You're Not a Gifted Athlete

I had a fight in 2022 and got knocked out in the first round. I'm an Upson, which means I have no aptitude for sports, but I like them. I also just turned 47, so my boxing-career-clock is ticking.

You’re probably good at something, but it’s not this

I was signed up for two kickboxing fights last year and couldn’t participate in either. For the first fight, the club said they couldn’t find a suitable opponent, i.e. someone fat and ungainly enough to make it look like a fair fight. For the second, my club coach said, ‘You can’t defend yourself adequately,’ then there was a pregnant pause, and I could tell he was trying to phrase the next sentence delicately. ‘Also, you aren’t good at attacking.’

___The Knock Out________________________

Now, Madame Reader, I don’t know how much you know about combat sports, but it’s not like a decathlon where you might be really good at the 100-meter but not so great at the javelin throw, and that’s OK cause your strengths will balance out your weaknesses. In boxing, other than the ability to enter a ring by slipping your body between two horizontal ropes, there are zero skills that don’t fall into the categories of attacking and defending. In the nicest way possible, my coach was saying, ‘Luc, you’re ill-equipped for every part of this sport.’

So, being headstrong and slow on the uptake, I decided to purchase some personal training lessons from the coach—you know, to work on the basics. We spent the first five hour-long sessions working on just the jab and the cross. Once again, Madame Reader, I don’t know how familiar you are with boxing, but if we were to translate this to soccer, it would be ‘kicking the round thing on the ground.’ Not only were these lessons embarrassingly simple, but they were public. In my gym, the boxing ring is dead centre in the middle of the space, and it’s raised. Not only that, but the group lessons face the ring, so whether you like it or not, if you are in a group’s lesson at 9 AM, you will be witness to a greying man hitting the pads while the coach shakes his head elastically.

During the last few sessions, I’ve noticed the coach wanting to encourage me; the trouble is that he’s not prone to lying. This put him in a difficult position: how to encourage the ageing, sweating, untalented boxer in front of him while maintaining his integrity? Finally, in our most recent session, he managed this feat with great dexterity. After what I felt were a few decent jabs on my part, he looked at me with his perpetually piercing glare and said, ‘Luc, you have the spirit and the motivation.’ He generously left out, ‘but not the talent.’ That day after training, I wiped the sweat from my brow, threw my towel around my shoulders, and walked out of the gym with my head held high.

“But he did not hope…. As if in rebellion against his influence, they had succumbed to whatever in them was weakest, and often it was nothing he could even define.”

-The Coach bemoaning the failure of yet another of his boxers in Fat City

If you want to read a book about boxing and just some damn good American literature, you can’t do better than Leonard Gardner’s Fat City. Leonard Gardner only wrote the one book, which no one understands since it’s so great, but he did lots of screenwriting for, among others, the television show NYPD Blue.