c. 1997 Religion News Service
NEW YORK _ Catholic boxer Tommy Rodriguez prays to God to protect him and his opponent before a fight. Still, the boyish, 132-pound former Golden Gloves champion says he can get “really motivated” when the crowd yells for him to “take a guy out.” During his last fight, he threw a punch so hard he broke his hand against his opponent’s head.
“I prayed to God he wouldn’t get up so I wouldn’t have to hit him again,” Rodriguez, 25, recalled during a recent workout at Gleason’s Gym in Brooklyn. “If I ever really hurt someone I couldn’t live with that.”
Muslim Muhammad Ali voiced similar concerns midway through his career, but Evander Holyfield, reigning world heavyweight champion and evangelical Christian, says restraint has no place in the ring.
“A guy shouldn’t be a boxer if he’s worried about hurting someone,” says Holyfield, who defends his title against Mike Tyson June 28 in Las Vegas. “Do you think people are going to pay to see … a boxer hold back?” If an opponent gets up, he says, “you knock him out.”
Holyfield, Christian minister George Foreman, and recent Muslim convert Mike Tyson, join Ali as the most famous fighters to embrace religion in recent years. Like scores of lesser known boxers, mostly Christian and Muslim, they have tried to reconcile the violence of their sport with the teachings of their faiths.
For fighters like Holyfield, the boundaries between life in and out of the ring are clear: Street fighting is a sin; boxing is a sport. And it’s the boxer’s job to knock out his opponent.
For other boxers, the lines are fuzzier. For them, the question of how hard to hit a man already dazed becomes a moral question. And still others wonder whether the teachings of their religion can ever be reconciled with the sport they love.
“Boxing is not godly,” says Domenico Monaco, the former Italian national lightweight champion who left the Jehovah’s Witnesses to return to the ring. “It’s a basic principle to love your neighbor, and you cannot hit someone you love.”
Go to any ring before a fight, says Gleason’s owner Bruce Silverglade, and “you’ll see fellows in the corner crossing themselves and genuflecting.”
But Rodriguez suspects “some guys are not really religious; they’re superstitious.”
But even devout boxers say they pray harder before a fight.
“I say, `Allah help me, please,”’ says super middleweight Kabary Salem, a Muslim from Egypt.
“I pray to win,” says Holyfield, who knocked out Tyson last November against 25 to 1 odds.
If the skill matches the fervor, says Thomas Hauser, author of “Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times,” prayer can give boxers a strong psychological edge. “So much of fighting is a test of will … If you believe you are fighting for God and God is on your side, that’s a pretty big boost.”
Christian welterweight Keith Lee Jr. doesn’t think God takes sides.
“Both guys are praying to win,” he says, “and only one can win.” But he and his father, trainer Keith Lee Sr., pray for protection.
“You’re this far from death every time you step into the ring, ” says Lee Sr. “You’re leaving walking or dead, and if you die, you want to be in one of those mansions. Football is a team sport. In boxing your only help is faith in God.” That’s why fighters, he says, “are so religious.”
The Rev. Anthony Lorento, a Catholic priest who exercises at Gleason’s, smiles when he sees a boxer praying in the ring. On the one hand, he says, he likes to see a young man pray. “On the other he’s going to knock the other guy’s block off.” The goal of debilitating an opponent cannot be morally justified, he says, “nor the blood lust” of the people watching.
Still, many priests, he says, have had an ambivalent relationship with the sport that’s produced great Irish, Italian and Hispanic Catholic boxers, and provided a vehicle for poor inner-city youths to get ahead, even if few earned much money from the sport.
The late Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad, Ali’s early spiritual mentor, also considered boxing immoral, a display of brutality that pits one black man against another to amuse a white audience, according to Hauser. Some interpreters of orthodox Islam, which Ali later embraced, also reject boxing as acceptable entertainment.
Most boxers, however, see the ring as a separate arena, where traditional moral codes don’t apply.
“If I hit you to deliberately hurt you, it’s a sin,” says Keith Lee Sr. “If we go into the ring and agree to a contest of skill, it’s a game.”
Although many fighters say they pray for their opponents before competing, once in the ring they do not ask themselves ethical questions about inflicting immediate harm or long-term damage.
“That’s the referee’s job,” says Holyfield. For the boxer to worry about harming his opponent, he says, “is a conflict of interest.”
North American Boxing Association super middle weight champion Joseph Kiwanuka of Uganda, a devout Roman Catholic, agrees.
“You got to take the guy out before he takes you out,” he says. “You can’t pray in the ring.”
Some boxers, however, believe even in the heat of the fight they are morally responsible for caring about their opponent.
Before his religious awakening in 1977, former heavyweight champion George Foreman writes in his autobiography, “By George,” “boxing had been a funnel for my hatred,” and he thought nothing of hitting a man as he fell to the ground.
After he returned to fighting at age 37 to raise money for his Houston-based youth center, he was determined that he would “have to win my matches with an absence of rage and a minimum of violence … There was no way I could go wild on a human being again; no way could I unleash a torrent of punches until the man crumbled to the mat.”
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Ali, Hauser notes, also became increasingly concerned about hurting his opponents, and in 1972 he defended his decision to go easy on Buster Mathis in a one-sided fight.
“I don’t care about all them people yelling, `Kill Him!”’ he told reporters. “I see the man in front of me, his eyes all glassy and his head rolling around. How do I know just how hard to hit him to knock him out and not hurt him? I don’t care about looking good to the fans. I got to look good to God. … How am I going to sleep at night if I killed a man in front of his wife and son?”
“Muhammad,” says Hauser, “would never have beat a man senseless. He never had the killer instinct. Evander believes in his religion as much as Muhammad. But I suspect if Evander had an opponent who was clearly helpless he might hit him harder.”
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Rodriguez, a school safety officer, thinks often about the hit that could kill.
“(Colombian boxer) Jimmy Garcia went to a hospital and never woke up. I worry about that when I’m fighting. I think about his family. If I have a guy standing in the ropes and he can’t respond, I’ll back out. Some guys will keep hitting. But God is watching. God sees all that.”
Domenico Monaco, face scarred and nose flattened after 60 fights, has spent years listening to boxers explain how they can be true to their religions and still fight, and he’s unconvinced.
“It’s all rationalization,” says the former Jehovah’s Witness. “I shouldn’t be doing this, but I choose to. Boxing drives me athletically and I like to display my technical skill. But it’s all a lot of talk to say it’s not violent. No matter how you twist it, the purpose is to hurt.”
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Rodriguez combines Bible study and boxing in the hopes of being a good Catholic and a good fighter. His mother will not watch her son _ nose still unbroken _ return to the ring after his injury. But she prays hard for his safety, as does his priest.
“I don’t try to hurt anyone,” says Rodriguez, rubbing his hand, still tender a year after the fight. “I’m not an evil person. My trainer says I’m too nice.”
MJP END LIEBLICH
