LITMIR.BIZ

       THE FIGHT

      It turned out to be a famous night in the history of boxing, all right, although the atmosphere in this world-famous arena was, at first, profoundly disappointing for a girl who had relished the idea of a Saturday off from British football fans. All week, the news hounds in our midst had been telling us that ‘six or seven thousand’ British fans were travelling to New York to support Lennox Lewis, yet it somehow never occurred to me that this was a coded warning to make for the Adirondacks. I never guessed the British fans would bring their usual boorish British-fan manners with them to MSG. But here they were, many in England football shirts, and all in full-throated away-game mode, in an enclosed place of entertainment well past bedtime (the fight didn’t start till after 11 p.m.), chanting that Don King was a ‘fat bastard’ - which was fair enough actually - and also roundly booing everything American in sight.

      I had mixed feelings. These fans were funny, but they were also incredibly depressing. They booed the ringside celebrities; they booed ‘The Star Spangled Banner’; they couldn’t pipe down even for the tribute to the just-deceased American hero Joe DiMaggio. All those old boxing movies had not prepared me for the reality of this particular fight crowd. True, I’d seen scenes of angry fight-goers jeering, whistling and throwing folded programmes, and sometimes even uprooting furniture and trampling defenceless well-dressed women underfoot - but that was usually after the fight, not before. Why such animus towards the inoffensive Paul Simon? Bridge Over Troubled Water was not only an enduring classic album, it included that sensitive song ‘The Boxer’ which we would surely all do well to remember this evening. ‘Why do they hate Donald Trump so much?’ I asked Rob. ‘Do they even know who he is?’ When the presence of Jack Nicholson was announced, however, they stopped booing and gave a big cheer. Perhaps they were scared of him. It was a mystery I never got to the bottom of.

      On the plus side, however, it’s a big arena, holding over 21,000 people, and there was plenty of salt popcorn. Rob and I had seats quite a long way back from the action, but we had taken our binoculars, and there were large screens suspended above the ring. I felt really, really bad about how I’d been planning to murder Rob and dispose of his body, but I won’t go on about it. I was now quite glad he was there. And I have to say, the build-up was horribly prolonged for someone already near to a state of hyperventilation, privately fretting about what might unfold within the next hour. Boxers have been known to die in the ring, you know. They have also died in hospital afterwards, without recovering consciousness. The crowd goes crazy, I was informed, at the first sight of blood. Holyfield was predicting a knockout in the third. Although Joyce Carol Oates insists in her book that boxing is statistically less dangerous than other mainstream sports such as horseracing, motor-racing and American football (and that therefore liberal middle-class hand-wringing about boxing is less straightforward than it looks), it’s still true that boxing is all about efficiently biffing someone on the head, which is the most violent thing you can do to another person without resorting to weaponry (or to crime).

      It’s all to do with how soft the brain is, and how little protection it has inside the brain box. If the boxing authorities could only find a way of packing the fighters’ cranial cavities with little polystyrene balls, or kapok, or feathers - just for the duration of a fight - a lot of squeamishpeople in the wider world would definitely relax more. But no one has ever come up with a suitable material (or indeed, even tried to), so the brain is left to slosh about inside a hard casing, which isn’t such a good idea when organised biffing is going on. Basically, if you carefully place a nice wobbly milk jelly inside a biscuit tin and then kick it against a wall for half an hour, you get a fair idea of what happens to the human brain during a heavyweight fight. A wellaimed blow from a professional heavyweight carries the equivalent force of 10,000 pounds, says Oates - and you can’t help wondering whether boxers themselves are deliberately cushioned from this kind of information.

      As an ersatz sports writer, I loved the drama of all occasions. I never felt it was my job to testify to greatness, as some sportswriters do; it was my job to see how an unwritten story ineluctably formed itself, in front of my very eyes, from quite unpromising basic ingredients - such as a flat rectangle of grass with lines on it and twenty-two men in shorts; or an undulating landscape with flags and sand pits at intervals, and dozens of individual men, dressed in natty knitwear, each with a small white ball and a bag of sticks. Waiting for the start of my first heavyweight fight was a moment of reckoning. The basic ingredients here were a spot-lit ring with ropes, and two very large men wearing padded gloves, with designs on each other’s sense of physical well-being. A heavyweight fight was completely different from all other sporting occasions I’d encountered because this ineluctable drama contained in it the potential for ineluctable tragedy, and this was the first time I’d ever had to address anything quite so serious. As Joyce Carol Oates kept reminding me, this was not a metaphor for something else.

      I still wished they would get on with it, though. Even when the fighters finally made their appearance in the arena the suspense was terrible, because it took them such a bloody long time to reach the ring. The Lewis entrance (first) was a shambles, with his ragged entourage having to shove its way through a crowd that appeared to be shoving back. Laid-back reggae was the incongruous accompaniment to this disgraceful near-riot, involving Garden security staff, fans, bodyguards, and a chap with a flag, and it would have been quite funny if it hadn’t been so dreadful. ‘Whose fault is this?’ I wanted to know - but then I’ve already established how I feel about things being badly organised. Still, Lennox looked focused and unfazed by the turmoil holding up his progress, possibly because the mellow music was working so well for him, but also possibly because he towered literally head and shoulders above everyone else, and all the aggro was taking place about a foot below his eye-line. I ought to mention that in the thick of the mêlée was the tiny figure of Frank Maloney, Lewis’s boxing manager, tastefully dressed up as a parody

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