before; otherwise, it had critical flaws. One day at the Gramercy, I was beaten up by a redheaded, angelic-looking 15-year-old. Nothing terribly shameful in it, except I outweighed the kid by 70 pounds and I was supposed to be taking it easy on him. By the third round, he was still bobbing and weaving and jabbing my eyes out, and I was coughing and wheezing and praying for the bell. That night, I watched Oliver's Story on TV and stopped hoping for O'Neal to show his face, because I wouldn't stand a chance. The next morning, I quit smoking.

Eight months later, on another gray November day, I decided to fight in the Gloves. Although I was too old to box seriously from the first day I picked up gloves, my quick and final decision hinged on the inescapable fact that I was getting older. If I wanted to fight competitively, procrastinating further would not help.

The Golden Gloves is New York's amateur boxing championship--what its sponsor, the New York Daily News, calls the toughest nine minutes in sports. Bob Ciocher, who has been coaching amateur boxing for 50 years in New York, calls the Golden Gloves the toughest competition in the world. "Tougher than the pros," he says in the fatherly tone he uses to talk young boxers out of foolishness. "In the pros, you know who you're gonna fight, what he does, how good he is. In the Gloves, you just don't know." The Gloves divides fighters into two classes: novice, with fewer than nine fights, and open. At one time, I actually considered the possibility of boxing open. Hubristic, considering the Gloves' more notable alumni: Floyd Patterson and Sugar Ray Robinson, among others.

That year, the Gloves would begin in late January, with some 1300 kids fighting in such arenas as the Mitchell Community Center in Harlem and Saint Thomas Aquinas Church in Godknows-where, Brooklyn. After a series of elimination rounds, it would end in March with 40 kids fighting in the finals at Madison Square Garden. It is the farm system for pro boxing. A kid who wants to emulate Sugar Ray Leonard should begin his pugilistic education by his preteens and be an experienced fighter by the time he is old enough for the Gloves.

To make up for my vast inexperience, I went searching for professional assistance. Ciocher, who had taught my angelic redheaded assailant, seemed like the man to start with. He is 75 and looks like a young Irish 50, with silvery hair and blue eyes and the slightly shuffling gait of a prize fighter. In 1931, he won the New York amateur championship. He never fought professionally because of a promise to his mother. To calm her fears that the sport was dangerous, his would-be sponsors persuaded her to see his last amateur fight. He won effortlessly. In the next bout on the card, one of the two fighters was killed. "His head bounced off the mat twice," Ciocher recalled. "When they bounce twice, they don't come back."

I introduced myself to him after one of his classes at the 63rd Street Y.M.C.A. in Manhattan. I explained my ambition, and he said I was crazy. "They have guys who train two or three years undercover just to get into the novice Gloves," he said. "These guys want to go pro. They'll kill you."

But Ciocher, I learned, is a sucker for dedication. Although most of his energy is given to teaching boys and men who have physical or emotional handicaps, at any given time he coaches maybe half a dozen young boxers who want to fight in the Gloves. The one thing he demands from them is dedication to the sport--as he teaches it. I explained, immodestly but passionately, that if anyone could pick up his system in three months, I could. And that my brains, and the fact that I had stayed in good physical shape since my football days, might just be enough to counteract the lack of experience. I was going to do it, I argued, and his help (continued on page 143)Standing Eight Count(continued from page 84) would be appreciated: After all, he was supposed to be the best.

He relented. "I've coached Olympic boxers," he told me. "I've coached so many fighters I can't begin to remember them all. It'll have to be a crash course, but I've had kids who've never had gloves on in their life and turned them into champions." The sanity clause: If by the time of the Gloves he thought I could get hurt, I wouldn't box.

So in room 402, a classroom at the Y. with the chairs pushed to one side, Ciocher watched my Ali imitation. He had two things to say. One, I didn't know anything; and, two, teaching me in three months would be near impossible. "I don't do half-assed jobs," he said.

"If that's all we can do," I said, "let's do the best half-assed job we can."

•

The lessons began with step zero, the boxing position. In the next three months, Ciocher's most frequent command would be "Keep your position." Stand flat-footed, arms to the side. One: Take a normal stride, with the left foot slightly to the side and slightly pigeon-toed. Two: Bounce two or three times lightly on the balls of the feet to get comfortable. Three: Lift the left forearm from the elbow so the hand is about a foot out from the shoulder joint and the fist is flat. Four: Lift the right forearm so it's about three inches from the chest, directly under the chin, fist flat. Five, six: Drop the right side slightly and lean a bit forward, a controlled droop. When he was satisfied, after about 20 attempts at getting all of that right, we progressed to step one: moving around with Tiny.

In the mat-covered wrestling room, Ciocher's fighters were warming up. Tiny, about six feet tall and 280 pounds, stood out: small squinty eyes, bulging stomach hanging over tight light-blue sweats. Headgear squeezed onto his head so tight it looked as if his scrunched-up ears would pop out of the ear holes. His upper arms were a bit larger than my thighs. But Tiny was inordinately gentle, and the sparring was painless. Under Ciocher's orders, he threw his punches at my gloves. I never moved close enough to hit him back. I wasn't frightened, but at the end of two easy rounds, my sweat had soaked through even my sneakers.

I estimated it would take me about three hours a day for a year to absorb the rudiments of the "sweet science." Even the pathetic heavyweights who haunt weekly televised fights seemed almost infinitely beyond my talent. The trick was not absorbing intellectually what Ciocher had to teach but, as he said, "teaching yourself to think with your body."

•

The week I began my training, Alexis Arguello was beaten into unconsciousness in Miami by Aaron Pryor. Arguello was knocked from his senses in the 14th round by a right hand that almost broke his jaw and was able to defend himself against several more punches until Pryor overwhelmed him. The ref stopped it about ten punches later and ten punches too late. Arguello slid to the canvas and remained unconscious for four minutes. But he survived. A day later, Duk Koo Kim was knocked into unconsciousness by Ray "Boom Boom" Mancini in a championship bout in Vegas. He died after neurosurgeons drilled holes in his skull to release the pressure on his brain from the blood clot. Kim was decked by one punch in the 14th round. Nothing you can do about those but pray they don't happen to you.

The next morning, the warnings began. The press wrote that boxing kills. And I was working for a science magazine: In one of those slaps of irony, I was assigned to help report a story on boxing and the brain. The writer was a friend who, earlier, upon hearing of my boxing, had come into my office and for nearly half an hour had called me an asshole. When I showed her some American Medical Association statistics that recorded fewer deaths per thousand in boxing than in college football, her response was, "Great; first we'll get boxing banned, then we'll go after college football!"

She began slipping cheerful articles onto my desk or under my door; the first one was from a British medical journal. "We report," wrote a Dr. J. K. Cruikshank, "two cases of severe acute brain injury which were particularly worrying because they both occurred in amateur boxers who had no demonstrable predisposing abnormalities and after seemingly routine bouts in the ring."

The following week would provide a wealth of valuable information for the up-and-coming pugilist. For instance, that a good right hand can land with the force of 1000 pounds. This, if the fighter is extremely unlucky, can cause a blood vessel in the brain to burst, flooding blood into the space between the brain and its protective membrane. The result is a sub-dural hematoma, putting pressure on the brain, causing irreparable damage or death, as was the case with Pat and Duk Koo Kim. If the fighter is a little luckier, those 1000-pound punches day after day result in dementia pugilistica, punch-drunkenness. In this case, the boxer is only suffering from permanent loss of brain cells. Cerebral atrophy, the doctors call it.

Such information was of little help when I graduated to serious sparring. While it was running around my brain, I was beaten about the head and shoulders by Hank, my sparring partner. He was a hospital administrator for the city and rode in from Queens to box at the Y., which he had been doing off and on for a year and a half. Hank became my biggest fan. He regretted never having had the chance to fight in the Gloves, so I would be fighting for him. He was about my size, 20 years my senior and not particularly quick, but I couldn't block or duck his punches, and once he started hitting me, I fell apart. By the third round of sparring--far too late--I realized my problem. I was watching his eyes, a natural instinct, but his gloves were punching me in the nose.

Fighters will tell you that your nose stops hurting once it gets hit enough. It doesn't have to get broken; with enough punches, the cartilage simply erodes and the nose loses its shape, becomes floppy. But my nose was too big, too angular. It hurt every minute during those months. When a good jab hit it, the response was instantaneous: blood and the barely controllable desire to crawl into the nearest corner and cry. By the end of a round, I was nearly helpless, because I couldn't see through the tearing in my eyes. Blood pooled in my nostrils, and I had to breathe by sucking air through the holes in my mouth guard. I felt like I was drowning. And this voice in my head was screaming, What the hell am I doing here?

When the sparring was over, I showered and dressed and walked home up Broadway. I wanted to find a shoulder to cry on. Losing makes you feel as if someone has stuck a hypodermic into your bones and sucked out your marrow, taking your self-confidence with it for good measure. In boxing, when you lose, the only excuse is that you weren't good enough to win. There's no one else to blame. When you're sparring and losing, the child in you suddenly appears. You want to jump your opponent and bite, kick and scratch. When it's immediately over, even if you've been praying for the bell to stop the punishment, you want to start again, to keep going until you can start winning. Later, all that remains of your childish anger is cruelty. You feel small and vulnerable, and you want to boost yourself up by shoving strangers around or kicking poodles. You want to insult people half your size, then dare them to do something about it. At least I did. I still wasn't sure whether the feelings came from boxing--did Hank feel that way?--or from me.

By mid-December, a month of my schizophrenic life had left me worried, obsessed and nearly crippled. I had taken a comfortable Manhattan life and turned it into Stalag 17. I was in bed every night by 10:30--not so easy, considering that I rarely finished work before eight--and up every morning at six to begin a two-hour workout. I had noticeable and worrisome palpitations at the thought of women who might entice me to disturb my routine. (Syd Martin, the trainer at the Times Square Gym, told me that it takes 16 drops of blood to equal one drop of semen; therefore, "You can't go blowing it before a fight, because you can't get it back.")

I wasn't worried: My girlfriend had walked out three weeks after I began training. "You're getting in the best shape of your life," she complained, "and by the time I get hold of your body, it's asleep."

Physically, I was two years short of my athletic prime, but my body felt 50 years past it. A pulled muscle in my back had me screaming every time I sat down. My fingers were swollen and stiff, making my handwriting look like that of a three-year-old. With every other step I took, my right knee collapsed. The knee was a multiscarred victim of Ivy League football, and I wasn't giving even odds that it would last until the fight. It seemed somewhat shameful to be only 26 yet wishing I had the body of a 21-year-old.

What made it all worse was not just that I was doing this voluntarily; I was doing it illicitly. I had finally noticed the small print in the Gloves' entry forms pointing out that I was not in my last year of eligibility, as I had thought. I was nine months beyond it. But I was obsessed. Without Ciocher's knowledge, I falsified my age. An artist friend with a pencil altered the date on my birth certificate from a neat 1956 to a 1958 that looked as if it had been inked by a rusty typewriter. I rationalized the duplicity by telling myself that at least I was a truly sincere novice.

"There are no more truly sincere novices," Johnny DeFoe once told me. DeFoe, who won the Gloves in 1932, is head of the Police Athletic League's boxing program and, by his own count, has been in the corner for 164 Gloves champions. "If a kid comes in who never boxed before and he goes into novice, he's worse off today than years ago, because he's up against someone with 30 or 40 bouts and he doesn't know it." This experience comes in a variety of contests, from Kiddie Gloves and Junior Olympics, when the boxers are as young as ten, to "smoker" bouts. Smokers are unsanctioned bootleg tournaments held by the local clubs, with no experienced referee, no ringside physician and no effect on the fighter's official record. A young boxer can fight in one smoker a week for years and then enter the Gloves as a novice. Being nine months too old, I rationalized, would not constitute an unfair advantage over such a kid.

•

By late January, I was showing signs of talent. I could handle Tiny and Hank easily, though I still had bad days with them, and I had dug up a more challenging sparring partner: Tom Gimbel, the New York Athletic Club superheavyweight champion, who had fought in the Gloves five years earlier, fresh from college with little boxing experience, and had won two fights by knockouts before losing to a real boxer. At 28, he was already a vice-president at a brokerage house, but he kept up with competitive boxing and was planning on fighting in the Empire State Games later in the year.

Gimbel was large. He outweighed me by ten pounds, mostly muscle, and it felt like 50 when we were in the ring. The first time we sparred at the Gramercy, my nose hurt for a week. Every time I sneezed, every time I laughed, I was reminded of his left jab. After three rounds, he predicted that if I got a lucky draw in the Gloves, I might be able to win one or two fights. I interpreted that, with some vindictiveness, to mean that if I were lucky, I might be as good as he was five years earlier. I began entertaining the same fantasies toward him that I had once held toward Ryan O'Neal. But I was improving, and the last time we sparred before my fight, he upgraded his prediction: I could and should win it all.

On those good days, insidious fantasies of a boxing career crept into my head. Those grandiose delusions went something like this: My chances of winning the Gloves in New York were about one in ten. Figure another one-in-ten chance of winning the nationals, because, after all, I'm the New York amateur champion and they have damn good boxing in New York. The nationals would give me a one-in-ten chance, optimistically, for a gold in the Olympics. Then I'd go pro. With the proper guidance, I could move up into the top ten and a championship fight without getting within a mile of anyone even remotely talented. The money would be big: Howard Cosell would eat up a bright white heavyweight from Harvard--he would come back from retirement to do the color commentary--as would the rest of the media. I wouldn't even have to win to make a quick $10,000,000. A little easy arithmetic gives me about a one-in-1000 chance of making that kind of money by the time I'm 30, which beats hell out of playing the lottery or writing. Unfortunately, the bottom rung of that ladder wasn't easy. The first one of Ciocher's protégés to fight in the Gloves was a kid named Bobby. He lost after taking three standing eight counts in the first round. Three days later, I saw him outside room 402. His left eye was black and swollen, and he was limping badly. Bobby was 17 years old and slender, from the Italian neighborhood of Ozone Park, in Queens. He took up boxing after nearly getting expelled from high school two years before for starting half a dozen race riots. "I had 15 street fights alone in my sophomore year," he said. Now he helps his father run a deli and takes lessons from Ciocher, who also taught his father 25 years ago.

"I might've lost the fight," Bobby said in the wrestling room, "but I wasn't going to take a single step backward. And I didn't. I just kept moving forward." His opponent had had nine fights, he said, the limit for the novice division.

"Nine that we know of," Ciocher added.

"If he says nine," said Tony, a novice Gloves fighter who has had 12 smoker fights, "that means 18."

"You were unlucky," Ciocher said. "This guy had experience. You came in with a left, brought your hand down, and he saw it. Next time, ping. He hit you with the right."

"It hurt," said Bobby of losing. "Now it's inside me. The only thing to do is to go back next year and bust his ass up." As they drove home from the fight, his father and Ciocher rode in the front seat. Bobby sat in back with his mother and cried on her shoulder.

•

Two and a half months after my first lesson, the Daily News mailed me a postcard that said to report in a week to the Felt Forum, where all the heavyweight elimination rounds would take place. With that advance warning, I bought boxing shoes and blue-and-white-satin trunks. I was nervous. My early strategy was to block out fight night, to keep out any daydreams, fantasies or stray worries until the bell actually rang. I figured I could look at it in one of two ways. The first I called the Black Hole Theory. A black hole is a collapsed star so massive that not even light can escape its gravitational pull. No amount of intellectualization will tell you what happens when you enter a black hole. You may end up on the other side of the universe. You may not end up at all. The fight was my black hole.

The second was the Getting Hit in the Nose Is Fun Theory. Somehow, I believed this should be the preferable view: Hell, I get to stand in a small roped-in ring in front of thousands of strangers and punch somebody's lights out. Or he gets to do the same thing to me. What could be more enjoyable?

When fight day arrived, it started like any other--except that I had to work at staying calm and concentrating on my science writing. Then, at 6:30 P.M., I packed up and hustled down Sixth Avenue, cutting across the Garment District on 38th Street in the twilight and then down Eighth Avenue to rendezvous with Ciocher and Tiny at the Felt Forum.

The dressing rooms are small, with nothing but benches and coathooks, and each has a bathroom with a couple of sinks that later become streaked with blood and saliva. The rooms fill up with small Hispanic and black fighters and their coaches, and an occasional heavyweight. For the most part, the fighters are friendly. There are very few assholes before the fights.

I settled in with Tiny to evaluate the competition, chiefly the Bed-Study fighters. Bed-Study is the Bedford-Stuyvesant Club of Brooklyn, Mark Breland's club. Breland, at 19, is the reigning king of the Gloves. The year I fought, he won the welterweight title for the fourth time (and has won it again since); he's world amateur champion and is well on his way to becoming very well known and very rich. Breland has brought good fighters to Bed-Stuy and, with them, a reputation as the toughest gym in the five boroughs. With their black trunks and their quiet confidence, those fighters looked as if they were hired ringers from out of town. They had a host of 139-pounders and one heavyweight. He had massive biceps and went about 5'11" and 210 pounds. His facial expression never changed, just a solid stare that kept going all night. He seemed about 30.

The only other heavyweight in the room was a short Italian kid named Joey Rizzo. He had a five-o'clock shadow that would take me a week to grow and the kind of inflated chest that comes from doing too many push-ups in one lifetime. Rizzo was warming up a good two hours before the fight: flinging his head back and forth, throwing punches without moving his feet, building up a sweat. I figured he'd wear himself down by the time he got to the ring and wouldn't be able to throw a punch. He hadn't sparred a single round in preparation for the fight. The fact that you weren't really supposed to hit your opponent hard, he said, confused him. I was thinking, This kid is going to get bombed, going into the ring without ever having laid a glove on another fighter. I was wrong. He later won a decision from a young black boxer who must have weighed in at about 260 and loomed against the sky.

•

About 11 P.M., a 50ish fat man with the requisite cigar poked his head into the room and called for the heavyweights. I had been waiting for four hours, the catch to being the 22nd fight on a 27-fight card. I hadn't been nervous, really, just impatient. About once every hour, that impatience would be broken by a subvocal interrogation: What the hell are you doing here? How did you get here? What incomprehensible chain of events led to this?

I first saw my opponent during the walk from the dressing rooms to the check-in area. Ciocher had told me only that he was Irish and flashy and that I'd have to take it to him and put him out early. The guy went far beyond flashy.

In the locker room, I had guessed that you could probably judge the fighters' experience by the age of their equipment. Theoretically, the true novices would have new shoes and trunks, as I had. The totally inexperienced would have new mouth guards. My opponent, on the other hand, was wearing worn white boxing shoes with green trim and tassels and a white robe with the hood up. On the back of his robe, in classy green embroidery, were crossed boxing gloves and his name, Walter. None of his outfit was new. From the back, with his hairy legs and his hood up, he looked like the archetypal journey-man heavyweight: Jerry Quarry, Earnie Shavers and Joe Bugner rolled into one. He can't have any more than nine fights, I kept saying to myself. How the hell can he look so experienced and so mean? Ciocher ordered me not to look at him.

The heavyweights gathered in the entryway, waiting for their numbers to be called. It was a hallway leading into the forum. On one side, a short, fat Irishman with a yellow Gloves raincoat, a cowboy hat and a cigar kept yelling for everyone to clear out so the boxers could get by. On the other side were chairs for the fighters who waited to get gloves and headgear from the boxers returning from the ring.

I could barely tell which of those returning fighters had won and which had lost. They seemed equally downcast. Tiny said he could tell: The fighters who'd won didn't look particularly happy, but they didn't look depressed. The losers did.

After the check-in, the walk out to the ring was a relief. In the bout going on, a huge Irishman in sweat shorts was brawling with the heavyweight from Bed-Stuy. I was hypnotized by their fight and stopped fretting about my own. The Irishman's fans were chanting, "Fuck 'im up, Peter! Fuck 'im up!" The second round degenerated into a knockdown contest in which the fighters took turns belting each other's faces. Each one went down once, but Irish Peter showed surprising stamina and won.

While Peter and Bed-Stuy were waiting for the decision, Walter was nowhere to be found; Ciocher was trying to give me last-minute instructions, and Tiny was massaging my shoulders. Tiny's presence comforted me. Should I get knocked unconscious, I was sure he would climb into the ring, enfold me in his huge arms and carry me safely from the arena.

A few minutes before the fight, Walter entered in classic style. He and his coach had been through this before. They came from backstage in a semijog--like a procession from Rocky III, the coach first, then Walter, his hands upon the coach's shoulders.

As they disappeared around the ring, Ciocher climbed up and held the ropes for me. I slipped into the ring and everything disappeared. Nothing existed but the brightly lighted square of white canvas, Walter standing without his robe opposite me and the referee. No crowd, no announcer, no past, no future. To establish some ground rules--or to see if I was already too dazed to fight--the referee stood in front of me, looked me in the eyes and said, "I'm going to tell you only three things: box, break and stop."

He then called us into the center of the ring. I was trying to decide whether I should be staring at Walter's eyes to intimidate him or staring off into space. I think I went for his eyes, like Joe Frazier with George Foreman. When the referee told us to shake hands, I thought, How the hell do two people shake hands when they're both wearing boxing gloves with the thumbs sewn to the fingers and the fingers sewn into a fist?

Looking back now, I wonder what I expected to happen, because I certainly didn't get anything remotely like what I might have imagined. Only the first three seconds, until we touched gloves, could have been predicted. As Melville put it, "Reality outran apprehension."

The bell rang, and for the next 90 seconds Walter punched me in the face. All I remember are his gloves arcing out of nowhere. Thwack! Thwack! Thwack! Everywhere I turned, every place I put my face, he put his fist in it. Thwack!

When I went into the ring, that voice in my head was reminding me of all the things I should do: Jab, then move. Keep moving the left foot. Jab, step back. Fake the jab, throw the right....

Within ten seconds, that voice was wailing, HolyshitohmyGodwhatshappeninggetmethehelloutofhereohjeeezeshelp....

About then it occurred to me that it was conceivable, a definite possibility, that I might fall down unconscious. Not certain but conceivable that everything I had done for three months was wasted. That I was a bad boxer: not tough, period. That I had failed, had let down Ciocher and my friends.

And then Walter gave me a second to think. I had a revelation: Maybe if I hit him back, I'd slow him down. So I tried it, and it worked. And the voice said, Try it again. And the bell rang.

Between rounds, Ciocher wiped the blood from my face with a sponge. I'd seen it on my shirt but hadn't made the connection that it was from my nose. (I was later told that the blood first made me look like I had a mustache, then a goatee and, finally, a full facial mask.) Ciocher was trying to tell me something, but I couldn't get my mind off Walter. I couldn't stop thinking about being thrown into the ring with this Waring Blender. The hell with Jack Nicholson and his leer and his ax. Let me tell you about fear.

Just before the bell rang for round two, Ciocher managed to get my attention. With his hands together in front of my face, he said, "Gary, just give back to me one quarter of what I gave you." Then he told me to throw the right hand.

At some point early in the second round, I hit Walter with a right hand and watched him stop for a few seconds. This probably means, I thought, that I hurt him, but I didn't trust him. Maybe he was waiting for me. A little later, I realized I wasn't feeling his punches anymore. More important, he seemed to be feeling mine.

The fight runs through my mind now like a film that someone edited with scissors, cutting out snippets for me to have and stealing the rest. In one scene, I'm up against the ropes and he's throwing hooks and I'm whaling back and thinking that, just like the other lousy heavyweights, we're brawling and Ciocher is surely embarrassed.

Then I stopped thinking at all, just going from action to action. Some part of my mind knew that my body was tired, breathing heavily; it was arm-weary; it hurt. But whatever was in control was saying, It doesn't matter. We have a job to do. We have to get out of here. Fight!

So I fought. Walter was backing into the ropes; and in a flurry of blows, I threw a right hand and his face disappeared behind it. I watched him go over backward. Curious. Did I do that? I managed to move to a far corner, and I remember hoping that Walter would decide not to fight anymore.

And then the physician was in the ring, and so was Walter's manager, and they were attending to him as they did to Pat, struggling to get his mouthpiece out, cradling his head. For a moment, I hoped that he wasn't dying.

I walked up to the referee and asked him politely, "Can I leave now? Can I go home?" There was still no joy, no exultation, no excitement. I was simply praying that they'd let me out of that damn ring.

Finally, Walter was up. He could have been out for two minutes or ten; I still had no notion of time. After the announcement--"The winner, red corner, referee stops contest, 1:34 of the second round, Taubes"--Ciocher helped me down the steps and out of the arena. In the locker room, Tiny wouldn't let me take my own shoes off. Ciocher went off for ice while Tiny kept handing me wet paper towels to put on my eye, which was already showing black.

After the fight, an old-time Gloves aficionado congratulated Ciocher on the outcome. "So tell me, Bobby," he asked, "what did you stick up his ass between rounds?"

As we left, Ciocher suggested I buy white bread, soak it in milk and put it on my eye. At a 24-hour vegetable stand around the block from my apartment, I could find only rye. Well, I thought, I'm Jewish; maybe rye will work better. (Later, Ciocher said no. White.)

I fell asleep about three in the morning with the soggy rye bread still on my eye. I couldn't help thinking that my reward for winning is that I get to go back into the ring and do it again. Why don't they make the losers fight again? They need more practice.

•

My second fight was Wednesday, only one week after the first fight, and I was a wreck. I couldn't help worrying--not that somebody would do to me what Walter did but that somebody would do to me what I did to Walter. The realization that boxing is not like sparring, that boxing is not fun, had started me spiraling into my black hole. The first fight, I wasn't nervous, because I didn't know what to expect. The second fight, I knew what to expect and I didn't want anything to do with it. I was no longer willing to sacrifice my nose. I had visions of some huge fist smearing it to all corners of my face and not leaving enough for the plastic surgeons to put back.

Jinxes became the overriding concern in my life. Here was a previously rational man now pursued and haunted by jinxes--from the towel I dried with to the restaurant where I ate to the people I invited to the fight. If my friends came, it would ensure disaster. At two, a compatriot from the Gramercy called to tell me that the Raging Jews would be at the fight, including Mailer. Mailer. How had I arrived at a point in my life where Norman Mailer would actually come to see me fight? A jinx?

When the day came, I left for the fight, physically overwhelmed by nerves. Even with ten hours of sleep, I was in bad shape: a slight hacking cough every few minutes; a headache that swelled and receded; shoulders tense; neck tense; hands sweaty; bones moaning with a dull, dark pain. But the aches eased in the locker room. The boxers were friendly, with the camaraderie that comes from people's undergoing something horrible together. Rizzo was back. He said that after listening to me talk after my last fight, he had assumed I'd lost. I assured him that I'd won but it was thoroughly no fun. He agreed. Then the other boxers agreed.

While I waited through the evening, all the heavyweights somehow metamorphosed into killers. The fat ones I figured for demonically quick and skilled; the slender ones would slice a fighter up with razor-blade fists. After last week, I was apparently the favorite. Half of me felt like swaggering; the other half felt like some kind of second-rate impostor who would be smart to beg for mercy.

Once we got to the waiting area, everything began moving too fast. The week before, mine had been the only knockout. This night, everyone seemed to be getting creamed. Two heavyweights would go out. Then the introduction over the loudspeakers. Then, bang. The crowd would roar. The two heavies would come back--one excited, the other dazed, being led slowly by his trainers. Several of the fights ended minutes into the first round. I barely had time to get my gloves on before my bout was called.

My last thoughts before entering the ring were inauspicious: My protective cup wouldn't sit right and the thumbless gloves were too small, squashing my little finger up under the others.

•

The next thing I remember, I was sitting on a chair outside the ring again. Ciocher was in front of me with another man whom I figured for the ring doctor. They were asking me questions: Did I know what building this was? What color was the man I fought? What's my name? I heard myself giving smartass answers: "You tell me; you're the doctor." Gradually, it occurred to me that I had already fought and probably had not won.

The effect is called retrograde amnesia. You get hit so hard that it knocks a little of the past out of your head. It had happened to me in football a couple of times but never to this extent.

They asked me if I wanted to go to the hospital and took me anyway when I said no. Company policy. If a fighter is rendered unconscious, check for permanent brain damage. Can't have someone go home only to wake up dead in the morning. Ciocher and Tiny rode with me in the ambulance, and with their help, fragments of the night began to return.

First, my opponent, Schuyler Jackson. He was impressive: 25, black, muscular, about 6'4" and 220 pounds. An awkward fighter but a natural athlete. I remembered exchanging jabs with him, noticing blood on his mouthpiece, feeling his bombs go whizzing past my face and wondering what would happen if one connected. Evidently one did, or rather two, because I took a standing eight count and then, 1:43 into the first round, went down for good. I stayed down long enough for some of the audience to start chanting, "Get the stretcher, we want Peter!" The eight count, standing with the referee as he announced the winner, walking out of the ring--none of that ever came back.

Ciocher told me that the punches were not what caused the blackout. He said that the first right caught me squarely in the nose. Then I fell apart. I've always had a habit, because of my nasal sensitivity, of trying to pull my head back away from punches rather than tuck it safely into my shoulders, under my gloves. When Jackson threw his second right hand, it caught me with my head back and nowhere to go but over. When my head bounced off the mat, Ciocher knew it was over. Bounced off the mat? I thought. Like Pat? Ciocher had been thinking along similar lines, and he had been scared.

In the emergency room, I sat next to a kid who had just been carried in after wrecking his motorcycle. He remembered a cab's beginning to cut him off and then hitting it broadside. The next thing he remembered was sitting in the back seat of a police car with the siren screaming. The conclusion we reached simultaneously was frightening: For both of us, there could just as easily have been no next thing to remember.

Over the next three weeks, I watched Jackson wallow through a succession of overweight, untalented heavyweights. Finally, he won the novice championship in a bout that had much of the audience either laughing or booing. Of the boxers he faced, all lasted the full three rounds, and none was as well trained or as physically prepared as I was. So why had I done so poorly? I could think of several reasons: First, I had hoped to win with intelligence in a contest in which instinct was more important. When I fought Walter, he forced me to revert to instinct to survive. Jackson knocked me out before my instinct kicked in. The most essential quality, it seemed from watching Jackson's later opponents, was to want to fight, and I had stopped wanting that after my first bout. I realized that I disliked hitting people almost as much as I disliked being hit.

•

At three in the morning, I left the hospital and hailed a taxi at 14th and Seventh. I was sad and tired and my nose hurt. It was over, one way or the other.

The cabby was about 50. Between swearing at other drivers, he told me he had owned a liquor store in the Bronx until the neighborhood went bad and he sold out. He was somebody to talk to. I told him about the fight, about maybe writing it into a story. "The only thing I feel now," I said, "is that this isn't the way I would want my story to end."

"Whattaya mean?" he said with the classic wisdom of the New York cabby. "It's a fucking great ending. You learn how to win one week. You learn how to lose the next. What else is there to life?"

"The next morning, the warnings began. The press wrote that boxing kills."