What Bernie Taught Me

I have six older brothers, and when I became a teenager I thought it best to learn to fight. I took boxing lessons and started boxing at a gym not far from my house. My hometown is famous for boxing, so there are plenty of places to box, if you are of a mind to do so. I boxed through high school, and when it came time to go away to college I boxed there too. I could go on for pages and pages about boxing, but this story isn’t solely about boxing, it is about a cross cultural experience at the basest level. This cross cultural experience stuck with me and really gave me more of an education than I had expected to get at UCC.

When I went to University College, Cork, I joined the boxing club. It took me a while to get around to it, but I knew that I eventually would. I took the time to sightsee and to do the more traditional things that exchange students do, and when it was time to settle into a routine I found the boxing club. To tell the truth, I took long hiatuses from the boxing in order to travel around and to spend time with new friends, but boxing was a worthwhile thing to do, if only for the lesson I learned during one bout.

I had befriended and been befriended by the captain of the boxing team, a guy named Trevor Hayes, who was a concert pianist and a pre-med student. Why he wanted to jeopardize his hands by boxing I’ll never know. He kept cajoling me at first to join the club, and when I had joined, to spar with the fighters. Boxing is what boxing is all about, so I sparred with the other guys, trying to keep to the coach’s guideline that bouts are won by points, and that fighters should focus on scoring points, not knocking the opponent unconscious. That’s the way it was while sparring.

We sparred quite frequently, at the end of the club’s training sessions, and if someone did not want to participate then he was not required to participate. After only a few sessions I noticed something that I never said aloud, and never would. I was a better boxer than eighty percent of the fighters there.

The coaching and the facilities were not up to the same par as the club’s U.S. counterparts. The club coaches in Brockton and at UMass had a tremendous amount of experience and expertise both in the ring themselves (which is important) and as expert observers (which is more important). The Irish club didn’t have a weight room or any of the equipment specific to a boxing training regimen, such as medicine balls, weighted gloves, or duck-ropes. Back home, thirty percent of the training time was spent reviewing and dissecting techniques, doing reflex exercises, and working to undo habits. In Ireland we worked out with callisthenics and abdominal exercises, did some bag work, and sparred.

It is easy to tell who does and does not have a lot of experience in the ring. The thing that you look for is coverage. Someone who has frequently been in boxing matches knows that the fighter gets hit the most when he is throwing a punch. An experienced boxer will offer as little of his body unprotected as possible, will keep his head down but eyes up (covering his neck), clenches his teeth properly, forcefully exhales while delivering, and can sustain a hit and still deliver a combination on rhythm.

When I sparred with the Irish guys they couldn’t hit me as much as they wanted to, and when they did, it didn’t satisfy them as much because they would get my shoulders, upper arms, or gloves more often than they’d get their targets. I would be able to put gloves on their score zones when they didn’t think I could, because the average Irish boxer at UCC stopped throwing punches when they were getting hit. At first they were surprised, but then they complimented me on my abilities by saying that they wanted to see me beaten. Trevor and I worked up to a match to decide who the best boxer in the club was, but that is a story for another time.

The UCC boxing club had a meet with a club from an agricultural school from Kerry. We trained for it and shared our secrets with each other like warriors going into battle. I told each of the guys what I noticed about them, what their “tells” were, and they shared with me. There was some discussion as to whether or not I would participate, some saying that because I was not a regular student I shouldn’t be included. That was fine with me. No matter what the coach said, I knew this meet would be bloody. This was a rivalry between entities that would not interact again for a year. The opponents had no impetus to restrain themselves, and neither did we.

I was put on the slate and the opposing club had no complaints, so I was assigned an opponent by weight class. We were the third bout, so I had the opportunity to look him over. His name was Bernie, and Trevor knew him from previous meets. According to Trevor he was a big dumb country boy who thought he should fight because he was strong. That gave me something to think about. Bernie was about six inches shorter than me, but he outweighed me by at least twenty pounds, and he was not at all fat. He looked like a hurdler that someone dropped an anvil on from twenty stories up. A true fireplug. I knew how to use reach, agility, and foot and hand speed to rack up points, but I had a strange feeling going into this bout.

It is normal to fear physical pain and injury. Anyone who does not fear pain and injury has a form of psychosis, which can cause the person to die prematurely. Boxers, the ones I knew anyway, had healthy doses of fear and nerves before bouts, but never to the point of debilitating the fighter. Again, this is a function of experience. When a boxer is new to the sport he may be preoccupied with injury and pain. Eventually, though, one learns that injury and pain are inevitable, and that preoccupying oneself with them increases one’s chances of sustaining injuries and feeling pain. So a boxer’s anxiety dims and fear becomes a background sense, more of a heightened sense of awareness than abject terror. I saw Bernie from that perspective, but I also had a different feeling. He looked like he had something to prove. He was cocky and arrogant. He had obviously worked on his considerable strength, and there was no getting around the fact that he was short. I was not the underdog. The gossip that flies around a meet must have come to Bernie; I had overheard “Yank” in the conversational buzz.

We watched the first two three round bouts and cheered on our club-mates. By the time we were stepping into the ring we were one hundred percent in the moment. We met in the middle of the ring and he was trying to make a point of appearing ferocious and hard-eyed. He fought me and I boxed him. I landed my gloves on him over and over as he tried to get close to me. I had conditioned him to expect head shots as he tried to get in range to land his own combos. I would score points on him and by the time he got under my reach I slipped the corner and was back in open ring. It frustrated him mightily, and he became predictable. I used his predictability to land some body blows on him to try to get his arms down, but they didn’t come down. In the second round I was fairly tired and I tried to give him more of the same, but my fleetness afoot left me for a while, and when I tried to lull him into reacting predictably enough to try to take his wind away with body shots he made me pay, big time. He caught me with a hook that physically moved me back in the boxed off corner. All the air in my body expulsed from the force of the blow and snot hung from my nose. I was lucky to keep my mouthpiece in. I was stunned long enough for him to bull his body straight into mine, forcing me against the rope (where he wanted me). He was able to unleash a combination that made best use of his strength and unleashed all of his frustration. I covered up as best I could, which was fairly well because I was no novice at getting my ass kicked, but he hammered my arms and trunk with a force I hadn’t experienced since my first year of boxing. I started to get that suffocating and underwater feeling. I had to get out of there, so I let myself take a hit to the ribs in order to land a blow to his face. A blow to the face often serves to disorient an opponent long enough to make an escape. It did, and I made my escape to open ring. I couldn’t breathe as deeply as before, my feet were flatter. I was hurt and the cajoling teams outside the ring became a roaring din.

I hated not being the underdog. I hated being singled out as a foreigner, and I hated the fact that Bernie had so much support. More than anything I feared Bernie’s strength. He bulled right back to meet me in the center of the ring and I didn’t try to be cute with combinations landing lightly to earn points. I hit him in the head very hard, over and over again. He was at first surprised, thinking perhaps that I couldn’t hit that hard simply because I had theretofore chosen not to. He pursued with more dogged persistence, and I met him and let him under my reach in order to land punishing blows on his head. Soon enough he became muddled, and his decision making faculties began to be compromised. I dropped my guard and delivered blow after blow, and I must admit that I was unsettled. The bell rang.

Trevor and the guys in my corner congratulated me on a good round and Trevor told me that I had to keep fighting my fight. The other guys were telling me to keep doing what I was doing. It entertained them, but Trevor was right. I said that Bernie hit like a bull, and Trevor told me to stay out of his reach. The bell rang, and I went back in.

Bernie had regained his wits and was fighting smart and well, if not cleanly. He committed the fouls of charging, head butting, and rabbit punching in a clinch, but he was doing everything he could to get under my reach and land body shots. I took a couple serious blows and I had my wind taken away. I feared that I would suffer a broken rib or worse. Bernie scared me early in the round, and I decided the best way to deal with the threat was to eliminate it. I decided that I would knock him out. I mustered a rally of my internal resources and rained some head shots on him to cloud his eyes and stuff up his nose. He had his hands up and he was facing where I was standing a moment before, expecting that I was still there. I waited an eternal moment and he did what I knew he would- he dropped his hands and looked up, looking for me. I had a clear and open shot to deliver a haymaker if I wanted to, to give him the coup de grace, and God forgive me, I did. I hit him as hard as I have ever hit anyone, a punishing blow to the left side of his jaw. The sound and tactile sensation were unforgettable, and sickening. I was flabbergasted when he punched back at me. By rights he should’ve been dead. I couldn’t believe it.

He turned toward me and I started to count off combinations. Jab, jab, cross, jab, out. Jab, cross, hook, hook, jab, out. I gave up trying to score; I gave up body blows altogether. The coach from the other club was berating me and the coach of our club. What kind of a savage was I? Would I be wielding a tomahawk in there next? I put it out of my mind. I had to drop Bernie before he hurt me seriously. I know Bernie had the sympathy because my blows were landing on his face and head, but his blows were more devastating to me than mine were to him. Blood came out of his nose, blood came out of contusions inside his cheeks and lips, and each blow would fleck blood on me and clinches were his opportunity to clear his eyes and face by wiping his blood on me in big smearing swaths. I became disgusted with myself and laid back to wait out the round and he pummelled my solar plexus and lights flashed in my peripheral vision. He had indicated that he was not amenable to allowing the bout to end without further gore. I resumed hammering his head until he fell over.

He sort of staggered to the left and it seemed as if he simply forgot to put his other foot down to keep himself up. He wound up sitting and leaning on his outstretched arms with his head hanging. A long gooey line of deep red blood and snot hung from his face. There was a mixture of horror and relief. I had unleashed the atavistic, reptile core of myself in the fight or flight reflex and it had taken over, but at least it was done. The danger stopped. Until Bernie started back to his feet.

Some of the members of his club cheered him on, but others advised him to stay down. By the time he got up the referee took a while before he started the standing eight count. I was about to chalk it up to home field advantage because he was Irish and I was not when I rethought that this was our club’s gym and that I was a home member. I wasn’t allowed to approach him, but from my corner I also advised him to stay down. I think he took it as an insult, when in fact it was good advice to a man I now respected. He got to eight and asked Bernie if he wanted to keep fighting, and he said he did.

I didn’t wait for him to meet me in the center of the ring. I went to him and resumed my effort to put him away. I spared nothing and I knocked him down again. He got up again and I kept at it. Eventually the bell rang, ending the bout. We went to our corners to regain ourselves and to receive our admonishments and congratulations. The scores were added to the teams’ totals and we left the ring. There were a couple of bouts after ours, but ours was the talk of the meet. By the time we left, Bernie looked as if he had been thrown under a truck. His face had begun to swell and the cuts that you could see became visible wounds, not just seeping nicks. No one could easily see my injuries, but I think I got the worst of it. I definitely bruised a rib if not cracked a rib and I couldn’t leave the house the next day. I felt it for weeks.

What Bernie taught me was that I could turn myself into an animal. I didn’t like it, and I quit boxing after that.