Paul Rouse: Training to become a middle-aged boxer. What could go wrong?

I have a plan. The question is what will happen to that plan when I get punched in the face

I have a plan. The question is what will happen to that plan when I get punched in the face

At the end of February, I am to make my debut as a boxer. My friend Murt has appointed himself as my coach. He has never boxed either, but being reared on a diet of Rocky films and Muhammad Ali television appearances means he feels well-placed to direct operations.

His main contribution so far has been to make elaborate plans for the production of a short film of my ‘training camp’. This is to involve not merely footage of me sparring with a range of different opponents, but also me chopping wood and lifting boulders and displaying all manner of physical prowess in forests and mountains. He is a man for whom the aesthetic is everything.

Murt has also focused on writing lines that will allow me to perform at my best in the pre-fight taunting. “The words matter,” he says.

This is presumably why he also wants to get his friend, the poet, to act as cornerman. The poet is a fella who once fainted in an optician’s.

My opponent is a bigger man than me. He breakfasts well and brings this momentum with him through the day. He also “did a bit of boxing” when he was younger. These two things give him what I think most people would consider a significant competitive advantage. Against that, when he tries to run, he looks like he’s about to dislocate a shoulder.

So why are we fighting? The quick explanation is that my opponent returned to a bit of sparring recently to get fit and he loved it. A conversation started about this one evening recently. One line borrowed another and within a few minutes, I had not just agreed to a fight but had actually proposed it.

This seems sensible: I’m only 51.

It’s now more than 30 years since I first saw a real sporting fight. I’d a great view of it. Indeed, I was even a little bit responsible for it starting. And in keeping with the etiquette of things, I should probably have been involved in it.

It was the early 1990s. I was just 20 years of age or so and had arrived in England on a Friday to look for work. Two days later I was playing a football match on a public park near Manchester.

The game was good fun, a leisurely introduction into the social life of the vast swathes of Irish people who lived in northern England. I was playing centre-forward and midway through the second half I took a shot from about 40 yards. The ball only went about 6ft wide. The umpire on the nearest post decided to put up the flag. He was not a neutral and was instead doing his duty by his club, as he saw it. After all, a well-chosen umpire is a vital member of any forward line.

But on this occasion he may as well have fired a gun in the air to start a race. The first man to throw a punch at him was the goalkeeper. The two of them — umpire and goalkeeper — then ended up rolling around in the March muck.

This was just the start of things. Men appeared from everywhere and, within seconds, I was more or less the only player on the field not fighting. For a couple of minutes, the referee and I stood beside each other as the fight spread out around us. He was nicely droll: “I’m not sure Sunday morning is always the best time for a match.”

Normally, of course, these things are more push and posture than anything else, but there was a bit of real punching in this one. And then it ended all of a sudden, for no apparent reason, and the match continued without further fuss.

The sound of a punch landing stayed with me, however. It is a singular thing.

It was a sound that was back in my head last night when I spent 30 minutes out in the shed. I’ve hung a punchbag from a wooden beam using a heavy chain. It cranks and groans every time I hit it. It’s a pleasing sound. And it is a pleasing feeling, also, to hit the bag. I know the drill from the videos I’ve watched and from YouTube: left and right, uppercuts and jabs, a few hooks, all the while moving the feet and bobbing and weaving.

There’s no science to it, of course, the way I’m doing it. It’s just slow-motion exercise, using muscles that had previously been informed they had taken early retirement. In the first flush of enthusiasm for being back active once more, everything felt great.

Quickly, though, that has no longer proved to be the case.

This morning my arms hurt so much that I struggled to open a second Mars bar. There is also a pain across my shoulders that only Hercules might recognise after he managed to clean the Augean stables in a single day by diverting two rivers.

I now have to hold myself in new ways. Even getting up out of a chair is complicated.

Murt rings to give me an update on the planning. He tells me that he thinks I should enter the ring wearing a costume. He proposes that professorial robes would be one option. He thinks that my opponent would be so enraged by the professorial robes, “especially if you wear the fancy furry cap with them”, that he will lose all discipline and be vulnerable to counter-punching. He doesn’t seem to hear me when I question the strategy of angering a man I’m about to fight and whether counter-punching is really effective if you’re on the flat of your back.

He goes on to say that he’ll bring a big boom speaker to what he is now calling “the event” and will use it to play out ‘The Final Countdown’ by Europe as I step through the ropes and dance around. Apparently, this would set the right tone. The word he kept using was “ominous”.

The lyrics to the first verse of ‘The Final Countdown’ go: ”We’re leaving together, Yes, it’s farewell. And maybe we’ll come back To Earth, who can tell? I guess there is no one to blame. We’re leaving the ground. Will things ever be the same again?”

I told him that I had received a message this morning from my opponent who had asked: “Do you have headgear?” He had followed this message up with another one that read: “And 16oz gloves?” I tell Murt this is clearly an attempt to intimidate me and that my opponent was playing mind-games already. Murt nodded wisely at me. He said: “This is good. You’re already at the paranoia stage. This is where a fighter goes when they’re heading towards a big showdown.”

I think about getting a new coach.

There’s a voice in my head telling me I need to hit the bag again now. I head out to the shed and put on the gloves. The dog is after eating most of the padding out of the left one. So I keep throwing rights.

Ten weeks is plenty of time to get fit. When Ali trained for his fights in his compound at Deer Lake in Pennsylvania, it was intended in the first instance as a place of solitude away from the bright lights of the city, where he concentrated on getting physically and mentally ready to fight.

It didn’t exactly work out that way. One of his biographers, Jonathan Eig, described the place in the weeks before Ali fought Ken Norton in 1973 as being like a carnival, with a revolving door of celebrities and entertainers. In fact, there wasn’t even a gate to the compound. All manner of people wandered in and out as they saw fit. It sounded like great fun.

Murt appears through my shed door. He is carrying a huge framed poster of Ali. Along the bottom of the poster, in large font, run the words: “The fight is won or lost far away from witnesses — behind the lines, in the gym, and out there on the road, long before I dance under those lights.”

He says: “Stand over there and I’ll send on a photo of you training.” I hold the Ali poster in my gloves. I tuck myself in and push myself out, trying to reshape middle-age.

- Paul Rouse is Professor of History at University College Dublin