Death in the boxing ring
Charles Conwell never had qualms about the violence he meted out in a match, said journalist Jacob Stern in The Atlantic. Then he killed an opponent, and wondered if he would go to hell.
IT’S THE TENTH and final round, and Patrick Day is fading. He’s still circling the ring in search of an opening, but his punches have lost the switchblade quickness they had in the early rounds. If he doesn’t do something dramatic, he is going to lose this fight.
He had once looked like a star: No. 1 amateur welterweight, Olympic alternate, undefeated in his first 10 professional fights.
But boxing is unforgiving. One bad loss to a weak fighter and the glow was gone. If this 2019 fight, at the Wintrust Arena, in Chicago, does not go well, Day’s career could be over.
And it is not going well: Day went down in the fourth round and again in the eighth, and he’s way behind on points. “You got no choice,” his coach told him before the final round began. Either he scores a knockout in the next three minutes or he loses.
At 21 years old, Charles Conwell is everything Day once was and more: an 11-time national champion, a 2016 Olympian, a perfect 10–0 since he went pro. Conwell knows that he can wait this round out.
The fight is already his. But he also knows, as all boxers do, that people don’t pay to see a 10-round decision. They pay to see a knockout. Sometimes, before fights, Conwell will write himself a short note to hang above his bed. Before this one he wrote I WILL KO MY NEXT OPPONENT AND DOMINATE.
Conwell’s punches flow together in quicksilver combination. A big left hook hits Day square on the chin and he collapses onto the canvas. The referee doesn’t even bother with the 10-count. It is clear that this fight is over. The crowd is roaring, and Conwell is pounding his chest. He vaults onto the ropes and flexes his biceps, then leaps down and flashes an electric smile.
A man pushes his way into the ring. His voice is sharp with panic. “Get away! Get—get away from him!” Only now does Conwell turn and see that Day has not moved. EMTs climb through the ropes. Day’s chest heaves and heaves, but he does not blink, just stares glassy-eyed into the floodlights. The crowd has gone quiet.
On the way to the ambulance Day had a seizure. The EMTs tried to intubate him but could not insert the breathing tube.
This unsettled the doctors at the hospital. Even five minutes without oxygen can do the brain permanent, catastrophic harm; nearly half an hour had passed before Day was finally intubated.
Conwell flew back to his training camp in Toledo, Ohio, and drove home to Cleveland the next day. His girlfriend was waiting to greet him. When she started to unpack his black gloves and bloodstained uniform, he asked her to take them away. He said they scared him. When he tried to watch a fight on TV, his heart started racing, and his hands started sweating. He felt like he was having a panic attack. He turned it off and told his girlfriend he didn’t like boxing anymore. He said he was done.
Four days later Conwell’s girlfriend called to tell him she was pregnant, and for the first time since the fight, he felt happy. That evening, the two of them were at the mall when his phone rang again. Patrick Day had died—one of the 2,000 fighters who have died in the ring in the history of professional boxing, and the nine or 10 who die each year.
PATRICK DAY’S FATHER was a doctor. His mother was a multilingual secretary at the United Nations. Most boxers come from poverty. Day did not.
His parents were Haitian immigrants who settled in Freeport, Long Island, in a pleasant little burgundy-and-yellow ranch house so close to Baldwin Bay that, some evenings, you could feel the salt breeze blowing off the water. They had four sons and named the youngest Patrick. Then they divorced, and Patrick’s father moved out, but Patrick never did. He lived all 27 years of his life in that house by the bay, made honor roll there, and earned his college degree there.
On a summer day in 2006, at the age of 14, he walked into a neighbor’s open garage and started hitting an old Everlast heavy bag. He’d never boxed before, but his father used to buy Mike Tyson fights on pay-per-view. And one of his older brothers had started training at a nearby gym. As Day hit the bag, his neighbor appeared in the doorway. Joe Higgins was a former New York City firefighter who could still remember how the air at Ground Zero had tasted like metal and sparkled at night. Since 1992, he’d run the Freeport Police Athletic League Boxing Club. He showed Day how to jab. Day stayed all afternoon, then returned the next day, and the day after that.
Coming out of the amateur ranks, Day had been the top fighter in his weight class. He was undefeated in his first 10 professional bouts. But after a 79-second loss to a journeyman fighter, Day’s golden-boy days were over. Now he was a B-side fighter, an opponent, the guy promoters brought in to give their top prospects a good workout and a résumé boost. He hoped to resurrect his career, and over the next three years, he won six straight fights, all against highly regarded prospects.
His streak ended in June 2019 with a loss to a Dominican fighter, “El Caballo Bronco.” Next came Conwell. In the fourth round, Conwell floored him with a straight right to the chin, but Day hopped up immediately. It was only a flash knockdown. In the eighth, though, a hard one-two left him sprawled against the ropes and sent his mouthpiece spinning into the crowd.
It was at this moment that Higgins thought, “No more. I should stop this fight.” But at the end of the round, Day jogged back to the corner. His eyes looked clear, and his legs looked good. Day did all of this, and fought the ninth round to a stalemate, and rose from his corner for the beginning of the 10th round. Higgins laid a black-gloved
hand on his neck, tenderly. “You good?” he asked in a low voice. “Yeah,” Day answered. He looked Higgins in the eye. Higgins touched his cheek. The bell rang.
CONWELL WEPT AT the news of Day’s death. He had conceived a child and killed a man and learned of both on the same day, hours apart. At first, he thought maybe it was reincarnation, but later he decided it was only chance, because the baby turned out to be a girl, and anyway he was not a particularly religious man.
He’d never liked telling people that he was a fighter, and now when strangers stopped him to ask, “Hey, are you that guy who boxes?” he’d say, “Nah, that’s not me, I don’t box,” and for a moment they’d stare, but then they’d leave him alone.
Charles Conwell Sr. had wanted desperately to be a fighter, but he didn’t have the stuff. He trained and sparred in the basement of the local Salvation Army with a coach everyone called “The Godfather,” but he never fought a single bout.
His first four children all tried their hand at boxing, but none of them took to it. The next two, Charles and his half brother Isaiah, started competing when they were 11 and 7 years old, respectively. Charles hated it at first. He wanted to quit, but his father wouldn’t let him. In the backyard, he hung lights and a third heavy bag from a tree so that the boys could train after dark. Some nights, at 3 or 4 a.m., Charles Sr. would wake them and make them run laps around a nearby graveyard in the headlights of his pickup truck.
Conwell hadn’t been to church in years, but after the fight with Day his mother, his father, and his grandmother had all suggested he seek spiritual counsel. “Your grandmother kind of explained to me what was going on,” the pastor said. “But tell me how you feel. What’s going on in your mind?” Conwell’s eyes started to well up. What he needed to know, he said, was whether he was going to hell. He had killed a man, and he was afraid that God would not forgive him.
The pastor assured him that God would. He spoke of grace and mercy and redemptive love. He said that if Conwell requested forgiveness, he would receive it. But even then, he said, Conwell must also forgive himself. “It was not in your heart to kill him.
You’re a man who was doing your job.”
But Conwell wanted to be certain: Was the pastor sure he would not go to hell? Was he sure God would forgive him? The pastor reassured Conwell that he was, then rose and laid a hand on his shoulder. He closed his eyes and asked God to protect this fighter and grant him “peace as he moved on with his career.” When he left the church, Conwell felt lighter. He was ready to box again.
HIS PROMOTERS WANTED to take things slow, so they scheduled a fight on a small card in Hammond, Ind. The competition would be tame, the crowd small, the TV cameras absent—a perfect comeback bout. Conwell understood his promoters’ concerns. Some fighters came back fine after a killing; others could never hit the way they once had.
At the weigh-in he got his first look at his opponent, a journeyman from Mexico named Ramses Agaton who’d lost 10 of his previous 15 fights. Agaton appeared to have hardly trained at all. He had a visible paunch and was over the weight limit, but Conwell’s camp told the officials to let it slide.
To step into a boxing ring, a fighter must convince himself that several things he knows to be true are, in fact, false. He must convince himself that his opponent is not altogether human, because otherwise how do you strike someone toward whom you bear no ill will, and strike him not just for show but savagely, to hurt him? Above all, he must convince himself that what goes on inside the ring and what goes on outside it are separate matters entirely, that the one has no relation to the other. And he can have no doubt, because doubt breeds hesitation, and in the ring, hesitation can be deadly.
The bell clangs. Conwell has always been, by his own admission and to his coaches’ chagrin, a slow starter. He almost never throws the first punch of a fight. Agaton opens with a series of jabs, then tries a onetwo. He doesn’t get anywhere near Conwell. His punches have no pop.
No one seems to notice the man at ringside with tears in his eyes. He is a cutman, the person who treats a boxer’s wounds during a fight, and as such has an intimate familiarity with the damage the sport can inflict. He has worked some of Conwell’s fights before, but at this one he is only a spectator; he is here for another fighter. He has not worked a corner since October, when he watched the live broadcast of Day’s fatal bout with Conwell. Day was one of his fighters. Tonight, as he watches Conwell pound Agaton, he can’t help but see Conwell pounding Day, and he can’t take it anymore. At the end of the first round, he walks out.
In the next two rounds Conwell’s body blows seem to almost literally deflate Agaton. Early on he had tried to match Conwell punch for punch, but now he simply leans on him. When, in the fourth round, Conwell breaks Agaton’s guard and lands a powerful shot to the head, Conwell does not flinch. “In the moment,” he will say after, “it’s just boxing.”
After the round, the referee is waving his arms. Agaton will not come out for the fifth round. The fight is over. There will be no brutal knockout, no paralyzing flashback, no moment of reckoning. Just two human beings fighting for some money, and a thousand more intoxicated by the spectacle, and an empty folding chair at ringside, where not long ago the cutman sat, until he couldn’t watch anymore.
Adapted from a story that originally appeared in The Atlantic. Used with permission.