Put on the gloves and see...

It wasn’t like I wanted to sock somebody in the kisser. Though now that I think about it, some 60-plus years later, it might not have been a bad idea.

I’m not a particular violent guy, I don’t think. I seem to remember me getting in some sort of scrap with my oldest friend Mark Fountain on the first day of school but he probably started it. And I certainly didn’t know how to throw a punch so I’m not sure it even counts. (I am sure I won, though.)

When I tried out for the football team in junior high, I had no problem being aggressive and actually wore the ass out of one kid during a one-on-one drill, only to discover after the practice that he was an actual amateur Golden Gloves boxer. Ooops. (We became friends. Good call, Nogo)

The last time I can remember throwing a punch was in self-defense in the middle of a basketball game against the town hoods, one of whom wore boots that kept him skidding on the basketball surface at the Youth Center (now the Brookline Library!). And one of them, who clearly did not know how to play, was hanging all over me so aggressively it was driving me nuts.

So I hip-checked him and he went ass-over-teakettle into the door, hitting his head with the kind of thump that sounded like when Muhammad Ali hit George Foreman in the corner in Zaire some years later. The hood came after me in a fury, “I oughta murder you….” and threw a wild punch that I leaned way back - like Ali - and it missed and I threw a right that hit him on the side of the head. That was the end of the basketball game. So really, it was my hip that scored the TKO or at least the knockdown.

As I’ve written before, the boxing bug hit me at the start of the 70’s, just as Muhammad Ali was making his return to the ring, ABC’s Howard Cosell was in full throttle with a stunning array of fights every other Saturday it seemed. So instead of sending my weekly $8.50 to Ring Classics in Hauppauge, New York for another film, I saw an ad for a pair of boxing gloves - what good would one be? - for G&S Sports, I think it was around $35 and bit the bullet and ordered them. My first major investment!

These aren’t my pair, who are brown and much more worn-looking. Couldn’t get to ‘em.

Naturally, Mark was the first person to try on the boxing gloves and spar with me. (I suspect, like Ken Norton, he was eager for a rematch.) The only real boxing instruction we had was the endless hours watching my boxing movies. Now I know Mark’s dad Matt had done some boxing back in the day - so he told Mark - but I’m not sure if he took the time to pass on this information to his tall and slender son. (It was the enemy camp so I wasn’t privy to their strategies.)

Sorta looked like this, except I kept my shirt on. Mark, with long arms, did mostly blocking.

I don’t know how many times we put on the gloves, too many to count, so my record, I suspect, is just 1-0 with a KO. Not over Mark. We never really had a referee or fought in a ring or anything. Usually in my front yard or over at Camp Tevya.

We even made a film of our “big fight” that somehow has been lost to the ages. We filmed us signing a contract in Mark’s basement (so dark you could hardly see our faces. But we each made fists, threatening one another.) We enlisted our neighbor Joe McInnis (now a recently retired pastor) to climb up on the roof of one of the Tevya cabins to get a different shot of the actual match. We were thinking “Nogo-Fountain: The Rematch.” Maybe ABC could run it on a slow Saturday.

It was in the fall, as I recall, we took shots of us “training”, running up towards Rock Raymond. And for the fight, Mark wore a sleek brown jacket and blue pants, not jeans. As for me, I had striped gray pants, a long-sleeved, untucked gray shirt over my father’s copper-colored Cashmere vest sweater. Really.

To describe our styles, Mark would sort of crouch his 6-2, slender frame, his long arms stretched out in front of him, not unlike the technique used by former middleweight champion Gene Fullmer, whose films we’d never watched. It was his best and most persistent defense.

As for me, I was hopping around him, a 17-year-old white kid in pretty good shape trying to mimic what I had seen Muhammad Ali do so much more elegantly, flicking out left jabs, usually hitting Mark’s forearms with great and I’m sure irritating consistency. Once in a while, one of my peppery jabs would snake through and catch his dimpled chin. His arms would go up and he’d throw something at me or just lunge with his jab. And the fight went on.

It was fun, I think, for both of us. I certainly would have won on points, if for effort and my attire, alone. It also showed both of us just how difficult boxing really is. Also, I think, what might be inside us, if we ever let it out.

What made me think of this was a birthday wish from a former Brookliner who I knew but wasn’t really friends with. One day, Mark and I were sparring on my front lawn and this kid and one of his friends came walking down Springvale Avenue and saw us. They immediately did what every kid would, mocking us, pretending to spar in the middle of the road.

I hollered over to them. “Come on over. Put on the gloves, if you dare.”

One of them did. We tied on the gloves and he squared off with me, immediately coming after me in Rocky Marciano-caveman style, throwing wild, wide punches with either hand. I backpedaled, easily blocked them, then like Joe Louis would have done, stood my ground and fired a left-hook, right cross combination that landed on either side of his face and absolutely stood him up.

It was hard to say who was more shocked. He immediately threw up his hands and said “I’m getting scared. That’s it.”

The bout was halted. My KO. The thing I remember most, though, was how much I enjoyed landing those punches. Other than that one at the Youth Center where my hip really did the dirty work, those were about the last ones I threw.

“Coulda been a contender” - Thanks, Liz and AI for your lovely inaccuracies.

Author John Nogowski, when not boxing, has used these fists to write several books, including three editions of a comprehensive book on Bob Dylan: “Bob Dylan: A Descriptive, Critical Discography and Filmography,” a book on Neil Young “Neil Young: A Descriptive, Critical Discography and Filmography,” due in 2027, two books on baseball - his son, a former major-league first baseman, now a coach with the New York Mets’ organization - “Diamond Duels,” a deep dive into the game’s great matchups and “Last Time Out” a collection of stories of the MLB finales of baseball’s greatest players. He’s also written about his experiences as a classroom teacher at a struggling minority Florida High School - “Teaching Huckleberry Finn” and is a regular contributor to the Hartford Courant. He’s written a free Substack, now heading into Year Three with over 1,000 subscribers and is at work on a book on Bruce Springsteen’s music. Gloves off, of course.