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BOOKS

Bare Knuckle: Bobby Gunn, 73-0, Undefeated - A Dad, a Dream, a Fight Like You've Never Seen by Stayton Bonner

I came across Bare Knuckle a few months ago when a couple authors I know posted photos of the advance copy they got in the mail. The cover instantly grabbed me: like an action movie and gritty documentary all in one. It had everything I look for in a book cover to make me want to buy:

Stellar title + compelling cover photo + tantalizing subtitle.

This formula usually equals a win. In this case, it's a knockout (I couldn't resist, sorry, I didn't even want to write that but my fingers typed it and I couldn't help it).

Bare Knuckle is the brutal, occasionally barbaric, endlessly compelling, action-packed and always full-of-heart story of Bobby Gunn, a man raised to fight by a fighting father who was raised by his fighting grandfather in a community that cares about three things: faith, family and fighting.

Forget about any random high school or college fight you got in. Forget about the craziest fight any of your friends has been in. Forget about any fight you found on YouTube. Bobby Gunn's fought in 10x worse with 10x more on the line. Every chapter of this book will stay with you and when I finished I reached out to Stayton Bonner because I had to know more…

More about his writing process, more about the Travelers, about Bobby, about the underground fighting world...

Thankfully, Stayton agreed to a Books & Biceps Q&A and this is easily one of the most thorough, powerful interviews we've done. Enjoy!

FINKEL: There are so many stories in this book focused on brutality and beatdowns, but the one that sticks out the most, at least for me as a dad, is when Bobby Gunn’s father wakes 11-year-old Bobby up in the middle of the night and tells him to step outside in the cold to fight a drunk, grown man in a bare knuckle match. My son is eleven, which is why this seems so outside of anything I can picture. Total destruction of psyche and innocence and trust. But young Bobby smoked that dude. How did hearing that story inform your telling of their father-son relationship?

BONNER: As a journalist, this is one of the most inspiring and heartbreaking stories I've ever come across. Bobby Gunn is the ultimate underdog tale, a real-life Rocky who rose from an abusive childhood to become a 73-0 champion, and it’s all rooted in his complex relationship with his father.

Bobby suffered abuse, no doubt. But in Gunn’s mind, this was all done to accomplish two goals: protect him in life and ensure he upheld the family name in championship fighting. His father, Robert Williamson Gunn, came from a long line of Irish Travelers, a nomadic people who revered religion and fighting (think Brad Pitt in Snatch). Robert knew that he needed to train his son to survive their itinerant life, a savage world of bloodline feuds and campground brawls. In addition, he needed his son to uphold their family name. In Traveler circles, renown was accomplished with fists, not money.

So Robert taught his 11-year-old son to rub a leather belt over his eyebrows to toughen them up, and to pour kerosene on his cuts to heal them more quickly. He taught him how to take pain, wrapping a baseball bat with foam and duct tape and hitting his son repeatedly in the midsection to harden his abs. Most importantly, he taught him always to be ready for battle. Robert would rouse Gunn in the middle of the night from their motel rooms and trailer parks to fight grown men he had brought home from the bar. He gambled up to $1,000 on the child brawler he had molded since birth. An unsuspecting drunk man would glance at the scrawny boy and say, “What the fuck, this is a kid.” Then Gunn would punch him in the nose. It's a father-son story unlike any other. And, once Gunn became a father himself, I found it telling that he refused to train his own child in the dark arts of bare knuckle, wanting to give him a better life.

For a brief period of time Bobby was an up-and-coming prizefighter represented by Don King. I know King wouldn’t sit down for this book, but man, he seems like a horrible guy who didn’t give two shits about Bobby at all. Who should Bobby have signed with as a pro? And how do you think it would have turned out?

Gunn never got his chance as a pro boxer. At age five, coached by his father, he began working the bags at the Shamrock Boxing Club in Niagara Falls, soon making a name for himself with his hard punch. At six, he began competing in Peewee fights. In 1988, at 15, Gunn moved to Las Vegas, lied about his age, and began fighting under Carl King, the son of Don. At the time, Gunn’s mother, Jacqueline, was sick with hepatitis C, and needed $23,000 for a liver transplant to survive. So Gunn was literally entering the ring each day to fight for her survival.

Gunn thought he’d hit the big time in Vegas. But instead, he was soon shipped to King’s training compound in Orwell, Ohio, to work endlessly as a sparring partner. He sparred twice daily, once in the morning and once in the afternoon, boxing champions nearly twice his age and up to a hundred pounds heavier. At night, Gunn pissed blood from the kidney shots. He broke his arm, continuing to spar while wearing a cast. He woke up one Christmas morning, his pillow soaked in blood, his eardrum ruptured by a blow from Julian Jackson, a fighter now considered one of the hardest punchers in pro boxing history. “I goes to the hospital, they put a needle in my ear and suck out the fluid,” Gunn says. “I lost forty percent of my hearing.”

How would Gunn’s career have turned out if he’d had better support? It’s telling that in 2013, after a 10-year hiatus from pro boxing, Gunn returned to the sport at age 30 because he wanted to show his son that he was more than a street fighter. Incredibly, Gunn then held his own against legends like Roy Jones Jr. and James Toney, even becoming an IBA Cruiserweight champion of the world. Perhaps the most amazing story from this period is when Gunn fought Tomasz Adamek, the top cruiserweight boxer in the world, in 2009 at the Prudential Center in Newark, New Jersey. Gunn drove his work truck straight from a construction site to the Prudential Center. Passing Adamek’s stretch limo, Gunn parked, wriggled out of his work clothes and into his trunks, and then entered the arena. “Smelling like an old dog, I get on the scale,” Gunn says. “Adamek’s handler is reading contracts, signing things. They’re checking the gloves, and paint is coming off my hands. The guy looks at me like ‘Where is this paint coming from?’ Where is my team?” Gunn pauses. “No team.”

In front of six thousand screaming Adamek fans, Gunn stood alone against the world’s top boxer. He lost, but he showed heart—a perfect microcosm of his boxing career.

Let’s talk about Ike’s Gym. This place feels like it’s cut from the same cloth as where Rocky trained with Apollo for his comeback against Clubber Lang. Bare bones. Hard nosed. Nasty, but necessary. Can you explain that environment and why it’s so important to Bobby to train there?

Ike & Randy’s boxing gym in Paterson, New Jersey, is the anti-Equinox.

To enter, you walk through a chain-link gate, down a narrow alleyway, past two snarling pit bulls, and through a metal door. A former auto-body shop, Ike’s is a cramped, low-slung, windowless space with brick walls the color of smoker’s teeth. Gunn carries a wooden bat when he goes. He once used it to beat a man attempting to carjack him outside the gym.

Ike’s will never host a Pilates class or smoothie bar—which makes it the perfect environment for Gunn. He seeks out Ike’s for training because it keeps him tough. In preparation for his big-money bare-knuckle matches, he pits himself against the fiercest sparring partners he can find, local heavyweights who troll gyms looking to pick fights, men willing to go ten rounds for $50.

Gyms like this are feeder systems to the underworld circuit of illegal bare-knuckle fights. In these shadow economies, journeyman fighters share information on quick-cash bouts, promoters look for prospects, and trainers act as conduits for everyone, cherry-picking the top talent for underground bare-knuckle bouts in which participants can risk their lives for up to $50,000 in a brown paper sack. To reach Gunn, New York City mobsters call a landline phone the size of a toaster at Ike’s and leave messages.

A story. In 2008, Brandon Jacobs, then a star running back for the New York Giants, who had just won the Super Bowl, parked his sports car outside Ike’s, stationed a bodyguard by it, and walked through the metal door, donning sparring gloves. A former amateur heavyweight, Jacobs wanted to test his stuff. But after a couple of sessions with local boxers, the 6'4", 265-pound behemoth got dropped to one knee by Gunn’s left jab to the body and hasn’t been seen since. Even an NFL star accustomed to bone-crushing tackles from 330-pound linemen couldn’t survive Ike’s.

The descriptions of some of the fighters Bobby squared off against are like a movie: mobsters, gangsters, cowboys, fighters flown in from other countries, and on and on. These gang leaders and mafia guys would recruit bad asses from all over the world to find someone who could take down Bobby…And yet, he beat them all in some insane scenarios under terrifying conditions… What was the one battle that stood out to you that was the most life-threatening regarding his surroundings?

Gunn’s bare-knuckle fight history is the craziest, most compelling story I’ve ever come across. He was never scared of his opponent, but he was always worried about the environments in which he fought—and for good reason.

There are so many insane scenes in the book. A Hells Angel biker bar bout. A suburban mob den with a mountain lion in a cage. A Chinatown basement with dog fights.

But the craziest story has to be the Russian mob fight in Brooklyn in 2011. Even for the underground, the Russians stand out for their brutality. “I hear they put guys in fifty-five-gallon barrel drums of acid,” Gunn says. “Turn you to syrup and then throw you in a sewer drain. No DNA, no proof.” He pauses. “I mean, a lot of their own soldiers have no fingers because they disobeyed something—and that’s their own guys.”

From the beginning, the fight went nothing like Gunn had expected. He arrived late at night to a McMansion in the outer reaches of Brooklyn, entering a large foyer to find an elegant party underway—men and women in evening wear, live music, and a giant Russian man standing in the corner, waiting to fight him…

To read the rest of my full interview with Stayton Bonner click here:

BICEPS

It’s Spring and you know what that means? It’s 5K and TRI SZN.

The hardest part of getting ready for monthly 5Ks is the, uh, running. Yeah, after a full year of running these races I am definitely in flux… I really enjoy the races themselves. I like pushing to beat my best times. I like competing and trying to get Top 3 in my age group. And I like racking up medals…

BUT… I still don’t like to run that much outside of races. For whatever reason, it doesn’t bring me the same joy as hoops or swimming or lifting or football or my other favorite sports…

I think a big part of it is because I don’t like having to work out twice in one day to get in the proper running workouts to improve (because I don’t want to give up a lifting day or swim just to run)… This year, I’ve got a new plan, though. Instead of doing leg day in the gym and then running on two other days a week, I’m going to combine the running with the leg training.

What does that look like? Easy:

On Wednesday I ran a nice 2-miles around the lake in our neighborhood, aiming for an 8:30 pace, so it only took about 18 minutes…

Then I did three sets of high reps on the hex bar followed by three sets of lunges and high rep slam ball work:

The whole workout took 45 minutes and I liked it because I didn’t have to head out for road work later.

If I were running 10Ks or half-marathons or something, this might not work.

Not sure about running 5-10 miles and then hitting legs with weights, but by keeping the runs under a half-hour and at a moderate pace it feels more like an intense warm-up than something that will gas my legs. To be continued!

QUICK FLEXES

To give you an idea of how devastating Bobby is to fight, check out this 10 second knockout of a much bigger bare knuckle fighter who at the time hadn’t lost yet. YouTube won’t display the link because of the fighting content, but if you click on it you’ll be able to watch it. It’s older, grainy footage, BUT:

Bobby straight up just drops this guy. It’s crazy to watch him crumple so fast.

My guest appearance on Chris Jericho’s blockbuster podcast, Talk is Jericho, dropped this week and they put together this Hall of Fame graphic:

This conversation was great because not only was Jericho a multiple world champion wrestler in the WWE, he shed some light on stories he’d heard about Macho as well. Really fun. Listen here or on Apple or Spotify

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