When the legendary heavyweight Joe Frazier died in November of 2011, I wanted to call my father and tell him right away. To me, my dad has always been affiliated with boxing; he watched the sport, practiced the sport, taught me enough about the sport so that I can tell good technique when I see it. (I never followed up on his early, rudimentary teaching, and can't box my way out of an ice cream carton.) 

It was an instant response, and I went so far as to search mentally for his phone number before remembering that he was dead. Even though Muhammad Ali was his favorite boxer—an impression aided, no doubt, by the fact that Ali has served timed in prison—I know he respected Frazier tremendously. 

We would have had a good talk on the phone, me and dad. Frazier's legendary left hook. The time he beat Ali in New York. The Thrilla in Manila. It would have expanded into more abstract discussions, such as how to carry yourself with dignity through this world. How to be a man. 

Boxing was the perfect sport for Thomas J. Wingate, and has always drawn in people like him. Poor people who feel they have to be self-reliant, for whom personal discipline is a way out of trouble. It's a sport for proles, misfits, the given-up-on. I'm sure he met a lot of people like him in the boxing world, though really I have no idea how deep he went into the sport. 

I know he boxed in New Jersey Golden Gloves, but I don't think he won anything. I used to have a silver boxing glove necklace of his, but it got stolen in LA. One of his fellow boxers was the young man he got into trouble with as a teenager, Arnold de Marzio. 

Boxing plays no other role in my life than this: teaching my sons the basics how to fight. I'm hardly a brawler myself, but I can give them the names of different punches, as well as combinations—the ones my father taught me, I'm sure, though no longer have any recollection of being taught—that would be particularly useful if they ever found themselves in a scrape. 

Not that I want them to get into scrapes. But scrapes will come in this life, and at this point boxing feels like an ancestral thing. I've got to pass on something of it, even if it's the little I know.