George Plimpton vs. Archie Moore

The writer George Plimpton pitched a baseball to Willie Mays. He was goalie for a day with the Boston Bruins. He played in a pro-am golf tournament. He tried out for quarterback of the Detroit Lions. He played percussion with the New York Philharmonic. He performed as a trapeze artist in the Clyde Beatty-Cole Brothers Circus.

In 1959 George Plimpton challenged the Old Mongoose, Archie Moore, to three rounds of sparring. Moore was light heavyweight champ from 1952-1962 and a cunning ring presence. His record at the time of Plimpton's challenge was 171-22-9 (123 KOs). Plimpton's record was 0-0-0 (0 KOs).

"There are people who would perhaps call me a dilettante," Plimpton said in an interview several years ago, "because it looks like I'm having too much fun. I have never been convinced there's anything inherently wrong in having fun."

There was precedent for famous writers getting hit by famous fighters. Sportswriter Paul Gallico got dropped by Dempsey in 1922 during an exhibition. "All I knew about boxing was to keep my left arm out," he wrote. "Dempsey came in, bobbing and weaving...There is one photograph in the News...I am bent over and Dempsey's left hook is whistling over my head. I have no recollection of ducking that one. But I didn't duck the next one. I found myself on the floor. Everything went sort of black. I held on to the floor with both hands, because the ring and the audience outside were making a complete clockwise revolution, came to a stop, and went back again counterclockwise."

Despite Plimpton's pluck, the odds of his hurting Moore were slim to none. "I am not properly constituted to fight," wrote Plimpton. "I am built rather like a bird of the stiltlike, wader variety — the avocets, limpkins, and herons. Since boyhood my arms have remained sticklike: I can slide my watch up my arm almost to my elbow. I have a thin, somewhat fragile nose which bleeds easily." In addition to having a nose which bled, Plimpton had eyes that teared.

"I suffer from a condition which the medical profession refers to as 'sympathetic response,' which means that when I am hit or cuffed around, I weep. It is an involuntary response. The tears come and there is nothing I can do except dab at them with a fist."

Skinny guys with noses that bleed and eyes that tear are a dime a dozen in the fight game. The late great trainer Charlie Goldman once said, "You know them fighters with long necks and them long, pointy chins. They cost you more for smellin' salts than they do for food."

To prepare himself for his three rounds with Moore, Plimpton, at the recommendation of Ernest Hemingway, contacted the trainer George Brown to help get him in shape. "Hemingway spoke of his skills with awe," Plimpton wrote, "saying that he could never remember having landed a good punch during a sparring session with Brown."

Plimpton telephoned Brown and asked, "Well, what am I going to do?" Plimpton told Brown that Martin Kane over at Sports Illustrated suggested he go to Stillman's Gym on Eighth Avenue and try to find himself a trainer. Brown was appalled. "Stay out of Stillman's," he said. "You'll get some awful disease fooling around there. Stillman and his people don't know what a mop looks like, much less how to push such a thing through the crud in that place...Listen, if you have to go to Stillman's, go and work on the light bag, the heavy bag, but don't get yourself pushed into the ring if anyone else is fooling around in there. Go into the ring when it's empty — alone — shadowbox, get the feeling of the canvas, and get out if anyone starts climbing through the ropes. I don't care if it's Lou Stillman himself, or someone who looks like your grandmother...get out!'"

Plimpton initially steered clear of Stillman's. But he had to prepare himself for the Old Mongoose, so he "fell back on the theory that I could teach myself what to do from books and a self-imposed training program."

George Brown thought learning to fight by reading a book was the most ridiculous thing he had ever heard, so he agreed to teach Plimpton what he could in the little time allotted.

Plimpton finally made it to "the famous and rickety boxer’s establishment on Eighth Avenue just down from Columbus Circle. A dark stairway led up into a gloomy vaultlike room, rather like the hold of an old galleon. One heard the sound before one’s eyes acclimatized: the slap-slap of the ropes being skipped, the thud of leather into the big heavy bags that squeaked from their chains as they swung, the rattle of the speed bags, the muffled sounds of gym shoes on the canvas (there were two rings), the snuffle of the fighters breathing out through their noses, and, every three minutes, the sharp clang of the ring bell. The atmosphere was a fetid jungle twilight."

The gym's owner was Lou Stillman. His real name was Lou Ingber, but changed his name to Stillman after he won the gym in a game of cards. Stillman was a character and had what Budd Schulberg described as a "garbage-disposal voice." He also had a way with words: "Big or small, champ or bum, I treated 'em all the same way — bad." Plimpton told Stillman that he and the Old Mongoose needed the gym for an hour. "I told him about Archie Moore and what we hoped to do," wrote Plimpton. "Sports Illustrated would pay him a small sum for the inconvenience. He did not seem especially surprised. An eyebrow might have been raised. It turned out that he condoned almost anything that would break the dreary tedium."

Lunching with friends at fancy club a few days before the fight, Plimpton was obsessing about Archie Moore. Meanwhile, across town, Moore was asking Peter Maas, a friend of Plimpton's, what he should expect. Maas had a sense of humor and told Moore that Plimpton was an "intercollegiate boxing champion...He's a gawky sort of guy, but don't let that fool you, Arch! He's got a left jab that sticks, he's fast, and he's got a pole-ax left hook that he can really throw. He's a barnburner of a fighter, and the big thing about him is he wants to be the light-heavyweight champion of the world. Very ambitious. And confident. He doesn't see why he should work his way through all the preliminaries in the tank towns: he reckons he's ready now."

The day of the fight arrived. Plimpton and his trainer arrived at the gym and "Lou Stillman led us through the back area of his place into an arrangement of cubicles as helter-skelter as a Tangier slum."

"Suddenly, Archie Moore himself appeared at the door of my cubicle. He was in his streetclothes. He was carrying a kit bag and a pair of boxing gloves; the long white laces hung down loose. There was a crowd of people behind him, peering in over his shoulders — Miles Davis, the trumpet player, one of them; and I thought I recognized Doc Kearns, Moore's legendary manager, with his great ears soaring up the sides of his head and the slight tang of toilet water sweetening the air of the cubicle (he was known for the aroma of his colognes). But all this was a swift impression," wrote Plimpton, "because I was staring up at Moore from my stool. He looked down and said as follows: 'Hmm.'"

Moore started to undress. He put on his foul-protector. He put on his boxing trunks and shoes. He began taping his hands. Then "he offered us a curious monologue, apparently about a series of victories back in his welterweight days: 'I put that guy in the hospital, didn't I? Yeah, banged him around the eyes so it was a question about whether he could ever see again.' (Moore) looked at me again. 'You do your best, hear?' I nodded vaguely. He went back to his litany. 'Hey, Doc, you remember the guy who couldn't remember his name after we finished with him...just plumb banged that guy's name right out of his skull?'"


The two men met at the center of the ring. Then the bell rang to start the action: "He came at me quite briskly," Plimpton remembered, "and as I poked at him tentatively, his left reached out and thumped me alarmingly. As he moved around the ring he made a curious humming sound in his throat, a sort of peaceful aimless sound one might make pruning a flowerbed, except that from time to time the hum would rise quite abruptly, and bang! He would cuff me alongside the head. I would sense the leaden feeling of being hit, the almost acrid whiff of leather off his gloves, and I would blink through the sympathetic response and try to focus on his face, which looked slightly startled, as if he could scarcely believe he had done such a thing."

Moore had no problem knocking men out. Making them cry was another matter. Plimpton continued: "Halfway through the round Moore slipped — almost to one knee — not because of anything I had done, but his footing had betrayed him somehow. Laughter rose out of the seats, and almost as if in retribution he jabbed and followed with a long lazy left hook that fetched up against my nose and collapsed it slightly. It began to bleed."

"We went into a clinch," continued Plimpton. "I was surprised when I was pushed away and saw the sheen of blood on Moore's T-shirt. Moore looked slightly alarmed. The flow of tears was doubtless disarming. He moved forward and enfolded me in another clinch. He whispered in my ear, 'Hey, breathe, man, breathe.' The bell sounded and I turned from him and headed for my corner, feeling very much like sitting down."

Moore toyed with Plimpton in round two. "In the third round Brown began to feel that Moore had run through as much of a repertoire as he could devise, and that the fighter, wondering how he could finish thing off aesthetically, was getting testy about it."

An early bell ended the "fight."

"That round seemed awfully short," Plimpton remarked to Brown.

Brown said, "I suppose you were getting set to finish him."

James Toback’s "Tyson"

"Who is to blame for this most recent of sports disgraces in America? The culture that flings young athletes like Tyson up out of obscurity, makes millionaires of them and watches them self-destruct?" – Joyce Carol Oates/Rape and the Boxing Ring (1992)

I first met Mike Tyson three years ago at Gleason's Gym in Brooklyn. I'd seen him fight many times, and was in awe of his speed and power, his ambition and success, at the same time as I was troubled at how elemental, how primal he appeared, embodying as he did all the unchecked impulses that have fueled mankind's worst excesses – the killer instinct, the will to win at any cost.

Tyson was in the ring teaching youngsters the rudiments of boxing, fulfilling a public service agreement in lieu of doing more time for one of his many run-ins with the law. He was no longer champion. His glory years were behind him. He'd been in an out of jail more times than anyone could count. And his fortune, the hundreds of millions he earned by scrambling other men's brains, had been squandered or stolen by Don King and other "leeches," as Tyson calls them, supposedly administering to his welfare.

Watching Tyson that afternoon, I was, even though surrounded by all manner of celebrity gawker, able to observe him unmolested. He was not especially tall, but he was exceptionally broad, with a huge head adorned by the now-famous Maori tattoo, and hands and feet that looked more like paws than any known human appendage. And his physical presence – the knowledge that here was Mike Tyson – seemed to electrify the molecules around him. But rather than give off an air of intimidation, he emanated vulnerability.

Tyson and I spoke for half an hour and he couldn't have been more kind. Gentlemanly and polite, he seemed as interested in me as I was interested in him and went out of his way to put me at ease. He was somewhat wary at first, natural under the circumstances, but there was no bluster, no bravado, no hostility, no preening ego or bad attitude. Tyson was humble, down-to-earth, someone who, if not quite at peace, saw himself as just another man, no better or worse than any other. It was a bit of a shock to discover that Tyson wasn't the monster I'd been led to believe. Instead, I discovered that he had been misunderstood, misrepresented, misconstrued.

James Toback's long-awaited documentary, Tyson, is an attempt to set the record straight. Toback has known Tyson since he was a teenager and had already cast him in two of his films, Black and White in 1999 and When Will I Be Loved in 2004. He is also the sort of compassionate interlocutor (although a silent and invisible presence in the film, which is a self-analytical, stream of consciousness monologue) an armored character like Tyson needs to let down his guard.

Toback culls the newsreel archive to show Tyson at different stages of his career, recounting the former champion's storybook rise from the mean streets of Brownsville to Cus D'Amato's gym in the Catskills to the bright lights of the Vegas Strip and beyond. The director hits all the highs (youngest man, at age 20, to win the heavyweight crown) and lows (the Barbara Walters interview, the rape conviction, the Bite of the Century) that are synonymous with Tyson's tale. And Toback, to his credit, and despite the empathy he feels toward his subject, doesn't pull his punches. He simply points his two cameras and lets Mike be Mike. The champ parades his man of a thousand faces, so that we get to see all sides of Tyson, often on split-screen and just as often in rapid succession, as he morphs from the violent Mike to the gracious Mike to the self-aware Mike to the clueless Mike to the self-pitying Mike to, finally, the Mike who is incomprehensible, most of all to himself.

It's easy to view Tyson as the anti-Ali, as someone who seems to have taken perverse pleasure in middle fingering the world, who appears to stand for nothing, to believe in nothing, who appears more at home receiving lap dances from floozies than awards at testimonial dinners. But that dime store analysis does a disservice to Tyson, no less than to Ali, as Toback's revealing documentary makes clear.

Beautifully filmed, Tyson, which runs 88 minutes from opening to closing bell, leaves one with the impression that it's impossible to fully understand another human being (just as it's impossible to fully understand ourselves). We can sit in judgment while lounging in our armchair or rattling around our ivory tower, but Toback's willingness to acknowledge and make allowances for human frailty, writ large in Tyson's story, makes his documentary an intrinsic document, as it also reminds us of the world of possibility, no matter how tenuous, at our fingertips. Or, as Tyson observed when Toback showed him the film for the first time: "It's like a Greek tragedy. The only problem is that I'm the subject."

(This review first appeared in Bright Lights Film Journal)

Pacquiao Decimates Hatton

It didn't take long. After an extensive build-up with all the concurrent hype that accompanies a big pay per-view fight, it took Manny Pacquiao (49-3-2, 37 KOs) a little less than two rounds to flatten Ricky Hatton (45-2-0, 32 KOs) Saturday night before a crowd of 16,262 at the MSG Grand in Las Vegas.

Oddsmakers and a handful of dreamers gave Hatton a fighting chance against the man now universally recognized as the pound-for-pound fighter on the planet. Hatton's last fight, a TKO11 over feather-fisted Paulie Malignaggi last December, convinced some that the old Hatton was back and had the goods to stop Pacquiao in his tracks. At the same time, these same people reasoned that Pacquiao’s recent win over a faded Oscar De La Hoya didn't count for much, since Oscar was on his last legs (and has since retired).

So much for prognostications.

Hatton, having starved himself, as usual, to make weight, (he gained 12 lbs. from the time of the weigh-in to the fight the next day) entered the ring looking like a ghost. Whatever strength he possessed had to have been strength of character, because he appeared severely depleted, despite his chiseled physique, as though he had left what fight he still possessed in the gym; or, perhaps, in the record books.

Pacquiao, by contrast, never looked stronger. He knocked Hatton down twice in round one, always a harbinger of things to come, and continued his assault in the second, before delivering the coup de grace, a picture-perfect left hook at 2:59. Hatton didn’t see the punch coming and crashed to the canvas. Referee Kenny Bayless didn‘t even bother to count. The fight was over.

"This fight was no surprise to me," said Pacquiao’s trainer Freddie Roach after the bout. "I knew him (Hatton) better than my own fighter. Hatton pumps his fist before he throws. We also knew he'd be looking for the left."

"I'm surprised the fight was so easy," Pacquiao said. "I worked hard in training camp and he was open for the right all night. It was nothing personal. I was just doing my job."

And a fine job it was. All that's left now is for Pacquiao to meet, and very likely destroy, Floyd Mayweather Jr.