Million Dollar Baby (30 page)

W
ORKING WITH THE
big guys takes training to a level that can break your back and your heart. The trick is to get them slick and looking pretty—pretty because the pretty fighter usually makes more money than the grunt fighting with his face.

Because of the damage that can be done with one shot, heavies in particular must be cautious. So you work on the geometry of the game—angles and distance and how to get in and out of range with the least possible effort. The big fellows are too heavy to waste energy.

Fighters can drive you crazy, especially when they lose concentration during a fight. They go back to bad habits, or they are suddenly unable to follow instructions in the corner. Felix Trinidad, the former welter and current junior middleweight champ, most certainly listens to his father-trainer, Felix Sr., who has been known to slap him in the face between rounds. Then Felix Jr. goes out and executes. But who’s going to slap a heavyweight, son or no son?

Pressure, pain and exhaustion still cause many fighters to make fundamental mistakes—or, worse, to close down and go brain-dead on you. That’s when the trainer has to come through for his fighter. The fighter supplies the sweat, the chin, the will and the brain. The trainer must get his fighter to learn, to remember, to think as coldly as an executioner when the bell rings.

Working with the big guys of the game makes a trainer’s job harder. How do you tell someone supercharged with testosterone to use his mind instead of his 60-pound dick? How do you teach a heavyweight that it isn’t the man with the most muscle who wins, or the fastest feet, but the one who gets there first with deadly force? Because heavyweights have huge upper-body strength, they tend to work from the waist up, to throw arm punches. George Foreman did that, but big George was so strong he got away with it—besides, he seldom missed. But lesser heavies have to work from the waist down, as well—to get their asses behind their shots. They must learn that a thousand things must take place before a good punch can land, and those things begin on the floor, with balance. Did you know that a good left jab begins with the right big toe?

After they win a few fights, especially by knockout, heavies are liable to become hardheads on you. They’ll try to control the training process, and balk at learning what they need to do to reach the next level. Once they make a few grand, they get prone to laziness and they love to chase poon, of which there is plenty whenever there is evidence of heavyweight green.
Why shouldn’t I run things?
the heavy’s eyes demand. He doesn’t understand that he cannot be the horse and the jockey at the same time.
How could anyone as big and handsome and powerful and smart as me be wrong about anything?

When that happens, your fighter is already halfway to the gutter. You may have to cut him loose.

Few fight fans ever see the inside of fight gyms. Yo, I don’t get the deal with these big bums!

Think money.

First, there aren’t that many heavyweights going into the gym. Most big athletes go into team sports—more gain, less pain, even if they have to play 150 games a year or more, and suffer the major surgeries that go with them. Beginning fighters? Some of the more talented think they should get big paydays from the day they walk into the gym. When they don’t, they fall away, and you know they were never after what all great fighters seek—respect.

The heavyweights especially see themselves as first-round draft picks out of Big Money U. Seldom do they understand they need to be hungry fighters before they can become championship fighters. They have to survive the many layers of work and hurt that the sweet science demands. Obviously, there are fewer white heavies than black heavies, and the whites can be even goofier regarding big, fast money. Some spout off that because they are white, as in white hope, they should get easy fights up to and including the one for the title. These are the heavies, black as well as white, who soon learn they don’t have the tit or the brains for the game.

Though heavies may appear much the same, they are as different as can be in mental stability, manners, warrior mentality, athletic ability, desire, power, chin and heart. Compare Mike Tyson and “Neon” Leon Spinks with Joe Louis and Jack Dempsey. Compare Rocky Marciano and Evander Holyfield. Getting the heavies into shape is one problem. But keeping them in shape is an even bigger one, for they have bottomless pits for stomachs. Some think that they can lay off for eight months or more and then get ready for the next fight in four weeks. Forget that. You work to keep them in at least decent shape all the time—but not in punishing top shape, the kind that you want to peak just before a fight. A fighter would go raving mad if he had to live at that peak longer than a few days, with apprehension and hunger eating him alive through that endless wait before the first bell. The job of molding a human being—whose primal instinct is flight before fight—into a fighting machine that meets danger instead of fleeing from it is as complex and delicate as ballet, as punishing as driving a jackhammer into a wall of stone. Fighting is easy, training is hard.

People ask about balls. Does it take balls to be a fighter? Yes, but in ways most men can’t conceive of. It takes balls to train, to put on that cup, to climb through the ropes, to stand virtually naked before the world. It takes balls to shove off that right toe with “evil intent,” to quote Tyson. But once a fighter is in shape, once the mechanics are imprinted to the bone, the rest is mind. If I had to choose between a brute with a snarl and a coward with brains, I’d take the coward every time.

Then there’s the thump factor. First of all, when a heavy moves, his trainer must move with him—in the ring, on the hardwood or around the big bag. You’re there. You’re there to guide him, and to stay on his ass to keep him from dogging it. All fighters will dog it after they’ve been in the game awhile, but heavies can be the worst. They’ve got all that weight to transport, and, being human, they look for a place to hide. Money will usually stimulate them into action. But there is always more training than fighting, and the faith and fever it takes to be a champ will drop below 98.6 quickly unless your boy eats and sleeps fight. Which is where the mitts come in.

The big bag they can fake if you don’t stay on them, but not with a trainer with mitts, calling for combination after combination, like a wire jock. Keeps them on their toes. Both of you know when a punch has been thrown correctly—not only does the thump bang through you, but you hear the crack of a pistol shot, leather smacking leather with thousands of pounds of force.

So for the trainer, the mitts mean catching punches thrown by a 6’5” monster, punches with enough force to drop a horse. But even a 115-pound bantamweight can make you squint. And the trainer takes this punishment round after round, day after day, the thump moving through him like a six-pack of nine millimeters. Being an old man, I can’t work the mitts as much as I once did, unless it’s with smaller fighters, or when I’m teaching moves and mechanics, or for a short stretch leading up to a given date. Part of the payoff for all that work is something sweet as strawberry pie. It’s when fighters stop acting like bulls at a watering hole, looking for something to gore. It’s when they begin to accept that they have to do it wrong for a long time before they get it right, when suddenly they discover how to use their feet instead of their gloves to control an opponent, how they smile like shy little boys when they see that their every action has become both offensive and defensive, and that they suddenly have the ability to beat a man with their thoughts as well as with their fists.

Getting a boy ready for a specific fight on a given night is more intense still. After a session with the mitts, my fingers will curl into the palms of my hands for an hour or so. It’s like having arthritis, and driving home on the freeway becomes interesting. The muscles in the middle of my back squeeze my shoulders up around my ears. I have piano wire holding my chest and ribs together. I am heading home with one thing on my mind—time in the prone position. When you get down to it, being a trainer is volunteering to be a cripple.

After surviving all of the above, you live with the knowledge that you might work years with a heavy only to have him quit altogether—or leave you for somebody who is dangling wads of money. But a good heavy has to win only 25 fights, maybe less, to get a shot at the title. If he wins that, he’s earning millions, even if he defends his title only once. The payoff can be enormous if he defends successfully. And when the champ gets a $10 million payday, the trainer gets 10 percent off the top—a million-dollar bill to stick in his wallet. That can make you forget your crippled back and hands. Then again, some fighters dump their original trainers once they win a title and then pay the next trainer pennies on the dollar. The next guy will take it, because it has dropped into his lap—and because he figures he, too, will be dumped down the line.

Fighters are usually portrayed as bovine victims of a dreadful game, but it ain’t necessarily so. Of course, the downside for the fighter can be worse. That’s when your heart goes out to him, as you watch helplessly while he takes punches to the head that can hack permanently into his memory. And your gut will turn on you one day, when you see your boy’s eyes wander glassily as he tries to find a word that no longer is in his vocabulary. You feel disgust at yourself, but you also love your fighter for having the heart to roll the dice of his life on a dream; and you understand he may well have nothing but his life to roll, and maybe you gave him the only shot he’ll ever have. That’s why a fighter will love his trainer for his whole life, will make of him the daddy he never knew. Yet the real lure, when you love the fights with everything that’s left of your patched-up heart, is being part of a world where the dues are so high that once paid, they can take you to the Mount Everest of the squared circle, to that highest of places where fire and ice are one, where only the biggest and best can play.

Every trainer knows the odds against winning a heavyweight championship are a gazillion to one. So why do I risk the years, why do I take shots that stun my heart? Why am I part of the blood? B.B. King sings the answer for me:
I got a bad case of love.

T
HIRTY YEARS AND NO
champ, but the bell still keeps ringing in the dream I have every morning. It wakes me at 5:30, and I get up groggy and holding my head. You got to have the right boy to make a champion. But if you catch a break and get a kid who’s a champion outside the ring same as inside, when you got what I call a holy man, one who will sacrifice himself, then what you got is happy work and you ain’t tired all the time.

Then Ernie Pescetti came along. I watched him come up as an amateur. Good-looking boy, Ernie, strong, and white. His daddy’s still a stonemason back in Albany. Ernie is one of those light-skinned north Italian boys, straw-blond hair and blue eyes. He gets hit, or he slides along the ropes with his back, his skin turns red and streaky. Brothers in the gym saw that and started calling him Peachy, Peachy Pescetti. Ernie liked the name Peachy, specially when he put the brothers on their ass.

Ernie turned pro and for a while did all right because he’s a big banger. But the trouble is, he got no class. You never saw a stronger fighter at 147, but every punch is a hard punch, and you always know what’s coming. Just the same, he won his first 15 fights, 11 by KO. People were talking about him, watching him come along, and I said good for him. Except nobody in his corner had bothered to tell him that the guys in the other corner get better the more you move up in class. And that he best have more to his game than just moving in behind that big wide left hook of his.

Seemed for a while like things was going dead right, but then the worst thing that can happen to a L.A. fighter happened to Ernie. It ain’t booze, or that
shit,
or the ladies. The worst thing in Los Angeles is Hollywood. All of a sudden Ernie’s hanging with the Italian Hollywood tough guys, movie heroes who act like fighters and fight like actors. This actor Vinnie Vincenzo gets Ernie some little TV walk-ons and a movie bit part as a washed-up pug who cries.

They show him off at parties, some bitch wants to touch the slick skin around his eyes. Everybody’s a fight fan all of a sudden, everybody’s telling Ernie he’s better than any of the old-time Italian fighters. Better than Graziano, better than Basilio, imagine. Ernie’s dick is hard. Next thing, he’s sticking that shit up his nose and driving a silver BMW with the top down.

Word in the gym is that he’s into booze more than he’s into that shit, that starting at five in the afternoon he’s doing double peppered shooters of ice-cold 100-proof Stolichnaya. He’s dancing and screwing and sweating all night, sleeping till noon, thinks he don’t need roadwork, thinks he’s King Kong. Old-time fighters, some of them, could stay in shape by fighting every week or so. Today’s guys don’t fight half what the old guys did. But they fight faster, they throw more punches. So conditioning today is even more important than before.

Ernie lost three of his next four fights, the last two by KO. Worse than KO, the last one. He turned his back to his opponent, which is to quit, which means he’s gone dog, and now the ref has to stop it automatic.

Once Ernie found out it ain’t no fun when the rabbit’s got the gun, he saw he wasn’t as good as he thought he was. He didn’t want to fight no more—it’s a common thing. The Italians don’t take his calls no more. And now the bank comes for the car. He’s hurting for money, but the only guys who want to fight him are ones who are 30 and 2 and looking for a stepping-stone or a tune-up fight for a title shot. Forget shooters of Stolichnaya, now Ernie’s stumbling around on half-pints of supermarket vodka.

After that, I didn’t think about Ernie. Besides, fighters change from week to week. It’s us trainers who are always the same. But every so often I hear something, Somebody says Ernie’s begging at off-ramps, somebody else says he’s a street drunk wearing one shoe and got puke down the front of him. Stories keep getting worse about Ernie, and then somebody says that he’s in some high-ticket rehab center in Palm Springs. For two years, nobody hears nothing. Then one day, I see Ernie sticking his nose in the gym. He’s all cleaned up, nice clothes, polite. To his credit, word was that he’s going to AA and he’s got a job driving a delivery truck,