Learning to love boxing - 1. Chapter 1

I always hated sport. I had never played football or cricket, which seemed to be the sole options at my high school in 1960s Melbourne, for the simple reason that no-one had ever taught me how to play, or encouraged me to learn. I couldn’t swim and as far as I know I was never given the opportunity. I have never been able to learn a movement by watching someone do it, it has to be explained in detail, so nothing in the physical realm came easily to me.

I didn’t know the rules, the objectives, and the various player roles in organised sport, and I was clumsy and un-athletic to boot. As a child I felt intimidated by the rough-and-tumble that some boys seemed to love, and I avoided physical contact like the plague. I sensed my difference early, knowing that in some way I was different to other boys. As a small boy pre-teens I already knew I would never marry. I didn’t know why, but I was certain that it wasn’t for me.

As a 10 or 12 year old I used to pray every night that God would take my life and I could go to heaven. Its not that my life was at all harsh – I was fed, clothed, educated, and was treated well by my parents. I was never bullied or threatened at school or elsewhere, was never abused. The only people who had ever hit me were teachers who hit everyone (corporal punishment was the norm in those days), and my mother gave me a few wackings for doing things I shouldn’t have.

That sounds like I should be grateful for my childhood situation, but life was simply unattractive to me. I had a deep sense of my own alienation from all others, and life was at best tedious and at worst rather bleak. I had no expectation of a future of any kind, no plan for what I wanted to do with my life. No belief that I would ever be happy.

High school sports afternoons were misery as I was always left standing on the edge of the oval not knowing what the heck to do if a ball came flying in my direction. At some stage during high school I wrote a note for my father to sign, telling the school principal that I would no longer be doing sport but would do private maths study instead. My maths didn’t improve much but I was spared the pointless pretence of sport.

Being educated in a Catholic school system I went through a period in my early teens when I thought I would become a priest or a brother. Perhaps fortunately for me, the usual course for blue-collar families then was for kids to leave school as soon as they could, and I followed that pattern.

By the age of 13 or so I had started to have erotic thoughts about a boy two doors away from us. He was one year older, and when I was recovering from some surgery he let me tag along with him when he walked his dog or went to the beach. I never had explicitly sexual thoughts about him or anyone else. What two boys might do in bed simply had never occurred to me, I didn’t know such a thing was possible. But I was entranced by this boy’s good looks and loved to be with him. At night I would fantasise about wrestling with him or some other boys, and would hump the sheets to get off. But to me that wasn’t homosexuality, because my sex education book ignorantly claimed that homosexuals were men who wanted to be women, and that didn’t apply to me. I didn’t know what I was, just knew that I wasn’t like other boys.

To younger people it may seem I was incredibly naive, and I was. But remember that there were no public role models, no gay magazines, no public mention of homosexuality except occasional lurid headlines that reinforced the view that homosexuals were weak, dirty, sick, sinful perverts who corrupted or raped children. That was the sort of hypocritical crud being pumped out by the Catholic Church and its minions, whilst they quietly moved known paedophiles around their parishes destroying young lives. I was lucky I wasn’t one of those abused.

So I had been a naive youngster and never knew there was a label for my sexuality. I came to understand it at the rather late age of twenty seven, and then had to learn to relate to other people in ways that most straight boys had learned to do by the age of sixteen. Or much earlier.

By the time I was thirty years old I had renounced my childhood religion, become a firm atheist, I had begun to experience being loved and had utterly rejected the homophobic propaganda that I had encountered for much of my life growing up in the fifties and sixties in Melbourne.

And yet ….

Despite my intellectual rejection of it, there was still a little voice somewhere inside me, telling me I wasn’t a “real man”. I’d been in plenty of battles in my lifetime, and some of them were tough ones, but they were all political/activist, not physical; I had never been in a fist-fight and in fact had never needed to be. No-one had ever bullied me, or harassed me, despite my being a precious little goody-two-shoes as a child. So why the hell did I feel inadequate about my masculinity?

Fast forward to the nineteen nineties. Facing my fiftieth birthday, I was experiencing a deep sense of unhappiness; my mid-life crisis had arrived. I was 10 kilograms overweight, which was enough to make me miserable in itself but there was also more to it than that. I still had a sense of being inadequate in some way.

I happened one week to be in Sydney for a few days to go to some concerts, and had caught up with an acquaintance for lunch. He was a very sexy young man who was probably straight. He had somewhat shocked me by disclosing that he was taking boxing lessons. Boxing!! Nasty, violent brutish, how could anyone want to do that, I had thought.

But my friend had painted a far nicer picture of boxing than what I had in mind. He said that he was fitter, stronger, and got peoples’ respect more when they knew he did boxing training, and suggested I could give it a go. I had countered that there wouldn’t be anywhere in Canberra to do such a thing, and was promptly silenced when he suggested the Police and Citizens Youth Club would be a good starting point.

I knew full well that the local PCYC was just five minutes drive from my home, but I was not about to make any promises. Lunch ended pleasantly and we parted company, but I couldn’t help wondering about the boxing thing. It frightened me, yet I felt drawn to the idea for reasons I couldn’t really comprehend.

The next day, I phoned the local PCYC and told the coach that I was nearly fifty but was thinking of learning to box. The response was blunt - “you’re never too old to learn to box, turn up on Tuesday night”.

And I had done just that, fully prepared to walk away if they tried to use me as some sort of punching bag. Of course it wasn’t like that at all. Marching up and down along a white line on the floor, my arms ached as I performed what seemed like a thousand repetitions of “step and punch, step and punch” along with the other new boys stepping along the same line. As for the boxing ring, no-one was allowed inside it unless the coach explicitly permitted it. Everyone was being taught the basics, step by step, and no-one was going to be hitting anyone else until they were judged competent to do so.

My first experiences of the boxing gym left me feeling quite emotional. For the first time in my life, someone was actually taking the time and trouble to teach me what to do with my body, instead of berating me for not knowing how to do it already. The coaches were providing encouragement to me as I stumbled along, instead of ridiculing me; I had never before experienced positive feedback for my efforts in the physical domain. So I kept coming back to training, week after week, and before long I had shed the unwanted 10kg of belly fat, and was feeling fitter than I had ever been. Even fitter than when I’d been in the army doing my national service.

Virtually everyone training at the Police and Citizens Youth Club was indeed a youth, and I was old enough to have fathered any of them. Well, truth be told, I could be a grandfather to some of them. But I pushed myself hard to keep up with all the younger ones, as much out of vanity than anything else.

One day, the usual coach was away and the replacement coach allowed the guys to try sparring each other for the first time. I very quickly discovered how painful a punch in the nose could be, and realised that the real art to boxing was not so much in throwing a punch but in avoiding one!

Over the next couple of years I continued with my boxing training and sparring, though it was pretty clear that my reflexes were too slow to be able to compete! But I noticed that my coordination had improved markedly and I was much less clumsy than I had always been before.

One day when getting ready for training, I discovered that the white tee shirt I had packed wasn’t the plain white shirt I meant to pack. This one had the words “Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras” emblazoned on it. When I walked into the boxing area of the gym, someone who wasn’t a boxer but was using weights in our area called out “uh oh, backs to the wall everyone”. I retorted quickly with “You should be so lucky” and my boxing mates all laughed heartily.

I also began training as a judge and later became a boxing referee and a sports administrator. Over the course of about two decades I met some truly fine people in the sport and was respected by most. I made no secret of the fact that I was a gay man, and quite a few of the boxing folks had met my partner. In 2016 I was awarded an Order of Merit by the national amateur boxing organisation, for the “intellect and dynamism” I brought to the sport.

I am now nearly eighty years old. I still occasionally attend a local tournament and have a quick chat with officials and coaches I had worked with in the past. I have never regretted the day I first turned up to boxing training at age fifty. I only regret not having been introduced to boxing much earlier in life.