A Blow to the Head

Joe Price's aggressive spirit may not have been leashed by boxing, but it was undoubtedly given expertise. Before he was twenty, he left Staffordshire for London after a confrontation with his father. It must have been a good day for a man who liked solutions, the day he fought for himself and for his mother, for what he loved. When I was very young, I met his mother, my great-grandmother, a few times: the last in a hospital. She lay motionless in an oxygen tent, the ward around her somehow distorted by the presence of a person so near to death. My grandfather couldn't bear to look at her, or even go close. He couldn't win her back—there was nobody to fight.

In London, Joe Price was apprenticed into the steel trade, learned how to dodge molten metal when it flew, played cards with a suspicious efficiency and slept in a hostel with a knife kept close to hand, because the Queensberry Rules don't cover everything. He kept on learning how to take his lumps and, even though he'd told his mother he would stop, he kept on boxing. She realized this was the case when she opened the March 7 issue of Health and Strength in 1936. There she discovered him, just as I do now, standing at the edge of a group from the Corinthian Athletic Club, Stoke Newington. (My mother and I have both inherited his photographic reticence, we all lurk at the frame's edge, if we can.) I can see the slight dip in his sternum—the place where he always told me he was hit by a cannon ball, a lie we both enjoyed. He's smiling a little, a muscular twenty-year-old in neat black trunks and boots. And (I may, of course, be biased) he seems to have a confidence, a presence, that none of the other Corinthians matches. Something about his expression suggests he is standing a little apart, not out of shyness, but because he is special.

And he's right, he knows he's special: as special as human beings prove to be when given any kind of close examination. He knows, for example, that he has 'short arms'—he grinds through his opponents' defences until he can infight. In the process, he soaks up punches to the eyes, the left eye especially, and to his head. Although he only fights for something like ten years and solely as an amateur, boxing will close down his eyesight and leave him using a magnifying glass for near work, squinting at splinters of metal that he can't find in his hands. What the punches will do to his thinking, no one will really be able to tell. Joe Price, like many boxers, wasn't educated to be an intellectual and his life rarely encouraged him to lower his guard among strangers, he was a largely closed and quiet man. His handwriting was never expected to be anything more than the fiercely angular printing I recognized on envelopes at Christmas and birthdays, or on the wildly over-wrapped parcels he sometimes sent. As I write in the hush of the room, I miss his lettering. I miss him: his secrets and evasions, even the ones about his eyes.

Joe made sure until late in his life that no one he loved would be able to tell exactly how much he couldn't see. With doctors, he would be adamant his weakness had nothing to do with boxing, most particularly when they said it was. With me, he would admit his style meant he'd had to battle—that was why they'd called him Battling Joe Price. He admired Sugar Ray Leonard, marked out his life according to a calendar of all the middleweight champions, but he always had a special affection for Marvin Hagler, another infighter, another brawler.

Because Battling Joe, when I think about it, didn't fight clean. Although with me he was never anything but tender, having no son and now no grandson, he told me his secrets of victory in the ring. How to stand on your opponent's feet, how to elbow, headbutt, rabbit and kidney punch and hit below the belt, how to wet the old-style leather gloves to make them hard and how to work your fingers through their horsehair stuffing to put some knuckle in your punch. It was his own fault when he broke his hands fighting—it would have been someone else's when he broke his arm. And for the eyes, he had no mercy, because an opponent blinded by swelling or blood is no real opponent at all. The gloves Joe fought with still had separate thumbs that could gouge into sockets and untaped lace ends he could use to open cuts above the eye, just as every twisting punch he landed on the eyebrow would be meant to. He fought, as they say, 'with bad intentions'. When he acknowledged that sometimes these tricks had been used against him, he still seemed both puzzled and aggrieved. Listening to the familiar purr in his voice, I never could understand why anyone would want to hurt him, why anyone would want to punch him in his eyes.

Joe's eyes, the same blue as mine, were built in the usual way, with a lens and muscles for focus to the front and a relatively gristly exterior behind which formed an almost spherical hollow filled with a translucent gel called vitreous humour. Like the eyes you're using to read this, they were miraculous; organs of sense so delicately complex and elegant that they gave Charles Darwin pause for thought. He wondered how gradual evolution could have created something only functional in such a highly developed state. The curved back of the eye has three layers: the outer sclera, then the choroid and then the retina. Our retinas receive the images which pass through the clear cornea, lens and vitreous humour. The retina is arguably where we start truly to see. If the eye were a camera, you might say the retina was its film.

But I hope it would come as no surprise that the human retina is far more lovely than any film. Freshly dissected, it is semi-transparent with a gentle purple tint, although it quickly clouds and whitens, fading. It is, after all, a fragile thing, never intended to be exposed. Under a microscope, the retina's ten layers appear more vegetable than animal, like impressionistic wood grain. Nutrition and sensitivity combine as the nerves within the layers transmit, and their cells consume and grow, entirely interdependent for the transfer of information and nourishment. This is a balanced system, cells sometimes intertwining across layers and sometimes simply resting against each other. Which is the retina's weak point—a hard blow to the eye can distort it for a moment and split the retina's layers apart, ripping the pigment cells away from the receptors which feed them and carry the impulses to generate our sight. Rents, even holes may form. An especially traumatic blow can rupture the eye itself, allow it to lose vitreous humour, but more commonly the retina suffers. Any detached section dies and the eye becomes, to a greater or lesser extent, blinded.

Joe Price boxed at a time when ringside doctors might not be present, when referees were none too anxious to stop fights, when boxers—if they could find the matches—might fight two or three times in one night, under a false name if they had to. He took more punishment than he would today, but the laws of physics haven't changed. Multiple hard blows will do more damage to an eye, may even 'punch your man blind', but it still only takes one significant impact to damage a retina. Laser surgery can fuse the retina back into place—my grandfather was offered the option, but didn't like the sound of it. Recently, minority medical opinion even suggested that eyes repaired in this way were stronger than they had been before. This has proved, unsurprisingly, not to be the case and boxers who have suffered retinal damage or any other serious eye pathology are not legally permitted to box in Britain, or to take part in world title bouts. A detached retina effectively ended British heavyweight Frank Bruno's career. Worldwide regulations are similar, although sometimes less stringent and more easily evaded, particularly when boxers choose to change their identities. No regulations can reach the unlicensed boxing underground which quietly eats up former contenders at the bottom of their downward slope and hard men who need money more than health.

Hard men: my grandfather haunted my childhood with them as if they were entirely natural companions for a young girl's mind. In my earliest years, I suppose, he was still hard himself. I would swing from his straight-extended arm, at least as pleased as he was with his strength, but I had no cause then to consider what such strength could do. I would read the descriptions he sent me of Victorian bare-knuckle battles to the death, or the marathon bouts between giants like Jim Corbett, John L. Sullivan and Jack Dempsey (he of the lead-pipe-weighted gloves) and the carnage would seem as genuine as a World Wrestling Federation contest. Joe Price and all the ghosts were just friends. Still, I've heard the stories of the way he was as a young married man, anxious to flatten any face that stared too long at my grandmother, looking for a fight.