Monthly Archives: April 2017

The Problem with Fighting Angry

17 Monday Apr 2017

Posted by in Sports

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“Anger provides the number one difference between a fist-fight and a boxing bout.

Anger is an unwelcome guest in any department of boxing. From the first time a chap draws on gloves as a beginner, he is taught to ‘keep his temper’ — never to ‘lose his head.’ When a boxer gives way to anger, he becomes a ‘natural’ fighter who tosses science into the bucket. When that occurs in the amateur or professional ring, the lost-head fighter leaves himself open and becomes an easy target for a sharpshooting opponent. Because an angry fighter usually is a helpless fighter in the ring, many prominent professionals — like Abe Attell and the late Kid McCoy — tried to taunt fiery opponents into losing their heads and ‘opening up.’ Anger rarely flares in a boxing match.

Different, indeed, is the mental condition governing a fist-fight. In that brand of combat, anger invariably is the fuel propelling one or both contestants. And when an angry, berserk chap is whaling away in a fist-fight, he usually forgets all about rules — if he ever knew any…

Let me suggest that any time you are about to be drawn into a fight, keep your head and make a split-second survey of your surroundings… In 99 out of 100 cases you can force the other guy to move to an open spot by challenging his courage to do so. Don’t let the action start in a crowded subway car, in a theater aisle, in a restaurant, office, saloon or the like. Keep your head and arrange the shift, so that you’ll be able to knock his head off when you get him where you can fight without footing handicaps…

In connection with that danger, never forget: The longer the fight lasts, the longer you are exposed to danger… When you square off, you hope to beat your opponent into submission in a hurry… it is imperative that you end the brawl as quickly as possible; and the best way to do that is by a knockout.”

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Some advice for boxing, and life, pulled from Jack Dempsey’s 1950 book Championship Fighting.

As my trainer tells me, be more composed than your opponent; “if you can make him miss, you can make him pay.”

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An American Brother

07 Friday Apr 2017

Posted by in Biography

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“Cheese, I say to George A., borrowing the camera.

So, you see, he’s happy when I snap him and sticking it to the cameraman a little. I can take it, though. The truth is, when it comes to us, I want to crush him in the dust, but when it comes to anybody else, to the whole outside, other world, I want George A. to win. I want that for us both. And on this day I still feel no less sure of him than of myself.

In the photo you can tell the boy’s an athlete of some kind. Six-foot-seven and 210 or 215, he’s lean-waisted, broad across the shoulders and chest, more man than boy, though there’s still a spindly coltish something in his legs that marks him at the tremble point. From hoisting those heavy cans all summer, he has thick, good arms as ‘good’ was then, in a more casual time… George A.’s proud of the body he’s achieved. In the way his arms fall at his sides, there’s a tad of the gunslinger pose. He’s like someone with a new suit he paid a lot of money for and doesn’t want to wrinkle in the wearing, or a cherry car he parks at the far edge of the lot to ward off dings.

I thought my brother was the best-looking boy I ever knew, among the best-looking I ever saw. As I study this old photo, though, I think perhaps it isn’t Gable that I’m searching for, but those clean-cut all-American boys on lawns and beaches, posing for the camera with their girls and paste-waxed cars, before they went away to World War II. George A.’s smile extends a friendly confidence like theirs, but a little further back, I see something that’s prepared for disappointment, and it strikes me that George A., too, this day in 1975, is going off to war, an inward war no less real. It will last twenty-five years and the rest of his short life, and George A. won’t return from it.  This picture is the last glimpse I’ll ever have of him, which I guess is why I kept it and put it out in every place I ever lived in.”

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Pulled from David Payne’s memoir about growing up in North Carolina, published last year, Barefoot to Avalon.

Earlier in the book, he offers this description of his brother, referenced above, “He reminded me of young Clark Gable, only the confidence in Gable that flirted with conceit and smugness was in George A. nuanced, sly and sweet.” You can see David Payne talk to Charlie Rose, a longtime family friend of the Paynes, here.

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