by Loïc Wacquant
A dark-skinned, broad-shouldered, African American with searching eyes and a slight stutter, Jake “the Snake” Torrance resides in a depressed neighborhood of the depressed industrial town of East Chicago, Indiana. He rents an unfinished basement in the house of a friend where he lives alone (at age 32, he is single with no known children) and all of his belongings fit in a couple of suitcases. He is 3 months behind on his rent and he cannot drive because his licence has been suspended. Jake has not held a steady job for three full years; instead, he makes his living in the ring, fighting regularly once a month, sometimes twice, and nearly always out of town. He takes odd jobs on the side, moving furniture or cleaning work sites for a day-labor agency that used to remunerate him in kind by letting him stay in a room gratis, but no longer. His only on-the-books prior employment was garbageman for the city of Gary for 7 years, a patronage job paying the solid hourly wage of $5.80 (almost twice the minimum wage) that he got as a personal favor from the mayor, to allow him to pursue what was once a promising career in the ring, and which he promptly lost after the mayor got voted out of office.
For our interview at the gym of the Gary Police Athletic League on a warm September afternoon, Jake is wearing a black T-shirt “The Big Apple,” black burlap pants, beat-up black shoes and black ankle socks. The outfit showcases his svelte and muscular body: at 155 lbs on a sturdy 5”7’ frame with broad shoulders, he fights in the junior middleweight division. He bears the marks of his trade on his face in the form of a flattened nose, cut marks to his large forehead, and scar tissue around his narrow eyes and across his thick eyebrows. Throughout our extended conversation, Jake is fidgety and hesitant, his delivery choppy; he speaks barely above a whisper and slides from word to word and sentence to sentence as if on a slippery slope, often mumbling or half-talking to himself. His persona exudes sorrow more than any other sentiment. If nothing else, the ring has taken its toll.
Jake was born and raised in the notorious north side of St. Louis, Missouri, at a time when the city was vying for the title of murder capital of the United States. He is the oldest of nine children (seven brothers and two sisters) and grew up with his siblings and his mother, a hospital maid with a high-school education, after she separated from his father, a steel-mill worker who did not finish high school, himself the son of carpenter who migrated north from Mississippi in search of racial solace and economic betterment. Because his father had a stable factory job and his parents never received welfare, whereas neighbors barely eked out a living, Jake considers his family “very middle-class, really,” even though they did not own their home, had no wealth to transmit, and no one held a college degree. Of his siblings old enough to work, the best job and highest education were achieved by a sister working as a secretary and studying for her bachelor of arts at a small Michigan college. Jake’s relative sense of privilege is validated by the fact that his close childhood friends and relatives of his generation have gone on to become “really industrial peoples,” working in factories and government jobs with at least a modicum of economic security. His family stood squarely on the respectable side of the black working class.
Jake’s childhood neighborhood was rough: “It was like a typical ghetto area where black peoples had a fight among themselves,” rife with drugs, prostitution, and shootings, where social jealousy was rampant, and people settled grudges and disputes by resort to force. Clocking in daily at the gym from his early teens on, Jake avoided entanglement in street culture and crime (“If I didn’t be sussessful boxer, I knew I probably would wind up bein’ a drug dealer”), even as he was involved in street fracas just about weekly to “kinda hold my own.” He got shot once and, although he belonged to a tight neighborhood-based set of youths, they did not have a named public identity and so he hesitates to call them a gang, noting that “we stood our ground” but that “it was nothin’ real treacherous.” Jake personally witnessed several killings, related to drug trafficking, but he has never sojourned in jail or prison. His only tussles with the law have involved court appearances to deal with recurrent traffic violations that led to the suspension of his driving licence. He muses that “if I wasn’t careful, had good judgement, I be inside a penitenciary right now. See, I’m over 30 years old. In fact, if I can reach thirty, you know I gotta have a little sense, to reach thirty.”
Jake started learning the sweet science at the tender age of 12 after becoming entranced by Muhammad Ali on television, and he was gifted for the ring and dedicated to his craft. By his late teens he had developed into a top regional and then national fighter. Daily training in the gym, boxing in tournaments around town and across the country, and a part- time job as a cook at McDonald’s kept him busy outside the classroom. Jake “liked school a lot” but school did not much like him and he struggled to complete his secondary education (“I’m not a bright student, I’mma common-sense person”). And so he stopped his studies after graduating to pursue his pugilistic career full time, turning professional and migrating to northwest Indiana after his nineteenth birthday: “I wanted to pursue into boxin’ ‘cause at that time boxin’ was my upswing. I was lookin’ for a piece of the rock (chuckles), I wanted a piece of the gold. So I put all my interest into boxin’.” He readily concedes that “I’m not really sussessful, I’m jus’ on the limb, jus’ there, jus’ in motion, know what I mean? But at that time, I wanted to be sussessful, I wanted to be a well-loved boxer. An’ my goal was to be a champ an’ I had the tools to be a champion.”
Indeed, Jake had a brilliant career as an amateur. He accrued an exceptional record of 210 victories for only 10 defeats over a 7-year stretch earning him a number-one ranking in the country in his weight division. He narrowly missed making the US Olympic team in 1980 because of illness and was considered the equal to future star Donald “The Cobra” Curry (who won the welterweight gold medal at the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984 and would go on to hold several world titles as a pro). So when he turned professional, he was a highly experienced and proficient fighter from the get-go–although he also carried significant “wear and tear” from the sheer number of bouts accumulated (most amateurs turn pro having fought 40 to 60 bouts, with a low of 15 and a high around one hundred). Jake was considered a “hot prospect” and attracted the interest of the Chicago promoter Ernie Terrell (the former world heavyweight contender who famously clashed with Ali in 1967) who had high hopes for him. Jake started off by meeting those expectations and more, winning his first seven fights with coach DeeDee in his corner. A gym mate reminisces that Jake was unique for “his style, his grace, his movement–he was so good, folks could not hit him: his technique, his rhythm, man, he was a true snake. He was smooth, because of his knowledge of boxing.”
But then, from a record of 7-and-0, Jake went to 10-and-3, 11-and-6, and 13-and-12 by his fifth year. From there he compiled an avalanche of losses: after a decade in the ring his record stood at 18 victories for 41 defeats. The more he lost and the more he fought because, paradoxically, his losing record made him a more attractive adversary for up- and-coming fighters looking to run up their record and gain ring experience against a proficient foe willing to travel and posing a minimal risk of losing. Jake had morphed into what every rising boxer dreads becoming: a professional “opponent,” a skilled and resilient pug who can be counted on to put up a good fight and, more often than not, be defeated because he is defense-minded, lacks punching power, and agrees to fight on his opponent’s turf, thus exposing himself to a disfavorable “hometown decision.” After a while, opponents also lose the sense of near-invincibility that every fighter must have to step into the squared circle and evolve the mentality of a loser, which further decreases their chance of an upset victory, despite their ring abilities.
In 1991, the year I interviewed him at the mid-point of what would be a twenty-year career, Jake’s record stood at 20 wins and 47 losses; he fought twelve times that year, losing 9 matches, in Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Oklahoma, Arkansas, France (twice), Switzerland, and Spain. All but one of his opponents had a lopsided winning record; they included boxers with tallies such as 62-and-2, 54-and-0, 35-and-2, 21-and-0, and 11-and- 0. During that stretch, Jake competed in three main events in ten rounds but also pre- liminary bouts in four and six rounds, thus serving the gamut of needs of matchmakers and ensuring in turn a steady supply of future bouts to take. His upset win over the Italian welterweight champion Romolo Casamonica, who was 28-2-and-2 and had just fought for the European title, proves that Jake still had considerable skills: he won the bout on points in eight rounds at the Palacio de los Deportes in Madrid (for which fight he received the princely purse of $1,500). Says DeeDee: “Now, Jake wins every now an’ then. Jake knows he can upset you. As bad as his record is, Jake Torrance was (huffing for emphasis) championship material.”
Boxers who go on to become champions almost always take the slow upward route of the “protected fighter” (also known in boxing lingo as the “name fighter,” “house fighter” or “A fighter” set up to win), from prospect to contender, by careful choosing matches to pad their records and gain ring experience until the time comes to fight the division’s better competitors for a worthwhile “payday” or a title. By contrast, Jake took the fast downward path from prospect to “opponent” (the “B fighter,” expected to lose) and eventually “journeyman.” Three factors conspired to derail his career in this direction after only seven fights. First, Jake developed or escalated a drug habit, mostly cocaine, which had a deleterious influence on his ring preparedness and was a clear contributing factor to his other troubles, managerial and mental, as well as to his pressing need for cash. He concedes as much in our interview by candidly noting that staying away from drugs and alcohol is the single most difficult “sacrifice” that a professional boxer has to make (when other fighters flag the trinity of food, social life, and sex), and that he had bad experiences with narcotics: “I’m not really a drug addict, I’m really gettin’ away from drugs, I don’t mess with drugs anymore, I don’t miss it.
Second, instead of sticking with the plan laid out by his initial Chicago promoter and backed up by the sage ring counsel of DeeDee, Jake “ran off with the drunk white man” (in DeeDee’s words), Lionel Towers, a businessman from Gary who had loaned him a car, paid his rent, and promised to buy him a condominium, give his girlfriend a car and send her to college (none of which promises materialized). To add to the confusion, Jake also signed a 3-year managerial contract with Jerry Mullins, the wealthy owner of a catering and limousine service in downtown Chicago who agreed to pay him a 200-dollar weekly salary (against a 50-percent cut of his future purses, instead of the usual 33 percent), but quickly “cut him loose” after he started piling up losses. DeeDee, who counts Jake among the missed economic opportunities of his own career, observes bitterly: “He got contracts everywhere an’ nobody never said nuthin’ about it.”
Last and relatedly, Jake suffered from abrupt mood swings in and out of the ring, likely caused by his use of cocaine, but perhaps owing to a separate mental health condition that emerged under the stress of launching a professional career. It is possible also that this was a physiological effect of the accumulation of blows received during his amateur career, but it is unlikely because Jake was an unusually elusive fighter who could go a whole fight without getting touched and so he never suffered beat-downs, and the mental change was sudden. Recalls DeeDee: “He lost his mind, anyhow. He had a mind problem, somethin’ happened to him, I dunno what it was. But he changed overnight… You couldn’t trust ‘im. See, some nights Jake would fight, some nights he won’t fight. Just the way his head is… Say, ‘Jake why don’t you go out and whip that fool?’ (tentative and embarrassed) ‘Huh, mister DeeDee, I don’t know.’”
And thus Jake turned from “one of the hottest prospects in the country” into a second- tier fighter reduced to live flesh served up to “build” the career of other fighters who enjoyed the managerial guidance and promotional protection he had lost or forsaken. DeeDee again: “Yeah, Jake went off then after that, it was downhill… He win a bout, not long ago, he went overseas, upset somebody, ‘cause he ain’t gonna git hurt. Too skilled. With natural skill. Then he got to foolin’ around, fast life an’ shit. Oh boy! I wish you coulda saw ’im! He fought a boy down in d’hotel one night, the [boxing] commission wrote him, says: ‘Jake Torrance put on a boxin’ clinic.’… But he lost his mind. An’ it might not have been to drugs. Some people don’t have to have drugs to, y’know, to be off. So, one of ‘em things.”
*Excerpted from “Ruination in the ring: Habitus in the making of a professional “opponent”. Ethnography, 2022 https://doi.org/10.1177/14661381221114069