Until I saw her name and location on Google Maps, I had forgotten all about her. The name. The way she looked. The things we did together. But there I was, alone in Paris one night, and there she was, standing right in front of me: Levallois.
It wasn’t towards Levallois that I walked that evening, but it was, I discovered, just three kilometres from Salle Pleyel, the famous concert hall and my target destination. That made it walkable, close enough to touch. It also surprised me, the proximity, for although I visited Paris every year, this was the first time I had been near Levallois, one of its suburbs. It was the first time, too, that I had been in Paris and remembered what I had witnessed in Levallois on the night of November 10, 2007.
It was a boxing match, maybe even my favorite. Yet in time it had become no more than a memory that progressively fades on account of maturity, new interests, and a desire to move on. My being in Paris two years ago, for instance, had not a thing to do with boxing or indeed that particular fight. If anything, annual visits to the French capital, my favourite city, were an attempt to get away from boxing. In Paris, there was no danger of ever running into it; being reminded of it.
There, back in 2023, I found myself more inclined to tour cafés and try wading through the first volume of that massive Proust book, the one about memory, the one with two names: In Search of Lost Time/Remembrance of Things Past. It began with perfect recall granted by a cake dipped in tea: “The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it... the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment.”
Now a similar thing had happened to me, albeit with a word, not a taste. The word was Levallois. It was there on a phone screen, like a missed call from an old flame, and now I couldn’t shake the memories attached to it. Some of them I had once written down, even published in a book, but those were the naïve recollections of a child, a mere imposter. This time I had some perspective, context. Not only that, time, plus the distance it offers, had given the fight between Jean-Marc Mormeck and David Haye a rather comforting sort of haziness. It was a test now to remember its details and to work out why seeing Levallois, while in Paris, had come as such a shock. Perhaps because it was so small, and not part of the Paris you recognise, it was a place easily ignored and forgotten. Or perhaps the fight itself, shamefully lowkey at the time, was easy to forget by virtue of how it resonated most with the few who were there and meant considerably less to everyone else.
Whatever the reason for it, the fight had become just one of many and now, as I sat and waited for a concert to start, I thought only of what happened at the Palais des sports Marcel-Cerdan 16 years ago. I then checked again to see how far it was from Salle Pleyel – 3.1 kilometres – and resolved to walk there after the concert had finished. Provided, by then, the rain had stopped.
***
The first thing I remembered was how close the hotel was from the Palais des sports Marcel-Cerdan and how the distance was in fact walkable, something rare on such occasions. I remembered waiting for other people to leave the hotel and I remembered my impatience soon getting the better of me. I remembered walking to the venue on my own, fuelled by nervous energy, and seeing outside it a line of people, most of them smoking, waiting to go in. It gave the impression of a student gig more than a world title fight and I suspected that passers-by would have had no idea what was about to happen inside.
As I joined the queue, I remembered Haye asking his coach, Adam Booth, “When am I going to feel it?” as they earlier walked back to the hotel having eaten spaghetti Bolognese in a local café. “Feel what?” Booth replied, to which Haye said, “Something. I don’t even feel like I’m fighting tonight.” I remembered Booth then saying to him, “Maybe that’s the way it is supposed to be,” and afterwards telling me about the time he watched Lloyd Honeyghan interviewed ahead of dethroning Donald Curry in 1986. Asked how he felt ahead of the fight, the underdog, raised in the same London district as Haye, apparently said: “It just feels like I’m at home or walking down Walworth Road. I’m not coming to piss around. I’m coming to win.”
I remembered Haye stayed in room 501 before the fight. I remembered him listening to Stevie Wonder in that room and watching lots of Sugar Ray Robinson. I remembered him saying, “Take a seat – you make me feel uncomfortable just standing there,” not long after I had joined him. I remembered him bemoaning the fact his left hook was not a patch on Sugar Ray’s as he watched on his laptop Robinson pulverise Gene Fullmer with that punch. I remembered him asking me if I had heard his ring walk song for the Mormeck fight and remembered him excitedly loading it up on his laptop when I said “no”. I remembered watching him shadowbox to McFadden and Whitehead’s “Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now” for the first time. It would soon become synonymous with Haye, of course, but it was there, on November 7, that it all started. I remembered Larry Holmes, the one who sparked Haye’s fascination with it. So did Haye. “I think it’s going to get everybody jumping around and dancing,” he said. But I was less sure of that. I remembered him asking me if I thought he would get booed, fighting a Frenchman in Paris and all, and I remembered trying to reassure him. I said the French weren’t like that or something. They seemed too morose to boo. It took energy to boo. “Yeah, that’s what I thought,” said Haye.
With the fight drawing closer, I remembered him telling me how it would go and how people were wrong to assume he had to win the fight early and that Mormeck would come on strong late. He saw it the other way round, by all accounts, and said Mormeck was apt to do nothing in the second half of the fight. He had proof of this, he said, having, like me, watched countless Mormeck fights in the last 12 months. He also asked me what Sugar Ray Robinson would do to Jean-Marc Mormeck and we both laughed. “What punch would he use to knock him out?” he asked. “Probably his left hook,” I said.
I remembered a brief period when he didn’t want to talk. I remembered that during this period he chose to instead clean his room, something he seldom did at home but always did before a fight. Earlier in the day he had even ironed his clothes. “I like to take my time and really enjoy it,” I can remember him saying when I expressed confusion. “I just like to have my shit in order. I guarantee the room will be immaculate by the time I leave and head to the arena.”
I remembered that it was. It was getting that way by the time I left and it was certainly immaculate by the time Haye returned to that same room later in the evening.
Inside the venue, I remembered the tiny changing room, no bigger than a train toilet. I remembered how Adam Booth was outraged on his fighter’s behalf and searched the premises for a bigger space in which they could both prepare for the fight. I remembered the look on his face when he opened the door to a basketball court and said to a fiery Frenchman, “We’ll take this, thank you very much.” Or maybe it was Haye who said that.
I remembered sitting at ringside and seeing on a table a stone sculpture of Jean-Marc Mormeck’s head. It was solid, imposing, lifelike. I remembered feeling intimidated by an inanimate object.
I remembered how Mormeck, the real Mormeck, was a lot like a woodlouse, all balled up and hard to nail clean. I remembered Haye scuffing the champion’s gloves and forearms with punches, each of them heavy, thrown as though they would be his last. I remembered getting worried he might punch himself out and that the second half of the fight would be Mormeck’s, not his.
I remembered how easy it seemed at first: Mormeck covered up, but he didn’t punch, and this permitted Haye to outwork him without taking much in return. If it continues like this, I thought in round one, why were we so nervous?
I remembered in round four looking at Haye and thinking, Well, that’s it. He gave it a good go. It was a left hook, I think, and as it landed the canvas suddenly turned to ice. Now he couldn’t stand on it, let alone move on it, and all he could possibly do was drop to one knee and take a count. I remembered him looking at Adam Booth in the corner and nodding his head. There was concern on his face, of course there was, yet I remembered thinking that to be concerned one must be aware of what is going on – their surroundings, their predicament. I remembered thinking he was still thinking.
As time stood still, I remembered how shaky his legs were when he got back up, but also how cleverly he held Mormeck and how unfamiliar to him these defensive tactics were. I remembered him using his left hand more, Robinson-like, as though accepting the right would not bring him his usual joy against such an impenetrable target. I remembered Booth shouting “Perfect!” from the corner and telling him, “Thirty-two punches. You’re well within.” I remembered then how Booth had been counting Haye’s punches during every sparring session at their gym in Northern Cyprus. I remembered Haye was averaging 85 punches a round.
I remembered the left cross, launched from a temporary southpaw stance. I remembered the impact it had on Mormeck’s skinny legs in round seven and how the second it landed the course of the fight changed. There were other shots to come, hard to remember now, but the finisher, the right uppercut, was the punch. It was a punch that would live long in the memory of all who heard it and a punch Mormeck, its recipient, would struggle to recall in the days to follow, much less now, almost two decades on.
I remembered the long count and how it made no difference. I remembered seeing a Frenchman a few rows back stand up, catch my eye, puff out his cheeks, and applaud. I remembered how it felt like not only had Haye become world cruiserweight champion that night, but that each of us, by association, had achieved something noteworthy. I remembered feeling proud.
I remembered the surprise on the face of Haye’s girlfriend, Natasha, when she entered his hotel room and saw that it was tidy. I remembered her asking Haye if he was hurt when knocked down in round four and Haye saying, “My legs were fucked. I wasn’t that hurt, but my brain just got scrambled.” He then added: “My left leg knew where it wanted to be, but my right leg had a mind of its own.” I remembered standing there and confessing to Haye that I had doubted him and never imagined him one day beating Mormeck. To that, I could remember him laughing. I remembered him saying to me, “So you’re a believer in me now, are you?”
I remembered being in some awful Paris nightclub and nobody there having a clue why we were celebrating. I remembered, afterwards, some of us attempting to hail a cab along the Champs-Élysées and none of the drivers wanting to stop. In the wait, I remembered looking at the Arc de Triomphe and remembering when I was last there, in Paris, as a child. I remembered thinking, You should try to remember this.
***
Once the concert finished, I went back the way I came, comforted to know the path was mostly straight. For added reassurance I consulted my phone and plotted a route to the hotel, which was situated in the 10th arrondissement and about an hour away. For protection against the rain, meanwhile, I opened my umbrella and soon became envious of the long trench coats of the French, stylish even when sodden.
Head down, it was only when I had reached the midway point between the concert venue and the hotel that I remembered my original plan. It was only then that I remembered Levallois and how, to sharpen my memory of what occurred there 16 years ago, I had intended to walk from Salle Pleyel to Palais des sports Marcel-Cerdan after the concert.
Now, though, it was too late. I had travelled too far. I had allowed myself to become distracted by other things: the rain, the map, the music, and the question of whether tomorrow I visited Victor Hugo’s house or traipsed around the catacombs instead. I thought of the future, not the past, in other words. It was better that way. Healthier that way. I then pulled out my phone again, this time to plan tomorrow’s itinerary, and was reminded of the day’s date: November 10. It had been 16 years to the day. How could I have forgotten?
