In Praise of David Duchovny
Asking the actor-author for forgiveness on the eve of 9/11
The 24th anniversary of 9/11 approaches, and we all remember when we first heard the news of that tragedy.
In my case, I was at home, sleeping, when I got a call from my boxing trainer, Dave Paul, a dear friend, who told me what had happened.
Later that day, I reported to work at the old L.A. Weekly office in Hollywood, where I was working the late shift, helping to put the paper to bed, as I did for nearly nine years.
A colleague, who was from New York, mentioned that the attack by Al Qaeda hideously perverted the lessons of jujitsu or other martial arts by having a weak entity, a terrorist group, undermine our country, a superpower, by using our strength, in the form of U.S. airlines, against us.
The evil of Bin Laden, a small man, did subvert American power on that day when we lost roughly 3,000 people in the World Trade Center’s twin towers.
Nearly 24 years later, much has changed.
We can thank God that President Obama ordered the commando mission that took out Bin Laden.
Under President Obama, as under President Biden, our country made progress in so many ways, in terms of affordable health care expansion, a strengthening of our alliances overseas, as we defeated Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups, a dedication to making the planet a more humane and sustainable one, and perhaps, more than anything else, a reaffirmation that our country at its best gives all of us a chance to succeed if we truly “work hard and play by the rules,” a dictum expressed by many political leaders.
As so many came together in the years after 9/11 and later under President Obama, we showed, as we often have, that our nation can indeed be a beacon of light and truth for other nations in the world, a “shining city on a hill,” in the words of President Reagan.
Sadly, much of the progress that we have made as a nation is being reversed not by Bin Laden but by our own country’s chief executive, who, as I have contended for roughly a decade, is in bed with Putin, our enemy, a dictator who is even more evil than Bin Laden.
Our country’s foundations are being ripped away by Trump at the behest of Putin, who is essentially the devil.
The World Trade Center came crashing down 24 years ago on 9/11. And now Trump, doing the work of Putin, threatens to bring down our entire country and the world order.
But Trump will fail.
It is he and Putin, who will go down.
I wrote years ago in the HuffPost a piece titled “Trumpty Dumpty Will Have His Great Fall.”
He will, and it may very well last forever.
The fall of the House of Trump, egged on by Putin, will plunge them both to the bottom of the pit, from which they are unlikely to emerge.
In theory, no one is beyond redemption.
But Trump, as former Speaker Nancy Pelosi once said, is “a hard sell.”
We all get the thorn of Satan in us from time to time.
That may be our lot since Adam and Eve partook of the forbidden fruit.
Of course, we can all repent. We can all atone. And we can all reconfigure our lives.
We can do it, but it takes time, decades, lifetimes even to redeem ourselves.
With this in mind, I will return to 9/11 and to my former L.A. Weekly colleague’s reference to the martial arts.
I have never studied the martial arts.
I am, however, a longtime fan of pugilism.
It is important to show humility in life and to apologize and to ask for forgiveness when we have harmed others.
Sometimes, we learn our best lessons on the athletic field or in the sports arena as often as we learn such lessons in the classroom or the workplace.
I joined a boxing gym in the fall of 2000, a year or so before 9/11, back before the Internet was as prevalent as it is today, when social media played a minor role in our media landscape, and when few had heard of A.I., except in Steven Spielberg’s movie by that very name, a film that came out in 2001, or in science fiction.
People used to read more often a quarter-century ago.
So many of us still enjoyed the ritual of reading the local paper of record as well as the local, alternative paper, like the L.A. Weekly.
Reading takes character. So does growth as a human being.
And in some respects the two are linked because we are not likely to accumulate wisdom and humility if we don’t struggle, if we don’t persist, and if we don’t commit to something greater than ourselves.
Reading can be a joy, but it does not come easily for most of us. It is not as hard-wired into us, homo sapiens, as are many other activities, such as speaking or observing or walking.
Reading, particularly reading literature or high-quality publications, is a difficult pleasure, but it is well worth it. And it is necessary if we are to realize our potential as decent human beings, who care for our country and the world, who comfort the afflicted, who speak truth to power and who bring light to the truth.
This, of course, is what the best journalists do.
In a different way, it is my belief that those who excel at sports or anything else in life can experience a similar growth in character, in humanity, in wisdom.
Almost 24 years after 9/11, we have a chief executive, who is “functionally illiterate,” in the words of Gen. James Mattis, one of Trump’s former defense secretaries.
Trump is being played by Putin and other tyrants.
It is also true that Trump is not alone among those who do not read literature or the newspaper of record.
We have a literacy crisis in our country, as Nikki Haley pointed out during the 2024 Republican primary.
This literacy crisis, which is afflicting the world, is hurting everyone, children, so to speak, of all ages.
Not enough people have wisdom any longer; not enough people think critically.
This brings me back to my time at the boxing gym a quarter century ago.
Every once in a while we encounter someone who is a Renaissance Man, someone as gifted in the arts as he or she is in sports, someone who is uniquely accomplished, someone whose versatility spans many fields, including literature.
When interviewed a few years ago by Michael Silverblatt, then-host of KCRW’s “Bookworm,” David Duchovny cited Harold Bloom, the literary critic, for his influence when Duchovny wrote Truly Like Lightning, a novel about Joseph Smith, who is considered the founder of the Mormon religion.
Bloom, who believed to an extent that the Western canon revolves around an agon between writers, taught Duchovny when the X-Files star was a graduate student at Yale.
As it turns out, Bloom taught me when I was a senior at Yale, around the same time that Duchovny was working on his Masters degree.
As it also turns out, I met Duchovny some years ago at the boxing gym in Los Angeles.
The actor-author is a fan of the sweet science and is a very good athlete. He reportedly played basketball and baseball at Princeton and is said to have quipped that a dream of his as a kid was to play for the New York Knicks.
I never played basketball or baseball with Duchovny. But I did work out with him in the boxing ring many years ago. We were sparring partners at times.
And while boxing has sometimes been known as a gentlemen’s sport, it is inherently a fistic battle or agon of sorts between fighters.
I believe in God, as did Harold Bloom, a prophet, who had a voice at once fierce and mellifluous, which one could hear in the classroom and everywhere he spoke, including on Michael Silverblatt’s show some years ago when Bloom finished an interview by cantillating or reciting a passage from the Hebrew Bible.
Those of us, like Duchovny and I, who were Bloom’s students, were in awe of him and felt grateful to be in his presence.
I also feel grateful that I got to meet David Duchovny more than two decades ago.
He was a gentleman in the ring with me. I was a relative newcomer to the sport, unlike Duchovny and some of the others at the gym.
I will always remember our workouts and conversations, talking about the Yale cabaret and sports.
I will always remember how nice Duchovny and Michael Watkins, his X-Files director, and so many others were to me.
And I will always remember Duchovny’s modesty.
Years ago, I was not only new to boxing; I was also new to deeper aspects of life.
It was not that I lacked character.
I just did not always evidence empathy.
And there are times that I “mistook kindness for weakness,” as Bobby Dylan would say.
I once wrote a snarky piece about a boxing match between David Duchovny and me, a fight that took place not long after Labor Day in 2001.
It occurred in fact a few days after 9/11.
As I mentioned earlier, I can recall getting a call that very day from Dave Paul, our trainer, who told us that the gym was closed and that the match might not take place. George W. Bush, our president, was in hiding. And no one knew what might transpire.
Fortunately, President Bush was in a safe location. He and others would later lead us back from the tragedy.
As for my boxing match, at the 11th hour, I learned that the fight would occur and that David Duchovny would be my opponent.
The details of the contest may not mean too much now.
We entered to our fight songs, his “Dangerous,” mine “Street Fighting Man,” by the Stones.
But just before we began our match, I gave a short speech, in which I told everyone at the gym that it had been a “searing week” and that two of my dearest friends had lost buddies in the World Trade Center.
Dave Paul then raised the American flag in the ring, and we dedicated all the matches that day to the victims of 9/11.
I had no idea what to expect from the bout. David Duchovny was a much more experienced fighter than I and a better athlete.
I just knew that I wanted to have fun.
Once we got into the ring, I could see that David was wearing a contraption that covered his face, which was no doubt insured by Hollywood.
A handsome man, David stood several inches taller than I, and he was quick in the ring. I can still picture his first punch, a left jab, coming in, as if in slow motion.
I was shocked that he had hit me.
Of course, David had done what you are supposed to do, hit your foe.
Still, I was a bit ticked off.
Like Brett Favre, perhaps I had to be hit in order to know that I was in a match.
After David hit me, I hit him back, and so we proceeded through five rounds.
As I have described before, there was a lot of clinching, perhaps another surprise in a boxing match.
And we seemed to be about the same strength, as we shoved each other around the ring.
Although David did throw the first punch, I was probably the aggressor after that, stalking him much of the time across the canvas.
It was a good bout, and for all I knew he had won.
When the judges made their decision, it turned out that they saw the match in my favor.
That was another surprise to me.
What was even more of a surprise to David and others was that I then wrote about the fight in an article years ago.
I did not set out to do so, but I did so nonetheless.
This was wrong, completely wrong of me. I made a very bad decision, one that lacked wisdom and kindness.
It is true that an article of mine on my sparring session with former lightweight boxing champ Ray Mancini, an article that was set to be published before my fight with David Duchovny, had been withdrawn for reasons that are no longer important.
It is also true that an editor of mine later heard about my boxing match with David Duchovny, and she asked me to write a piece on the fight.
I still should not have done so.
Writing the article was a violation of the code of the gym.
Given that I did write the piece, I should not have been other than respectful to David.
I did apologize to David a few weeks after the article came out. I am not sure if he remembers that, but at that time I did not convey to David how deeply sorry I am.
I ask him now for forgiveness.
You are a gentleman and a scholar, David, a true Renaissance Man.
And I have nothing but respect for you.
All these years later, we are living in a country, where our chief executive, a monstrous demagogue and wannabe dictator, refuses to apologize to anyone. He refuses to take responsibility for his actions. And he blames others for his evil.
Trump is an atrocious role model at so many levels.
He could have improved himself over the years, but he has refused.
He brags that he doesn’t read, because, as he said in December 2016, when asked why he didn’t read his intelligence briefings, “I am like a smart person.”
If Trump actually did read quality news publications and books, he might actually have some character.
He might actually reconfigure his life.
And he might actually apologize to the world for what he has done.
Someday, he will have to face God.
It is not likely to end well for Trump.
Not one of us is perfect.
We are all sinners, and that includes me.
But we can all atone and repent and become better people.
We can apologize and ask for forgiveness, something that I have done over the years and that I am doing now.
As the Bible says, “The truth shall set you free.”
As for David Duchovny, he is a very good man, a mensch of light and truth.
I might echo Harold Bloom, a scholar of Hebrew and English literature, in saying to David, Col ha-kavod!
All the respect, David, all the respect!