Million Dollar Baby (21 page)

The spring air was clear of smog, and Mac and Puddin sat at the outdoor counter because the dining room was full. Latinos and blacks kept the place crowded. It was located just off the corner of Vernon and Compton on the southeast side of Los Angeles, a crossover area populated by blacks and Latinos. Though gang members sometimes congregated on the corner, there was an armed truce between them in and around the café. The señora never had fights in her place, or trouble with gangs or her black neighbors. She was too nice and the food was too good.

It was two weeks after Puddin’s win at the nationals. He needed a rest, but soon it would be time to get back into the gym. To be in top shape for Barcelona, he needed to be in good shape when he got to the U.S. training camp in Colorado Springs. There he would be taken over and supervised by Olympic trainers. This was the part of their triumph that hurt, because Mac wouldn’t be allowed to work with Puddin in camp, or to be in Puddin’s corner in Spain. It was the way it was done. It was at this point that Olympic trainers, acting as front men for wealthy backers, sometimes stole fighters from the trainers who got the boys to the Olympics. But no matter what it cost, Mac would be sitting ringside for Puddin’s fights, where he’d be shouting up instructions. It would be Mac’s voice that Puddin heard over all others, and nobody could do a thing about it.

Mac thought about Puddin’s use of the word
give.
“First of all, nobody gives you anything. Backers pay for the right and the privilege to represent you, understand? It’s business. Forget
give.
”

“Forget give,” said Puddin.

“But either way, it’s too soon to talk about money,” said Mac, “and it ain’t good to count your chickens before they peck their way outta the shell, right?”

“Right,” said Puddin. “But how much?”

“The way you bang, and with you on your way to being a big heavyweight, you could get a downstroke of a hundred grand, maybe more, plus a minimum guarantee of a hundred thousand dollars for each of your first twenty fights, something like that, as long as you win all of them. You don’t win, you get squat. Could be they pay more, who knows? But don’t bank on it. If you win pretty, and if you keep on keeping on. Once you fight for and win the heavyweight title of the world, now you’re talking ten million dollars a fight.”

“First ten million go to my mama.”

“But all this is conversation, because you got to win big in Barcelona.”

“I win and I win pretty, like you say. And you be my trainer all the way, Mac. Whoever want me, they take you wit me or I don’t sign up. Like my mama say, you my daddy in boxing.”

There’s a saying in boxing: Don’t forget the people you meet on the way up, because they’re the same ones you’ll meet on the way down. To that Mac always added: First your legs go, and then your money, and then your friends.

But many a promising fighter would dump his trainer of five or six years for sweet talk about big money from a stranger. Sometimes it worked out. Often it did not, and then the fighter had no one. But Puddin didn’t lie, and Mac knew Puddin wouldn’t dump him. And neither would Puddin’s mother, a beautiful six-foot, two-hundred-pound Hershey-colored lady with short natural hair, with lines and flat planes to her suffering proud face that made her look like the mother of Africa.

It was Willa who had come to Mac for help. He made monthly bulk-food donations to her parish, St. Columcille’s, at Sixty-fourth and Main, where Mac had gone to grammar school. It was an Irish parish from the twenties through the forties, the blue-collar Micks digging ditches and working the tire and steel factories on the east side of Los Angeles. Or collecting garbage and working the slaughterhouses, anything during the Great Depression to feed their kids. What is now Chinatown is where the bust-out Irish working the railroads first lived. Then came the Italians and the Chinese. Boyle Heights, now Mexican, was Irish first, then followed by Jews. Now St. Columcille’s served blacks and Latinos, most of them poor, and Mac would drop off sacks of beans, rice, flour, sugar. Cooking oil and laundry soap, and cases of apple and pineapple juice. And Famous Amos chocolate-chip cookies for the kids. Cases of hard candy at Christmas.

Being white, Mac now stood out in his old neighborhood. It was after one of his deliveries in 1990 that he was boxed in by three carloads of teenaged black boys. They were high on Olde English 800 malt liquor, yelling
honky
and
whitey
and
old man redneck muhfuh.
Most were laughing, and he figured they were just trying to scare him. When he gave them a peek of his .38 Police Special, they sped off. If they’d been hard-core gangbangers, Mac knew that a six-shot revolver wouldn’t get the job done had they been out to kill him. Even if six rounds was enough, there was still the problem of being white and of getting out of the neighborhood alive. The next day he bought his nine-millimeter Glock 17, which he packed on the left side of his belly, inside his belt. As an ex-cop in good standing, he had a license to carry a concealed weapon, a CWP. But if someone got to him first, say from a distance or from behind, it wouldn’t matter if he had a hand grenade. But the Glock was tits, and if he saw trouble coming, it gave him a total of eighteen hollow-point rounds to work with—seventeen in the clip, one in the chamber. He hoped he’d never have to use the gun, but if some fool of whatever color was coming to kill him, he’d pop a cap in his ass in a heartbeat. Let the courts sort it out.

Mac had been about to leave after one of his deliveries to St. Columcille’s when Mrs. Pye approached him near the kitchen. “Mist McGee, sir, I don’t mean to bother you none, but I got me a boy wantsa be a fighter awful bad.”

“How old is he?”

“He fourteen, but he big.”

“Ma’am, I don’t train amateurs anymore.”

It had taken all Willa’s courage to ask, so she was stunned by Mac’s answer. “Why not?” she had asked, hope draining from her eyes.

“Most boys aren’t serious, and they drop out on you the first time they see their own blood. So it’s mostly a waste of time,” Mac had said, “and with my white hair, time isn’t something I got a lot of. Besides, like in the pros, there’s politics in the amateurs, and after all the work you put in, politics takes the fun out of it. In the pros, at least, there’s money to be made.”

“Don’t know about politics, but my boy don’t quit, uh-uh.”

“Who told you about me being in the fights?”

“Father Carey did.”

Mac exhaled. “What makes you think your boy wants to box?”

“He fightin all the time.”

“Who with?”

“Gang boys.”

“That doesn’t mean he wants to be a fighter.”

“It all he talk about, boxin. Follow the TV boxin like it fried chicken. But he don’t know who to see to learn, not no one decent, leastways.”

Mac was getting in deeper than he wanted. He saw Father Carey watching from across the parking lot. Damn priest. “Why does your boy get into fights?”

“Gang boys jump Henry because he don’t want no truck wit no gangs.” She had bitten her lip to steady her voice. “Please, Mist McGee.”

“Call me Mac, okay?”

“All right, Mist Mac.” It wasn’t what Mac had meant, but it’s what she called him from then on. And he called her Mrs. Pye.

“Look, I’d like to help, ma’am, really I would, but I’ve got too many fighters as it is, all pros.”

“My boy gonna die on the streets, Mist Mac. You my hope. He a good boy. He a altar boy, work wit the priest in Latin, too.”

“Jesus,” Mac had said.

That’s how it had begun.

At fourteen, Henry Pye was five feet ten and weighed 155 pounds. He was muscle and bone, and you couldn’t grab fat on him with a vise grip. He had big hands and feet and no hips. His shoulders filled a doorway. He was neat and clean and had close-cropped hair. He was polite and well-spoken. His deep black eyes were soft, shaped like a deer’s, and set in a head with contours so noble that Mac knew he had lucked into something regal the first time he met the boy.

Mac worked with him, pressed him hard, hurt him with work, but the boy had no quit in him. He hit the speed bag and jumped rope as if he’d been born to them, the relentless
wahp-wahp-wahp
of the speeding leather and the steady sizzle of the rope as it smacked the hard wood were signs the kid had the hand-eye coordination and the ability to instantly shift his weight that would be necessary when it came time to hang. Without them, no matter how strong you were, you were TV fodder.

Soon the kid was working the punch mitts so well that old-timers slapped their thighs. It was the speed and power he had in both hands that made people wince, fighters and spectators alike. And his moves—moves that most people and many fighters could never learn, moves that fight guys called slick and sweet and pretty, that got the kid his nickname. After nine fights in the juniors, people were already calling him Puddin, Puddin Pye. When he reached 180 pounds at seventeen, he and Mac had their third goal in mind, the heavyweight championship of the world. Including his wins at the nationals, Puddin had an amateur record of 81 and 7, with 42 knockouts, a kayo ratio virtually unheard of in the amateur ranks. He would have had more wins, but trainers wouldn’t let their boys fight him.

Mac called him his baby boy, loved him like he still loved his own baby boy, Brendan Pat. But Mac showed Puddin no favoritism in the gym, and there was no jealousy among the other fighters in Mac’s stable. The fighter who had a fight coming up sparred first and got the first work on the punch mitts. That was it. The others waited their turn. The one difference was Señora Cabrera’s café.

Puddin’s mother worked from eleven until eight in the evening. She was a cafeteria cook at Jefferson High School, which was near their house, and where Puddin was a B student.

“I try for all A, but after the gym sometime, I eat and go asleep.”

Willa would prepare him a good breakfast, pack him a bag of fruit and healthy snacks to take to school. She also gave him lunch money, but she couldn’t be there to fix supper when he came home from the gym hungry enough to eat the couch. Because Mac didn’t want the kid eating junk food, he began taking him to the Acapulco for seafood. It was a favorite from his days as a cop, and located about a mile from where Willa worked at the school with her sister Daisy. Home was a few blocks away.

In order to get sparring for Puddin, Mac would usually have to take his kid to different gyms in and around Los Angeles. The nearest and most convenient for plain workouts was Sewing Machine. A mile from the Acapulco, it was located off Vernon just east of Alameda, built in the basement of a Puerto Rican clothing manufacturer who had his own stable of fighters. Sewing Machine was decorated like a Puerto Rican nightclub, but it was clean and a serious place to work, despite the blaring Caribbean music. Mac’s problem with it, and why Puddin went there only if it was raining or if Mac was out of town, was that it only attracted Latino fighters weighing 140 pounds or less, which meant there was never any sparring for Puddin at Sewing Machine. When possible, to save himself time on the clogged freeways, Mac would send the kid home on public transportation, and Puddin would eat alone at Señora Cabrera’s, devouring broiled or poached seafood, nothing fried. Shrimp and
totoaba
from the Sea of Cortéz, as much as Puddin wanted, and lean steak twice a week, or chicken and rice, Mexican-style; or
pozole
with chopped raw cabbage and hominy. The señora called him Pudeen, prepared things for the kid that weren’t on the menu. One of the dishes on the menu was Seven Seas Soup, Puddin’s favorite, a huge bowl that contained seven different seafoods. He saved the baby squid till last, rolled them in tortillas and drenched them in salsa. He was the only black that ate squid in her café, and Señora Cabrera loved him for it. She also loved him because he was hungry all the time, and she knew he loved her, knew by the way he smiled as big as the Nile when he came through her door; knew from the expression on his face when he smelled her cooking; knew from the way he’d give her a hug and say,
“Muchas gracias,
Señora Cabrera”; knew when he finished that he’d leave her a dollar tip, which was a lot to him; knew that after he was champion of the world he’d remember back and tell stories about the nice Mexican lady he once knew, about her shrimp
rancheros
or maybe the shrimp
á mojo de ajo
he had at her humble little café. She prayed for him every night.

One of her illegal Mexican customers once told her she loved the black boy more than she loved her own kind.

“You are right,
caballero,”
she said, nodding with a smile at the photograph of Puddin on the wall next to her grandfather.
“Mi muñequito prieto,
my little dark doll, is a
boxeador.”

The illegal raised his chin and eyebrows in understanding and smiled back.

Señora Cabrera’s was nine blocks from Puddin’s house, which was on East Forty-first Street, and Mac always had Puddin walk home from the Acapulco in order to work off his meal. Puddin would call Mac on Mac’s cellular phone as soon as he got home, so Mac would know he was safe. Mac’s deal with Señora Cabrera was that he’d give her two hundred dollars up front. When Puddin had eaten his way through that, she was to call him, and Mac would stop by that day or the next with another two hundred. Mac had also provided Willa and Puddin with cellular phones, so Puddin could call her immediately after a fight, regardless of where she was, when they were fighting out of town. Afterward, she and Daisy would have to walk around the block, couldn’t wait to tell their friends. Mac told Willa to call him if she ever needed anything. Sometimes she’d call for a progress report on Puddin, but since she went to all of his local fights anyway, the calls didn’t last long. Other than information, she never asked Mac for anything, except to pray for her boys.

“Damn!” said Cedric “Cannonball” Lee, speaking quietly to Mac. “You boy got a jab on him like hop on a flea.”

Mac had worked with his pros at Hymn Gym at midday. Now it was afternoon, and he stood on the ring apron outside the ropes of Cannonball’s Not Long Gym. Inside the ring, Puddin continued to fire jabs into the face of a thirty-year-old pro, a light-skinned brother named Malik “Chilly” Tubbs, who carried gang tattoos and would sometimes throw signs to passing cars. Tubbs’s promising career had been interrupted for seven years due to his armed robbery of a Korean liquor store. Some said he was an O.G., an original gangster. Now he was trying for a comeback, and his two wives and their eight children cheered him on from the low bleachers on the far side of Not Long. Their presence only made Malik madder, his nose having turned raspberry red from punishment. When he tried to counter the jab with a looping right-hand, Puddin would pepper him with another double jab, knocking his head back even further, taking his balance and making it impossible to punch with power. As Malik became more and more frustrated, he depended less and less on defense. Instead, he began to fight dirty and to talk trash through his mouthpiece, hoping to jail-talk intimidate Puddin. But Puddin stepped up the pressure and cranked hooks to Malik’s body that made his legs wobble. Malik was heavier than Puddin by eighteen pounds and had built an excellent cruiserweight record of 21-3-0 with 13 knockouts. He was now a full heavyweight; his gloves began to stray below Puddin’s belt line and he tried to head-butt Puddin in the nose, but he was unable to connect solidly. Meanwhile, Puddin continued to kick ass.