All you need is glove

Like with any sport worth watching, there will be beer. Loads of it.

Enough to get Dionysus off that wine kick and onto some Budweiser.

"Let me tell you about being sober in boxing," says Fred Berns as he sets up a row of folding chairs. "What a fucking terrible way to spend your money."

Fred Berns is a promoter in a sport largely unnoticed. It's vital to his job to keep people's attention.

Boxing used to be the courtyard of American kings, where King Joe ruled with a gracious smile and an unforgiving overhand right; where the immortal clown prince Ali made men spit and then laugh; where nobles and jesters cheered alike as the warriors fought that unending duel.

But somebody didn't heed the warning from the watchtower, and the whole thing's been left to ruins. But there are still nights in this America, like Friday Night Fights at the Farm Bureau Building in Indianapolis, when the carnival still plays and the people still come. Tonight, about 250 will gather in a small, two-room hall that usually houses things like milk-tastings and FFA fairs.

Old players, like Fred Berns, will be there, too. They always have and they always will be.

Fred Berns is a Sagamore of the Wabash.

Fred Berns is a Kentucky Colonel.

Fred Berns is a boxing promoter.

Most of all, Fred Berns is a last bard telling tales of a dying order.

Right now the biggest promoter in the Midwest is setting up folding chairs -- people got to have a place to sit.

Plenty of Bobs and Randys will get plenty of Budweisers, and they'll get sauced and yell things at two men who they know can't hear them, but can only hope will listen:

"He's open for the left hook!" Randy'll say.

"Just follow it up with a straight right!" Bob will counter.

Bob and Randy are a good hour away, but they will be here -- they always are. It's the fighters who are a no-show.

"Man, one dude said he's going to go play in a basketball tournament," says Reggie Strickland. He's the one with the shiny grill and the worried look on his face. Reggie is the matchmaker.

"Oh God, if I don't have a heart attack over this one." says the 68-year-old Berns. He looks a bit like a Jewish Sean Connery with a golfer's cap and glasses, but it is hard to see his face when he's doubled over looking at the floor and muttering in short breaths, "I can't take this. I'm done with these small shows."

At the moment, Reggie and Fred are having a hard time doing their job. The fighters aren't showing up.

"It's too much work," Strickland says as he scrolls through his phone, trying to get in touch with fighters.

"I'll end up dead over this," Berns sighs. He stands upright again with a pained look on his face.

In boxing, different things happen to the body. Muhammad Ali can't talk. Don King's hair stands in complete defiance of gravity. Fred Berns has a bad heart.

Strickland gets back on the phone to make sure the first punch gets thrown. Berns gets back to the chairs. The fighters tape up, increasingly aware of the lack of competition.

There's heavyweight champ Franklin Lawrence. He's a big, happy bear of a man who talks through gold incisors and is always chuckling, even when he speaks.

"Well, I'm goin' in here to knock this dude out in the first round," he says. "But I see he's taking kind of long. I might have to go to his house and get him -- knock him out there."

There's Roberto Florentino. Florentino is quiet and introspective.

"My family doesn't know I fight," he says. "They think I'm at work."

And he is.

Eventually Strickland and Berns put the show together, but the ten-fight card is trimmed to five. It mostly works out, but in this scenario someone is inevitably left out. Florentino has nobody to fight. He's led into the ring and the crowd gives him a standing ovation, but Florentino doesn't acknowledge any of it. His head is down and defeated by the absence of willing competition.

The fights start without him.

A boxing match is a lot like a Shakespearean play. The commoners openly cheer with vulgarity and dirty innuendo, while the nobles insist they are there for altogether different reasons.

Still, just as with Shakespeare, both will cheer at the first sight of blood.

But for now, it is dead quiet. The outset of a fight is the only time you'll find a similarity between the crowds at a chess tournament and a boxing match.

People size up the fighters. The swiftness of their mind. The strength of their soul.

But the silence breaks with a landed punch and time speeds up again and the screams start and the punches land and the people fill their throats with beer.

If this is some modern-day Globe Theatre, Fred Berns is its famous playwright.

"See, I got plenty of stories because I'm old," he says.

Berns'll tell you about being a cop in Chicago when, "the only thing legitimate in Chicago was (pro) wrestling."

There's the time Willie Pep tried to hustle him and a buddy at pool. Or the time Jake Lamotta, of Raging Bull fame, came on a tour of the Midwest and used the line, "I fought Sugar Ray so many times I got diabetes," so often Berns felt like taking a swing at him. Or the time that "Ty Cobb was sitting in the backseat and he pulled the seat out of the floor. So I take it to Eastgate Chrysler to get it fixed. He says, 'We've never seen this before -- only in head-ons at 40 miles per hour do the bolts come out of the floor.'"

But perhaps Berns' best stories have to do with Strickland and the traveling caravan of fighters he roamed with.

"They would go on a trip and they'd stop and do an Illinois fight. They'd go to Minnesota. Then South Dakota. Then North Dakota. Wyoming," Berns says. "By the time (Strickland) got home, he got 15 fights in maybe three weeks."

Reggie Strickland has more fights than Sugar Ray Robinson. He has more fights than Willie Pep. That's like having more sea dives than Jacques Cousteau.

In fact, Strickland has more fights (363) than any other boxer -- ever. He also has more losses (276).

"He's been screwed more times than a two-dollar hooker," Berns concedes, because boxing is never clean, especially when you're the out-of-town man just filling the card. The 38-year-old fighter would still be in the ring if the boxing commission hadn't revoked his license after a car crash. "(Strickland's) got all his marbles. That's incredible. That doesn't happen. Guys with 40 fights can't talk."

Boxing is haunted by famous figures so punch-drunk you could pour a handle of Jack down their throats and nobody would know the difference.

The crowd cheers. A man hits the canvas. Berns takes another sip of his beer and says of Strickland, "You ain't gonna hit him with a handful of rocks."

Strickland finds Berns and takes a break from matchmaking duties to watch the fight.

"It doesn't matter. Good heart or bad heart, the business is in the toilet," says the promoter.

"It's slow. I'm thinking about starting back up pimping, for real," says the fighter.

"Well, you had a good week," says the promoter. And he is right. The old fighter took some of the younger guys on a barnstorming tour and came back with a Cadillac and that glistening new grill.

"The woman takes all the money," counters the fighter.

"He's got him a honey and a new baby," says the promoter, taking another sip from his beer. "He's a good daddy."

The fighter is a daddy now, and the two roles don't always complement each other. There's something about the ring that won't let a fighter go, especially this one.

"You should have seen the standing ovation I got in West Virginia," he says, his eyes watching the fighters circling the ring. "I felt like a star for a minute."

The moment of introspection ends because Strickland's not only a matchmaker, not only an old fighter, but he's a corner man when he's got to be. So he leaves, preps an out-of-town fighter and leads him to the ring.

The fights wind down, and Berns is right about the booze. You could have a silverback in a straight jacket and line people around the block to take whacks at the beast for 10 bucks a pop and people would watch it.

But that doesn't mean the fans didn't get their money's worth. The crowd saunters out high on action and fermented hops.

Berns and Strickland take on another role now. They become accountants. Fighters stream through a back room where the promoter and the matchmaker hand out cash.

250 bucks to that fighter.

750 to the other.

The fighters come to speak to Strickland. They come to speak to Berns. Mostly, they come to get the money.

But who can blame them?

The old fighter leaves in his Cadillac to go home to his new honey and new baby. The promoter leaves a little later, after the ring's torn down and the last beer drank.

"It's a hustle," the promoter says. "It's a hard way to make a living."

The cash that comes in dwindles and the weeds in that regal courtyard -- where boxing's throne decays -- grow larger with each passing year. But it's still another night of stories.

Another fight night.