cally: “One, two! We’re all sensitive people! I said jab!” In the course of his professional career, he fought six world champions, including Oscar De La Hoya. “I didn’t win, but I fought them all,” he told me reflectively. “Yeah, I’m oh-for-six with those guys.”

In March, when Bunkerd and Cariaso threw a party to celebrate the gym’s first anniversary, the positivism was so thick you could cut it with a knife. The boxers had brought some of their favorite things: several pounds of raw cauliflower, Michael Jackson’s “Ultimate Collection,” a strobe light, a keg of beer, a big white dog (one of Cariaso’s rescues), and a vat each of lemon cupcakes and barbecued spare ribs. Bunkerd, who was wearing a black beret and an earring, started a line dance: we were all supposed to shimmy closer and closer to the floor. He spent most of the evening a few inches from the floor—perhaps, I thought, to get a better quad workout. A bit later, Alexander started to dance, going lower and lower, until he, too, was barely hovering above the floor. It was as in the old days of Thai boxing, when each fighter would perform a ceremonial dance called a ram muay, and you could tell from the style of the ram muay which region and camp he came from.

Not long after the party, I saw Cariaso fight in the livestock pavilion of a disused fairground in Fresno. When his entrance music started playing, he appeared, but instead of marching to the ring he just stood there in the aisle holding up one bandaged hand. “Gloves, gloves,” people began murmuring, and in fact Cariaso didn’t have any—he ended up using the gloves from the previous fight.

During the fight, Bunkerd hung off the ropes, as if the ring were a boat and he didn’t have a ticket. He was wearing a beret and expressionlessly chewing gum. Cariaso was a good six inches shorter than his opponent, whom he nevertheless managed to kick in the jaw early in the second round. The opponent looked sheepish and started spitting blood into a bucket: his jaw was broken, a T.K.O. for Cariaso. Bunkerd’s face lit up, and he jumped into the ring and picked Cariaso up and waved him around.

In June, Cariaso went professional. He won his first fight, at the HP Pavilion, in San Jose, among flashing L.E.D. signs announcing the upcoming 50 Cent “Anger Management Tour.” Shortly after Cariaso’s professional debut, Bunkerd made a surprising announcement: he was coming out of retirement. On August 20th, in New York, he would fight the flyweight championship against a thirty-two- year-old Polish boxer named Mariusz Cieslinski.

“Where in New York?” I asked.

“Man. Hat. Tan,” Bunkerd replied. When I asked what had prompted this, Bunkerd exclaimed, “Because I love to fight!”

On the evening of the fight, I took a bus to Penn Station and made my way to the Hammerstein Ballroom. The event had been dismally publicized and the place was less than half fill, with maybe a thousand people in attendance. Demographic groups represented in the audience included hip- hop-influenced, text-messaging Hispanic and Asian couples; middle-aged Thai men; white couples in sweatshirts and jeans; black men in dark glasses and silk shirts; Russians from Borodin’s Gym, in Brooklyn; and Cieslinski fans from Poland.

The preliminary rounds featured local amateur fighters; perhaps the most charitable thing you could say about them was that they were good at looking as if they were not well versed in the lethal art of Thai boxing. The first fight that seemed to generate any audience interest was between the two-hundred-and-thirty-pound Jarrell (the Gorilla) Miller and the two- hundred-pound Zadie Morris. The Gorilla looked like a turn-of-the- century circus strongman, in a tight sleeveless jersey and short shorts that exposed his quivering thighs. Morris danced in circles around the Gorilla; he was faster and more skilled, and won the first round, but, through sheer perseverance, the Gorilla prevailed. When the judges announced their decision, the Gorilla got so excited that he burst into applause, bowed, and hopped up and down.

Soon, the m.c. announced the first professional match: Mohamad (Moe) Fawzy versus Moti (the Hebrew Hamm er) Horenstein. The Hebrew Hammer was something of a cult figure: a three-year veteran of the Israeli Special Forces, a fighter, and the proprietor of a martial-arts academy in Miami, specializing in a variant of the Israeli self-defense technique known as Krav Maga.

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