Clever calls me bhuti. Day in and day out, 5am in the morning, he punches my fist and says, morning, bhuti. In the rain and dark, he tells me, skipping, let’s go. 30 minutes later, we’re sparring, he grabs my fist and pulls it towards his face, until my knuckles are on his nose, and says, big punch, bhuti, right here, try, try try try. Another half hour, my sweat is everywhere around us, and Clever smiles and takes my fists, unties my wraps and says, sharp, bhuti. This is something my mom used to call me, when I was a kid. I grew up in Durban, we had a domestic worker who called me “bhuti Tom”, and there’s been something intimate, something familiar,
Tag: boxing
Thank God for The Armoury
Everyone’s got dreams. Everyone imagines a different life, a future self, doing something else, somewhere else, happy, healthy, filled with promise and potential and a different kind of ambition and success. Dwell on that daydream long enough and everything you have now, everything around you – your cutthroat career, your killer commute, your cubicle prison – feels somehow separate, far away, as if behind a fogged-up window. It’s a blessing: next to the bright shining fantasy of where you’d really rather be, who you really feel you could be, this ordinary life, with its ordinary problems, pales into a dull grey nothing. A stagnant life is easy to put up with, easy to forget about, when your mind is somewhere else. When I
Come On, Commit
Moses and Jesus are playing golf. Moses steps up to the tee and hits a beautiful shot straight down the middle of the fairway. Jesus steps up to the tee and hooks the ball into the trees. Jesus looks up into the heavens, raises his arms, and suddenly the sky darkens. A thunder clap rings out, rain pours down, and a stream rises among the trees. The golf ball floating on top finds its way into the mouth of a fish. Then a bird flies down and takes the fish and the ball out over the green, drops it in the cup for a hole-in-one. Jesus turns to Moses with a satisfied grin, and Moses says, “Look. Do you wanna play golf or you
All of Life’s the Fight
Boxing, writes Joyce Carol Oates, is a sport forever in crisis. What must we make of this: two men, half-naked, hell-bent on hitting each other so hard, for so long, that one will eventually fall to the ground, as if dead? There is nothing inherently likeable about this scene. No immediate sign that makes clear: this is entertaining, even fun, or at least important. To the casual observer, she writes, boxing must seem not simply barbaric but mad. The Armoury on Fight Night is a place of worship: the weights are packed away, the lights come out, the cameras go up. This is a party. Beer and burgers. A hundred voices, dressed up, excited, electric, waiting for the bell, waiting for the fight. The Armoury
Hitting Back
The problem with life is, it’s dirty. Dishonourable. It’ll come out of nowhere, and it doesn’t care about the rules. Vicious, like it’s trying to put you in the ground and cover its tracks. Low blows, stabs in the back, these are everyday things. When you’re down, it’ll kick you, and again, in the head, for fun. The problem with life is, you know it’s coming for you, but you can’t get out the way and you never think you deserve it. Life knocks you down and the world counts you out and you wonder, why me. Before joining Men’s Health, I’d been at my last job almost two years before I realised I was really unhappy.
It’s All Edible
Before I began this MH Staff Challenge, I never really ate breakfast. Or lunch. Coffee got me out of the house, onto the train, into the office, just fine. More coffee got me through to lunchtime, even more got me through the afternoon. What kind of coffee, from where, this is what I thought about. What kind of grounds, how much water, how hot, with milk or without. This was my focus. This was food. You drink enough coffee, you start shaking. You start twitching, in your neck. In your brain. You go from one thought to another, back and forward, in a mad racing heartbeat, lights flickering on and off, talking fast and crazy like a paranoid schizophrenic. Seeing things. Imagining things, like this is good