<< Back

10/23/02

Anasi chronicles one man’s pugilistic pursuits

By Jeff Minick
The Gloves by Robert Anasi.
North Point Press, 2002. $24 — 331 pp.


Ever since I was a kid in Boonville, North Carolina, I wanted to be a boxer.

Although I don’t remember exactly how I acquired that ambition in a town and at a time when the only sports that counted were football, basketball, and baseball — probably it came from watching Body And Soul or some other old-time fight flick — I do remember the man who first taught me footwork, the jab, and the straight right.

His name was Bill Bianco, and he had moved from New York to Boonville to live near his daughter. He was a slight, balding man with a grin that could light up a room and a sense of humor to match. Bill boxed Golden Gloves in New York 60 years ago, back in boxing’s Golden Age, and he had, I believe, turned professional for a while. He had stayed in shape over the years; he let me hit him in the stomach once, and my fist bounced off solid muscle.

I thought of Bill when I recently read Robert Anasi’s The Gloves. Like Bill, Anasi is a New York fighter. Like Bill, he loves boxing even with its many problems.

Boxing nowadays suffers from a bad reputation. People watch it on television, or go to a tough man contest, or read how Mike Tyson took another bite out of someone’s ear, and they can’t believe that anyone could enjoy boxing, much less call it a sport. Friends of mine who know about my interest in fighting have asked me what I could find to like in such a brutal sport. One even asked me how someone professing to be a Christian could love a sport where the object was to hit another person in the face.

Over the years I have tried to explain, usually without much success, that amateur boxing is a sport that requires a great deal of strength, stamina, willpower, and skill. I have explained that amateur boxing is far safer than many other sports, including football, baseball and soccer. I have tried to compare boxing to other sports such as football and racing where violence is at the center of the sport and has far more drastic consequences than may be found in boxing.

Too often no one wants to hear these things. It’s hard to change other people’s prejudices — I’m a pretty stubborn character in that department myself — and after a few weak attempts I usually give up trying to put the case for boxing in a favorable light.

Now, however, I have Robert Anasi’s The Gloves. With that book in circulation, I won’t have to make the argument. I can just tell my listener to read the book and make up his own mind.

In The Gloves, Anasi gives us an account of his attempts to enter amateur boxing’s premier tournament, the Golden Gloves. Though he has trained in boxing gyms off and on for nearly 10 years, Anasi has never undergone a real fight. At the age of 33, his last year of eligibility for the tournament, he decides to push himself both into shape and into the ring, where many of his competitors are in their teens or early twenties.

The best parts of Anasi’s book are not his accounts of various fights, though these are done well, but of his weeks and months of preparation under Milton, his tricky, harsh trainer, and of the other boxers who for many different reasons are taking their own shot at amateur glory. Anasi’s intimate story of their lives and of the gyms in which they work out let the reader come as close as is perhaps possible in print to feeling what it means to train as a boxer.


After the rope and the warm-ups come shadowboxing, the heavy bags, exercises and more shadowboxing. Milton may have you work pads with him as well, directing you to strike the oversize gloves on his hands while he shouts instructions and corrects your movement, using such choice idioms as “retarded,” “robotic,” “paraplegic,” “idiot,” and “bullshit,” among others, punctuated with little smacks to your head. All this training, however, diminishes beside sparring. Sparring is the psychic center of the gym, as the ring is its actual material center. Milton’s gym is a fighters’ gym, not a health club or “fitness center.” Fighters fight. To prepare to fight, fighters must spar.


Anasi’s book may be enjoyed not only by those unfamiliar with boxing, but by those who have followed the sport. Of particular interest was his discussion in the middle of the book regarding hand position in boxing. Most fighters these days fight with their hands up, protecting the face, but as Milton points out to Anasi, many of the great fighters, especially those considered slippery and hard to hit, fought with their hands lowered, slipping the punches or pulling away rather than getting hit on the hands.

The Gloves also works in terms of drama and storytelling. As we read Anasi’s account of his own preparations for the ring, we begin pulling for him to make it into the Golden Gloves, to get past his disappointments, his weight gains, and all the other daily activities that pull a fighter away from training, away from the test that comes when the bell rings.

This is more than just another sports book. Anasi gives us his take on race and class and what it means to be a man in modern America. He gives us a superb account of what it takes to be a fighter. Finally, he tells us a good deal about himself and what it costs not only to dream, but also to try and live out that dream.

(Jeff Minick lives in Waynesville and can be reached at saintsbookco@aol.com)