In 1977, one of my fellow neighborhood kids brought home two pairs of heavy boxing gloves after spending the weekend at his dad’s house for a visit.
Both pairs of gloves were huge. They looked as if they hadn’t been used for a couple decades.
I would have been seven or eight years old at the time. The kid with the boxing gloves was a year older. Physically, he wasn’t much bigger than me. We were friends, but not close; in retrospect, he and I were more like acquaintences with mutual friends.
A small group of us neighborhood kids had been hanging out on Boxing Glove Kid’s L-shaped front porch, which had glass windows instead of screens. Bikes, chairs, boxes, coffee tables, etc. cluttered the porch, so there wasn’t a lot of room to maneuver in.
After bringing out the two pairs of hand-me-down gloves, Boxing Glove Kid explained where he got them from and asked if any of us wanted to put on the second pair and “box” with him.
Everybody else seemed hesitant, glancing at one another before shaking their heads no.
Well, if nobody else is going to try it, I thought…
As I strapped on the second pair of gloves, I realized they weren’t tailored for seven or eight year old hands. I was shocked at how heavy they were. And how hard.
As we slowly squared off to begin sparring, Boxing Glove Kid grinned at me and said, “I probably ought to let you know: I been practicing with these”.
Unconcerned, I shrugged. I’d watched heavyweight boxing matches on TV before. I was familiar with the basic concept of the sport.
How hard could it be?
Neither of us had head guards or any kind of mouth protection.
Only one of us really knew how to defend against an opponent. (Hint: It wasn’t me.)
Talk about an amalgamation of adolescent bad ideas: Let’s have a boxing match, with no safety gear, on a cramped porch enclosed with big glass windows!
I remember raising my fists in front of me, as I’d watched boxers do on television, but my guard was too low, leaving my entire face an open target.
The first jab caught me on a cheek, snapping back my head, causing me to stagger forward a step before catching myself.
The second blow was a right hook that caught me in the temple. Another stagger-back. Now I felt dizzy.
I heard one of the other kids yell “Hit him back! What are you doing?!”
Responding with a sloppy, telegraphed right hook, slowed down by the awkward weight of the glove, I never came close to connecting.
With minimal effort, Boxing Glove Kid bobbed to avoid it, then returned with a right haymaker that landed between my eyes, mostly on my forehead, but also grazing the top of my nose bridge.
Another inch or two lower, I’m convinced that blow would have broken my nose. I had been hit in the face before, with bare fists, but never with that much concentrated force.
Looking back on it now, I realize that this kid hadn’t just been practicing throwing his gloved fists against a heavy bag, which is what I had imagined when he told me he’d been practicing. He’d been taught, or figured out on his own, how to use his legs to put his full weight behind a punch.
Reeling from that final punch, I fell back against a window pane, my hip bumping against the ledge below the bottom window.
I felt a stinging sensation at the top of the bridge of my nose. My legs felt like they were about to give out on me.
I was angry enough now that I wanted to fight back, but I also felt too physically incapacitated to actually pull it off. I let it subside.
“Shit, you alright?”, Boxing Glove Kid asked, then glancing past me. “You didn’t crack the window, did you?”
It appeared I had put a tiny crack in the upper glass pane of a lower window…after I’d been punched into it…so, yes, in that regard, I suppose I did crack the window. Never mind whose forceful punch propelled me into it.
Boxing Glove Kid’s mom never came out to see what the racket on the front porch was all about. After a while, my dizziness went away, but the headache stayed with me for a bit longer. Nobody else volunteered to spar with him, either.
Just another fond memory of my casually violent 1970s childhood.
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