The first time I stepped into the boxing ring I had my a*s handed to me. After that experience I had decided that I didn’t ever want to step back into the ring or wear another pair of boxing gloves again. But my father was a persistent man, and he wasn’t going to have “no f****t artist son”. So I was stuck.
My father was physically abusive. He had a very long fuse, but once it reached the end, there was no stopping the violence that he would fork out to either me or my mother. All of this pent up anger, hurt, resentment turned into the fuel that I brought into the ring.
I am a physical being. I cannot feel emotion without physically feeling it. So my trainer used this pile of junk from my personal life and fed it into my head when I trained and when I went into the ring.
The problem with fighting in the ring is that an average man will tire within 3 minutes of heavy fighting. As a boxer, it is your job to pace yourself while tiring out your opponent. My first few fights I lost because I would go in there in a wanton rage and tire out by the middle of the first round.
The first knockout I dished out was one of the most euphoric experiences of my life. The combination of blows done in an almost choreographed fashion and then dealing that final punch to the side of their head and watching them go down on the mat releases so much adrenaline you don’t even feel the punches you took. I became addicted to it.
The whole trick was to balance that rage I had been holding onto against my father and let it out in little increments until the final barrage of punches and I could release it all. Sometimes I let it all out too early, and I paid for it, but I was mastering it and would have made it further had I stayed in it.
With each fight, I had put my father’s face on my opponent. This was just a mind thing I did. It ended up ending my “career” in youth boxing. At first, it aided me in focusing my anger. But on my last match, I had broken my opponents nose and he laid there on the mat trying to shake it off. I was thinking of my dad, and that was the problem. Because I began to feel guilty for wanting to hurt my dad this much. I thought about how I would really feel if that was my own father lying there on the ground, bleeding from a cut on the lip and nose that I had dealt him. In the future, there would come a time when I would deliver those punches to my own father. It wouldn’t be in a ring, it would be in his front yard. I went to my corner and I never returned.
Thus ended my stint in boxing at the age of 19. I had no other way of venting those feelings anymore, and this is when they became self-inflicting. Punching walls, hardwood floors, mirrors, windows, punching bags. But I never laid another hand on another person until I was 21, and that was in bars fueled by the drink. And that…is another story…for another day.
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