Among the Oxford University boxers that fought a Channel Islands selection in Jersey was a 6ft tall, rangy welterweight from Texas who traipsed just about everywhere with an acoustic guitar under his oxter.
Squaring off against a more polished opponent who had gone deep at the previous year’s Empire Games, the American shipped heavy punishment. On the canvas more than once, he bounced back up and gamely refused to take a backward step. Until the referee finally stepped in during the third stanza to end his suffering.
“Sorry guys,” said a beat-up Kris Kristofferson, upon reaching his colleagues in the dressing-rooms. “I guess I just ran out of gas.”
As a nine-year-old, even before he started collecting Hank Williams’ 78s, he subscribed to The Ring magazine, saving and savouring every issue as his father’s work, a US Air Force major-general turned oil company executive, took the family from Texas to California and Saudi Arabia.
READ MORE
Throughout his peripatetic childhood, he could proudly recite the weight, record, and placement in the top 10 of every ranked boxer, something he boasted about to Muhammad Ali when the pair became close friends in the mid-1970s.
As a college student he fought in the Golden Gloves, a lack of genuine fistic talent overridden by immutable self-confidence, the same brio that once had him knocking on the door of the Oxford rugby team.
“Those British, they peel off layers of bullshit instantly,” said Kristofferson. “I’d organised a rugby team at Pomona College but at Oxford they wouldn’t even let me try out for the team. They maintained an American couldn’t know shit from rugby . . . They all called me Yank so I just kept on talking more like I always did. I got on okay with some of the English athletes, it was the sherry party guys who drove me bananas, they truly gave me to understand I had shit on my boots.”
A left end on the college gridiron team, it was his prowess as a rugby outhalf that first brought him to national attention, meriting a brief feature in Sports Illustrated magazine in 1958.
The clean-shaven, crew cut young man whose photo accompanied that piece scarcely resembled the grizzled, hirsute, grey beard whose death last week very briefly brought together in mourning this warring nation. One more measure of the enduring impact of the 88-year-old and his art on America’s counterculture and conscience.
In his song The Pilgrim, Chapter 33, he wrote about a man who was “a walking contradiction partly truth and partly fiction, taking every wrong direction on his lonely way back home”. As accurate a summation of his own sprawling biography as any.
A rich kid, he grew up to quest for social justice around the world. One minute, landing a chopper on Johnny Cash’s front lawn to badger him to listen to a new composition, the next, hanging with Daniel Ortega and the nine-man National Directorate in Sandinista-led Nicaragua.
His most eclectic of resumes included stints as studio janitor during Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde sessions in Nashville, US Army Ranger, paratrooper, firefighter on the Alaskan railroad, oil rig helicopter pilot, and co-commentator for Ali v Larry Holmes in 1980.
An American life so overstuffed with experiment, accomplishment and anthems that his sporting pedigree justifiably only merited a footnote in his obituaries. Yet games coursed through him and were such a part of his unique character he was still showing off the relics of baseball and football scars in his eighties.
In a matter of months in 1959, Kristofferson boxed for Oxford in the colours clash with Cambridge, recorded five of his own folky numbers in London under the moniker Kris Carson, and submitted his first novel to Houghton Mifflin. The songs never became hits, musical stardom eluded him for another decade, and the book wasn’t published either.
But he managed all this while avidly mainlining William Blake, reading Beowulf in the original as a Rhodes scholar, and announcing his intention to sample cricket. That laid-back troubadour exterior always concealed a determination to, somehow, some way, happen upon a higher calling.
“Well, Kris really isn’t very tall,” said Jesse Cone, his college gridiron coach. “And he isn’t really very strong. And really, he’s not very fast. Kris is a football player by the will of Kris Kristofferson, not by the will of God.”
At one point, the Oxford boxers were booked to fight in France. When that trip fell through, he returned to California to spend Christmas with his parents, looked up his old high school girlfriend and got married.
Enrolling in the army, he eavesdropped Ali’s first victory over Sonny Liston on a crackling car radio signal in a snow-covered Volkswagen on a German military base. Just over a decade later, he met the three-time heavyweight champion, and they co-starred in NBC’s miniseries Freedom Road. That begat a very special friendship, best exemplified by the three-page letter he penned Ali on hotel notepaper after working together.
“I had to say what a special human being you’ve turned out to be and you need to hear that as much as you need to hear what a great fighter you are,” wrote Kristofferson.
“You’re one of the most generous and unaffected human beings walking this planet – how you’ve done it under the spotlight, love/hate attention that’s focused on you is really a miracle and shows what a special dude you are. You’re the last hero we’ve got man . . .”
Game recognises game.
