Introduction

THE LAST PUNCH

Berlin, Germany, 2016. The last punch I ever took voluntarily landed in the basement of a council-run gym in the centre of the city, a few months away from the cut-off date I had set for myself.

Age in boxing is different than it is anywhere else. A man of thirty-five is still relatively young on the street, but in a ring, in shorts and flat-soled boxing boots, his hands wrapped, gumshield covering his teeth, he is geriatric. He is old beneath the skin, his knees starting to creak, the unseen damage accumulated and held.

I had not wanted to spar that night, but I was still following my rule about never saying 'no'. I felt old and heavy, missing the fifth gear that had been there throughout my twenties and early thirties.

My opponent's name was Jens, and I had always struggled against him. We touched gloves and went to work. I, a southpaw, jabbed pointlessly at him with my right. He moved and jabbed back. I plodded. His punches connected, little taps to my forehead. I tried to bend my knees enough to twist and tilt my body into a shifting target.

It is dispiriting to know that you have lost so much of yourself. I moved back to the ropes and placed myself in the pocket of a corner, trying to lead him into a left-hand counter. He stopped.

I lowered my left hand, my head too far in front to slip anything coming back. Jens threw a punch. I saw his hand move from his shoulder, begin its arc, and then it was landing just above my cheekbone.

My legs shook and my hands fell. I raised them again. My brain fogged and I blinked. Uh oh, I thought.

It was not the biggest punch I had ever taken, but it was the biggest I had ever taken that badly. An inch lower would have put me on the ground.

Jens took a step back. I stumbled to one side and tried to straighten up. I snorted. Keep going. I leaned forwards and shifted my weight as if I was going to come forwards. But I did not want him to hit me again.

I waved him in. Don't let anyone see you quit, I thought. 'Los geht's,' I said. I stepped forwards. 'Mir geht's gut.'

Jens looked at me. 'Nein,' he said. 'Du wirst nicht noch einmal geschlagen.' No, you are not getting punched again.

I went home that evening with a headache that stretched out for days into the weekend. That Saturday, I went by myself to the Max-Schmeling-Halle to watch Arthur Abraham fight Tim-Robin Lihaug. The lights in the arena made the pain flare like a beacon in the mist.

And that was where it ended. I kept my membership going for a while and I went back a few times to hit some bags. But I was done. I drifted away from boxing until it seemed as if it were behind a glass panel, something that I looked on with a mixture of sadness, regret and awe. That used to be me, I would think from time to time. I used to do that.

I never saw Jens again. He got me out of boxing. He may have been a guardian angel.

A YOUNG MAN'S GAME

Boxing is full of lessons. Most things are, if you stay in them long enough. But I learned most of mine in the ring.

And there is one lesson that you learn at the start but which only beds itself in after a few years: boxing is hard at the beginning and increasingly merciless as you get older.

It is a lesson that all boxers eventually learn, but it takes a long time. Too long, mostly. As an old fighter once opined, the only time you have ever learned your lesson is 'too late'.

The beginning is as discernible as the end. I first walked into All Saints Boxing Club in York on Valentine's Day 2002. I was with my girlfriend at the time. My love affair with boxing lasted much longer.

I had been a tall and skinny teenager, easily intimidated. I wore glasses with a strong prescription, and I stayed away from fights. Bigger kids and grown men scared me, but when I left home at nineteen I was still an overgrown, awkward and gangly boy, and I went deep into the parts of the world where the value of a man is directly correlated with his ability to harm others.

I wanted most of all to be a man, and these were the examples set down. The path to manhood, it seemed, involved pain and the ability and willingness to inflict it. I fell hard in love with that world.

I tried to build myself. I lifted weights three times a week and boxed twice. I learned some jiu-jitsu and judo moves. I tried to make people think I was tough, even if I could never convince myself of that fact. At times, I must have been unbearable.

There was baby fat that I shed and replaced with muscle. The coach at the gym laughed at my efforts when I started and within a year had me demonstrating the basics to newcomers. But the real tough guys still viewed me with disdain.

A chance came up to compete. My eyesight kept me out of it.

I read and watched everything I could on boxing. I spent more time doing that than I did anything else. I subscribed to every boxing magazine, bought every VHS and DVD available and watched any and every fight that I could find on TV. I watched When We Were Kings each week, religiously. I bonded with other men in ways we never had before.

The first stories I ever wrote were about boxing. I was twenty-four and teaching in Japan, thinking that I needed to do something else with my life. I decided to write.

An insurance title in London hired me and brushed off some of the rougher edges in my reporting and writing. I started doing stories for The Sweet Science and Boxing Digest. I travelled up and down the UK at weekends to do reports. I went to Paris and met Don King briefly. I found the Fitzroy Lodge and started training there.

I became known around the office as 'the boxing guy'. I eventually got tired of the insurance title around the same time it got tired of me.

Laid off, I plotted to get out of London in 2010. I worked for a newspaper for a few months to save money while I eyed Paris. That was too expensive, so I shifted my focus to Berlin. Germany had good boxing at the time - Vitali and Wladimir Klitschko, Arthur Abraham, Marco Huck.

I came over and tried to make it work. I taught a class for a couple of years when money was tight. I became good at holding the pads for people. I was better at showing the basics than I had ever been in the ring, and I got forty to fifty students a week. I began working with the Muay Thai fighters who trained in the gym before us.

Life got in the way of the classes towards the end. Everyone got older and began to drift away. I stopped training for a year or so. I began to get old, and the wear and tear began to murmur its introductions. The body forgets nothing you have done to it, someone told me later.

I found the council-run gym and went there. I wanted to get back to what I had been. But the hour was too late. I still sparred a little, but I was afraid of everything that landed. I worried about serious injury. I said that I would stop when I turned thirty-five. I was running out of road, and I knew it. And then there was that final punch from Jens.

A year or so after I stopped boxing, I found myself drawn to grappling. In a gym in the north of Berlin, far from where the tourists go, I found myself, in my mid-thirties, wrestling with men nearly half my age. We were doing a derivation of Brazilian jiu-jitsu, itself derived from Japanese judo and sprinkled with techniques from English catch wrestling.

I was terrible at it. I loved it. I began to get obsessed again. All great love affairs have an element of obsession. I loved being back amongst men being made gentle by the training and wrestling they did with one another.

The second week I was there, a bull-strong Indian called Ranesh, also new to the sport, threw me to the ground and my ankle twisted when I landed. I limped home and the next day it was twice its normal size. I stayed away for a few weeks, then returned.

I injured my ribs away from the gym a few months later and had to take even more time off. Once I got back, I still got submitted by everybody. There were a lot of mornings after when I was covered in bruises.

Eventually, the teacher left to set up his own gym and tried to take along all his students. The new place was too far away, stuck deep in a suburb of Berlin. I went once and realised it was too far, that travelling there twice a week was too much of a commitment. I had run out of road again.

A VALEDICTION OF BLOOD

I am not entirely reformed. I doubt I ever could be at this late stage. There is still a switch that is triggered over the promise of watching a fight, still the anticipation of sitting in a darkened arena, sports hall or bullring to watch a succession of men enter to fight each other. And if I cannot get to the card itself, I find the darkest, smokiest sports bar that I can and sit there, with other men, to cheer and gasp and shout and say at points, 'They should be stopping this right now. He's had enough.'