I know the precise second I began daydreaming of becoming a great Jewish boxing champion with Stars of David emblazoned on my Everlast trunks. It started back in 1989, the moment a Manhattan mugger's fist hit my cheekbone, sending my glasses skittering across Columbus Avenue.
Gee, I marveled to myself somewhere in the midst of the assault, you don't die if you get punched in the head.
Of course, I never intended to fight back. Like all nice Jewish boys, I'd instinctually turned tail to run when I was first accosted by the mugger and his crackhead accomplice. Yet I tripped over my cowboy boot heels as I began fleeing and fell down on the pavement right in front of my attackers.
I felt like just another Jewish Male Nebbish, an archetype as vicious as the Jewish American Princess, a libel perpetuated not only by Woody Allen's pale schlemiel, but by the primarily Jewish TV writers who gave us characters such as Jerry Seinfeld and Joel Fleischman of "Northern Exposure." Having internalized the stereotype, I would have gladly, shakingly, handed over my wallet, but the two young muggers, wired out of their gourds, began pummeling me. Though they never did get around to demanding money, I did manage to land a few feeble return hits, including one blow to a man's nose that felt...great.
I remember thinking, as I left my glasses on the street, maybe I'm not just another Jewish wimp with "spectacles on his nose and autumn in his heart," as Isaac Babel wrote. I could throw a punch, no matter how pathetic it might be.
Eleven years, one long-distance move, four broken bones and an eight-stitch scar under my chin later, I've given up that long-ago daydream of alchemizing into a great Jewish boxing champion. At age 40, I am too old even to work as an "opponent," those who make a living losing to emerging talents looking to inflate their records.
Yet I can now finally say, without laughing, that I really am a boxer. More important, I'm a Jewish boxer, trying in my own puny way not just to destroy the myth of the American Jewish male weakling, but to follow in the tradition of such fighters as Daniel Mendoza, aka "Mendoza the Jew," the Sephardi fighting out of England who, between 1792 and 1795, became the first and only Jewish heavyweight champion of the world.
First thing every morning, I pull out my red Everlast boxing gloves and make a cup of high-octane coffee. Then I don a moldering sweatshirt and pair of pants, and I pull on those candy-apple-colored 16-ounce boxing gloves, shoving aside the 12-ouncers that I use for actual ring work. I then start a pugilistic routine that fighters of all calibers -- or, in my case, no caliber -- have basically followed for centuries. Though I loathe the roadwork I do later in the day, I follow this litany to prove I'm a boxer, old school, who automatically scoffs at the trendy kick boxing that has become the workout du jour in hip exercise studios from Manhattan's Upper West Side to Minneapolis, where I live, and Los Angeles, where my first bout was scheduled last year before I broke my leg in four places while, well, doing my roadwork.
To begin my daily workout, I walk gloved-up into the hallway off the front door of my apartment, part of my makeshift boxing gym that includes a quarter of my dining room and half my kitchen. Surrounding that front door and foyer is what I tell my friends is my "Walls of Shlammers."
There, in my version of davening shakharit, I say good morning to the framed 8 x 10 ghosts, yellowed copies of 60-year-old Ring magazines and fight ticket stubs I've collected of long-dead Jewish boxing champions and contenders. Among them are such fighters as Kid Berg, Slapsie Maxie Rosenbloom (of whom Philip Roth once wrote, "Slapsie Maxie Rosenbloom was a more miraculous Jewish phenomenon by far than Dr. Albert Einstein") and the sadly forgotten World War I hero who fought and won the flyweight world championship under the name Corporal Izzy Schwartz. Kingfish Levinsky is also on my wall, as is Leach "The Fighting Dentist" Cross, a world-class lightweight contender who at the beginning of the 1900s became famous by often working on patients whose teeth he'd knocked out in the ring the previous night.
Laboring beneath their ancient photos, I feel them, the greatest Jewish boxers of all time, urging me to keep punching, to fight exhaustion, to keep practicing, to take another round in my kitchen against the 300-pound, 6-foot-tall "SlamMan" computerized boxing machine.
Every morning, I do my shadow boxing into the full-length mirror behind my front closet, directly under the ghosts' stares. I begin with five minutes of deep breathing, followed by 50 left jabs into my own reflection, followed by 50 right crosses, 50 combinations consisting of jab-jab-right cross, 50 more left jabs and then a combination of 50 jab-jab-left hooks. I then jump rope for at least 15 minutes, using for a metronome beat a concert tape of one-liner king Henny Youngman, on whose autobiography I once collaborated.
After skipping rope, I amble for three minutes around my apartment, purposefully walking slowly and breathing deeply. Then I walk into my kitchen, and bounce combinations off the robot whose head and torso blink in maddening speeds at the spots where you are supposed to hit ad nauseam. After 20 to 30 minutes, I stumble around my apartment wheezing.
I swear that the other morning I saw Corporal Schwartz wink at me from my sacred wall that it was okay to stop.
The next day was gym day with my tutor Tim "Murph" Murphy, ex-trainer of a top-five ranked heavyweight in the 1980s, Scott LeDoux. I needed to rest up before Murph tore me down again.
But not all is lost. Ten days earlier, Murph had given me unexpected news. I finally have learned, suffered, smacked and been smacked enough, he said, to have earned the right to put a Star of David on those white Everlast ring trunks that have hung in my front hallway for several years.
Forget Ivy League degrees, fancy-looking bylines and book contracts that Jewish male writers have traditionally competed for and measured themselves by. Nothing has ever made me more giddy than the word from a frighteningly tough 300-pound Irishman that I am not dishonoring the ring or my religion by wearing a Star of David inside the squared circle.