The anguished heart of an Aboriginal tent boxer
We were driving a stretch of straight-arrow bitumen that pierced the Australian Outback’s alien red center.
Dennis and me.
I was behind the wheel of the battered old ute, which was encrusted with dust and mud.
Like us.
We’d been on the road for days without a shower, en route to Alice Springs, part of a caravan of vehicles headed north along the desolate Stuart Highway.
We were a tired troupe of nomadic tent boxers beginning a tour of the Northern Territory, the country’s so-called Dead Heart.
Ahead lay rural towns like Katherine and Tennant Creek, where we would erect the bigtop tent at local fairs, looking for volunteers who could throw a punch — ranch hands and cowboys brave enough to climb into the ring with our trained fighters, both for cash and bragging rights.
I was a working journalist, too old and too soft to fight.
Dennis was even older, but he had been a fierce boxer in his day, with big fists and an unleashed anger that put men to sleep on the mat.
Now he was making one last tour with the boxing family with whom he’d grown up, back to revel in old relationships, the colorful contacts he’d first made long ago on the road.
Dennis Cutmore was half-Aboriginal. His father was of Italian descent. He grew up on a indigenous mission where he learned to fight to protect himself.
He was quiet, with a lingering silence that could lead to brooding.
He was Aboriginal first, Australian second, if that.
We’d stopped for coffee and snacks at some nameless gas station. The steering wheel was on the right side and I remember looking left at Dennis as he rolled down the window and tossed a plastic wrapper into the wind.
“None of my business, mate,” I said. “But this is your country. Why treat it like that?”
Dennis was silent.
“It’s not my country anymore,” he said softly. “They took it from us a long time ago.”
I knew enough to let the statement stand.
Not just because it was true, but because Dennis let you know when he’d said his last word on a subject.
We rode on.
Now Dennis is dead, and I feel a need to write this, to explain him to myself and others.
To celebrate him.
The day I met Dennis I gave him a T-shirt.
It featured an image of Mohammed Ali, his fighting hero, like him a man of color who had raised a fist against white people, and won.
Over the next three months, I rarely saw Dennis without that shirt.
For days, we stayed at the home of Michael Karaitiana, the promoter who would lead this team of boxers into the Outback.
A few, Aboriginal men with names like Fugzi and Mauler, had fought for Michael before.
There was a back-slapping feeling of getting the band back together again.
I’d heard the stories of how Dennis came up through the tent-boxing ranks. He and his older brother were teenagers when they joined a troupe headed by Michael’s grandfather, a tough cigar-chomping promoter named Roy Bell.
They toured towns where white Australians spewed racism and ugliness against Aboriginal kids like Dennis. But Roy gave him a chance to even that score, if even for a few moments, inside the ring.
One day, I called my wife to check in from the road. Dennis and I were seeking shade in some small-town park.
After awhile I handed him the phone so she could say hello to the old fighter I’d told her so much about.
I could see him come alive, with this woman he did not know on the end of the line. His voice was sweet and soothing.
Later, he told me how his womanizing had eventually taken the place of his boxing.
But there were such bright shining moments under the big tent!
How good it felt to watch a white opponent, some stranger against whom he’d harbored no personal grudge, crumple to the mat before him, dispatched with a hard right delivered by an angry young Aboriginal with anvils for fists.
Roy Bell took care of his fighters, treated them like family, paid them on time.
Dennis respected Roy, who passed away 50 years ago.
One afternoon, in the last days before we hit the road from Michael’s home in New South Wales, we visited a local cemetery looking for Roy’s grave.
We didn’t find it right away. When he did, I could see the melancholy in Dennis’s eyes. I took a few pictures of him looking pensive, dressed in his ever-present cap and orange jacket.
Then I said, “Show ‘em your fists, Denny, like you were back fighting for Roy.”
And he did.
And in that moment I was glad that I was not a white boxer facing Dennis Cutmore in the ring, about to pay dearly for the sins of my kind.
We slept on the ground, inside a bundle of tarp to keep out the snakes.
Aussies call them swags
Dennis worked ringside, helping boxers into their gloves. sometimes playing security so kids didn’t slip in without paying.
He wasn’t much for the physical labor of erecting and tearing down the big tent, but Michael didn’t complain.
To him, Dennis was an ambassador from the heady days when his grandfather ran the most famous fighting show in the land.
To have Dennis along seemed a blessing from those gloved gods of the past.
In Tennant Creek, as Michael stood atop the lineup board, a hawker calling on passersby to come inside the tent and try their hand, he gave Dennis a special salute.
He called him out onto the dirt in front of the stage and told the Aboriginal crowd just what Dennis had accomplished as a young boxer of color.
Dennis stood stoop-shouldered, his big hands thrust into his pockets, embarrassed by the attention but loving every single minute of it.
I videotaped the moment and for weeks afterward, he'd asked me to replay it for him, while he watched and listened in rapt silence.
It was why he had come on tour, after all, to feel the bellowing voice of the boxing spruiker, or showman, to stand in the limelight, cited for this prowess and strength.
Celebrated, just one more time, for those fists.
And the damage they could wreak.
As members of the troupe’s old guard, Dennis and I spent a lot of time together. We rode in the same truck, rolled out our swags next to one another on many nights.
When the tour was over, we spent a few days in the north coast town of Darwin, reveling in the cool hum of the motel air conditioner and the softness of mattresses after so much time on the ground.
I viewed Dennis as a mentor, someone who had seen things I had never seen. But there was a distant unknowable part of him as well.
Once while unloading the trucks, I made a joke at Dennis’s expense in front of the other men, something I immediately regretted.
I saw anger flash in his eyes. When he got me alone, he hissed at me.
I don’t remember his exact words but they came like punches: Who do you think you are? You don’t know me. I have hurt the likes of you.”
I apologized, profusely. And he calmed down.
Later, inside some shared motel room, I asked him a personal question.
Suddenly, he snapped.
For a moment, I saw that ferocity he usually reserved for the ring.
Moments later, he apologized.
He reverted to that humble soft-spoken man of color who had stared down racism and evened the score.
He was the fighter who had seen things I had never seen.
After that summer of 2017, Dennis and I stayed in touch.
We became Facebook friends. I sent him more Mohammed Ali T-shirts.
He remained in the Aboriginal mission where’d he’d grown up. People knew him there, recognized what he’d accomplished in the fight arena.
He drank a lot. I could always tell when he’d had a few.
After a few years, he dropped off social media. I heard from others that he had moved south to Sydney to live with his daughter.
The word of his death came just the other morning. What did he die of? Was it alcoholism? Stroke? His kidneys? A broken heart?
There weren't many details, just the fact that Dennis was gone.
And that’s the way he probably preferred it, this private, anguished man who always gave as good as he got.
For those few sweet moments, he towered over racism.
Knocked it out.
Put it to sleep right there on the mat.
