In my third week on the job, I received an e-mail asking if I wanted to attend a boxing match. I didn’t even have to write about it if I didn’t want to. Other than free lunch at staff meetings (which has since been discontinued), this was the first perk of the job. As boys, we’re supposed to enjoy testosterone displays like punching fests, so how could I turn it down? Charlotte’s own Calvin Brock, the banking boxer, was scheduled to fight a dumpy looking dude named David Bostice.
Before the main event, I checked out the prefight press conference, hoping it would be as entertaining as the Don King/Mike Tyson ones I’d seen on TV. It wasn’t. No one had to restrain either boxer from eating the other one’s babies. Brock predicted victory, and Bostice basically predicted defeat, saying things like, “I’m going to give it my all” and “Most boxers wouldn’t fight a highly ranked opponent in his own state.”
At the match, I assumed I would be seated somewhere near the front, but upon arriving, I was ushered to a ringside table. (A ringside table! For me?) One of the three ringside judges was seated to my right in what looked like a booster chair. He broke the stoic referee demeanor to tell me how many of the boxers on the undercard sucked and that Brock wasn’t much of a heavyweight contender like he had been touted.
My judge friend was right. Three of the boxers on the undercard lost their boxing virginity in Ovens that night. In one match, a newbie fighting ex-basketball star Kendall Gill turned tail about ten seconds into the match and hid in the corner. The referee had to stop the match as Gill beat on the back of his opponent’s head.
The best part about sitting only inches from the action is that you get to use more senses than just your eyes and ears. Every landed punch launches a misty shower of sweat and spit into the air, and the closer the boxers are to your side of the ring, the more mist lands on you.
Those aren’t the only bodily fluids that reach a ringside spectator though. At one point, blood from two wounded boxers sprayed up like water out of a rotating sprinkler. Four maroon droplets landed on my notepad. Some might call it a health hazard. Not me. I circled the droplets with my pen, drew an arrow to them and labeled them “blood.” It was the ultimate souvenir.
This article appears in Mar 8-14, 2006.
