There’s an old guy who hangs around the boxing gyms in the Bronx. The owners do their best to discourage him from coming even though it’s against their business interest to do so. Attracting customers is their stock in trade and much as it is against the grain to repel those who want to pay them money to train, they feel sorry for old Saul, as well as concerned, because he’s sixty seven and still harbors the ambition and desire to fight professionally again. He’s already in the record books as being one of the oldest men ever to fight professionally in a licensed boxing ring and despite the obvious brain damage he suffers, he still thinks he can do it one more time.
He was no soup can (easy to knock over). And back in the day when a world title meant something more than a marketing opportunity for somebody other than the champion, he’d won a world title in South Korea by knocking out their man, their World champion in the fourteenth round. Professional Boxing is as much, if not more of a business as it is a sport and people like Saul were not invited to travel from the Bronx to Seoul on the basis that they stood a chance of relieving their champion of his title. It was the kind of place where you’d have to knock their man unconscious to have an even money chance of being awarded a draw.
I was getting dressed, having trained and showered, as Saul was changing to train. We were the only people in the changing room and we chatted a little as we had a couple of times before. He repeated that he wanted to fight again.
“Doing the same thing endlessly over and over is really boring. Have you considered maybe that it's time you packed it in, and learn to do something new and challenging, like be a boxing trainer?”
He said he’d once tried to train his son, but that he wouldn’t listen.
“What did you expect? Sons rarely listen to their fathers. I have four brothers, none of them, me included, ever listened much to our old man, not unless we wanted something off him.”
"But”, I said, “in your case, you’d make a great trainer.” In New York City there are eight million people, how many do you think ever held a world title in boxing?”
He looked at me, wondering where this was going.
I said, “I’d guess, maybe ten.”
“It’s probably less than that,” he offered.
“So of all these trainers, for example, in this club, in this city, few if any has been where you’ve been, faced what you’ve faced, know what you know. They might think they know, but that’s not the same as knowing what you know. All you have to do is learn how to put it across.”
“But what if they won’t listen to me?”
“Would you agree that in the history of mankind, the wisdom of the old was always respected by the young, at least that element of the young who were going to achieve anything?”
He agreed.
“So if you meet someone who doesn’t listen to you, doesn’t offer you the respect you deserve, ignore them, find someone who does.”
A smile crossed his face. “I’ve never thought of it like that.”
He shook my hand and I left the gym as he prepared to train.