- stinks to high heaven of corruption, criminality and playing Joe Public for a mug. Fights are fixed; managers are hoodlums; mobsters with flickknives climb into the shower with the patsy who refused to go down in the third; contender wannabes cop a one-way ticket to Palookaville. There is rarely a happy ending. Films like Golden Boy (based on a play by Clifford Odets), The Harder They Fall (based on a novel by Budd Schulberg) or Fat City (based on a novel by Leonard Gardner) depict the sport of boxing pretty starkly as a system that thrives on individual greatness but also consumes and destroys all things noble as a matter of course. In less grandiose terms, a strong, half-naked man stands alone in the ring, taking the blows, while a bunch of venal weaklings in snazzy hats pocket all his dough and then sell his broken body down the river.
Compromise always wins over integrity in this eternal tragedy. In these movies, fighters never get the bouts they deserve, despite begging for shots at the title, because it serves no one else’s skulduggery to set them up. They are often obliged to take strategic dives - and sometimes they boo-hoo afterwards at the ignominy of it, like Jake LaMotta (Robert De Niro) in Raging Bull, whom it is still incredibly hard to feel sorry for, incidentally, because he’s such a git. Finally, but most important of all, these traditional movie boxers are completely dumb about money - as confirmed by their regular, fruitless cry, ‘Give me my money.’ ‘I didn’t fight for under a thousand for five years,’ boasts a boxer in the original play of Golden Boy. ‘I got a thousand bucks tonight, don’t I?’ His manager, reading a paper, looks up and says no, actually tonight he got twelve hundred. The fighter jumps to his feet, livid. ‘What? I oughta bust your nose. How many times do I have to say I don’t fight for under one thousand bucks?’ The manager shrugs. ‘Okay, you’ll get your thousand,’ he agrees.
What the movies don’t tend to deal with (because it’s so boring) is boxing’s system of administration, which is so byzantine and preposterous that no one outside has a clue how to penetrate it, let alone challenge or dismantle it. But if you already have a suspicious nature and a sceptical attitude to boxing based on prolonged movie-watching, you can’t hear about the WBO, IBO, IBF, WBU, et cetera without narrowing your eyes and making ironical harrumphing noises. The World Boxing Council, you see, has nothing to do with the World Boxing Association besides two shared initials; meanwhile there’s the International Boxing Federation, the World Boxing Organisation, the World Boxing Union, the International Boxing Organisation, the World Boxing Federation, the International Boxing Council, and the International Boxing Association. In other words, if you can ingeniously contrive any original three-word combination of this limited range of nouns and adjectives, and can afford a big round bit of metal with some leather attached, you can set up your own legitimate boxing organisation in your downstairs lavatory for the price of a packet of stamps. All of these organisations are in the belt business, and at the time of the Holyfield-Lewis fight in 1999, Holyfield was ibf and wba champion; Lewis was wbc. Or, quite honestly, it might have been the other way round.
Either way, the one thing I understood about this fight from the moment I arrived in New York was that toilers in the foetid world of boxing were hoping for a breath of fresh air to blow through the whole sport this coming weekend. Boxing’s reputation was as low as it could get, and commentators had long since run out of synonyms for ‘stink’. A recent fight arranged for Lewis had been against the American Oliver McCall - a man who may have looked, on paper, like a worthy opponent, since he had once knocked Lewis out at the Wembley Arena (in September 1994), but who was in such a bad mental state on the night of the second fight (in January 1997) that he was in tears in the ring. It was ghastly, apparently. All the commentators who saw this fight quickly ran out of synonyms for ‘sickened’. A recovering crack addict, McCall wandered around the ring avoiding Lewis, crying, talking to himself, and having a public nervous breakdown. Lewis held back, cautiously offering the occasional jab, like a cat testing a dead mouse. It was a confusing situation for a boxer trained to put himself on the line. To adapt the famous line from Raging Bull (‘I didn’t know whether to fuck him or fight him’), on this occasion, Lewis didn’t know whether to fight McCall or offer him a nice cup of cocoa.
But now, come Saturday night, by a Herculean effort, a diverted river was going to gush through the Garden and wash all the blood off the ropes. Holyfield-Lewis was a very big deal. In fact, I was beginning to realise that nothing in the world - certainly not Bosnia - was as important as this contrived fight, for eight-figure money, between two men who (as yet) I didn’t even know very much about. As I sat in my tiny hotel room in the evenings - listening to the exciting parp-parp of the wintry midtown traffic; leafing avidly through boxing magazines; pondering Norman Mailer’s theory that boxing, like chess, is all about ‘control of the centre’ (how true); and occasionally jumping up to practise a combination of right to the kidney, followed by uppercut and left hook (quite difficult without falling over) - I started to share the palpable sense of destiny.
My first sight of Evander Holyfield was at a grim gym in lower Manhattan. It was a raw, freezing day, and I shared a cab with the chap from the Telegraph, who was staying at the same mid-town hotel (The Paramount). The coincidence of our staying at the same hotel had really bucked me up, incidentally, because it seemed to me, during my four years in the business, that I was forever comparing travel arrangements with this particular chap, and coming out the loser by a knockout in the first round. ‘Where are you staying, Lynne?’ he would ask, when we met (say) at one of the earlier matches of the World Cup in Paris in 1998, and I would attempt to make light of the appalling truth. ‘Well, it’s quite interesting,’ I’d say. ‘They’ve put me in a hotel that costs a mere £24 a night - which must have taken quite some doing, don’t you think? My room stinks of drains, doesn’t have a television or a lavatory, and the phone has a big dial on it and is bolted to the wall, so I can’t plug in my laptop. But heigh ho, what can you do? It’s incredibly handy for the Musée d’Orsay, and I honestly haven’t been attacked yet walking back up that dark street from the Metro dragging my big heavy laptop after midnight.’ Then, with a huge generosity of spirit, I would ask, ‘Where are you staying, then, Paul?’ And it would always be somewhere stylish, bright, central, fully equipped, expensive, modem-friendly and (all-importantly) served door-to-door by media buses, that would make me want to saw my own head off.
Discovering that Paul and I were on the same flight to New York from Heathrow, therefore, we had gone through the usual routine on the plane - except, for once, I asked first. ‘Oh, I’m staying at that Philippe Starck place off Times Square with all the funky furniture and the low lighting,’ he said. ‘Oh really?’ I squeaked, trying not to betray my despair. ‘I’m at some dump called The Paramount.’ And for heaven’s sake, for once we were in the same place. It was a miracle. For once in my life, I was probably going to get a room with some basic bathroom fittings. Of course, when we arrived, Paul got himself upgraded to a better class of room immediately, while I had to argue for a couple of hours at check-in because the Times travel people had failed to confirm the reservation (this always happened). But still, to be in the same hotel in New York as the chap from the Telegraph for a whole week was really, really something, and I still feel quite proud.
Back at Holyfield’s gym, I was keen to get a sight of a real boxer by now - which was a shame, because when we arrived (at the appointed time) real boxers were nowhere to be seen. It was a bleak spot, this gym: a high-ceilinged, whitewashed-brick kind of underground space filled with punch-bags and stale air, not to mention huddles of impatient hacks sipping take-out coffees. There were a couple of large murals of famous boxers on the side wall - they turned out to be Joe Louis and Jack Dempsey, so I’m glad I didn’t guess. And as we all hung about, waiting to be summoned through a small door in the wall (like something from Alice) to an inner, warren-like place where Holyfield was said to be sparring in private, I think I had a bit of an epiphany. Making a puny fist, I tapped a punch-bag (which didn’t move), and someone told me the interesting fact that Mike Tyson filled his punchbags with water, so that hitting them was more like hitting the human body. I quipped, ‘Does he cover them in human skin, too?’ and then felt ashamed for being so flippant - especially as no one laughed.
Later, we would watch Lennox
