On Boxing

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Incongruity, like vulgarity, is not a concept in Las Vegas. This fantasyland for adults, with its winking neon skyline, its twenty-four-hour clockless casinos, its slots, craps, Keno, roulette, baccarat, blackjack et al., created by fiat when the Nevada legislature passed a law legalizing gambling in 1931, exists as a counterworld to our own. There is no day here—the enormous casinos are pure interiority, like the inside of a skull. Gambling, as François Mauriac once said, is continuous suicide: if suicide, yet continuous. There is no past, no significant future, only an eternal and always optimistic present tense. Vegas is our exemplary American city, a congeries of hotels in the desert, shrines of chance in which, presumably, we are all equal as we are not equal before the law, or God, or one another. One sees in the casinos, especially at the slot machines, those acres and acres of slot machines, men and women of all ages, races, types, degrees of probable or improbable intelligence, as hopefully attentive to their machines as writers and academicians are to their word processors. If one keeps on, faithfully, obsessively, one will surely hit The Jackpot. (You know it’s The Jackpot when your machine lights up, a goofy melody ensues, and a flood of coins like a lascivious Greek god comes tumbling into your lap.) The reedy dialects of irony—the habitual tone of the cultural critic in twentieth-century America—are as foreign here as snow, or naturally green grass.

  So it is hardly incongruous that boxing matches are held in the Las Vegas Hilton and Caesar’s Palace, VIP tickets at $1,000 or more (and the cheapest tickets, at $75, so remote from the ring that attendance at a fight is merely nominal, or symbolic); it is not incongruous that this most physical of sports, like the flipping of cards or the throw of dice, is more brilliantly realized as a gambling opportunity. In the elaborately equipped sports rooms of the big casinos, where television screens monitor various sporting events, sans sound, and betting statistics are constantly being posted, like stock market reports, one can bet on virtually any sport provided it is “professional” and not “amateur.” The favorites are naturally baseball, football, basketball, boxing, and, of course, horseracing, the sport that seems to have been invented purely for gambling purposes. In these semidarkened rooms gamblers sit entranced, or comatose, drinks in hand, staring up at the television monitors and the hundreds, or is it thousands, of postings. Red numerals against a black background. A dozen or more television screens in an electronic collage. The upcoming “fight of the century”—Marvelous Marvin Hagler/Sugar Ray Leonard for Hagler’s undisputed middleweight title, 6 April 1987 at Caesar’s Palace—is the casinos’ dream: as of 7 March odds are posted -3.25 Hagler, +2.25 Leonard, with these propositions: (1) the fight does not go twelve rounds; (2) Hagler by KO; (3) Hagler by decision; (4) Leonard by KO; (5) Leonard by decision. The Mike Tyson /“Bonecrusher” Smith odds are Tyson -7.00, Smith + 5.00, which means that you would make a good deal of money betting on Smith, if Smith would only win. Since Tyson’s victory is a foregone conclusion the bookmakers offer only one proposition: that the fight does, or does not, go four rounds. (Which accounts for the outburst of ec static cheering, the only cheering of the fight, when the bell rings sounding the end of round four and Smith, bleeding down the left side of his face, freshly admonished by Mills Lane for holding and refusing to break, nonetheless walks to his corner.)

  While in the antebellum American South white slaveowners frequently pitted their Negro slaves against each other in fights of spectacular savagery, and made bets on the results, in Las Vegas the descendants of these slaves, and their black kinsmen from the West Indies, Africa, and elsewhere, freely fight one another for purses of gratifying generosity: the highest paid athletes in the world are American boxers, and the highest paying fights are always in Vegas. Marvin Hagler, for instance, earned a minimum of $7.5 million for his April 1985 title defense against Thomas Hearns, who earned $7 million; in April 1987 he is guaranteed a minimum of $11 million against Leonard’s $10 million in a fight that boxing promoters anticipate will make more money than any boxing match in history. (“I’m sure there will be $100,000 bets on both fighters,” says a casino proprietor, “and we’ll be right here to take them.”) Mike Tyson will earn a minimum of $1.5 million for his fight with Smith (to Smith’s $1 million) and if his spectacular career continues as everyone predicts, he will soon be earning as much as Hagler and Leonard, if not more. Though Tyson lacks Muhammad Ali’s inspired narcissism, he is not handicapped by Ali’s brash black politics and Ali’s penchant for antagonizing whites: for all his reserve, his odd, even eerie combination of shyness and aggression, his is a wonderfully marketable image. (See the iconic “Mike Tyson” of billboard and newspaper ads, a metallic man, no twenty-year-old but a robot of planes, angles, inhuman composure: “Iron Mike” Tyson.)

  Yet how subdued the real Tyson appeared, following the inglorious fight, and the noisy press conference in a candy-striped tent in a corner of the Hilton’s parking lot: one caught glimpses of him that night at the jammed victory party on the thirtieth floor of the hotel, being interviewed, photographed, televised, and, later, being led through the hotel’s crowded lobby, surrounded by publicity people, still being televised, wearing his preposterously ornate WBC champion’s belt around his waist and his newly acquired WBA belt slung over his shoulder, his expression vague, dim, hooded, very possibly embarrassed (“It was a long, boring fight—twelve rounds”), like one of those captive demigods or doomed kings recorded in Frazer’s Golden Bough.

  What is “taboo” except that aspect of us that lies undefined, and inaccessible to consciousness: the core of impersonality within the carefully nurtured and jealously prized “personality” with which we are identified, by ourselves and others. In his speculative essay Totem and Taboo Freud meditated upon the ambivalent nature of taboo: its association with the sacred and consecrated, and with the dangerous, uncanny, forbidden, and unclean. All that one can say with certitude about taboo is that it stands in perennial opposition to the ordinary—to the quotidian. Taboo has to do with the numinous, with the ineffable, with utter indefinable mystery: with something not us. Or so we tell ourselves.

  To the boxing aficionado the sport’s powerful appeal is rarely exponible. It seems to be rooted in its paradoxical nature—the savagery that so clearly underlies, yet is contained by, its myriad rules, regulations, traditions, and superstitions. It seems to make the quotidian that which is uncanny, dangerous, forbidden, and unclean: it ritualizes violence, primarily male violence, to the degree to which violence becomes an aesthetic principle. In this, men’s bodies (or, rather, their highly trained employment of their bodies) are instruments and not mere flesh like our own. That a man as a boxer is an action, and no longer a man, or not significantly a “man,” puzzles those of us who feel ourselves fully defined in any of our actions. The romantic principles of Existentialism in its broadest, most vernacular sense have much to do with one’s volition and one’s will in creating oneself as an ethical being by way of a freely chosen action. Boxing, more than most contemporary American sports, clearly inhabits a dimension of human behavior one might call meta-ethical or meta-existential. There is no evident relationship between the man outside the ring and the man inside the ring—the boxer who is, like Mike Tyson (or Joe Louis, or Rocky Marciano, or any number of other boxers of distinction), “courteous,” “soft-spoken,” “gentle,” in private life, and, in the ring, once the bell has sounded, “brutal,” “awesome,” “murderous,” “devastating,” “a young bull”—and the rest. The aim is not to kill one’s opponent, for one’s opponent is after all one’s brother: the aim is to render him temporarily incapacitated, in a simulation of death. “It’s unbelievable,” Mike Tyson has said of boxing. “It’s like a drug; I thrive on it. It’s the excitement of the event, and now I need that excitement all the time.”

  When the boxer enters the ring, ceremonially disrobes, and answers the summons to fight, he ceases being an individual with all that implies of a socially regulated ethical bond with other individuals; he becomes a boxer, which is
to say an action. It might be argued that America’s fascination with sports—if “fascination” is not too weak a word for such frenzied devotion, weekend after weekend, season after season, in the lives of a majority of men—has to do not only with the power of taboo to violate, or transcend, or render obsolete conventional categories of morality, but with the dark, denied, muted, eclipsed, and wholly unarticulated underside of America’s religion of success. Sports is only partly about winning; it is also about losing. Failure, hurt, ignominy, disgrace, physical injury, sometimes even death—these are facts of life, perhaps the very bedrock of lives, which the sports-actor, or athlete, must dramatize in the flesh; and always against his will. Boxing as dream-image, or nightmare, pits self against self, identical twin against twin, as in the womb itself where “dominancy,” that most mysterious of human hungers, is first expressed. Its most characteristic moments of ecstasy—the approach to the knockout, the knockout, the aftermath of the knockout, and, by way of television replays, the entire episode retraced in slow motion as in the privacy of a dream—are indistinguishable from obscenity, horror. In the words of middleweight Sugar Ray Seales, 1972 Olympic Gold Medalist, a veteran of more than four hundred amateur and professional fights who went blind as a consequence of ring injuries: “I went into the wilderness, and fought the animals there, and when I came back I was blind.”

  In Clifford Geertz’s classic anthropological essay of 1972, “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight,” the point is made that, in Bali, the now-illegal cockfighting obsession is wholly male, and masculine: the “cock” is the male organ, as the Balinese freely acknowledge, but it is more than merely that—it is the man, the maleness, codified, individualized, in a context of other individuals: which is to say, society. The cockfight is utterly mindless, bloody, savage, animal—and ephemeral: though a Balinese loves his fighting cock, and treats him tenderly, once the cock is dead it is dead, and quickly forgotten. (Sometimes, in a paroxysm of disappointment and rage, Geertz notes, cock-owners dismember their own cocks after the cocks are killed.) Boxing in the United States is far more complex a cultural phenomenon than the Balinese cockfight—it has much to do, for example, with immigrant succession, and with the ever-shifting tensions of race—but some of the principles Geertz isolates in the cockfight are surely operant: men are fascinated by boxing because it suggests that masculinity is measured solely in terms of other men, and not in terms of women; and because, in its very real dangers, it is a species of “deep play” (an action in which stakes are so high that it is, from a utilitarian standpoint, irrational for men to engage in it at all) that seems to demonstrate the way the world really is and not the way it is said, or wished, or promised to be. The boxer is consumed in action, and has no significant identity beyond action; the fight is a convulsion of a kind, strictly delimited in space (a meticulously squared circle bounded, like an animal pen, by ropes) and time. (Jack Dempsey, in whose honor the term “killer instinct” was coined, once remarked that he wasn’t the fighter he might have been, with so many rules and regulations governing the sport: “You’re in there for three-minute rounds with gloves on and a referee. That’s not real fighting.”) The passions it arouses are always in excess of its “utilitarian” worth since in fact it has none. As the bloody, repetitious, and ephemeral cockfight is a Balinese reading of Balinese experience, a story Balinese men tell themselves about themselves, so too is the American boxing match a reading of American experience, unsentimentalized and graphic. Yes, one thinks, you have told us about civilized values; you have schooled us in the virtues, presumably Christian, of turning the other cheek; of meekness as a prerequisite for inheriting the earth—the stratagems (manipulative? feminine?) of indirection. But the boxing match suggests otherwise, and it is that reading of life that we prefer. The boxers make visible what is invisible in us, thereby defining us, and themselves, in a single consecrated action. As Rocky Graziano once said, “The fight for survival is the fight.”

  It’s like being in love with a woman. She can be unfaithful, she can be mean, she can be cruel, but it doesn’t matter. If you love her, you want her, even though she can do you all kinds of harm. It’s the same with me and boxing. It can do me all kinds of harm, but I love it.

  —FLOYD PATTERSON,

  former heavyweight champion of the world

  It is the boxing match with the distinct premise as its theoretical axis that is likely to be the most profound, and in our time the boxer whose matches are most consistently fueled by such interior—if rarely articulated—logic is Mike Tyson, the youngest undisputed world heavyweight champion in history.

  The premise underlying Tyson’s first title match, for instance, with World Boxing Council titleholder Trevor Berbick, which Tyson won in six brilliantly executed minutes, was that a boxer of such extreme youth (Tyson was twenty at the time, and fighting in a division in which boxers customarily mature late), who had never fought any opponent approaching Berbick’s quality, could nonetheless impose his will upon the older boxer: thus Tyson was a “challenger” in more than the usual sense of the word, as, for instance, the luckless Marvis Frazier, son of Joe, had been in challenging Larry Holmes for his heavyweight title some years before.

  The premise underlying Tyson’s second title defense in Atlantic City, on 16 October 1987, was something along these lines: the twenty-six-year-old challenger, Tyrell Biggs, an Olympic Gold Medalist in the super-heavyweight division in 1984, deserved to be punished for having enjoyed a smoother and more triumphant career as an amateur than Mike Tyson; and deserved to be punished particularly badly because, in Tyson’s words, “He didn’t show me any respect.” (Tyson said, post-fight, that he could have knocked out Biggs in the third round but chose to knock him out slowly “so that he would remember it for a long time. I wanted to hurt him real bad.”) That emotions between the boxers’ managers ran high before the match, very nearly to the point of hysteria, did not assuage the situation.

  As with the young, pre-champion Dempsey, there is an unsettling air about Tyson, with his impassive death’s-head face, his unwavering stare, and his refusal to glamorize himself in the ring—no robe, no socks, only the signature black trunks and shoes—that the violence he unleashes against his opponents is somehow just; that some hurt, some wound, some insult in his past, personal or ancestral, will be redressed in the ring; some mysterious imbalance righted. The single-mindedness of his ring style works to suggest that his grievance has the force of a natural catastrophe. That old trope, “the wrath of God,” comes to mind.

  Though there were boxing experts who persisted in thinking that Tyrell Biggs, with his “superior” boxing skills, and his height and reach advantage, could manage an upset against Tyson, for most spectators in the Atlantic City Convention Center the fight was a foregone conclusion. (The odds were ten to one in Tyson’s favor.) Not which boxer would win but when would Tyson win, and how decisively, was the issue; and how badly after all would Biggs be hurt. Thus, when Biggs entered the ring, dancing, bobbing and weaving, shadow boxing, a singularly graceful figure in a white satin robe to mid-thigh, with built-up shoulders and fancy trim, accompanied by a sinister sort of music with a jungle-sounding beat, amplified but muffled, the vision was both alarming and eerily beautiful: for here was, not the champion’s opponent, but the evening’s sacrifice to the champion.

  It is difficult to suggest to those whose experience of boxing has been limited to television how very different, and dramatically different, the “live” event is. For one thing, the live match is not filtered through the scrim of announcers’ voices; it is voiceless, unmediated. Since words do not encompass it or define it one is not distracted by concepts, nor is one likely to know, from second to second, precisely what is happening, because it happens so swiftly, and irrevocably: no slow-motion replays. Announcers, too, develop homey, formulaic ways of talking about boxing; domesticating it, in a sense—as mellow-voiced narrators of African veldt documentaries domesticate the savage “natural” events of the
animated food cycle. By naming, by conceptualizing, we reduce the horror of certain intransigent facts of life; by making the unspeakable speakable we bring it into a comfortable apotropaic relationship with us. Or delude ourselves that we have done so.

  The live boxing match, however, suggests that such strategies are of no avail, and the more ferocious the fight, the more relentless the stalking of one man by the other, the wearing-down, the out-psyching, the approach to the knockout and the knockout itself, the more spellbinding the event. If refusing to look at the gouging out of Gloucester’s eyes in King Lear could prevent that action, there would be some logic in refusing to look, but the event does occur, must occur, and by the terms of the contract we must watch. It is our obligation to the victim to witness, not his defeat, but the integrity with which he bears his defeat.

  Real courage is required when you lose, Floyd Patterson once said. Winning is easy.

  Matches of such spectacular action as Tyson/Berbick and Tyson/Biggs (arguably Tyson’s most intelligently fought fight thus far) suggest boxing’s kinship with ancient, or not-so-ancient, rites of sacrifice. The trappings of sport, let alone entertainment, simply dissolve away. One is witnessing the oldest story of our species, the battering of one man into submission by another, the triumph of one which is the loss (the mock death) of the other; but the significant issue, in boxing at least, is not this battering so much as the victim’s accommodation of it, second after second, round after terrible round.