In boxing you either die a hero or live long enough to become a cautionary tale, and seldom does a boxer get to choose his or her own ending. For some, death is a quite literal thing, which is what makes the idea of fighting, let alone fighting too long, a scary proposition to even consider. For others — that is, the majority — death is experienced only in the sense of one’s career; the identity, the purpose, the relevance. All this disappears, or dies, the moment fighters have both thrown and received their final punch, and the void created is often what causes the deferring of this death by way of either reinvention or denial. For as long as they still have the choice, they will continue. They will continue the pretense, they will continue to fight, and they will continue to believe it happens only to others, not to them.
There is, alas, no aging gracefully in boxing. Either you get out early and prepare for temptation and regret, or you stick around until you become a victim of your own fear and other people’s greed. There is no care home in boxing, either. The only options for a fighter in fact are death, a slow and painful deterioration, or a kind of euthanasia delivered by the hands of a much younger man. In many ways one could argue that this journey mirrors life itself. You raise, inspire and educate the young, then on your way out, or into old age, you find yourself, at best, neglected by them and, at worst, abused.
To make the process seem a little more natural, they of course have a language for it; code words, phrases like “the passing of the torch” or “the changing of the guard.” Increasingly, too, since it has become more about capitalizing on an old boxer’s fame while reducing the chance of anyone getting killed, they tend to trot out phrases like “exhibition” or “modified rules.”
All they imply — bigger gloves, shorter rounds — helps to ensure a better night’s sleep for the promoters, but it does little for the peace of mind, or indeed brains, of those taking part. Modified rules or not, the boxers are still the ones receiving punches to the head and body, and they are still the ones being dragged back to a place responsible as much for their trauma as their happiness.
It is a mark of the strength of the addiction that so many boxers drawn to and partaking in these bouts do so after years, decades even, away from the ring. In the case of Mike Tyson, for example, his eight-round modified rules fight against Jake Paul this Friday marks only his second visit to a boxing ring in almost 20 years. The other was in 2020 against Roy Jones Jr., a man after his own heart. That was an exhibition, one that soon descended into a mess of sagging flesh, with both holding on not only to each other but the same delusion that led them there.
Four years later, Tyson, now 58, stands a better chance of beating Paul, a 27-year-old, than he did Jones. That says as much about Paul as it does Tyson, or Jones, but it is true nonetheless. The only thing that makes the next assignment more dangerous for Tyson is the fact that in this scenario no longer are we observing two uncles sharing a ring, both aware of the etiquette, the plot beats and the common goal. Rather what you have in Paul is a neophyte whose ignorance, both in boxing terms and more generally, casts him instead as the nephew eager to prove a point and show his uncle that his time has now passed. It is the sort of dynamic a sitcom might exploit for comedic purposes, yet here, in the boxing ring, the idea of a 27-year-old fighting Tyson is exploitative, not to mention negligent, in every conceivable way.
Forget a sitcom, this is the assassination of Jesse James by the coward Robert Ford. It is just one more instance of a solipsistic swindler inserting himself into a world he does not understand while plotting the downfall of an iconic figure to enhance his own status and reputation. It is, to be exact, the pillaging of another man’s mythology for personal gain, or as they like to call it these days: clout.
Forget a sitcom, this is the assassination of Jesse James by the coward Robert Ford. It is the pillaging of another man’s mythology for personal gain, or as they like to call it these days: Clout.
Back when Ford did it in 1882, he went on to earn money posing for photographs in dime museums as “the man who killed Jesse James” and reenacted the murder alongside his brother, Charles, in a touring stage show. Should Paul do similar to Tyson on Friday, expect podcast appearances with Logan, the other Paul brother, and yet another Netflix documentary nobody needs to see.
The same could be said for the fight itself. The same could also be said for the countless other examples of this dynamic at work, the most famous of which is perhaps the heavyweight fight between Muhammad Ali and Larry Holmes from October 1980. Ali was 38 at the time of that fight, so some 20 years younger than Tyson, but was widely considered to have eroded, with even his voice, the last thing to go, starting to slow along with his hands and feet. Holmes, meanwhile, was anointed the next great heavyweight, and what made his beating of Ali so memorable was that it was a fight both men soon wanted to forget. For Ali, it was a loss punishing enough to suggest there was every chance that would one day be possible, whereas for Holmes, the fighter who had stopped his hero, the images with which he was left haunted him for years. Full of remorse for what he had done, a tearful Holmes raced across the ring at the fight’s conclusion to embrace Ali and kiss him on the cheek. “I love you,” he said to Ali. “I really respect you. I hope we’ll always be friends. Your house or my house, if you ever need me for anything, just call and I’ll be there.”
The concern was not exclusive to Holmes. It was in fact widespread. Keith Kleven, Holmes’ physical therapist, would explain: “Getting his weight down, looking fit and trim, became an obsession with [Ali]. He thought if his weight came down, everything else would fall into place. He lost at least 37 pounds in a very short period. He went too far. When you lose so much so fast, after such a dramatic change in diet and physical activity, there is a drastic change in the function of the body’s enzymes. Instead of losing fat, you begin to deplete muscle substance. Strength and stamina are lost. It wouldn’t have mattered either way, but against Larry, the old man was merely a shell of his former self.”
That is often said of an aging fighter, of course, that he becomes a shell of his former self. Yet what is interesting to consider whenever hearing it said is that a shell is something into which we retreat and where we hide and seek solace. It is something we use to protect ourselves from the outside world, and in so doing create a kind of fantasy world in which anything we say goes. Only when this shell then starts to crack and a boxer’s world becomes the ring again does the truth normally come to light.
“All I could think after the first round was, ‘Oh, God, I still have 14 rounds to go,’” said Ali following the Holmes loss. “I had nothing. Nothing. I knew it was hopeless. I knew I couldn’t win and I knew I’d never quit. I looked across at Holmes and knew he would win but that he was going to have to kill me to get me out of the ring.”
That’s another thing an aging fighter will do. He will use the idea of death as the full stop, or last call, rather than a fate he should ideally look to preempt and avoid. By doing this it enables him to convince himself and others that there is always hope of a turnaround, or just more.
“Death and injury has always crossed my mind, and it still does,” Jones told me when he turned 50. “That will never change. But it’s a dangerous sport and we know what we’re getting into.
“How can an NFL player play football and not worry about concussions? He throws a football and — guess what? — that’s part of it. He knows that when he goes on the field, just as I know I can get hurt every time I go in a ring. You can’t worry about going to war if you’ve signed up for the military, and I can’t sign up to be a boxer and sit around and cry about that. It’s always a possibility. Shoot, it’s a possibility for everybody. There’s a possibility I could get in my car, drive away, get in a collision and be killed today.
“If someone said to me, ‘You’re going to die tomorrow if you fight one more round,’ then I guess I’m going to die tomorrow because I’m fighting one more round.”
Jones, like Tyson, was of his own volition still boxing into his 50s. Unlike Tyson, however, he continued to live the life of a boxer, hampered only by the aging process and wear and tear.
His fear was not defeat — now having now suffered several of them — but rather the end. By that stage, in fact, defeat, for Jones, was seemingly preferable to acceptance and surrender.
“I’ll miss walking to the ring,” he said when asked about the inevitable. “That will be the hardest thing. When I walk to that ring, knowing it’s do or die, I don’t really care if I live or die. So long as I have the noise of the crowd and I have that moment, that walk, I’m good. We’re ready to fight.”
Tunnel vision, by design, works for both the aging fighter and the one brought in to erase him. With it, they block out the noise, they see only the target, and they refuse to so much as acknowledge the concerned faces all around them. The hunter carries out the assignment and then, like a trophy wife blinded by their youth and beauty, spares no thought for the fact that one day they, the hunter, will become the hunted. In other words: replaced.
In the case of Holmes, there were sad nights and painful fights long after he pummeled Ali in 1980. He lost to the Dane Brian Nielsen in ’97 and then, in his final fight, in 2002, he fought and was knocked down by Eric Esch, the fighter known as “Butterbean.” Esch, all 334 pounds of him, was seen as a bit of a novelty…
