With America going to glory in combat, I decided to put my personal spin on the quest by going to the Chicago Golden Gloves. For years I’ve planned to attend the Gloves–a legendary training ground for boxers and an annual fixture at the Saint Andrew gym on the north side–yet somehow I never made it until the prospect of another night watching bombs drop on Baghdad drove me out last Thursday. The Golden Gloves tournament is rich with associations–the smoke-filled arena, the square ring at its center, the film-noir lighting–and this one didn’t disappoint, even if boxing has succumbed to being smoke-free. Aside from the clean air, it was almost exactly as I’d always imagined it. Outside, a banner announced the schedule–this would be a night for semifinals in the novice division, perfect for a novice fight fan who’d never experienced the sport in the flesh–alongside a marquee promoting “STATIONS OF THE CROSS IN THE CHURCH 6 P.M. FRIDAY.” Indoors, Saint Andrew proved to be the woodiest gymnasium I’ve ever seen: wooden floors and ceiling, wooden bleachers in the balcony, and wooden seats on many of the folding chairs on the floor. The ticket taker at the door gave me a taste of the superior attitude of the fight aficionado; after I gave him my ticket and stood there waiting for him to rip it and give me back the stub–holding up the line–he growled, “That’ll be all for this evening.” There was no need for a stub in the general admission seating, thus no need for him to go to the trouble of ripping the tickets, so move on. I took a seat in the balcony over dead center of the ring, which lay there in light that shone on the Budweiser logos on the canvas. It was a sponsorship extended at the forbearance of the Catholic church to $3 Buds sold from a concession stand in the corner. I settled in as the houselights dimmed.
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The gym was never crowded–at most a few hundred people were in attendance by the middle of the fight card–but the place bustled with a unique energy and excitement. I’m guessing half the crowd was either involved with the bouts or related to someone who was. The PA announcer called on boxers to go to a check-in table to have their gloves examined. In the far corner, a lumbering, slope-shouldered boxer displayed a remarkably quick punch, pounding his trainer’s oversize mitts with a smack intensified by the trainer’s pushing the mitts forward to meet each blow. In the near corner, a woman–her trunks high on her thin waist–did the same with her trainer, creating smacks almost as loud as the behemoth’s; she had a crisp, short punch she put into brisk combinations. Yet it soon became obvious that punching a trainer’s mitts is a completely different talent from punching someone who’s trying to punch you.
The only women’s fight of the night came next. “Brought to you by Budweiser, the king of beers–or in this case the queen of beers,” the announcer said. Amelia Hannus, the determined little woman I’d seen warming up, took on Krista Hutley, and Hannus pretty much dominated the bout from beginning to end. Her combinations were nowhere near as clean in the heat of battle as they had been in practice–there was a lot of flailing about by both fighters–but she peppered Hutley into a standing eight count in the first round, reddening her face, and controlled the action to win the decision.
The final fight of the night, pitting John Truce against Efren Mendoza in the 147-pound class, was another collision of styles. Truce, his high-top boots peeled down like banana skins, bounced and moved, and he had a way of hissing as he punched more pronounced than the usual gust of air through the nose that fighters are taught to expel. Mendoza, hunch shouldered, simply plodded and jabbed, and while both threw a bunch of punches it seemed to me that Mendoza landed more. Truce came on in the third round, but Mendoza fought back. Truce got the nod in the end, and I think it was largely on style points.
