Monthly Archives: Apr 2022

Boxing

I followed boxing from an early age, listening to Harry Carpenter’s commentaries on the ‘radiogram’. The earliest fighters I recall were all in the heavyweight division; Rocky Marciano, Ingemar Johansson and Floyd Patterson. The British fighters, apart from Henry Cooper, seemed tame by comparison but there were some good men in the lighter divisions. Cooper would have been far too light for a heavyweight these days. He was naturally left-handed but fought with a conventional stance rather than as a southpaw. His manager Jim Wicks joked that southpaws ‘should be drowned at birth’.

Cooper achieved immortality after his fight with the then Cassius Clay at Wembley Arena in 1963. Clay had had a less impressive start to his professional campaign than you might think. The Cooper-Clay fight featured the future Muhammad Ali being knocked to the canvas for the second time in his professional career. With about four seconds left in the fourth round Cooper’s fabled left hook did the damage. Clay was up at a count of three but clearly shaken. The recording confirms that one of his gloves was already torn during the fourth round. He may also have been given smelling salts illegally (it looks like that on the tape). The break between rounds four and five was indeed longer than the regulation 60 seconds – but only by five seconds; and Clay fought on without changing gloves. Angelo Dundee later admitted exacerbating the pre-existing tear in the glove to delay matters – and perhaps increase the potential damage to Cooper’s face. The fifth round was a horrific three minutes of eye surgery during which Cooper’s gum shield was knocked out and his corner threw in the towel.

The following year the unbeaten Clay fought Sonny Liston for the world title. I was only ten but I was aware of the champion Sonny Liston’s frightening power. He’d learned to box while in jail for armed robbery. He had also been jailed for assaulting a police officer and seemed to be deeply involved with organised crime. Cooper’s manager Wicks said they would be prepared to meet Clay after the fight – but not Liston. They didn’t even want to meet Liston ‘walking down the same street.’

It seemed inevitable to me that Liston would put the shockingly arrogant Cassius Clay in his place. Clay won gold in the light heavyweight division at the 1960 Rome Olympics and seemed bent on winding everyone up with his relentless braggadocio. I couldn’t see how this conceited lightweight egomaniac would beat the fearsome Liston. I recommend Nick Tosches’ excellent The Devil and Sonny Liston if you want to explore this topic further.

Liston had knocked out Floyd Patterson in the first round of both their fights before he faced Clay. The brief nature of these fights meant Liston had very little recent ring time and there were rumours that his age was more than 32; perhaps even 40. He was also carrying chronic shoulder injuries which were being treated secretly. Confident of victory, he was not training vigorously.

The boxing authorities were nervous of Liston’s mob connections and the politicians were concerned about the potential damage he might cause to the civil rights movement. Boxing journalists disliked both fighters. Before the fight Clay called Liston a ‘bear’ and boasted he would ‘whip him like he was his daddy’ apparently unaware that Liston bore scars from savage beatings his father had inflicted on him using the buckle end of his belt. Uniquely, Clay also wrote a poem about his impending victory, which ended:

…Yes, the crowd did not dream, when they laid down their money,

That they would see a total eclipse of the Sonny.

Liston was incensed. All this grim background detail was unknown to the ten-year-old me.

The fight started at 10pm local time, 25th February 1964. The commentary was broadcast in the UK in the early hours of the 26th. I pleaded with my mother to be allowed to stay up and listen to Harry Carpenter but she refused. Reluctantly I retired to bed. I had no radio in my room. The following morning Mum came upstairs to wake me for school. I sat up bleary-eyed. “Well, your man lost,” she said, smiling. “No, Mum. I was supporting Liston,” I corrected her. “That’s right. Liston lost. Your breakfast is ready.” I was utterly astonished.

Clay admitted to being genuinely scared of Liston but out-boxed and out-hit him for four rounds. In the fifth, the ‘blind round,’ Clay’s eyesight went. Angelo Dundee touched Clay’s face, then his own eye, and found that he suffered the same blinding, stinging sensation. The allegation was that Liston’s gloves had been ‘juiced’ by his corner at the end of the fourth round. Alternatively the substance could have been put on Liston’s shoulders where it would be transferred to his opponents face. All these theories founder on the likelihood that the same irritant would be transferred to the perpetrators eyes. In any event, Clay survived by back-pedalling furiously until his sight recovered. He then dominated the sixth. At the end of it Liston told his corner ‘That’s it,’ and refused to come out for the seventh round. Only one previous heavyweight had given up the world title on his stool. Clay announced, ‘I must be the greatest! I shook up the world! I shook up the world!’

Clay swept everything before him, joined The Nation of Islam and changed his name to Muhammad Ali. In 1965 he would beat Liston again in an even more controversial fight which featured the ‘phantom punch.’ My uncles, who followed boxing a bit, liked Ali even less than before and expected his downfall with every fight. I liked him more and more and was disappointed when his refusal to serve in Vietnam on the grounds he had no beef with the Vietcong interrupted his brilliant career. He lost his best years – as Angelo Dundee said.

For a digestible analysis of Ali’s global impact I recommend Ken Burns’ excellent eight-part documentary currently available on BBC iPlayer.

Meanwhile, at school, I had the usual playground fisticuffs with rivals but steered clear of any seriously competent fighters; discretion being the better part of playground fights. Children love a fight and any skirmish was immediately engulfed by an excited crowd. A teacher would then wade through the diminutive melee to separate the adversaries. We were belted for fighting at school; the teachers presumably being of the opinion that violence could be eradicated by violence.

Ever keen to have a go at boxing, I persuaded my mother to buy me two pairs of gloves for Christmas. My friend John Hunter and I cleared a space in the hall, put the gloves on, and squared up. Very soon John hit me plumb on the nose and there was blood everywhere. The gloves were confiscated for a while and remained forever stained with my gore. In secondary school we tried to persuade the PE teachers to start a boxing club. They considered it for a while but eventually decided against it. Just as well.

I remained a big fan of boxing, and Ali in particular, but he was never quite the same after he returned to the ring. He lost to Joe Frazier in their first fight and then had his jaw broken by the underrated Ken Norton in the second defeat of his career. Norton and Frasier were both beaten up by George Foreman before Ali faced Foreman in the Rumble in the Jungle in 1974. Foreman could beat deep dents into a sand-filled heavy bag and was alleged to have broken sparring partners forearms when they covered up to defend themselves.

Rather like the first Liston fight, no one expected Ali to win. In fact, they rather expected he would get seriously hurt. Normal Mailer’s The Fight, which is about that encounter, is worth reading. The fight was meant to be preceded by a music festival, Zaire 74, featuring the greatest black artists of the day, but the contest was delayed due to a training injury to Foreman’s face. Because of the artists’ prior commitments the musical event went ahead on schedule. The movie Soul Power is about those performances. The Oscar-winning documentary When We Were Kings is tremendous and includes some footage of Zaire 74.

Ali spent the first round throwing right crosses in an attempt to surprise Foreman with this ‘amateur’ tactic. He connected but it had no effect. At the first break Ali stood in his corner and stared out into the African night, contemplating his fate. His high-risk decision was, famously, to let his opponent hit him until he was exhausted. Ali knocked Foreman out in the eighth round, ushering his falling victim to the deck like a matador intent on preserving the beauty of the moment. The fight was Harry Carpenter’s finest hour – ‘Oh my God, he’s won the title back at 32!‘

Three years later in 1977 I was doing a student elective at Bellevue Hospital in New York. At the end of September Ali was to fight Ernie Shavers at Madison Square Garden. By that time I had been in the States for two months and had run out of money. Emergency funds from home were on the way, but held up in the banking system. As a result I lost my only chance to see Ali fight – and he actually won that one. The later fights against Leon Spinks and Larry Holmes were a mistake. Holmes was an Ali fan and actually asked the referee to stop the fight to save his hero any more punishment. Ali was already experiencing serious neurological symptoms. He should have listened to Dr Ferdie Pacheco.

My American friend Al has lived in Philadelphia for many years but was raised in Newark NJ in the same neighbourhood as the great middleweight champion Marvin Hagler. Late one night in 1976, on his way home from work as a waiter, Al came across a large Cadillac parked in a Society Hill lot. The interior light was on and Al could see piles of money on the dashboard. Curious to see who would risk doing this, Al peered in. A man was seated at the wheel, counting the money with a gun beside him on the passenger seat. It was Joe Frazier who had just been defeated by George Foreman for second time. Undaunted, Al tapped on the window and offered his hand in commiseration. Initially startled, but confronted by a harmless-looking white kid, Frazier lowered the window and graciously shook his hand. ‘Yeah man,’ was all he said.

While I still retained some interest in the sport, the best fights were in the middleweight division where Marvin Hagler operated. Hagler’s fights against Tommy Hearns, John Mugabi and Sugar Ray Leonard were classics of the genre. The last fight I recall taking a serious interest in was Frank Bruno versus Tim Witherspoon in 1986. I was in Philadelphia at the time and Al had some trouble finding a bar that was showing the fight. The contest was being held in Wembley Stadium during the early evening in the States. Frank had already lost to James ‘Bonecrusher’ Smith and ‘Terrible’ Tim Witherspoon looked like another tough prospect. Al opined that British fighters lacked the tough upbringing of the Americans, which made all the difference. Frank lost in the 10th and we went off to a Japanese restaurant to get drunk on saki.

A week later Marvis Frazier, son of Joe, took on the 20 year old Mike Tyson. I had barely heard of Tyson and expected any son of Joe to have some decent chops. Al and I went to the City Bites bar-restaurant to watch it. Al’s friend Dean Rohrer’s band played there. We got some beers and went to a table. The fight started and Al said, ‘Watch. This won’t last long.’ It lasted 30 seconds. Tyson went on a rampage through the heavyweight division becoming the youngest ever champion later that year. A synonym for brute force and power his name adorns countless tough-looking dogs and another present-day world heavyweight champion in Tyson Fury.

We had our own top middleweights in the UK but the encounter between Michael Watson and Chris Eubank in 1991 ended my enjoyment of boxing. The two were very evenly matched but Eubank was losing, and in the penultimate round Watson put him down for the first time in his career. Eubank got up, feeling everything was on the line, and felled Watson with an uppercut. Watson was already showing signs of serious intracranial mischief by this stage but his lead on points persuaded his corner and the referee to let the fight continue. Eubank, realising he might now salvage the fight, went at the defenceless Watson with ferocity. Watson collapsed and became deeply unconscious. There were no medics and no oxygen at the ringside. There was a prolonged delay in getting him any treatment. Although he survived to sue the promoters, he ended up in a wheelchair for six years and permanently disabled. Eubank profoundly regretted the outcome of the fight.

You might say to me that a doctor who (up to that point) could not see anything wrong with a sport whose principal objective was inflicting sufficient brain damage to cause unconsciousness, was suffering from a large moral scotoma – and you might be right. I have ignored the Lewis/Klitschko/Joshua/Fury years and don’t feel I’ve missed much. Like a lot of things in life, the events of long ago seem more vibrant and satisfying.

Stadio Olimpico, Rome.

In March 2012 I travelled to Rome to watch Scotland play Italy in the RBS Six Nations rugby tournament. Scotland lost every match of that campaign. You can see the RBS logo on the tent in the background of the photograph above. Our party wore Scotland strips and kilts, topped off with Peroni horned ‘viking’ beer hats. We lost count of the number of times we were asked for a photograph. The weather was lovely, the catering, by Peroni, superb. Food and cold beer were served to the crowd on a sunken running track next to the Stadio Olympico itself. The site was surrounded by modern romanesque statuary left over from the 1960 Olympics. The Italians were delighted with the whole day and we put a brave face on it. In an idle moment, I googled the 1960 games and discovered I was standing in front of the hall where Cassius Clay had won his light heavyweight gold medal.

Scots Thoughts

Skirving after Naysmith

I was brought up on the family farm in East Ayrshire but my mother came from the Edinburgh area – which makes me the product of a mixed marriage. My father ran a large business and was a prominent farmer. This meant he was away from home most of the time. We lived 600 feet up a hill and a mile or so from the nearest town. I essentially spent the first five years of my life with my mother. I had no friends of my own age and the adults I met were either relatives or worked for my father.

I can recall the feeling of dread as schooldays approached. I couldn’t bear the idea of spending part of every weekday away from home in an alien environment. I made an ineffectual attempt at school refusal, easily overcome by my mother who pointed out that Jennifer, a girl of my acquaintance, was happily attending her second year of primary school.

My next problem was linguistic. The local town of Cumnock had just 10,000 inhabitants and was surrounded by farmland. This was the late 1950s and at least a third of my new school friends didn’t have a TV at home. They weren’t listening to the Home Service either. They communicated in broad rural Scots. To avoid being ostracised I had to become fluent in the vernacular as quickly as possible. Later I would complete the assimilation process by adopting the required left-wing politics. These views came in handy later in the debating society and, in East Ayrshire at least, they made you more attractive to girls. My mother’s early training did come in useful during English exams. When asked to fill in the blanks in sentences I would put down what I thought my mother would say and that was usually the right answer.

I am a tolerably good mimic and learning to speak like my new classmates was helped by my complete immersion in the patois. There being no national standard for Scots (there still isn’t) this was the East Ayrshire version. Scots speakers from Hawick, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Aberdeen or Kirkwall all sound different and may even have trouble understanding each other. Scots in its various forms is an archaic form of English with some adopted French and other northern European words, the result of foreign-educated monarchs, commerce and settlement. The Scots word ashet for a large serving plate derives from assiette and fash for angry or vexed from fâché.

Charles I was born in Dunfermline Palace. Once he was executed the Stuart dynasty’s connection with Scots was severed. When Scots ceased to be the language of court, it fragmented into its regional dialects. The language of power became the English of London and the south eastern élite. The shift of power from Edinburgh to the south freed the great academic and legal brains of Scotland from a royal court but left them under the yoke of a powerful and atavistic church. Somehow, in spite of this, there was a Scottish Enlightenment that outshone the rest. For a while Scots was spoken at all levels of society north of the Tweed but by the late eighteenth century only a few elderly aristocrats still used it. Aspirational Scots would even employ tutors to try and eradicate their embarrassing verbal inheritances. Broad Scots receded to the rural peripheries and diversified into regional variants like Doric. The major conurbations, notably Glasgow, all had their own unique styles.

To return to my autodidactic efforts; I first had to learn all the altered vowel sounds. Nothing signals a fake accent more quickly than getting those wrong. Then there was the alien syntax and the huge vocabulary of Scots words. Eventually I was fluent and sounded no different from the other boys but at home and in the classroom standard English, albeit with an accent, prevailed.

Like many generations of Scots before her, my mother was concerned as far as possible to exclude the provincial from her speech, but it was interesting to hear my father use full-on Scots with the farm staff. He had left the local village school with its handful of pupils at age 14. My mother’s family seemed to differentiate between the Scots they had spoken as children and what they regarded as the debased urbanisms I was learning at school. They particularly disliked ‘yous‘ and referred to the locals as speaking ‘fur-tae-be, gawn-tae-be‘ Scots. In retrospect I think they were nostalgic for the lost east coast rural dialect of their youth. In private situations my mother and her parents would use old Scots with us as the language of emotional intimacy and comfort. Outside the home it remained ‘common’ – the language of the ‘common five-eighth’. I rejected all this casual snobbery and revelled in my new expertise and communications skills. To do anything else would have invited ridicule – or worse.

My youngest brother was born six years after me. In that short interval every household had acquired a TV. There was now widespread exposure to BBC English and to multiple regional English dialects through soap operas and comedies. I was aware of the shrinkage of Scots among my wee brother’s contemporaries who could mimic many UK regional accents but would fail to recognise some common Scots words.

It being Ayrshire, Robert Burns’ poems and songs featured prominently in our education. For deliberate effect Burns wrote in an archaic form of Scots, even for the eighteenth century. He would also alternate stanzas of Scots with formal English in poems such as To a Mouse. Perhaps there was some truth in the urban debasement of the language because even we true country kids needed our vocabulary expanded to understand his poems. I suppose that is simply an illustration of the dynamic nature of language. It has always changed and diversified – but now mass media is homogenising English worldwide.

One day a student from Strathclyde University turned up at the farm bearing a thick research questionnaire about Scots words used in the area. He wanted me to fill in the local words next to the standard English ones. I glanced down the long list of animals, plants and objects with a blank column alongside for the local equivalent. I told him I knew a few of the words but doubted there would be much more to add. I showed it to one of our tractor drivers who was nearing retirement age. To my amazement he went through the list filling in words I had never heard before – or read in the works of Robert Burns.

Aged twelve I sat the common entrance exam for an independent boarding school in Edinburgh. Once again I was uneasy at the thought of leaving home – this time to live among strangers of uncertain character. It was an extremely hot day. I was shown to the examination room while my father went off to have tea with the headmaster. A teacher came in and handed out the papers. ‘The bright boys over there are sitting the bursary,’ he said. ‘You thickies are sitting the common entrance. When you open the paper you will find some questions on New Maths. That’s the last time you will see any of that rubbish. We don’t believe in New Maths here.’

Not having been to a prep school I found the exam puzzling and I did not feel motivated to do well. A succession of cricketing prefects in whites came in to invigilate us between their spells at the crease. Their accents sounded posh English to me. I felt lost and ill at ease. There was a break in proceedings and we candidates wandered out to watch the cricket in progress on the vast playing fields. Another farmer’s son, equally culturally adrift, asked me how many pupils there were at my school. I answered, accurately, ‘1500’. He assured me that couldn’t be correct, so I backed down in embarrassment and said I thought it might be 500. I was very relieved when my father picked me up at the end of the day and drove us home to Ayrshire, windows down, tyres singing over the sticky tarmac.

My father, an elder of the Kirk, had detected whisky on the headmaster’s breath at 10am that morning. This gentleman had emphasised that sporting excellence was what got a boy ahead in life and they would do their best to see that I spent as much time as possible playing games. I passed the entrance, but without distinction. My father asked me if I wanted to go. I said no and that was accepted. When this decision became known, some of my mother’s friends were appalled. ‘But Edith, he’ll get a dreadful local accent!’ Years later, when I was a junior doctor, one of my colleagues (The Dragon School, Rugby, Harlequin FC) asked me why I hadn’t been sent away to school. I recounted the story above to which he replied, ‘But your accent’s not that bad…’

All Scots have unconscious scotticisms in their speech; words and constructions they imagine are standard English but which stand out to an English speaker from the South. Among these are words like ‘outwith’ and the ubiquitous use of the possessive pronoun – my work, my dinner, my bed etc. The English go to work not to ‘their’ work. They have dinner and then go to bed. They are never ‘away to their beds’. And they don’t clap dogs or eat sweeties. Scots speakers also differentiate phonetically between the words witch and which, and the country Wales from the animals called whales. These word pairs sound the same in received pronunciation (RP) which makes some jokes impossible in Scots:

Question: ‘How do you get to Wales in a car?

Answer: ‘One in the front and one in the back.’

Similarly, Scots are rhotic speakers and always pronounce the ‘r’ at the end of words like war and door. RP speakers are ‘non-rhotic’ and drop the ‘r’ unless it is followed by a vowel as in ‘better apples’. Because of this, southern speakers will often add an intrusive ‘r’ where none exists – as in draw-ring and lawr-and order. Crosswords can be a problem when a setter references non-rhotic homophones like woe and war or doh and door. A Scot hears these words as distinctly different. When I left school and went to Edinburgh to study medicine I encountered independent school pupils from Edinburgh who sounded English to me. Then I met real English students and detected a difference.

At university I made no conscious effort to moderate my dialect or accent but if I had used full Ayrshire, almost everyone I was trying to communicate with would have struggled to understand me. For a few years, to my mother’s dismay, my social circle remained anchored at home and I could slip effortlessly between Edinburgh and Ayrshire speech. Later I began to have problems. Half way through a sentence I would muck up some word or vowel and create a ghastly linguistic chimera. My Cumnock friends laughed, and mocked me for an Edinburgh snob – but they suspected I was going over to what they regarded as the dark side.

As a young man I had a passion for everything Scottish. I saw us as a slighted, under-appreciated genius nation who should throw off the English yoke as soon as possible. On a few occasions I even voted for a party that wanted to separate us from the rest of Britain. I joined the Scots Language Society (SLS) and tried writing short stories in Scots. The effusions of the SLS soon began to drop through the letterbox. As I read these, I became uneasy. There was no ‘real’ Scots – it was anything you wanted it to be, spelled any way you liked. The tricky vowel sounds were not those between Scots and English but between Scots and other forms of Scots. It was an invented nonsense. Instead of being inspired, I found the high priests of the lingo like Hugh MacDiarmid morally repugnant – and TV’s peddler of the Mither Tongue, Galston’s Billy Kay, risible. I thought it was important to read, understand and study Scots literature but, a bit like urban Gaelic, the modern version was a sickly mutant. I underwent a complete cultural vault-face and quickly abandoned the movement.

At university I knew the folk singer Rod Paterson quite well. Later he would become a noted interpreter of Burns songs. I met him at a gig in Edinburgh once and remarked jocularly, ‘Where the hell did Billy Kay get that accent from? I’m from Ayrshire and nobody speaks like that in Ayrshire!’ Rod’s eyes narrowed, ‘Billy’s done a lot for our country Allan,’ he said. Like many things in our country these days the whole thing has gone beyond a joke.