A SLICE OF BOXING A BOXING FAN WHO UNDERSTANDS BOXING By Thomas Hauser
get up in the morning. It gave me the strength to walk onto the job site and bust it up for eight or 10 hours, five or six, sometimes even seven days a week. The fighters brought something good and decent out of me. I felt a connection to them and their mentality, their grit and determination, their refusal to give in. They were an escape for me. Not an escape with a bottle or a pill. An escape by watching other men overcome all the trials that can bring a man down.” But John’s thoughts come with a warning: “Something doesn’t feel right about the fight game these days. It feels like a hustle. The promoters think if they say anything enough times, the fans will buy into it. And we now have a new breed of fight fan. If someone says it or writes it on the internet, they repeat it. Let’s think for ourselves and not let someone else tell us who is the best and who deserves what. We got eyes. We can see.” “Look at all the time spent talking about celebrity boxing. Imagine, 30 or 40 years ago, trying to sell this garbage to men in a bar. A YouTuber fighting. You would not have lasted five seconds before being thrown out on your ass.” “Being a boxing fan now is like dating a crazy woman. She looks pretty and you really want her, but she just keeps playing you dirty. And every time you go to shut the door on her pretty face, she has this reason for what she did and, of course, you love that pretty face so much that you let her back in only to be mistreated in some other nasty way.” “I thought that boxing would always be here and there would always be
a place like HBO or ESPN where I could watch good fights without paying an arm and a leg. But they are pushing guys like me out of boxing now with everything costing more than I can afford.” “Boxing answers to no one but itself. It has stood with its middle finger held higher and longer to fans than any other sport. It isn’t held to any standards. And that is not good. Why can’t boxing take the hint, clean up its act, start to act a bit respectful and responsible to the fans? Boxing would sell and promote itself if it could just see that. A sport that can grab you so fast and not let go is blind to its own self.” “I guess I will always be hooked on boxing. But it is getting harder and harder to find people to talk with about the sport these days. The spirit of boxing is still out there. But it is like a ghost. More people talk to me about fights from years ago than about fights today. When I talk about the fight game now, people say ‘I used to love boxing’ or ‘I used to watch the fights on weekends’ or something like that. Always in the past.” A message to the powers that be in boxing: John is a fan who understands and cares about boxing. LISTEN TO HIM! Thomas Hauser’s email address is thomashauserwriter@gmail. com. His most recent book – The Universal Sport – was published by the University of Arkansas Press. In 2004, the Boxing Writers Association of America honored Hauser with the Nat Fleischer Award for career excellence in boxing journalism. In 2019, Hauser was selected for boxing’s highest honor – induction into the International Boxing Hall of Fame.
“I look back on my life now and I wish I’d done a little amateur boxing when I was young so I’d have that feeling of having actually been in the ring. But it’s too late to start now,” admitted John. In the past, I’ve shared some of John’s words with readers. More of his thoughts follow. “I wish I could put into words how I felt for so many years, growing up, watching fights. In a world that told them they were born to lose and would never amount to anything, two men gave all they had in the ring because the thought of losing was so sickening to them that they could not live with themselves if they lost. That was special. And once they got respect, they feared letting go of it. They would rather die than go back to life the way it was.” “Let me tell you something about tough guys: Most of them are either dead or in the state penitentiary doing life without parole. That leaves a whole lot of not-so-tough guys who think they’re the real deal. But boxing? Are the men in boxing real tough guys? Damn right, they are. It’s a different kind of toughness. It is the kind that has restrictions and rules and builds respect for one another in the ring and respect for the dos and don’ts of boxing. It is a code that brings respect on the street when you see a guy running as part of his training, when you see a guy living the right life and not the night life.” “Boxing was always an escape from poverty and hard times. It was a chance to get out from under the hardships of life, to be somebody without being an idiot. Boxing bled back into the communities it came from. The fighters gave guys like me a little hope, some confidence. I wasn’t in the ring or doing roadwork. But it gave me the push I needed to
I ’ve corresponded for years by email with a boxing fan named John Burghardt who loves boxing, understands boxing and speaks his mind when writing about it. But we’d never talked. That changed recently when we talked on the telephone for an hour. John was born in 1957 and worked in construction for most of his life. He grew up watching boxing on television with his father. “I’m not an expert on
technical things like movement and footwork,” he acknowledges. “But I love boxing. There’s something about watching a fight and the way boxers carry themselves that draws me in.” John had some street fights when he was young but fought with gloves only once. He was 12 years old and picking on a new kid in school during class. The kid challenged him on the spot to fight later in the day after school let out. Word got around. When classes ended,
they were on their way outside to settle matters when the gym teacher (who’d heard about the impending battle) stopped them and suggested, “Why don’t you try fighting with gloves.” “He gave us some boxing gloves,” John recalls. “Then he took out a stopwatch to time the rounds. We started punching. And after a while, our arms got so heavy we could hardly lift them. That was the end of the fight and, before long, we were best friends.
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