I get knocked down but I get up again (spoiler)
Back in the ring to take another swing
It’s the last round of this three-part pugilism series. Never fear, faint-hearts: next week we’ll depart from the biffo and get back onto more genteel topics.
“This sort of humiliation had been my worst fear imaginable, but the joyous baying of the throng only registers abstractly…”
Of course you can just train, with no pressure to humiliate yourself in front of a crowd. My reason for aiming for a fight was basically this: If you can withstand this, you can withstand anything.
Actually, there’s a long tradition of journalists who have wondered if they had it in them to swap spin for the ring. They follow George Plimpton, founder of The Paris Review, who faced off with the longest reigning World Light Heavyweight Champion Archie Moore for his 1977 book Shadow Box.
In Tapped Out, Matthew Polly recalls idly pitching ideas to his editor for the next book: maybe something on mysticism, or the influence of Japanese manga on American comics, or MMA… “That’s it!’ his editor interrupted, eyes gleaming. ‘You’re like all the guys who will buy this book. Out-of-shape ex-athletes who dream about competing again one last time.”
Josh Rosenblatt had long been a professional observer of the Octagon, before deciding to step inside. “I may finally find out who I am by simply walking into a cage,” he wrote in Why We Fight. “Am I a coward? A con man? A savage? A sadist? A technician? An artist? A brute? An intellectual? A sociopath? A humanitarian? The answer will be written all over me as soon as the bell rings.”
In December 2020, I’m invited to have a livestreamed showcase fight in a night put on by Warriors Way.
I’ve been sparring with some seasoned fighters who have volunteered to kick my arse, and I’m pleased to see I hold my own. We work at it right until the day before the fight. Ordinarily you’d have up to a week’s rest before a fight, but as nobody has been able to spar for four months, there’s little choice. Sparring at 100 per cent feels like an epiphany – like taking flight for the first time. The adrenaline and apprehension as you duck under the ropes dissipates when the buzzer sounds, and competition flares in the brain as you advance. A curious crowd inevitably gathers, comprised of whatever class is filing in, watching as they wrap their hands. There’s the primal, powerful feeling of seeing your sparring partner tire quicker than you; vampiric, you feast on their energy the moment they show any weakness. Or the elation is derived from just surviving a round in which you were outwitted and overwhelmed, and copped some good ones. Either way, you’re on a high for the rest of the day.
Two weeks before fight night, I notice electrical tendrils sparking my toes every time the word ‘livestreamed’ flickers across my frontal lobe. ‘You’re excited,’ says Joanne La, a pro-fighter whose all-female organisation, JS Muay Thai, provided daily Zoom classes throughout lockdown. ‘It’s the same feeling as nervousness,’ she emphasises, a believer in the power of positive thought, ‘but you’re excited.’
If this is true, excitement keeps finding new ways to infiltrate my body, its ghostly fists rattling my bowels like Jacob Marley and his chains.
Then, the week before, a change settles upon me. I realise that everything I’m feeling should be embraced as part of the experience. Being on an actual fight card this time, albeit third from the bottom, I can appreciate the idea of legacy, knowing that everyone that has gone before me has felt all the things I’m feeling. What’s more, I realise that no matter what the outcome, I’ve earned my place on the line-up.
On the day of the fight, a storm looms heavy into late afternoon. I feel exhausted and disconnected, like I’m looking at the world through the wrong end of a telescope, and I can’t be sure if the symptoms are psychosomatic or real.
Proponents of polyvagal theory would believe that my dorsal-vagal system has decided that if I was fully present I would be overwhelmed, threatening my chance of survival, so a level of depersonalisation, or even dissociation is induced.
Nick’s idea of a pep talk is to forward me a video of someone prolapsing their sphincter, which he thinks I might find interesting. But when he and I arrive at Hammers for the weigh-in, the storm outside breaks and the familiar surroundings of heavy bags and mats ground me. My energy returns in a rush, and I can’t wait to get in the ring.
We’re directed to an upstairs area allotted to the red-corner fighters. I’d looked up my blue-corner opponent, Clara, on Instagram earlier and found only her work page, featuring righteous hand-tooled heavy metal and leather goods. I’d definitely like her … but I can’t right now.
Nick wraps my hands, then holds up his own so that I can snap out jabs, crosses and hooks. He braces his biceps for kicks and pulls me in for clinches. I can tell he’s being careful to keep his demeanour jokey and relaxed, and he’s unusually tolerant, letting me call the time of each drill.
‘Give me your gum,’ says Nick, holding out a hand. My name has been called.
I’m directed to an X gaffer-taped on the ground, to shadow- box for the video cameras pointing at me from the ring. I conclude by smashing my gloves together aggressively, and stride up, ducking through the middle ropes. That seems a trifle obnoxious later, when I watch the footage and realise that my opponent, Clara, has followed the Thai tradition of bowing respectfully before lifting the bottom rope – considered the appropriate way for a woman to enter – and bowing four more times in the ring, to each of the four sides.
When the first bell rings, Clara delivers a jab and a fast low-kick combo, and it’s on. I immediately feel as though I’m dominating the round, in part because I only barely register her strikes. Straight away I’ve entered what in BDSM par- lance is called the subspace – the zone into which submissives enter when pain is inflicted and they are flooded with adrena-line, endocannabinoids and opioid peptides. It frees me to think aggressively. Clara tries to angle out and I block her path, with Nick relaying instructions in a guttural tone like I’m a sheepdog: ‘THAT’S IT, CUT HER OFF.’
After the first round I head back to my corner, confident that I’ve dominated enough already to have scored a win. I lounge on the ropes and listen to Nick, kind of. This is going amazingly. I think about all the fighters I’ve interviewed.
I’m Orion Starr, warning: This is what lethal looks like!
I’m Eugene S. Robinson, scoffing: You can’t lose if you don’t quit!
I’m Christine Ferea, bragging: You ain’t ready for me!
Wow, I’m feeling good.
But the second round is tougher. Whatever Clara’s coach said to her, she listened, and I’m unable to back her up to the ropes. We fire legs and fists in the middle, even-stevens.
The judges call a split decision, a draw. What a bummer – this is neither a glorious victory nor a heroic failure, and I can’t quite believe it, because the whole world knows I won. I try to control my face as the referee holds both our wrists aloft, but watching the footage later, I see my eyebrow shoot up in the universal language of ‘Pardon?’
Still, I’m on a righteous high. Thankfully I can’t hear the concluding remarks of the commentators: ‘I just want to mention that Jenny’s forty-five … so it just goes to show that any time is the right time to start when it comes to training and it comes to fighting,’ they chuckle, ribbing each other about their own inevitable trudge towards my age.
After I’ve changed, Nick and I go out to a nearby Korean barbeque restaurant to decompress. I can’t eat, but I plough through wine, drinking for the first time in two weeks. I just assume this is the right thing to do, even though I don’t really feel like alcohol. Nick indulges my boisterous assessment of the fight; now is not a time for serious analysis.
Later, back at home and thoroughly drunk, I message my parents to let them know that I was robbed. Robbed! Dad tells me I sound like Trump. A friend and I sit on the sofa with a bottle of wine and watch the video of the fight, and my high wears off. ‘It looks pretty even to me,’ my faithless friend says.
I crane forwards to my laptop and observe the skill with which Clara waits out my flurries and then counters, delivering technically proficient kicks at odds with my street-brawler style.
We replay the footage a few times and I realise that what I could see in the ring – the doubt and fatigue in Clara’s face as I advanced – is not what the judges were looking at. I think back guiltily to my conversation with her after the fight, when we grasped each other’s arms with shining eyes and congratulated each other on specific kicks. I’d secretly been thinking it was cheeky that she only singled out a couple of them for commendation.
A few days later, I’m battling the ever-encroaching sense of shame again: How could I have thought that I did so well? What must the people I messaged afterwards think of my obnoxious blustering? Could I not have worn my hair in bouncy braids like Clara? That’s the thing about learning something that demands you reveal your true nature: there’s always this rapid seesawing between triumph and humiliation. But then a lesson emerges, as it should, like a green shoot poking through shit. The lesson is to not mistake naked aggression for victory.
Although, you know, I enjoyed the naked aggression. Because it felt fucking great. And it cannot be denied that there is a certain breed of fighter who is an obnoxious arsehole – even if they subsequently evolve beyond this – and that type is necessary to the ecosystem and equilibrium of the sport. As Maximus Decimus Meridius, played by the ever-humble Russell Crowe, put it in Gladiator: are you not entertained?
“Here in the holding pen, each fighter slumps bucktoothed and irrelevant in their mouthguard, as promoters, match-makers and trainers gesticulate over them. It’s all ‘your boy’, ‘your girl’, like the fighter is a prize bull at best, a toddler at worst…”
My final fight is under the grand chandeliers of the Melbourne Pavilion. My original opponent pulled out days earlier and in the rush I’ve been matched with someone wildly the wrong weight. Backstage, Nick is castigated for it, even though it’s the matcher who fucked it up – plus I lost four kilos to come in under the weight that I was given. The unfairness of it messes with my mojo. My opponent is smaller than me. If I win, it’s a hollow victory, if I lose, it’s doubly embarrassing. Her coach takes advantage of our ‘mistake’ to change the rules from Muay Thai to kickboxing, which means no knees or elbows.
‘Don’t worry about it. You’re doing this for you,’ Nick reminds me with forced cheer, giving my shoulders an encouraging little shake and stretching his mouth into a jolly smile. He’s not happy either, but we’ve got away lightly. Someone else from my gym doesn’t find out till weigh-in, after he’s starved and dehydrated himself, that his opponent pulled out days earlier. I guess they don’t call this ‘amateur’ for nothing.
I just want to get in the ring. I’ve been working up to this moment for two years, but curiously, I’m disengaged from the screaming of the crowd, which is by now quite revved up after twenty bouts of boxing, seven of kickboxing, and an unknown quantity of beer. I try not to think about how I looked at my opponent’s Instagram earlier and saw that all her gym mates had written encouraging things like “DESTROY HER!” and “I FEEL SORRY FOR HER!”
As I walk out, vaguely, the fact registers that the deeply creepy Benny Mardones song Into the Night has been assigned to me: ‘She’s just sixteen years old…’ – surely a pisstake from the promoter when I must be the oldest fighter here – and above that I hear a lone cheer from a friend in the peanut gallery.
As soon as the bell sounds, my opponent and I go at it hammer, tongs and kitchen sink. At one point in the third round, there’s a boisterous crowd response when I’m punched in the face and fall onto my arse on the canvas. This sort of humiliation had been my worst fear imaginable, but the joyous baying of the throng only registers abstractly. There’s a job to do, and my sole focus is on bouncing back up for an eight count – and then making her pay. So if that was the biggest shame-job I could dream up, the fear has been declawed.
Immediately after the fight I’m on an almighty high, despite getting the silver medal. There are photos, hugs and congratulations, then a sprint for last orders. I crash an hour later, halfway through my cocktail and dinner… and the comedown persists for a week. It’s not because I didn’t win, or because of the bruises and the headache. It’s because I did the thing I set out to do, and now it is done.
I could carry on with the fighting, but now that all this intense focus has reached its zenith, my interest has flicked off like a switch. But then, if not a ‘fighter’ – the identity I’ve poured myself into, full-time – then who even am I anymore? I take a week off training, having not spent more than two consecutive days away from my gloves in the past few years. It feels weird and wrong, with the added danger that without a mission into which to channel my restlessness, I’m liable to make poor life choices. I turn to a closed group of athletes on Facebook. Did anyone else abruptly switch sports upon reaching a goal? Some say yes, but many more advise me to cool my jets. This malaise is normal. This sport is a rollercoaster.
A week after the fight, I head to the gym, to ponder the issue while in motion.
After a shy sizing up of the space by shadow-boxing a few rounds, I launch myself at the punching bag. Over and over again, I take ridiculous run-ups: flying knees, spinning hook kicks, Superman punches; all the things I’m usually told not to do, because when training for a fight it’s wiser to hammer the kinks out of the basics. After ninety minutes I feel the familiar brace of chemicals tear through me, as refreshing as a cool change. Today is Good Friday, and thankfully there’s nobody here to see what a goofy time I’m having, grinning to the grandiose soundtrack in my headphones.
When I pack up my bag, I bundle in the heavy skipping rope that I didn’t get around to using. Maybe next time I’ll start with three rounds of that. And then focus on building up the arms, just in case I need to strengthen my guard against an opponent in the future. Can’t eat another punch like that last one. There’s still a notebook in the bag’s front pocket in which I can lodge my reps and sets. Renegade rows. Skullcrushers. Pulldowns. These faithful friends that keep me in line.
Over the days, if I keep coming back, this gale-force mood will intensify into something verging on mania, until there’s a necessary crash and the cycle begins again.
Like a dog chasing its own tail, it may not be rational, but it never gets dull.
