—Maya Angelou YOU LEARN PRETTY FAST that fighters who need to look around for inspiration rarely amount to much. Maybe it’s the same thing for writers. If you’re waiting around for a breeze to fill your sails you probably have no business sailing upstream against anything in the first place. Besides, all the greatest boxers had a lot of holes in their sails. In his book Why We Can’t Wait, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote: More than twenty-five years ago, one of the southern states adopted a new method of capital punishment. Poison gas supplanted the gallows. In its earliest stages, a microphone was placed inside the sealed death chamber so that scientific observers might hear the words of the dying prisoner to judge how the human reacted in this novel situation. The first victim was a young Negro. As the pellet dropped into the container, and the gas curled upward, through the microphone came these words: “Save me, Joe Louis. Save me, Joe Louis. Save me, Joe Louis.…” Would you believe me if I told you that Joe Louis only became Joe Louis because his mother hated boxing?
