Best Friends Take Time for a Fight

They always thought it was possible. Simon Brown and Maurice Blocker figured that someday they would have to set aside friendship and meet in the ring. Last August it became inevitable.

That’s when Blocker won the World Boxing Council welterweight title. Brown already held the International Boxing Federation title. Back when they were learning their craft in the same little gym in Washingtons, the two talked about becoming world champions someday, maybe even fighting for a title.

Now that the time is almost here -- they’ll meet March 18 in Las Vegas -- people ask: How can two fast friends like Brown and Blocker set aside friendship and, in effect, try to scramble each other’s brains for 12 rounds, then be friends again? How can the loser withstand the cruel side of the sport that inflicts a physical and emotional hurt like no other and resume a close relationship with the winner?

“It’ll be strange, going into the ring and trying to beat each other’s heads off,” Brown admitted recently after working out in a basement gym in Rockville, Md.

“We’re mature men,” Blocker said. “This is only business. It’s nothing personal.”

Brown and Blocker are two of the best, if not the two best, welterweights in the world, the closest of friends who find themselves by twists of fate ready to battle each other in the fight of their lives. “It just happened sooner than anticipated,” Blocker said.

They became close years ago while working under Pepe Correa, most recently Sugar Ray Leonard’s trainer. Their friendship grew as they sparred almost daily, prepared one another for numerous bouts and traveled together and fought on the same cards. In their professional careers each has lost only one fight.

Each is married, with two children. Both live in Germantown, Md. They get together often, and their families are close.

“One thing greater than this fight is the love they have for each other,” said James Cooks, a lawyer who is Brown’s adviser and a friend of Blocker’s as well. “When the bell stops ringing, when people stop giving adulation, that’s all you have left, the love. They both know this.”

Those familiar with the fighters expect an all-out brawl. Brown and Blocker are known for giving everything on fight nights, and even in routine workouts, and for this unusual meeting they will have more than the usual incentive.

At stake are area bragging rights and, more significantly, the biggest payday of their lives (several hundred thousand dollars each) and the prospect for the winner of still bigger paydays.

“They both realize this fight is an opportunity,” said Cooks. “They’ve come to a fork in the road, and only one is going to take the road less traveled.”

Brown, usually reticent, predicts: “This is going to be one of the greatest welterweight championship fights in history.”

If that should be the case, defeat may be easier to accept. If the loser is satisfied he’s done his best, he may not be so envious of what the winner has gained as to ruin the relationship.

Envy, though, doesn’t have to be a destructive force and shouldn’t be in a mature friendship, according to social scientist and psychotherapist Lillian B. Rubin in her book “Just Friends: The Role of Friendship in Our Lives”: For people “with a relatively well-developed, satisfying sense of self, envy can become a creative internal force. ... Rather than the destructive wish to deprive another, envy can be a goad to greater self-fulfillment -- a reminder of tasks yet undone, of possibilities untapped.”

Like Blocker, Brown stresses both are “mature people.” They’ll go right on with their lives as before, Brown said.

“Very clear friendships when taken into the ring or in football, another contact sport, are usually reaffirmed immediately afterward with embraces and congratulations,” said sports psychologist Bruce Ogilvie. “Brother against brother, friend against friend, tends to bring a higher level of competition from both. And in most cases they leave it all at the event. I don’t remember a negative carryover in anything similar to this.”

Only some “external factor,” such as one of them believing he is the victim of a bad decision, could upset the Brown and Blocker relationship, Ogilvie said.

When they fought in 1971, Muhammad Ali and Jimmy Ellis were friends. Growing up, they had hung out together in Louisville. They’d remained close. Neither could work up a genuine animosity toward the other.

According to Angelo Dundee, who at different times trained both, Ali and Ellis approached their fight just as Brown and Blocker appear to be-as a payday and a professional opportunity.

“I managed Ellis and was in his corner,” Dundee said. Ali won on a 12th-round knockout, but Dundee recalled that after the fight “they hugged and everything was forgotten. Hey, after that fight, Muhammad took me back. He didn’t have any hard feelings.”

As Ogilvie and Dundee see it from different perspectives, the winner of Brown-Blocker will be sympathetic toward the loser, and eager to take the first steps toward resuming friendship. Writer Gerald Early, in an essay on boxing that was reprinted in the collection “Reading the Fights,” suggests that a boxer understands another boxer’s feelings better than anyone.

“A boxer must inflict a lot of punishment in the normal course of a fight in order to expect to win, and it would seem that he might feel less compromised or uneasy in his actions if the opponent was not a friend. On the other hand, it is quite natural for people who share a particular profession also to share friendships; who can know better than a prizefighter the rewards of achievement or the frustrations of defeat in the prizefighting profession?”

Expecting Brown to win, Cooks said he anticipates his man’s beginning to “mend fences” immediately after the fight.

If Brown had his way, “I’d like to knock him out quick, get it over and come out of the ring the way we went in.”

Correa sees absolutely no problem in Brown’s and Blocker’s resuming their friendship.

“They’re professionals,” he said. “They’ve been conditioned for what they have to face in the future to put bread on the table. So they say, ‘May the best man win.’ ”

Bob Rotella, director of sports psychology at the University of Virginia, concurs with Correa.

“If they can’t (be friends again), they don’t deserve to be professionals,” Rotella said.

“To anybody in that situation, I say, Think of what it was like when you were kids. You were close before a game, you put it aside and competed intensely, then you went on with your friendship.

“The world of sports is full of examples of players’ playing against friends. In basketball it happens a lot. You do put friendship aside. Because the idea is that you love competing. You test yourself. If anyone at the professional level has jealousy, envy or even hate of someone because of his winning, then he has lost sight of the idea of competition.”

Blocker professed not to have the least problem in fighting his friend. “When Butch (Lewis, Blocker’s manager) said he had a chance to make this fight,” Blocker said with enthusiasm, “I told him, ‘Go ahead.’ ”