For the first half of the 1990s, Don McRae was virtually embedded in boxing, a subterranean pursuit rarely illuminated by even the dimmest of spotlights. McRae wrote personal and intimate portraits of some of the most significant—and complicated—fighters of the era. Among those McRae profiled were Mike Tyson, Frank Bruno, Chris Eubank, Oscar De La Hoya, James Toney, Roy Jones Jr., Evander Holyfield, Naseem Hamed, Michael Watson, and Nigel Benn. These dispatches formed the basis of Dark Trade, a revelatory work whose narrative focuses on the inner lives of athletes in a business underscored by danger and deceit.
In some ways, McRae was fortunate to have picked the 1990s to pursue his ambivalent love. The ’90s were a pivotal turning point in boxing. The technological advance of pay-per-view (a quantum leap over the cumbersome closed-circuit methods previously used for marquee events) not only maximized profits for superfights, it also accelerated corporate takeover of a largely unregulated sport, leading to what we have today: conglomerate fiefdoms each presenting boxing based on vertical integration and a content-provider model for multiplex channels and platforms. That means that the free-for-all atmosphere of even twenty-five years ago—when fighters were mixed and matched with each other far more often—barely exists now. As fighters sign exclusive contracts with fewer and fewer entities, they are removed from the dues-paying playing field and elevated to marquee status at the whim of men in Brooks Brothers suits on Sixth Avenue. The demarcation line between world-class and run-of-the-mill has been erased over the years, until men who would have been toiling in bingo halls, high school gyms, VFWs, armories, Holiday Inns, and casino barges in, say, 1993, are now headline mainstays regardless of skill or appeal.
This sudden tech windfall of the 1990s led to a mad scramble not only for pay-per-view loot but for the means to springboard into position for it. Where few mega-events existed in the 1980s (the unwieldy and costly outlay of closed-circuit prevented second-rate fights—and fighters—from being given the gratuitous star treatment so common today), the ’90s produced the first crop of professionals looking at potential regular million-dollar purses. Big money, added to the already intense pressures intrinsic to a blood sport, created a new dynamic and, perhaps, a new kind of fighter. Don McRae was there—in Las Vegas, New York, Los Angeles, London—to catalog the dreams, hopes, and fears of daring young men in search of distinction.
Lost in Boxing revisits some of the central figures of Dark Trade at varying stages of their careers. These are snapshots, taken in some cases from the distance of decades, that aim to contextualize specific moments or achievements of each fighter. While the real-time narratives of Dark Trade have an immediacy and, at times, a desperate poignancy that a retrospective can never hope to duplicate, there are still compelling moments to be found in what McRae has called “a brutal and strangely beautiful world.”
Although McRae was not a participatory journalist, per se, his proximity to fighters (including dressing-room access to James Toney and a house-call to Chris Eubank) allowed him to be more than just an interested—indeed, fascinated—observer. He was, in a sense, a collaborator with his subjects, who are disarmingly frank when faced with their affable and empathetic interlocutor. Even Oscar De La Hoya, a man hypervigilant about maintaining a squeaky-clean image for the public and publicists alike, reveals psychic distress.
Surprisingly, perhaps, given the unpredictability of boxing—its world-within-a-world subculture, after all, is predicated on violence and moral ambiguity—McRae never suffered blowback from what some might have considered trespass. He did not even get his nose bloodied, inadvertently, of course, in a sparring session with one of his subjects (as George Plimpton did against Archie Moore). Nor did his experience writing Dark Trade parallel those of his less fortunate predecessors in subjective journalism. Think of Paul Gallico, trampled by Jack Dempsey in a suicidal challenge to go one round with “The Manassa Mauler”; or Hunter S. Thompson, trounced by the Hells Angels, whose lives he had been documenting; or Nick Kent, whipped with a bicycle chain by a deranged Sid Vicious in the street; or Bill Buford, pummeled by a riot squad during a melee at a football game in Sardinia.
In the end, this is surprising, considering the fact that James Toney once tore off a neck brace worn by aging New York Daily News beat writer Michael Katz, and that Mike Tyson was feverishly abusive not only to the press, but to its equipment as well. “You ruin people's lives,” Tyson once told a gathering of reporters. “I'm a sucker even to be talking to you guys. I should be ready to rip your heads off.”
Two of the most erratic boxers with whom McRae spent time, Toney and Tyson, are the main stars of Lost in Boxing. In “Them Bones,” James Toney achieves his world-title dream at twenty-two, fighting as an underdog on the road; more than a decade later, in “This Is the Future,” he is an aging ex-champion trying to recapture past glory, again with the odds against him. Tyson is also a young man in “The Savage Within,” which chronicles his spectacular and often profane rise to crossover stardom in 1986, when he was on his way to becoming the richest athlete of the “Greed Is Good” era. “Episodes in the American Berserk” captures him in 1991, against the mercurial Razor Ruddock, no longer a dominant force (or even heavyweight champion, for that matter) but with a seemingly unbreakable stranglehold on the American consciousness.
There is also Oscar De La Hoya, the former teen heartthrob with an envious/ruinous left hook, whose charmed life turned out to be far less charming than depicted in the ’90s, when Madison Avenue concerns (and pay-per-view dollars) forced him to masquerade as The Boy Next Door. Although De La Hoya was a Brady Bunch knockoff with knockout power, he also had a penchant for liquor, alcohol, and sorrow. Not the least of his many concerns as a budding young superstar was the love-hate relationship he had with the Mexican afición. In “The Hotstepper,” he must prove himself to them against soft-spoken, Jalisco-born Rafael Ruelas, the sentimental favorite. Years later, the former “Golden Boy” finds himself in a déjà vu moment when Fernando Vargas challenges his essential “Mexican-ness” leading up to their bitter showdown in 2002, as told in “Vendetta.”
Evander Holyfield might have been the least controversial figure encountered in Dark Trade (considering his record of fathering children out of wedlock, his public swooning at the hands of a faith healer named Benny Hinn, and long-standing suspicions concerning performance-enhancing drug use, that says a lot), but in the ring, “The Real Deal” was seldom anything but electric. His breathtaking struggle against Michael Dokes is the subject of “Earn It,” where both men willed themselves past their physical limits in the name of—what exactly?
On the other side of the Atlantic, oddballs such as Naseem Hamed and Chris Eubank dominated the U.K. scene in the early to middle ’90s. Here they pop up as well, Hamed, more obnoxious than any five-foot-three man has a right to be, in “the Edge of Derision,” and Eubank, a bewildering figure whose comical aura is grotesquely undercut when his grudge rematch against Michael Watson ends with Watson maimed in “Idyllic Masquerading.”
Finally, the enigmatic Roy Jones Jr., considered a super-athlete for years, is glimpsed during a slow and often disappointing development stage when there was still a kitsch/camp factor in boxing. (Today, even the lowest-rent club fights are streamed or televised, accompanied by the usual disproportionate hype, handclapping, and horn-blowing.) Fighting often in the prizefight backwaters of the Florida Panhandle, Jones, at one point, even poleaxed an imposter. “The Future Now” details how he finally outstripped both a mediocre start and the imaginations of hardened boxing observers and what they had thought possible.
The new edition of Dark Trade updates the lives of some of these captivating figures, long after their best days, in the ring, at least, have passed. There are also new fighters who reveal themselves to McRae, who understands an inexorable truth about the Sweet Science: “The ring was a bleak place in which to dream.” Lost in Boxing is merely a postscript to that bleakness.