The fight began, and Horenstein’s cornermen yelled at him in Hebrew and English: “Hisardut! Hisardut!” Then: “Think, Moti! Think, think!” He did appear to be thinking: he kept clinching Fawzy and absently punching him in the head, ejecting and reabsorbing his own mouth guard with a disaffected expression. At some point, Fawzy managed to knock Horenstein down, then he tripped over him and fell out of the ring. He briefly hung over the judges’ table, suspended by the ropes, like a drunk in a hammock. Finally, two of the judges got up and pushed him back in. Horenstein went in for a clinch and was visibly drooling on Fawzy’s shoulder. The judges called a tie.

When the sweeping, beautiful cascade of electric synthesizers filled the hall, I realized that Bunkerd had chosen his karaoke recording as his entrance music. A hundred-and-twenty eight-pound, hollow-cheeked Bunkerd appeared in a cloud of blue smoke. He wore a green mongkon and a tense smile. Then Cieslinski made his entrance, in a droopy red satin robe and droopy red shorts. He was four inches taller than Bunkerd and weighed a hundred and twenty-nine pounds, with a sullen and anxious, though not unsympathetic, expression. He took off his robe and jogged in place. Bunkerd stood facing his corner post, palms tog ether and hands raised, silently moving his lips.

The bell rang, and Cieslinski assumed the conservative posture of one who has decided to do the bare mini mum in order to win on points. He kept backing off, beyond Bunkerd’s reach, firing an occasional punch. Bunkerd tried to move in for a clinch; twice, Cieslinski tripped him and he fell to the mat. The only lively moment in the entire first round was when Cieslinski was backing away from Bunkerd, and Bunkerd ran after him and kicked him in the leg.

I was horrified when the first bell rang: Bunkerd had done next to nothing, and Cieslinski, who had done next to next to nothing, was ahead. A bikini-clad, breast-enhanced ring girl announced the second round, and the fight continued with a kind of grim inexorability. During a clinch in the second round, the fighters’ heads collided. Bunkerd broke his nose, and Cieslinski got a cut on his head. Soon, both fighters were covered with blood. The audience was full of Cieslinski fans, who began to chant, “Mariusz, Mariusz.” Bunkerd’s fans, for the most part, regarded the ring with silent, heavyhearted fixity, like the audience at a play with an unhappy ending. The only exceptions were a tall man in a powder-blue shirt and powder-blue pants, who was shouting advice in Portuguese, and a woman in boots and a miniskirt, with hawklike features and waist-length hair. “Bun-kerd.’” she yelled over and over, in a hoarse, abject voice.

“What is this Bunkerd?” a boy behind me said. “Fuck Bunkerd. It’s over, finished.” The rest of the match went by in clinches, with Cieslinski getting in some punches and Bunkerd getting in some knees. They grappled, and grabbed each other’s head, and there was blood on their faces, their bodies, their gloves, the canvas. The fight dragged on for the full five rounds, and the decision went to the judges. One of them scored it a tie, but the other two ruled in favor of Cieslinski.

Bunkerd hopped down from the ring and was hugged by a great number of people; every now and then you could see his stunned, mournful face over someone’s shoulder.

I didn’t get back to the gym until one sunny day late in September. Bunkerd was sitting at the computer playing solitaire, round-faced and cheerful. He explained that the problem had been weight loss. The week before the fight, he’d had to lose seventeen pounds. The fight was on a Saturday, and at Thursday’s weigh-in he didn’t make weight. He didn’t eat anything on Friday, and spent most of the day in the sauna, and on Saturday he woke up dizzy and weak. Could there be a more melancholy scene: Bunkerd all alone in a sauna in New York City, trying to become even smaller?

At the fight, I had taken a photograph of Bunkerd’s ring entrance. In it, he is walking with a light, purposeful step, and appears to be about to skip right out of the picture. You can almost tell that his recording is playing in the background. When I gave him a copy of the photograph, he accepted it cautiously and held it up to his eyes.

“Thank you,” he said. A smile lit up his face: “Oh—it’s me.”

Next page >>