Get Her Off the Pitch! Read Free Page B

from Alice ) to an inner, warren-like place where Holyfield was said to be sparring in private, I think I had a bit of an epiphany. Making a puny fist, I tapped a punch-bag (which didn’t move), and someone told me the interesting fact that Mike Tyson filled his punchbags with water, so that hitting them was more like hitting the human body. I quipped, ‘Does he cover them in human skin, too?’ and then felt ashamed for being so flippant - especially as no one laughed.
    Later, we would watch Lennox sparring in a much nicerspace at the Garden, but hanging about in that dank, unlovely gym brought things home to me in an important way, and at an important moment. Sometimes people come into my office and say, politely, ‘So this is where it all happens?’ and I get all uncomfortable, because, obviously, nothing happens here at all except a lot of impressive teadrinking, and I assume they’re just trying to avoid saying, ‘Oh my God, what a mess’ in any case. But anyway, my point is, you go into an old, battered, smelly Skid Row gym like that, and suddenly this upcoming fight is nothing to do with the HBO pay-per-view millions, or the international diplomacy success of the promoter, or the trading of hollow physical threats by besuited fighters on podiums with fireworks in the background. Because this is where it all happens. This is where men build defences, and learn by getting hurt. This is where they sweat and learn and concentrate, and - in Holyfield’s case - acquire neck muscles like anchor chains. Of course, I knew that Holyfield didn’t use this scuzzy gym every day of his life: a multimillionaire, he lived in considerable luxury in Texas, with a swimming pool shaped like a championship belt, and had fathered nine children by twelve women (or something like that), while also being strenuously devout, which some people saw as not quite adding up. Holyfield once said in an interview that all men had to get out of their trousers from time to time, and the interviewer said, ‘But not as often as you.’ But that’s not the point. By the time I got my chance to go through the little door and see the sweating, shaven-headed and massively muscular Evander Holyfield - sparring energetically in a darker, smaller, and even sweatier space - I was so sensitised to the idea ofboxing’s sheer physicality that I almost fainted at the sight of him.
    I hadn’t been prepared for this sudden powerful interest in these two men’s bodies. It came as a shock after three years in the trade. Every week of my life, I routinely heard about injuries of one sort or another - footballers with fractured metatarsals; tennis players with strained hamstrings - and the information didn’t impinge very much. The chaps’ bodies were just the tools of their trade. One of my treasured football press conference questions was, on the subject of a chronically injured star player, ‘Anything new on the groin?’ (My next favourite was golfer Justin Leonard saying that he’d taken his bogeys with a pinch of salt.) I admit that casual mention of footballers, in multiples, ‘on the treatment tables’ conjured a too-vivid image sometimes, because I pictured them naked and at rest, face up, expectant, lightly oiled, under sheets describing suggestive contours; and I also remember with great clarity a moment when the then fabulously dreadlocked - and very beautiful - Henrik Larsson, playing for Celtic, celebrated a goal with his shirt off and took me completely by surprise with what was underneath. But by and large, I regarded sportsmen as hairy-kneed yeomen whose flesh, skin and muscle were their own affair, and certainly nothing to do with me.
    It helped to be reading Joyce Carol Oates at this juncture - and there’s a sentence I never thought I’d write. But her book On Boxing is a small masterpiece. A great fan of boxing, she is in love with the plain fact that