1. How does a jazz pianist end up managing fighters?

It’s kind of a funny story.  Around 1990, I got involved with Lou Thesz, who was working as an agent for Antonio Inoki and other wrestling promoters in Japan. Lou was interested in sending high profile heavy boxers overseas to work programs with the wrestlers. The gigs paid very well.  Among others, I thought Mitch “Blood” Green might be a good fit.   He was a big guy, and he was flamboyant.  He had the perfect look and the right persona to go over big in Japan.  But Green refused to put over any of the Japanese wrestlers, which would have been the point of his going there in the first place.  Mitch was always very protective of his street credibility.  But, because I also knew a great deal about boxing, he asked if I’d manage him in his comeback.  So my first assignment as a boxing manager was to try to turn around the stalled career of Mitch “Blood” Green.    It was auspicious beginning: less than a year in, I picked up the Boxing Illustrated “Sucker of the Year” award.

2. When did you first become aware of the dirty side of the sport?

Muy pronto.  As soon as I began talking to people in the business, it became clear to me that the “boxing” part of boxing made up only a small part of what took place.  That didn’t bother me.  I was a little surprised that I hadn’t surmised it earlier.   Maybe I simply hadn’t given it any thought.  But I was lucky; I made friends with Al Braverman, who knew everything there was to know about the business.  Al had once been partners with Doc Kearns, and he was Don King’s Director of Boxing—the guy who had, along with Don Elbaum, brought King into the business.  He’d played a part in the Liston-Ali fixes.  Al really had been in the middle of the action for a long time.  Braverman and Vin Vecchione showed me that the mechanics of moving fighters were even more absorbing than the actual fighting.

But “dirty side of the sport” is a tricky phrase.  Not every aspect of what is conventionally seen to be “dirty” in boxing is unilaterally negative.  The boxing business is incredibly complex.  Culturally, you have to think in terms of who benefits from what, of who is helped and who is hurt.

3. Did you ever throw fights? If so, how did your fighters feel about it?

I never had any of my fighters throw fights.  It’s not that I wouldn’t have, or that I was against doing that in principle.  I’d certainly arranged lots of fixed fights, both to the benefit of my own fighters and as a broker for other managers and promoters.  But circumstances never quite played out that would have made it useful for my own fighters to lose in fixes.  There were four times it almost happened.  In three of them, my guys were okay with it.  Martin Foster was offered an HBO fight against Riddick Bowe, who was making a comeback.  Bowe would have slaughtered Foster, so I suggested to Martin that he spare himself the beating and get stopped in the 1^st or 2^nd round.  Foster agreed, but the fight wound up not taking place.  I arranged for Leon Spinks to throw two fights.  I won’t talk about the first, even though there are a couple of good stories attached to it.  The other fighter was a great champion, who would have carried Leon in exchange for my stopping the fight after a few rounds.  Vin Vecchione and I discussed a Leon Spinks versus Peter McNeeley fight that would have been fixed.  Ultimately we decided against it because it would have required McNeeley not hurting Spinks, and, as Vin said, “Peter is not that talented.” I was very worried about Leon taking more real punches.  It takes genuine skill to win a fixed fight without hurting your opponent while still making viewers believe that what they are watching is on the level.  It’s one of the reasons that you never let the winner of a fixed fight these days know that the result is predetermined.   Winning a fixed fight believably (one that goes more than a round or so) is a lost art.  Al Braverman and I also had a number of discussions about having Mitch Green fight Tyson as Mike’s first post-prison opponent.  I’d come up with a very good plan that would have created an interest in the fight (or, more accurately, in Mitch Green’s participation in it; the interest in Tyson already existed).  But Green would never have agreed to let Mike Tyson knock him out, so I never suggested it to him.  I also colluded with an ex-heavyweight champion to semi-fix a fight.  The guy was a friend of mine who was scheduled to fight against another ex-champ.  The day before the fight, my friend called to tell me that he was really out of shape; his strategy would be to go for broke early and hope to get lucky.  The guy he was fighting was virtually impossible to knock out, so we knew it was unlikely that he’d get his fast kayo.  We agreed that if he didn’t get lucky early he’d pull out of the fight after the 8^th round with a “shoulder injury.”  I put together all the money I could find, including everything my friends could round up, and bet on two propositions: that the fight would end in a knockout, and on the round it would end.  Toward the end of the 8^th, my friend showed signs of distress in the ring, and then complained in the corner that he’d thrown his shoulder out.  The fight was stopped.  Nobody got hurt, and we all made money.

4. What got you interested in boxing in the first place?

Here too, I was lucky.  I’m just old enough to have caught the tail end of the last great era in boxing.  As a kid, I was exposed to the miracle of The Fight of the Week, with Don Dunphy’s incomparable commentary and the glamour of Edie Adams’ Muriel cigar commercials.  I smoked cigars from about age six until I was nine years old simply because of those one minute spots. Incredibly heady stuff.  I got to watch fighters like Ray Robinson (who was way past his prime), Archie Moore, Harold Johnson, Emile Griffith, Luis Rodriguez, Joe Brown, Carlos Ortiz, and Sonny Liston week after week.  I don’t have the language to describe how skillful these guys were.  It’s not that there aren’t good fighters around today.  But no one on the current scene is even close in accomplishment to the fighters of that era.  As a boy trying to learn about life, I found watching them completely absorbing.  I still see it as a major part of my education.  Would-be intellectuals might want to spend some time looking at Harold Johnson videos.

5. What writing have you done before? Why did you start writing?

I wrote a horrible book when I was in my twenties.  The book deservedly went nowhere.  I did it as a discipline, not because I had aspirations to be a writer.  Once the book was done, I quit writing.  But a number of years ago, after being out of boxing for a while, I decided to see if I could manufacture, from start to finish, a heavyweight contender.  I thought it’d be interesting to do everything from behind the drawing board—find the “fighter”, make up a persona for him, get financial backing, pick his opponents, move him up the ladder fast, get a buzz going, etc.  The goal was to land him a big money fight within eighteen months.  I managed to get a good start on those things, but wound up picking the wrong fighter.  He came to a quick and embarrassing end. At the time, I was part of an email group that discussed boxing (the same eight guys still have The Boxing Standard blog site.)  I sent the group a detailed email that outlined the project, ambitious start to ignominious finish.  Carlo Rotella liked the piece, and suggested that I turn my attention to writing.  I love Carlo’s writing, so I took him seriously.  I brushed up the email, sent it to Eddie Goldman at Carlo’s recommendation and, for the next few years, wound up writing for Boxingranks.com and some other boxing sites.  It was an unusual start in that, from the very beginning, I was paid for my work and never had to deal with a rejection letter.  But I didn’t really have much of an opportunity to learn how to write, since I was publishing as many at twenty articles—roughly 30,000 words—every month.  It’s not an approach I’d recommend to anyone trying to become a real writer.

6. Who are some of the writers who impress, inspire you?

Charles Portis.  “Gringos” has the best opening of any book I’ve ever read: “Christmas again in Yucatan.”  Just four words.  “Again” is beyond brilliant.  I love Jean Rhys.  My wife introduced me to the work of Virginia Woolf.  I enjoy Fanny Howe.  And J. M. Coetzee, at his best, moves me very deeply.  I thought “Life & Times of Michael K” was a real achievement.  Coetzee seems to be getting better too, which is pretty scary.  But, to be honest, writers don’t inspire me.  Musicians don’t either.  I guess I’m old enough now so that I just do my work.

7. Do you see any connection between making music and writing?

I do.  I hasten to add that I’m a much more advanced and better musician, both by aptitude and experience, than I am a writer.  But I think the disciplines are quite similar.  Art is, of course, much more about routine, practice, and a kind of diligence than it is about inspiration.  And there’s maybe some irony about this: in the beginning, you work almost entirely from inspiration.  Then you learn a couple of things, and the work starts to move into craft.  You pick up craft, and you might then be receptive to inspiration again.  At least that’s the hope.  It seems to me that this trajectory is pretty much identical with music and writing.  I’ve been doing music for a long, long time, so the discipline part is deeply ingrained, and my projects are now comfortably (and maybe sometimes not so comfortably) beyond craft and back to a place where I’m open to inspiration on a moment to moment basis.  I don’t have that kind of background with writing, so I’ve got a lifetime of catching up to do.  My friends all write a lot better than I do.  So does my wife. So does my son.  But playing music has taught me a lot about process, so I know what to do in order to write.

8. People always talk about ‘reforming’ boxing. Thoughts?

It can’t—and shouldn’t—be done. Boxing is outside the realm of the controllable.  The only people who’d have a clue as to how to do it are the ones who wheel and deal in its center, and they’d have no reason to reform it.  Its crusaders, from John McCain to Teddy Atlas to Ron Scott Stevens to Thomas Hauser, have been, without exception, clueless—total marks.  What do any of them know about disenfranchisement, let alone about boxing itself?  I love boxing, but boxing, as a business anyway, is fundamentally a bad thing.  Aside from the breathtaking art that can come out of it at its best, it does almost no one any good.  Its successes?  Well, who’d want to be Bob Arum?  Who’d want to be Floyd Mayweather?  Jesus.  They have no friends; they’ve got absolutely nothing to do.  They’re both total bores.  In a sense, talking about “reforming” boxing is like talking about reforming loan sharking or armed robbery: it’s a kind of oxymoron.

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