In his 2001 essay “A rough trade,” British novelist Martin Amis writes ferociously, and with ironic humanity, about the increasing violence one finds in the pornographic-movie industry, probably America’s last bastion of pure capitalism. He employs an invocative clause – “jack-knifed over his flying fist” – before sorting out what is what in an industry that generated $8 billion annually, 10 years ago, and today generates much more than that. Then Amis sets out, in resume-builder fashion, the requirements of a porn actor.
In the middle, Amis lists “suffer(ing) from nostalgie de la boue” – a French term which denotes “yearning for the mud” while connoting “attraction to what is unworthy, crude, or degrading.”
What follows, too, will suffer nostalgie de la boue. It will plunder the trashcans of boxing gyms, Petri dishes of human waste kept at a humid temperature that would make a jungle envious.
Boxing gyms test their participants’ immune systems much as their chins and balls. If the American hospital has become world heavyweight champion of places to acquire a staph infection, boxing gyms nonetheless fight nobly on as sturdy, stubborn contenders. The fluids that flow in them are, in the frequency of their secretions: perspiration, saliva, blood, urine, semen and excrement.
A true boxing gym, as opposed to a fitness club, submits to the presence of sweat. Trapped in a 19th century ethic, boxing gyms, even in the world’s most humid spots, employ heaters. They keep themselves well above 90 festering, oppressive degrees, as if to answer the late Joe Souza’s rhetorical inquiry: “How else will our fighters make weight?” Boxing gyms are like lungs.
But they smell worse. Their scent is a fetid mix of human exertion and whatever industrial cleaners film these exertions’ leather surfaces. Handwraps, worked hard and put away wet, emit a stench curiously resembling corn chips. These are twisted round fists then pushed in the nylon interiors of gloves dutifully sprayed with an agent that is like PAM.
Fighters rub their bodies with Albolene, a makeup remover that induces perspiration, then climb in a shared contraption called a “sauna suit,” a plastic garbage bag with elastic seals for the neck, wrist and ankles. A sauna suit is not wrung-out afterwards but emptied like a wineskin. Then it dangles off a bench to drip dry – a state it never reaches, passing directly from wilted to crunchy.
A cotton t-shirt worn in a boxing gym is soiled irreparably. It will come out the dryer smelling like any other piece of laundry, yes, but add even a drop of perspiration, and its funk revives as a menace worse and more elusive than cat piss.
Bernard Hopkins says a proper boxing gym is one in which you can spit on the floor without drawing notice. If there is a human fluid ubiquitous as sweat in a boxing gym, it is saliva. In the documentary “Rumble in the Jungle,” Ferdie Pacheco refers to what comes off a fighter’s mouthpiece as “slobber” – the same white froth that accompanies a tennis ball wrestled from a dog’s mouth. The dainty latex gloves doctors wear on television are not worn in boxing gyms, places those ringside physicians would condemn on first visit.
Fighters plagued by chest colds, too, hawk phlegm from their throats then cast furtive glances at dark corners and concrete walls before looking for more polite receptacles.
Blood stains much fabric in gyms, and diversely enough that no forensics team could finger its source. Headgear precludes flesh-cutting better than brain-concussing, and so most blood comes from noses. Once a boxer’s nose begins to bleed in sparring, it is wiped by a trainer with some towel, any towel, between rounds. This, like most preventative acts taken during sparring, is to preclude humiliation. Careless official judges, they say, “score the blood” – but not nearly as much as fellow boxers leaning on a ring apron do.
A lonely urinal generally sits beside the shower in a boxing gym’s bathroom. The best way to tell the difference of the two spots is the height of their drains. The shower smells like the urinal. Its washing water is the same, of course, and whatever cleansing effect that may take, a mildewed towel is often passed over its bather’s body, just after the towel is pulled from a sweating locker, or communally employed.
There’s an old trainer’s tale that abstinence is a prerequisite for a prizefight; sex, the saying goes, weakens the legs. Perhaps. But more than one trainer, when frustrated by a charge’s tension, has counseled masturbation. A former Texas Golden Gloves champion imparted this anecdote:
I was a smooth boxer, so I needed to be relaxed. My coach told me to go in the men’s room before a bout and jerk-off before gloving up. I did it the first time, and it worked; I moved that day like syrup. Before my next match, I decided more would be better, and did it twice (ah, youth!), and I tell you it took my legs away. No more of that, Coach said.
Then there’s excrement. It happens round heavyweights, men whose diets are untroubled by making weight. They take lots of proteins in the ring with them because they have that luxury. A cruiserweight contender once fresh from a heavyweight’s training camp described what happened when a third-round body blow shocked the man’s large intestine into vacation.
“We took a break. He excused himself and went to the bathroom. Nobody mentioned it. Then we went back to work.”
All of this foulness, and the often-public way one is subjected to it, though, serves a purpose of its own: It tests a man’s desire to make combat, asking what he will endure to come out of a fight whole. It also creates a bond among its participants. It is, like much in boxing, cruel and essential.
Bart Barry can be reached at bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com
