Rope-A-Dope

In the college days of my misspent youth I read too much Hemingway and blundered into a short-lived amateur boxing passion that taught me several important lessons about life’s occasional testosterone fueled confrontations:

1. It is better to give than to receive.
2. If you punch with your left hand, cover with your right.
3. If you punch with your right hand, cover with your left.
4. Keep your chin tucked down.
5. Stay balanced on your feet.
6. Jab, jab, jab to keep your opponent off balance.
7. Straight punch to put your opponent down.
8. Your punching power comes from your thighs and butt, not your shoulders.
9. A boxer with short arms must stalk, stalk, stalk and be an infighter.
10. After three rounds, an infighter has a reconfigured face.
11. Throw a left hook to the head only when your opponent is completely open.
12. Throwing a left hook to the body will result in a trip to the canvas.
13. Do not get up from the canvas until the count reaches eight.
14. Your ego will tell you to fight outside your weight class. Do not.

My instruction and competition in the “sweet science” was a short 10 weeks of training and sparring, plus a whirlwind two-day tournament. Fifty-plus years ago I fought as a welterweight and won my class. Late in the tournament, because my team did not have a good middleweight boxer, I also allowed a coach to put me in the ring to fight as a middleweight. Please refer to Rule 14.

Looking back on my hour in the locker room after that final bout while a trainer taped an icebag over my left eye, applied butterfly bandages to close the cuts on my right eyebrow and chin, and packed wads of cotton into my broken nose, I wish I had been trained in the now-famous Rope-a-Dope boxing technique. Unfortunately, Rope-a-Dope was not much known until 1974 when Muhammad Ali employed the strategy against George Foreman in a heavyweight boxing match known as the Rumble in the Jungle in Kinshasha, Zairie.

Rope-a-Dope requires a boxer to retreat across the ring (actually a 20x20 foot square) when faced by a more aggressive fighter in the early rounds of the match, lean against the ropes that enclose the ring, and weave and deflect the punches of his opponent with the goal of tiring and frustrating him. In the later rounds of the fight, when the Rope-A-Dope boxer suspects his opponent is arm and leg weary, he comes off the ropes and delivers a series of combination punches that his opponent is too exhausted to counter.

Ali knew that Foreman was a brawler, an aggressive long-range puncher whose boxing style was to unceasingly attack his opponent with a constant barrage of punches. Ali used the Rope-a-Dope technique to perfection from round two into round seven, allowing Foreman to throw many dozens of wild punches that Ali dodged and slipped. In round eight, Ali came off the ropes and delivered a series of combination punches that sent Foreman to the canvas and caused the referee to end the fight.

The Rope-a-Dope tactic would probably not have worked for me as a collegiate boxer because each bout was only three 3-minute rounds, not long enough for my middleweight opponent to tire himself out. And unlike Ali, I was not skilled in dodging and slipping punches.

Fast forward 58 years, however, and I am rediscovering the Rope-a-Dope as a technique to successfully fight many enemies in my senior years: President Orange and his fascist gang of thugs, miscreants, and incompetents; insurance corporations; MAGA fanatics; ICE agents; Republican politicians; MAHA ignoramuses; climate change deniers; white supremacists; real estate developers, and a long list of others.

I can no longer get into the boxing ring and stalk, stalk, stalk until I corner them and engage in the infighting brawl at which I was once adept. I have learned that my best chance is to lean on the ropes, let these thugs and villains hammer away at me round after round, and come forth late in the fight when they are weary from wildly throwing all the lies, deceits, disinformation, hatred, corruption, dishonesty, and other cheap shot punches.

I pray for the strength to do that, to take the blows on the ropes and come fighting back for the knockout win. I pray that more than 220 million U.S. voters do the same in November.