with loved ones at home who said on the phone, vaguely, ‘Is it over? Did I miss it? Did anyone win?’; I danced in sidelong manner around my hotel bedroom practising my feeble left jab and making ‘Toof, toof’ noises; and most weirdly of all, I read the work of Norman Mailer, nodding wisely, and even underlined it with a pencil.
In short, I was a different person. A few weeks before, the name ‘Lewis’ would have made me think of maybe C.S. Lewis, Sinclair Lewis, the John Lewis Online customer services department (damn them), or Lewis Carroll. Now I wanted to chant that there was only one Lennox Lewis, and I wanted him to keep his hands up, use his jab, block Holyfield’s left hook, keep breathing, protect that lovely skin, and above all remember what chess teaches you about controlling the centre. On the day before the fight, I did something completely out of character, and it makes my heart-rate accelerate just to recall it. I phoned the office in London from my mobile - furtively, outside on 34th Street in the face-shrinking, slab-like cold - and said that, come what may, I must see this fight. I think they were a bit surprised by my vehemence, but the Garden had been prevaricating about press tickets; they kept promising and then delaying, and I had started to get very anxious. What if they gave The Times only two seats? There were three of us in New York! Oh no, not again, I said. Not this time, buddy. I’m not getting bumped this time. The problem was, the office always liked the sort of ‘colour’ piece I wrote about being banished to some nasty sports bar, to watch an event on TV with the locals. But they could whistle this time, I said; they could whistle up their god-damned ass. ‘If we only get two tickets, you’ve got to send Rob to some bar, not me. He hates boxing. He keeps writing pieces about the death of Joe DiMaggio instead. He doesn’t attend the press conferences. He’s spending all his time with Pelé. His heart’s not in this the way mine is!’ (Rob was the chief sports writer, and he outranked me in every way. There was no possibility they would accede to this demand.)
Luckily they didn’t quarrel with me; they just said, ‘Why don’t we wait and see what happens?’ But had they taken issue, I fear I would have quoted Joyce Carol Oates at them: ‘Like all extreme but perishable actions, boxing excites not only the writer’s imagination, but also his instinct to bear witness.’ What a genius this woman was. She was reading my mind. Because, yes, yes, I must bear witness to this extreme but also perishable action. I must. This fight might not be dedicated to women (or if it was, it was never mentioned again), but this woman was now totally dedicated to it. On the Thursday night, with the ticket situation still unresolved, I briefly entertained the idea of pushing Rob under a cab, or paying someone to lure him to a lonely dock on the East River and blow him away. It also occurred to me that the lobby of my fashionable hotel was so absurdly dimly lit, Rob’s lifeless body could lie undiscovered for quite some time amid the trendy Philippe Starck chairs, so the sleeping-with-the-fishes option might not be necessary. But on Friday, finally, I got my fight ticket, and so did he. We had seats together, as it happened, and we went on to have a very interesting and remarkable evening in each other’s company, marred (for me) only by crippling feelings of guilt and shame. I never told Rob that, had it come right down to it, I’d have done anything to get him out of the picture, or that being present at the Holyfield-Lewis fight on March 13, 1999 now meant so much to me that I’d considered it worth committing murder for a ticket.
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
