Get Her Off the Pitch! Read Free

these movies, fighters never get the bouts they deserve, despite begging for shots at the title, because it serves no one else’s skulduggery to set them up. They are often obliged to take strategic dives - and sometimes they boo-hoo afterwards at the ignominy of it, like Jake LaMotta (Robert De Niro) in Raging Bull , whom it is still incredibly hard to feel sorry for, incidentally, because he’s such a git. Finally, but most important of all, these traditional movie boxers are completely dumb about money - as confirmed by their regular, fruitless cry, ‘Give me my money.’ ‘I didn’t fight for under a thousand for five years,’ boasts a boxer in the original play of Golden Boy . ‘I got a thousand bucks tonight, don’t I?’ His manager, reading a paper, looks up and says no, actually tonight he got twelve hundred. The fighter jumps to his feet, livid. ‘What? I oughta bust your nose. How many times do I have to say I don’t fight for under one thousand bucks?’ The manager shrugs. ‘Okay, you’ll get your thousand,’ he agrees.
    What the movies don’t tend to deal with (because it’s so boring) is boxing’s system of administration, which is so byzantine and preposterous that no one outside has a clue how to penetrate it, let alone challenge or dismantle it. But if you already have a suspicious nature and a sceptical attitude to boxing based on prolonged movie-watching, you can’t hear about the WBO, IBO, IBF, WBU , et ceterawithout narrowing your eyes and making ironical harrumphing noises. The World Boxing Council, you see, has nothing to do with the World Boxing Association besides two shared initials; meanwhile there’s the International Boxing Federation, the World Boxing Organisation, the World Boxing Union, the International Boxing Organisation, the World Boxing Federation, the International Boxing Council, and the International Boxing Association. In other words, if you can ingeniously contrive any original three-word combination of this limited range of nouns and adjectives, and can afford a big round bit of metal with some leather attached, you can set up your own legitimate boxing organisation in your downstairs lavatory for the price of a packet of stamps. All of these organisations are in the belt business, and at the time of the Holyfield-Lewis fight in 1999, Holyfield was ibf and wba champion; Lewis was wbc. Or, quite honestly, it might have been the other way round.
    Either way, the one thing I understood about this fight from the moment I arrived in New York was that toilers in the foetid world of boxing were hoping for a breath of fresh air to blow through the whole sport this coming weekend. Boxing’s reputation was as low as it could get, and commentators had long since run out of synonyms for ‘stink’. A recent fight arranged for Lewis had been against the American Oliver McCall - a man who may have looked, on paper, like a worthy opponent, since he had once knocked Lewis out at the Wembley Arena (in September 1994), but who was in such a bad mental state on the night of the second fight (in January 1997) that he was in tears in the ring. It was ghastly, apparently. All thecommentators who saw this fight quickly ran out of synonyms for ‘sickened’. A recovering crack addict, McCall wandered around the ring avoiding Lewis, crying, talking to himself, and having a public nervous breakdown. Lewis held back, cautiously offering the occasional jab, like a cat testing a dead mouse. It was a confusing situation for a boxer trained to put himself on the line. To adapt the famous line from Raging Bull (‘I didn’t know whether to fuck him or fight him’), on this occasion, Lewis didn’t know whether to fight McCall or offer him a nice cup of cocoa.
    But now, come Saturday night, by a Herculean effort, a diverted river was going to gush through the Garden and wash all the blood off the ropes.