2017年10月10日
putting on good shows
“Oye, compay,” they’d say. “Listen up, my friend. We’re going to start a chisme, a little whisper,that you’re a top amateur from back east. The gringos are gonna love it, man. Every gabacho in thehouse is going to bet their kids on you.”
The Gypsy Cowboy shrugged. “Fine by me.”
“Just dance around so you don’t get slaughtered till the fourth,” they’d warn him—or the third, orthe seventh, whichever round the fix had been set for. The Cowboy could hold his own againstgigantic black heavyweights by dodging and clinching up until it was time for him to hit thecanvas, but against the speedy Latino middleweights, he had to fight for his life. “Man, sometimesthey had to haul my bleeding butt out of there,” he’d say. But even after leaving school, he stuckwith it. “I just wandered the country fighting. Taking dives, winning some, losing but reallywinning others, mostly putting on good shows and learning how to fight and not get hurt.”
After a few years of scrapping along in the fight game’s underworld, the Cowboy took hiswinnings and flew to Maui. There, he turned his back on the resorts and headed east, toward thedamp, dark side of the island and the hidden shrines of Hana. He was looking for a purpose for hislife. Instead, he found Smitty, a hermit who lived in a hidden cave. Smitty led Mike to a cave ofhis own, then began guiding him to Maui’s hidden sacred sites.
“Smitty is the guy who first got me into running,” Caballo told us. Sometimes, they’d set out in themiddle of the night to run the twenty miles up the Kaupo Trail to the House of the Sun at the top of10,000-foot Mount Haleakala. They’d sit quietly as the first rays of morning sparkled on thePacific, then run back down again, fueled only by wild papayas they’d knocked from the trees.
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