I managed a good workout at the gym today which involved hitting the pads with Ross, one of the Personal Trainers, with ‘Eye Of The Tiger‘ blaring out of the sound-system. It was exhausting and exhilarating. (That’s not us on the left but you get the idea.) I know the strong negative feelings people have about boxing and I understand them and respect them. But I have always had a guilty respect for boxers. I think they must be among the fittest and psychologically strongest of all sportsmen.
My father boxed in his youth. Although born in Inverkeithing in Fife he was brought up in the Gorbals in Glasgow. Benny Lynch was a local hero and my father was among the hundreds who gathered at the Central Station in 1936 to welcome Benny back to Glasgow as the undisputed Flyweight Champion of the world having beaten Jackie Brown. A Gorbals boy, the first Scottish World Champion!
Father had a short but successful run as an amateur until his nose was broken. He decided to retire then to save any further damage to his film-star looks. I think, however, his mother might have had something to do with that too.
He still attended boxing bouts and in my childhood he commandeered the television and the radio if there were any important fights on the go. In the early 1960s the World Heavyweight Championship fights were televised live to Scotland but very early in the morning. I think around 5 am or 6 am. He watched these before he went to work. I wanted to be up to watch too but my mother always claimed she couldn’t rouse me. Aye right! This was the time when Floyd Patterson, Sonny Listen and a young upstart called Cassius Clay were the big names. My father’s opinion of Clay was that he was ‘just a clown’ and Sonny Liston would shut his mouth forever. I tended to agree. Boasters and big-heads always came a cropper in the end. But Cassius had not read that script. The clown became the King.
So boxing was always around when I was growing up although I never actually went as far as to participate. After all, I was a child of the sixties, love and peace and all that. Furthermore, as the years went by I became like many people and began to have doubts about the whole thing. Then I read a book by Jose Torres, a former Light-Heavyweight Champion of the the World, called Sting Like A Bee. I still have my copy, well-worn and heavily foxed. As the title suggests it is about the former Cassius Clay, Muhammed Ali. Eamonn Andrews, the best boxing commentator there ever was according to my father, wrote a review in which this deeply religious man said:
‘Booze and tobacco I constantly run away from as damaging, corrupting things. For a long time I have been thinking the same about boxing and trying to push it away. Then up comes a book like (this), and all the smell and sweat and the evil magic is back.’
It is a remarkable book in which Torres lays bear the demanding lifestyle of a boxer in training and the physical strength and stamina that is required to sustain a contest. Of more interest to me was the psychological strength that is required which Torres deems crucial to any boxer’s make-up. For instance, he notes that Ali always had more bother disposing of white opponents. He knew how to upset black opponents, to press the buttons that would disarm them and render them more vulnerable.
Eamonn Andrews was right, though. For some of us, though we may find boxing fascinating, we can never defend it wholeheartedly. But I enjoy hitting the pads - and that is the way it will stay.
