Fighter's Mind, A (16 page)

“This went on for a while, and then one day, after Glen hit Dre with a good shot. I said, ‘That’s it, that’s enough,’ and Dre said, ‘No, no, I’m all right,’ and that’s what I was looking for, that statement. Now I began to really teach Dre how to hit him with punches.

“I told Dre, you can hit him with anything you want. Number one, he won’t believe you can do it, and number two, by the time he does believe it you’ll be whupping him. Now Dre already knew
what I been through it can’t get any worse, that’s all he can do to me
and he knew how to get away from Glen. He started working jabs and hooks and within three weeks he was dominating Glen, and they stopped boxing us. That’s what happens when you fight on your terms.”

Virgil taught Dre what he called the “slip-’n-slide,” a Texas style of boxing that could trace its roots as far back as Jack Johnson, the first black heavyweight champ, in 1908. “It’s not necessarily a crowd-pleasing style, when it emerged it wasn’t respected. It has a lot of hidden components.”

Dre’s Olympic run in 2004, when the details are told, takes on a
Rocky
feel. Dre’s father died suddenly, of heart failure, in 2002, out of the blue—one morning he was gone. Dre, at the age of eighteen, stood over the grave and promised to bring back Olympic gold. He struggled for a reason to continue, and his growing family and sense of faith helped rebuild the steel.

There were shadowy dreadnoughts in the mists of international amateur boxing. It was an uphill climb from the start, as Dre was dramatically undersized for his division. Virgil had made the decision, in January of the year before, to fight Dre at 178 pounds, because he thought that he was still in a growth spurt. But that growth tapered off. Dre fought his way through the Olympics weighing 170 in that 178-pound weight class. Virgil would make him drink a Gatorade right before the weigh-in so he wouldn’t be too light, when most guys were probably cutting four or five pounds to make 178. And not only that—they were men; in the European system boxers will often spend eight years as an amateur, fighting in major competitions and culminating in the Olympics, while in the United States a good boxer (without the financial support) will go pro much quicker. Dre was up against essentially professional men who were much bigger and vastly more experienced.

The
Rocky IV
villain in this story was Evgeny Makarenko, a six-foot-five Russian fighter who’d won the world amateur championships for several years, with apparent ease. He’d beaten everyone he might face in the Olympics, including the perennial runner-up, Magomed Aripgadjiev, from Belarus. Makarenko was the heavy favorite to win gold but he had never fought Dre.

Both Dre and Virgil maintain this was “not by chance but by design,” and not only was it God’s will but also strategy. Virgil recalls during the run-up to the Olympics that every boxing coach he talked to told him that Dre had to go to middleweight, where “maybe he could medal.” Virgil says he intentionally kept Andre out of the Pan Am games, and the Worlds, where he would have faced international competition at a top level. “I was branded a fool . . . even my wife told me I was ‘messing with Andre’s career.’”

Virgil had a plan. “I believed that if they’ve never seen him, if they can’t game plan for him, they can’t beat him in four two-minute rounds. There’s just too much going on.” Speed kills, and in amateur boxing, which focuses on point scoring, Dre’s speed gave him an insidious advantage. The weight differences, which might have told over a longer, more punishing professional fight, weren’t as crushing in the shorter amateur fights.

Dre remembers entering the arena, the enormity of the event all around him. The United States had just invaded Iraq and was seen as a power-hungry aggressor, and here on the world stage the boos were raucous, the disapproval given vent. The athletes had been prepped. They knew the boos were coming “and I didn’t take it personal,” Dre said. “But it was an eye-opener, that this is a big world stage. Any time the U.S. fans tried to get rowdy, they’d be booed down by the crowd, instantly. It was almost laughable.” Dre stood under the wash of boos and shook it off like water off a duck. When he entered the ring he couldn’t hear them, his focus was so complete. He went out and did his thing and blitzkrieged the first fighter he faced, winning through to the next bracket. He would face Makarenko in the quarterfinals.

The next day, Dre had to ride the same bus as Makarenko to the fight, and he can remember Makarenko smirking at him, laughing at him with a friend. Dre was dismissed as too small, too inexperienced for this world stage. For Dre, it was David and Goliath. “I would see those guys smirking at me, and I was reminded of when Goliath laughed at David and asked him, ‘Who are you to come and fight me? Am I a dog?’ and that fired David up.”

Dre fought the fight of his life. He used his speed, bounding in and out from the much taller, longer fighter. Dre put it on him. Of the fight, Virgil muses that Makarenko “could win—but not in that time, he wasn’t prepared to.” Dre dominated the Russian, 23-16.

“That disrupted the whole thinking of all the trainers,” Virgil recalls with a smile. “Here you got Makarenko who hasn’t lost in five years. He’s beaten every fighter in the division and so has the fighter from Belarus—but Makarenko always beat him by eight or nine points. What did this do to Magomed, the Belarus fighter?”

Virgil chuckles, “That was the best feeling, knowing what we’d done to the division.” He remembers going back to the house he was staying at in Greece, on the beach, and listening to the waves crash and smelling the jasmine and lavender through his window and feeling exhilarated. “It was a great moment for me as a coach. We forced the entire division, all this world-class talent, to rethink its strategy.”

But Dre was exhausted, emotionally. He’d burned out his adrenaline, he used up his tank to beat Makarenko. Dre drew on his faith. He took strength from it when he couldn’t imagine he had any left and went out and won the semifinal in a hard fight against a tough guy from Uzbekistan. “For that fight, I knew it would be ugly, because Dre was so emotionally spent, so I said to him, ‘Just go fight the guy and win, he has to stop you from doing what you do. Just win and it will recharge you.’”

Then the final, the gold medal match, against the Belarussian, against a fighter who had served as a gatekeeper to the best fighter in the division. Dre talks about the necessity of changing plans in a fight. “What I had done to Makarenko wasn’t working as well, the getting in and out. He was timing me. I’d go back to the corner between rounds and be a point down, or a point up. In the third I made an adjustment and started to really put pressure on him, using my speed up close, and he went downhill, he got winded. He was in his comfort zone out there picking me off, and I pushed him out of it.”

The international crowd had stopped booing Andre and cheered him. The
Rocky
cycle was complete.

 

Dre’s faith continues to be his bedrock, his source of strength. “It’s everything,” he says, “and it’s not just faith in faith. I have faith in Jesus Christ. This game, boxing, is so brutal—mentally, physically, financially—that me and Virg always joke we wouldn’t dare be in this game without God. But it’s the truth.”

When Dre has a fight, he goes into camp, moving in with Virgil. He has a lovely wife and two children he misses badly, but camp has to be all about training—it is a purely selfish place. The fighter has to be focused on himself. This is the worst part of boxing for Dre. “Being away from my family my heart aches every day. But I use it for motivation. When I run sprints on these hills, if I slow down, I think of them. This is how I make my living, and that, coupled with faith, helps me out. I know God has called me to do this, I know God has called me here for a reason. It’s a platform to where I can put God’s voice on a worldwide stage.”

I interviewed Dre after we both worked out, and he stretched and I sat there with my tape recorder, growing cold. He still has some of that boy in him, even as he relaxes into a man. He’s only twenty-four but he’s been through a lot. His face has that strange combination of youth and wisdom. There’s some of that eternal kid of the professional athlete, who’s so specialized that he may not function well in other arenas, but on the other hand he’s an experienced father, and Dre’s been in the deepest waters an amateur fighter can be in.

“If God has brought you to it, he’ll see you through it.” He smiles at the stock phrase, but to him it’s not stock.

“Although God has given me the power to do what I do, I have to get out there and do it. It doesn’t just fall out of the sky. You have to make your destiny happen. After I won the gold medal, I saw God had given me the power to do this. God is
real,
it’s not faith in faith. When I have bad days, when I’m tired and worn down, I can take strength from God and I can come in here and have the best day I had all week. I need God’s strength, his divine enablement, his
unmerited favor
—that’s what grace is.”

I am reminded of some of the thoughts I’d first had about Dre, about his faith—it’s a way forward for him without ego. If you are so much faster than everybody else, if you can see that power as being
for a reason,
not for your own glory but for something larger than yourself, it must be a great relief. A powerful tool.

 

Hanging around over the next few days I was reminded how quiet and watchful Virgil is as a trainer. He’s watching his fighters without talking to them much, listening to them, analyzing them. Later, at night, we would just talk. He would talk about what he was seeing, what he was looking for. He had no concerns about Dre, but there was still Antonio Johnson back in camp, and Heather Hartman, and Karim Maceo. Virgil’s “adopted” son Cymone Carney-Hunter was a devastating puncher as an amateur, and Virg also had a promising heavyweight named Marlow Dion. I always thought that Virgil would be a good trainer for a heavyweight, being tall, but also because Virgil wouldn’t accept that a heavyweight has to be slow and just powerful. Why can’t a heavyweight have the quick feet of a middleweight?

Virgil talked about the necessity of consistency in training. “You got to be screwed up in a lot of respects to fight anyway—I mean to take it to the pinnacle. To find those reasons, day in and day out. The ability to know that somewhere out there, all those days ahead”—his voice slowed and drawled for emphasis—“hundreds of days, thousands of days. That one day is
yours,
somewhere. You work hard for it, for that one day, then everything changes, and you have to be ready for it.”

Fighters live in preparation for instantaneous flashes, that one brief span of time that will define them for the rest of their lives. That moment when everything they’ve done, everything they will do, and everything they are is evaluated. There’s really nothing like it, nothing with the same level of preparation and risk.

“You can sense the change coming, like with Andre, for him, the day is at hand.” Virgil means that this is Andre’s breakout year, this is the year they come into the limelight. He means fighting and winning titles. “That day you transform from getting to keeping. You have to be prepared for it.”

Virgil talked about the recent Ricky Hatton/Floyd Mayweather fight. He looked at me and said quietly, “I was paying close attention to Ricky Hatton. He had accepted losing—by decision—as a possibility. He knew that was a very real chance. He wanted to lose on his terms, so he fought the way he did. Because Ricky knew he wouldn’t
lose
anything by losing a decision. But getting knocked out, that wasn’t on his script,” and Virgil shows me a flash of that small, ruthless smile. “Ricky didn’t think that could happen, so that’s why it did. You always have to be aware that you could lose. I could get knocked out, or tapped out. Anything is possible in the ring, don’t stop short of anything. You train ninety-nine percent of eventualities in training camp, but missing that one percent could get you knocked out. Your whole camp is serious disillusion.”

Virgil leaned toward me so I could follow. “If you and I were over in Iraq right now, we’re thinking about bullets flying. We’re not thinking, ‘Hey, I might get wounded,’ you see? You can get
killed
. And you react as such.”

Virgil continued, leaning back. “That’s the one thing that intrigued me about
The Book of Five Rings
: there was no trophy. It was understood there was a winner and a dead man. Which makes my approach to training totally different if I’m going to die. It’s impossible for you to train the same way, I don’t care how much you practice, I don’t care how sharp your sword is or what famous smith made it. If you go into a sword fight for points, you’ll never obtain what I’m obtaining with a dull sword against somebody that’s gonna die.”

I thought about that, about how my own training had always been compromised by a lack of sincerity, a lack of life-or-death intensity. I had been wasting Virgil’s time when I trained with him, and he had seen it and treated me accordingly. He’d done the best he could with me, without overly investing his time, because it was obvious that I wasn’t going to win titles.

Virgil continued on his riff. “When I think about Hatton, that’s what I think about. He didn’t have respect for his opponent. He never thought about Floyd knocking out thirty other guys, and Floyd knew this, he had it all together in his mind. This isn’t the best fighter, the best boxer. This is a person who has it all in
perspective
and he reacts accordingly.”

Successful professional fighters are the ones who achieve perspective at an early age.

Virgil smiled. “If I tell you my intent is to kill you in the ring, I’ll get labeled all sorts of things. But that’s my intent, within the rules.”

This is a serious business, and you have to recognize the underlying truth that fighting is a “hurt business,” as Mike Tyson, the poet laureate of rage, once said.

Virgil and I kept talking, and he moved on to Andre and his last fight in St. Lucia, where the promoter, surprised, said, “I never realized that this kid was
mean
.”