Kid Gloves

Growing up in Wichita Falls, I was a skinny kid with buckteeth and an inconveniently feminine first name. So I did what I could to work out the anger and fear in my head: I learned how to box. But not very well.

by Jan Reid

March 2002

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Johansson had little else, but he made the straight right hand look simple. With a dip of the right knee, his shoulder, arm, and glove shot out in a perfectly straight line—down the pipe, in the jargon of the game. With a look of near boredom, he knocked the heavyweight champ down seven times in one round, and like a robot Patterson kept getting up. But I had just a year of hero worship for the dimpled Swede. In their second fight Patterson knocked him so cold that for a dangerously long time the only part of Ingo moving was a quivering foot. There is no rational defense of boxing. It regularly maims and kills its contestants, and the professional business of it is a rotten mess. But I couldn't help myself. From the start I loved it.

Doing it, though, was another matter. In someone's yard we occasionally laced up gloves and sparred. I found that my only reliable defense was to keep sticking my left hand in the face of the other guy. The jab came to me naturally. But throwing a straight right was not as easy as it looked, and hooks and uppercuts required pivots and timing that were beyond me. To box you had to be in tremendous shape. The real mountain climb, though, was overcoming your fear. Golden Gloves tournaments were well attended in Wichita Falls. The newspaper gave them good sports-page coverage, and sometimes there were radio broadcasts. Amateur fighters didn't wear headgear then, at least not in Texas. You climbed through those ropes almost naked: More than injury, it was a fear of public humiliation. Worse than any of that was the torture of the "chairs." To get ready for a boxing match you needed to be up moving, breaking a sweat, and maybe banging your own jaws a few times to get the adrenaline flowing. But even at the state tournament in Fort Worth, fighters had to sit quietly in folding chairs beside their opponents. Every time a fight ended, they stood up together and then sat down in the next folding chairs. Did someone decide that that instilled sportsmanship? What could you possibly say? Then some man led the other fighter away, and you climbed through the ropes in the red or blue corner, looking at a boy who all at once was an enemy, and the light was as intense as that of an August sun. And if you weren't ready to go when the bell rang, the noise would fade until the only sound you could hear was the thump of gloved fists on your bare head.

Joe Haid researched the teams and declared that we should box for the Pan American Recreation Center. The gym was fashioned from the players' clubhouse of an abandoned minor league stadium called Spudder Park. It had speed bags, a heavy bag, jumping ropes, and not much else. The coach was a laconic man who listened as Joe explained how the Culver instructors had taught him to slide his right foot forward as he was throwing his right; that way he was poised to follow with the sweeping left hook. "Sailor told you that, huh," the coach grunted. "Get you knocked on your can, that's what. You've gotta set your feet beneath you."

One day he passed out medical release forms for our parents to sign. It amazes me now that he was going to let me fight the next weekend. I didn't even know how to wrap my hands. All I had done was thump the bags a couple of afternoons and run some laps around the old baseball park. I guess he was of the school that you learn by being thrown in the fire and that referees know when to jump in and stop a mismatch. Or maybe he was trying to run me off. The challenge thrilled me. This wasn't really sport; it was a fistfight, and if ever there was a way to stand my ground and prove myself, this was it. But as the tournament approached I lay awake at night certain that my fear and the ritual of the chairs would freeze me. When the bell rang I would just stand there, skinny, pale, and rigid, broken out with acne, as some boy ran across the ring to knock me out. Yet I wasn't about to tell my friends I couldn't go through with it. Then one day my dad stopped me in the hall when I came in from school. He had the release form in his hand. "Your mother," he said gruffly, having lost the argument, "she doesn't want you boxing. Find something else to do."

Saved! But secretly I was ashamed; I thought I was still hiding behind her skirts. Joe and Wayne ragged me about it, but they knew my mother—when she said no she meant it. Mother later said she put up with the unpopularity in the household because she'd cringed for years every time a fastball sailed near my skull; she'd gone to get me out of a hospital when I'd suffered a broken bone playing football, and boxing was just too much. But I always thought her veto of boxing was more than the simple fear that I might get hurt. It was a moral issue. She knew that violence stirred in that guise easily spills into the street.

THUGGERY IS APT TO FIND its way out, no matter how it's stirred. I was engaged by history and English classes in my first year at the hometown college, now called Midwestern State, but my parents didn't have the money to send me away to school, and I resented that. Living at home, I felt like I was missing the college experience. Impressed by the uniform and the tan of a friend who had come home on leave, I enlisted on a whim in the Marine Corps reserve. The recruiter was a tall, thin gunnery sergeant. His calculated indifference was effective. "It'll make a man out of you," he told me with a shrug.

Six months later I was back in Wichita Falls with thirty more pounds and a hair-trigger temper I'd never possessed before. Half a year of being harassed and brutalized will do that. Of course, the Marines were in the stated business of tearing us down and making us into certain kind of men—men who would kill and risk getting killed if ordered to. Military life fit me not at all, but ironically, my impulsive bolt into its ranks proved to be my way out of Vietnam. The Gulf of Tonkin episode happened while I was in boot camp, and as the ensuing conflict raged, the warmakers decided it would cost them less political capital to fill the divisions with draftees than to call up the reserves. For six years all I had to do was show up at weekend drills and two-week summer camps. And that's all I did—show up.

The oil had played out around Wichita Falls, so the refineries shut down. Daddy looked for another job and couldn't find one, so he took a company transfer to Mount Pleasant, a small town on the edge of the East Texas pines, and my parents made their home there for thirty years. Living in the house where I had grown up, I attended the college, worked at a seed-and-feed store, and slouched through the Marines' requirements of my time. I doused too many nights with booze, and sometimes I went looking for trouble.

One Saturday night I found it in Denton, where I was visiting my boxing pal Wayne Hudgens. Outside his apartment I slung my leg over a motorcycle. I was just sitting on it. But from a balcony a collegian yelled, "Hey, you! Get off that bike!"

I glanced over my shoulder and fit my hands around the handlebar grips. "Sorry, Pazz," I mocked him, whatever his name was. "I was just admiring it."

"Get your ass off."

"Oh, now, Pazz."

"I mean it. Get off. It's mine!"

"Sure thing, Pazz. Fine bike you've got. Roomba."

There was a thunder of footsteps on the walkway and stairs above. I wandered into Wayne's kitchen and grew aware of loud male voices at the door. "No, no," someone said. "We want 'Pazz.'"

On the kitchen counter was a steel utensil that the brewing industry's pop-top aluminum cans have made obsolete. Liquor stores used to give the beer openers away; we called them church keys. Gripped inside a fist, the hook made a nasty weapon. The uproar out there wasn't Wayne's problem. I swept up the church key and lurched outside to deal with these yahoos.

I wouldn't have taken half the beating if I'd gone out there empty-handed. As the punishment continued, I said some dreadfully stupid things.

"I'd like to do this again with the gloves on."

"Are you a Kappa Sig?"

I guess I wanted to slip him the grip.

Some boys never get over the horseshit years. They're rednecks in fact and toughs in their minds the rest of their lives. But if you're lucky, you become someone else.

The morning after that fight in Denton, with a wretched hangover I gazed in a mirror and took long stock of myself. Under one eye was a perfectly formed shiner. I wasn't just embarrassed that I would have to go to class and my job looking like that. I was horrified, disgusted. With that church key I could have put that boy's eye out—disgraced my family and gone to prison for maiming him.

Man, grow up, I told myself. And in that regard I did. I didn't throw another punch at a man in anger for 32 years.

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