And In This Corner…
Michael Gawdzik
From time to time, coach made his fighters stay in a pushup position while he whacked them with a bamboo stick. “Humility is the way to greatness.” So he beat them to keep them humble, to have them know that, no matter how hard they trained, they would never be better than a bamboo stick.
I had come to South Korea to get as far from Indianapolis as possible. It was 2013, I was fresh out of college, looking for adventure, and had just spent months listening to old teachers complain incessantly about the state of Indiana education. It was a sermon I wanted no part in writing. What I wanted was to get rid of everything, leave the country, burn my couch, break up with my girlfriend, crush my bike, disembowel my bed, and stomp on all the frozen loaves of bread in my freezer. I wanted to get in a fight and see what I was made of.
So that’s what I did. I heaved my couch into a dumpster, tossed my bed in next to the couch, turned down teaching suburban kids on the south side of Indianapolis, and sold my bike for twenty bucks. I gave the bread to a buddy, broke up with my girlfriend, and headed for the airport. By day I would teach Korean children conversational English, and by night I would learn how to punch and take punches; I would learn how to box.
The gym was all hardwood floors crisscrossed with electrical tape. To the right of the door was the coach’s desk littered with forms, empty food containers, and a big green ledger filled with the progress of boxers. The place smelled like sweat, rubber, and rice. Mirrors hung on all of the walls and hand wraps and jump ropes hung from the posts of the ring in the back of the gym. A pile of towels stiff with blood sat in a corner. The first night I got my gloves coach told me to hit the heavy bag for nine minutes. Jab, cross, hook to the body, hook to the head. My gloves were thin, black, and shiny like a beetle shell. I got too excited and fought that bag like I could win. The next day at school my hands shook so much I could barely hold a pen to grade papers.
Movement, balance, flow, strategy — concepts that, when followed, allow a boxer to transcend the fistfight into a tactical test of skill. At best I had flashes of coherence, but only flashes. Weeks passed. I started sparring. I began to feel confidence percolating through my fists. The muscles in my body relaxed, allowing me to take deep breaths and move less like a robot and more like a boxer.
For my first sparring session coach and I sparred three one-minute rounds. He, fit and short with gleaming black hair and pearl skin, came out of his corner, chin down, gloves up, shoulders loose. There’s a saying among boxers to be afraid of the guy who looks relaxed in the ring. Coach could’ve been napping as he stalked toward me. I, on the other hand, couldn’t hear anything outside the pounding of my heart. He faked a right cross to my head to cover a left hook to my body. I brought my arms over my head, exposing my ribs. His hook landed flush against my stomach and all the air inside me vanished. He finished with a hard jab to my nose. I crumpled to the canvas while he strolled to the nearest corner.
Getting punched in the face didn’t hurt immediately like I’d thought. I got all the other aspects of it though — the sudden shock, disorientation, buckling knees, blurred vision. If I was hit really hard, my mind would go blank. My whole world would skip like a record, and, when I came to, I’d either be down or still on my feet with my opponent coming at me.
My first taste of victory came against a Korean guy named Ji-Ho, who was in his late twenties and wore thick glasses. I punched him once in the gut then threw a jab and a cross to his head. I dropped him to the canvas. At the end of sparring, I lifted weights then ran a half-mile up Buramsan — the mountain near the gym — turning around at a cluster of Buddhist temples, before shadow-boxing back.
After training, Ji-Ho told me in broken English over beers and cigarettes about a boxing tournament happening in a few months in a small town twenty-minutes south of North Korea. I demanded he run up to the gym to tell coach I wanted to fight. Moments later Ji-Ho came down and said coach would sign me up in the morning.
A few weeks before the tournament I watched all the Mike Tyson I could on my laptop. Mercedes, Colay, Canady, Nelson, Bruno, Spinks — Tyson destroyed them all, anyone dumb enough to step in the ring with him. And in studying his destruction, I took note of how to keep my feet apart and chin down, how not to grin when I eyeball my opponent, and how to hit, as Tyson’s coach told him, “with bad intent.”
My coach had me sparring at least four times a week. With only two weeks before the fight, I started seeing myself as a mad dog, fighting sometimes six rounds in a night, getting beaten mercilessly, rarely landing any punches of my own. Now the pap-pap of gloves hitting punching bags and the tik-tik of jump ropes skimming the floor stayed with me well after I’d showered and gone to bed.
The morning of my fight was cold, and the air smelled like gasoline. My coach, two other boxers, and I piled into a car and drove the hour north to the tournament. As we drove, I thought of nothing other than my opponent. I boxed him in my mind, slipping all his punches while landing my own ferocious combos. I wanted to destroy him and prove to myself that, as long as I was conscious, I would never stay down.
Then reality hit. Why did I even sign up for this fight? I thought, as I entered the cold gym, thousands of miles away from home. And why did I think that studying Iron Mike’s knockouts would ever help me, a tall, freckly, skinny white kid with small hands and a big mouth? All the Tyson fights I had watched began to haunt me: Tyson hitting Michael Johnson so hard in the ribs Johnson crumpled to the canvas; Tyson calling his knockout against Francois Botha like Babe Ruth calling a home run; Tyson peppering Steve Zouski with organ deflating punches; Tyson knocking down Peter McNeely, the poor goofy bastard, twenty-two-seconds after the ding of the bell.
Ding.
I meet him at the center of the ring. He smashes a jab through my guard. I stumble back against the ropes, eyes on the canvas, bracing for impact. A few hooks to my ribs drops me for the first time. The ten count starts. I wait for eight, then spring back up. Something is different; time moves in fits. I’m stiff with fear; my mouth is dry. I avoid him for rest of the round.
Ding.
Coach pours water into my mouth. He tells me to punch fast then move away.
Ding.
Conjuring every Tyson knockout, I come out ready to do damage — to hit with bad intent. I meet him in the center, whip out a jab then a cross. Both slip through, connecting flush on the bridge of his nose. He stumbles back, coach cheers, and, for the briefest of seconds, I am Iron Mike Tyson.
My opponent comes roaring back — walloping my head and ribs with big rights and snapping lefts — at one point knocking me through the ropes to dangle half out of the ring. The ref helps me up by the shoulders, dusts me off, then, signals for us to continue.
Ding.
Coach had come with me on my last run before my fight. We ran in silence past the pear orchard and alders up to the summit of the mountain. As the frozen road tilted to the black sky, coach pulled ahead. I stopped once to catch my breath, sucking in the biting air with my hands on my knees, before continuing. I kept going, gravel and ice crunching under my feet, up the mountain, toward the forest and temples cast in moon and shadow.
Michael Gawdzik is a teacher by day and a writer in Indianapolis, Indiana, by night. He enjoys
traveling and attempting to bestow his enthusiasm for reading and writing
on anyone willing to listen.