On Boxing

by Joyce Carol Oates

  The “third man in the ring,” usually anonymous so far as the crowd is concerned, appears to many observers no more than an observer himself, even an intruder; a ghostly presence as fluid in motion and quick-footed as the boxers themselves (indeed, he is frequently an ex-boxer). But so central to the drama of boxing is the referee that the spectacle of two men fighting each other unsupervised in an elevated ring would seem hellish, if not obscene—life rather than art. The referee makes boxing possible.

  The referee is our intermediary in the fight. He is our moral conscience extracted from us as spectators so that, for the duration of the fight, “conscience” need not be a factor in our experience; nor need it be a factor in the boxers’ behavior. (Asked if boxers are ever sorry for having hurt their opponents, Carmen Basilio replied: “Sorry? Are you kidding? Boxers are never sorry.”) Which is not to say that boxers are always and forever without conscience: all boxers are different, and behave differently at different times. But there are occasions when a boxer who is trapped in the ropes and unable to fall to the canvas while being struck repeatedly is in danger of being killed unless the referee intervenes—the attacking boxer has been trained not to stop his attack while his opponent is still technically standing. In the rapidly escalating intensity of the fight only the referee remains neutral and objective.

  Though the referee’s role is highly demanding and it has been estimated that there are perhaps no more than a dozen really skilled referees in the world, it seems necessary in the drama of the fight that the referee himself possesses no dramatic identity: referees’ names are rarely remembered after a fight except by seasoned boxing fans. Yet, paradoxically, the referee’s participation is crucial. He cannot control what happens in the ring but he can control to a degree that it happens—he is responsible for the fight if not for the individual fighters’ performances. In a match in which boxing skills and not merely fighting are predominant the referee’s role can be merely functional, but in a fiercely contested match it is of incalculable importance. The referee holds the power of life and death at certain times since his decision to terminate a fight, or to allow it to continue, can determine a boxer’s fate. (One should know that a well-aimed punch with a heavyweight’s full weight behind it can have the equivalent force of ten thousand pounds—a blow that must be absorbed by the brain in its jelly sac.) In the infamous Benny Paret-Emile Griffith fight of March 1962 the referee Ruby Goldstein was said to have stood paralyzed as Griffith trapped Paret in the ropes, striking him as many as eighteen times in the head. (Paret died ten days later.) Boxers are trained not to quit. If knocked down, they try to get up to continue the fight, even if they can hardly defend themselves. The primary rule of the ring—to defend oneself at all times—is both a parody and a distillation of life.

  In the past—well into the 1950s—it was not customary for a referee to interfere with a fight, however brutal and one-sided. A boxer who kept struggling to his feet after having been knocked down, or, like the intransigent Jake LaMotta in his sixth and final fight with Sugar Ray Robinson in 1951, refused to fall to the canvas though he could no longer defend himself and had become a human punching bag, was simply left to his fate. The will of the crowd—and overwhelmingly it is the will of the crowd—that one man defeat the other totally and irrevocably, was honored. Hence the bloody “great” fights of boxing’s history—Dempsey’s triumph over Willard, for instance—inconceivable today.

  It should be understood that “boxing” and “fighting,” though always combined in the greatest of boxers, can be entirely different and even unrelated activities. Amateur boxers are trained to win their matches on points; professionals usually try for knockouts. (Not that professionals are more violent than amateurs but why trust judges?—and the knockout is dramatically spectacular.) If boxing is frequently, in the lighter weights especially, a highly complex and refined skill, belonging solely to civilization, fighting belongs to something predating civilization, the instinct not merely to defend oneself—for how has the masculine ego ever been assuaged by so minimal a response to threat?—but to attack another and to force him into absolute submission. This accounts for the electrifying effect upon a typical fight crowd when fighting suddenly emerges out of boxing—when, for instance, a boxer’s face begins to bleed and the fight seems to enter a new and more dangerous phase. The flash of red is the visible sign of the fight’s authenticity in the eyes of many spectators and boxers are justified in being proud, as many are, of their facial scars.

  If the “violence” of boxing seems at times to flow from the crowd, to be a heightened expression of the crowd’s delirium—rarely transmitted by television, by the way—the many restraints and subtleties of boxing are possible because of the “third man in the ring,” a counter of sorts to the inchoate wash of emotion beyond the ropes and the ring apron: our conscience, as I’ve indicated, extracted from us, and granted an absolute authority.

  …Whether [this] makes me a humanist or a voyeur, I’m not sure.

  —JOHN SCHULIAN,

  sportswriter

  Writers have long been attracted to boxing, from the early days of the English Prize Ring to the present time. Its most immediate appeal is that of the spectacle, in itself wordless, lacking a language, that requires others to define it, celebrate it, complete it. Like all extreme but perishable human actions boxing excites not only the writer’s imagination, but also his instinct to bear witness. Before film and tape, this instinct must have been particularly acute. (Consider a sport that often took place illegally, many of its most famous fights fought on barges, on islands, in outlaw territory between states, involving the risk of arrest for both performers and observers: what passion!) And boxers have frequently displayed themselves, inside the ring and out, as characters in the literary sense of the word. Extravagant fictions without a structure to contain them.

  In the days of the Prize Ring, accounts of fights were often in verse, accompanied by cartoon-like drawings, printed on broadsides, and sold by itinerant salesmen. From approximately 1700 onward—according to boxing historian Pierce Egan—most English newspapers, including the fashionable The Times, carried detailed accounts of fights; and in 1818 Egan brought out the first edition of his famous Boxiana: Sketches of Ancient and Modern Pugilism, which covered the Prize Ring from its earliest days to Egan’s own when, though wildly popular, Prize Fighting was officially illegal and announcements of impending matches were by way of rumor. (Any number of editions of Boxiana have been printed, the most recent being in the 1970s.) Egan’s zest for his outlaw subject is communicated in prose of a particularly vigorous kind—colorful, direct, blunt, “masculine,” yet as subtly and as wittily nuanced as that of his eighteenth-century predecessors Defoe, Swift, Pope, Fielding, Churchill. It is Egan who called fighting “the Sweet Science of Bruising” and it is Egan whom A. J. Liebling most frequently cites and acknowledges as his master in The Sweet Science, a boxiana of modern times much admired by boxing enthusiasts.

  (I sense myself uneasily alone in disliking much of Liebling, for his relentlessly jokey, condescending, and occasionally racist attitude toward his subject. Perhaps because it was originally published in The New Yorker in the early 1950s The Sweet Science: Boxing and Boxiana—a Ringside View is a peculiarly self-conscious assemblage of pieces, arch, broad in its humor, rather like situation comedy in which boxers are “characters” depicted for our amusement. Liebling is uncertain even about such champions as Louis, Marciano, and Robinson—should one revere, or mock? And he is pitiless when writing about “Hurricane” Jackson, a black boxer cruelly called an animal, an “it,” because of his poor boxing skills and what Liebling considers his mental inferiority. The problem for Liebling and for The New Yorker must have been how to sell a blood sport like boxing to a genteel, affluent readership to whom the idea of men fighting for their lives would have been deeply offensive; how to suggest boxing’s drama while skirting boxing’s tragedy. It is a problem that, for all his verbal cleverness, Liebling neve
r entirely solves.)

  A good deal has been made of Ernest Hemingway’s attraction to boxing yet Hemingway never wrote about boxing with the sympathy or perception with which he wrote about bullfighting; “Fifty Grand” and “The Battler” are not among Hemingway’s best short stories, and his portrait of the “Princeton middleweight” Robert Cohn in The Sun Also Rises is a startlingly crude piece of Jew-baiting, in which Cohn’s boxing skills are irrelevant. (When, provoked beyond endurance, Cohn knocks down Jake Barnes and his drunken friend, the scene passes by so swiftly it makes virtually no impression on the reader.)

  Far more canny and knowledgeable is Norman Mailer, whose essays on Cassius Clay/Muhammad Ali and his coevals, and on the “aesthetics of the arena” generally, are as good as anything ever written on the subject. Mailer’s strength lies in his recognition that the boxers are other—though he does not say so, even in the long extravagant meditation of The Fight (its title in homage to Hazlitt’s great essay), it seems clear to this reader at least that Mailer cannot establish a connection between himself and the boxers: he tries heroically but he cannot understand them and so he is forever excluded from what, unthinkingly, they represent: an ideal (because unthinking, unforced) masculinity, beyond all question. It is this recognition of his exclusion—an exclusion very nearly as complete as, say, the exclusion of a woman from boxing’s codified world—that allows for the force of Mailer’s vision. And since the great champions of our time have been black, Mailer’s preoccupation with masculinity is a preoccupation with blackness as well. Hence these characteristic flights of metaphysical fancy that strike the ear with the poignancy of a lovesick lament:

  If [the heavyweights] become champions they begin to have inner lives like Hemingway or Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy or Faulkner, Joyce or Melville or Conrad or Lawrence or Proust…Dempsey was alone and Tunney could never explain himself and Sharkey could never believe himself nor Schmeling nor Braddock, and Carnera was sad and Baer an indecipherable clown; great heavyweights like Louis had the loneliness of the ages in their silence, and men like Marciano were mystified by a power which seemed to have been granted them. With the advent, however, of the great modern Black heavyweights, Patterson, Liston, then Clay and Frazier, perhaps the loneliness gave way to what it had been protecting itself against—a surrealistic situation unstable beyond belief. Being a Black heavyweight champion in the second half of the twentieth century (with Black revolutions opening all over the world) was now not unlike being Jack Johnson, Malcolm X and Frank Costello all in one…

  (EXISTENTIAL ERRANDS, “King of the Hill”)

  It cannot be a coincidence that everyone’s favorite boxing novel, Leonard Gardner’s Fat City, is a novel less about boxing than about the strategies of self-deception; a handbook of sorts in failure, in which boxing functions as the natural activity of men totally unequipped to comprehend life. The boxers of Gardner’s Stockton, California—that notorious fight town—seem to exist in a world claustrophobic as a training gym, with no more awareness of the great boxers of their time (would not Cassius Clay himself have been their contemporary?) than of politics and “society” in general. Fat City is the underside of the American dream, in which men with some minimal skill in a dangerous sport are hired to fight one another for pitifully small purses: it is a measure of the novel’s irony that victory, for such stakes, is hardly to be distinguished from failure. Leonard Gardner seems to have written no other fiction, but his several articles on boxing—published in such magazines as Sports Illustrated and Esquire—display a remarkable gift for realizing, as if from the inside, the psychology of the man born to fight, the man who knows nothing but fighting, no matter the suicidal nature of his calling.

  W. C. Heinz and Ted Hoagland have written highly regarded novels about boxing, The Professional and The Circle Home respectively, though Hoagland’s novel is something of an anomaly: there are no fights in it, only training scenes, rendered with a mesmerizing kinetic precision. Budd Schulberg, Irwin Shaw, Nelson Algren, Ring Lardner, James Farrell, John O’Hara, Jack London—all have written stories about boxers, of varying worth and seriousness.

  What might be called the romance of boxing—and even the sordid, filmed, is romance—underlies a number of Hollywood movies of similarly uneven worth, the most extraordinary being Martin Scorsese’s award-winning Raging Bull, in which Robert De Niro almost literally transforms himself into Jake LaMotta. Other notable films in this genre are Fat City, Champion, Somebody Up There Likes Me (based on the Rocky Graziano autobiography), The Harder They Fall, The Set-Up, The Champ, Body and Soul, Requiem for a Heavyweight, and The Great White Hope—the last two based on successful plays. And then there are the “Rocky” movies, scarcely about boxing as we know it (Rocky and his heavyweight opponents are, for one thing, ludicrously encumbered with bodybuilders’ physiques, not boxers’) but effective as pop-iconographic success stories starring Sylvester Stallone as Rocky, “The Italian Stallion,” the sweet tough guy, the perpetual underdog who cannot lose even against overwhelming odds. Rocky is a comic book boxer, his matches are comic book matches, like the exploits of his look-alike Rambo, who embodies even more powerfully than Rocky America’s fascination with the (male) isolato whose orientation to the world is purely physical. Yet it is significant, certainly, that Stallone made Rocky a boxer, in homage to heavyweight champion Rocky Marciano, whose ring style he imitates—to a degree.

  Boxing has often stimulated first-rate sportswriting, that most taxing of genres. Among contemporary sportswriters John Schulian (of the Philadelphia Daily News) and Hugh McIlvanney (of the English The Observer) are outstanding for the consistently high quality of their prose and for what might be called their rigorously analytical approach to their subject: not merely what, and how, but in fact why—why does boxing exist, why are men (and some women) fascinated by it, what does it tell us about the human predicament? Schulian’s Writers’ Fighters and McIlvanney’s McIlvanney on Boxing bring together columns published over a period of time but are notable for the unity of their respective visions. Neither writer takes his subject for granted, nor does he draw back from examining the ambivalent relationship between the man who writes about boxing and boxing itself, “the sweet science of bruising.” Other sports draw forth other responses, but boxing is, here as elsewhere, a special case. In no other sport is the connection between performer and observer so intimate, so frequently painful, so unresolved.

  That no other sport can elicit such theoretical anxiety lies at the heart of boxing’s fascination for the writer. It is the thing in itself but it is also its meaning to the individual, shifting and problematic as a blurred image in a mirror. The writer contemplates his opposite in the boxer, who is all public display, all risk and, ideally, improvisation: he will know his limit in a way that the writer, like all artists, never quite knows his limit—for we who write live in a kaleidoscopic world of ever-shifting assessments and judgments, unable to determine whether it is revelation or supreme self-delusion that fuels our most crucial efforts. Setting aside for a moment the problem of incompetent or biased judges, of the kind that gave Michael Spinks a victory over Larry Holmes in Spinks’s title defense of April 1986, or had Ray Mancini outpointing Livingstone Bramble in the first of their two matches, the boxer’s world is not an ambiguous one: he quickly comes to know his worth in a context of other boxers. Indeed, it is impossible not to know it. “Promising” careers are ended in a matter of seconds; “comebacks” are revealed as mere mistakes; a young and unranked contender (like “Lightning” Lonnie Smith in his title match against junior welterweight champion Billy Costello) leaps immediately to the top. There can be no ambiguity about Marvin Hagler’s defeat of John Mugabi, or Thomas Hearns’s defeat of James Shuler, or the unexpected loss of his bantamweight title by Richie Sandoval to Gaby Canizales—the near loss, it seemed to some observers, of Sandoval’s very life. This sense of an ending, a limit, a final and incontestable judgment—boxing in its greatest moments suggests the bloody fifth acts of cla
ssic tragedies, in which that mysterious element we call “plot” achieves closure.

  For some writers the fascination has to do, as I’ve suggested earlier, with boxing’s dazzlingly explicit display of masochism—“masochism” in its loosest, most suggestive, one might say poetic sense. For, contrary to stereotyped notions, boxing is primarily about being, and not giving, hurt. (Which the most distinguished boxing movies—Raging Bull, Fat City, Champion—suggest most graphically.) To move through pain to triumph—or the semblance of triumph—is the writer’s, as it is the boxer’s, hope. The moment of visceral horror in a typical fight, at least as I experience it, is that moment when one boxer loses control, cannot maintain his defense, begins to waver, falter, fall back, rock with his opponent’s punches which he can no longer absorb; the moment in which the fight is turned around, and which an entire career, an entire life, may end. It is not an isolated moment but the moment—mystical, universal. The defeat of one man is the triumph of the other: but we are apt to read this “triumph” as merely temporary and provisional. Only the defeat is permanent.

  When I used to dream about boxing, or about abstract, inconclusive matches between dream-opponents whose faces I could not see, I thought of boxing as a knot of sorts, tightly, cruelly knotted, there to be untied. You can’t, but you must, untie it. You must—but you can’t. If you untie one knot you will be confronted with another and beyond that another, and another: rounds, matches, career, “life.” The difference for the boxer is that loss, humiliation, shame are only part of the risk—physical injury, even death, awaits as well. One is punished for one’s failure as Kafka imagined one might be punished for one’s sins, the sentence etched into flesh, killing even as it pronounces judgment.