THE CHAMPION
A CHAMPION lived a couple hours’ drive from my childhood home. He had relatives the next town over. He’d won fights an hour or two north of us, and fights an hour or two south of us. My older brother knew people who knew him. His name was Tommy, and Tommy could hit.
I remember describing his powers to classmates on the playground. I told of survivors who gave trembling accounts that when struck squarely with his left hook the gates of hell could be heard rattling in the ear that was soon pressed against the canvas. His left hook made men who had trained all their lives, since they were seven years old, convulse with stupefied shock as their legs went limp, as though they had never been hit this way before. As though they didn’t realise a man could hit this way.
Of course, Heavyweight Champion of the World is the highest title a man can attain. I understood this by kindergarten. It puts the mortal at the table with Mars, the god of war, and Thor, god of thunder. The heavyweight champion of the world is the one who will rise from bed and lace his boots to meet any intergalactic invaders foolhardy enough to enter our atmosphere in the middle of the night. That heavyweight champion of the world lived a couple hours’ drive from our house.
This changed the air in a town like ours. It was a small town in the middle of the States that the coasts dismissively call, “flyover”. No one’s destination – just that distance of hills and mountains that the collision of the continents had inconveniently sandwiched between the metropolitan cities of consequence.
Tommy changed things. He made the self-proclaimed greatness of other parts of the country sound less triumphant and more uncomfortably desperate. We were all raised
