On Boxing

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Like his predecessor Pinklon Thomas, whom Tyson handily knocked out to retain his World Boxing Association title, Tyrell Biggs was remarkably courageous in absorbing Tyson’s hammerlike blows, those left hooks in particular, so that the theme of the fight as a drama became Biggs’s quixotic, doomed determination in the face of Tyson’s single-minded assault. The fascination lay in how long Biggs could endure it, or how long his cornermen would allow him to endure it. (What a surprise to afterward see the fight as Home Box Office televised it, and to hear Sugar Ray Leonard wonder aloud repeatedly why Biggs had “abandoned” his game plan—as if the helpless boxer had had any choice in the matter.) Biggs’s strategy of lateral movement, quick jabs, constant motion was thwarted almost immediately, confronted by Tyson’s superior will and strength; his much-publicized jab was a flicking sort of jab, a stay-away-from-me jab, while Tyson’s newly honed jab was the real thing, a blow (with which, in the second round, Tyson split open Biggs’s lip). In retrospect the match seemed a mis-match, like so many of Tyson’s thirty-odd matches, but only in retrospect, since at the start—at the very start, at least—Biggs seemed to have had a chance. It was Tyson’s unremitting pressure, the intensity of his concentration, his will to do hurt, that must have broken Biggs’s spirit even before his blows began to take their toll, for never in Tyson’s career had he seemed so grimly resolute, so fixed upon destruction, and so exhausting to watch. The tiredness that must have seeped into the marrow of Biggs’s bones, not to drain away, perhaps, for months, or years, was felt throughout the arena, a counterpoint to the nerved-up exhilaration of Tyson’s attack. (Surely he is the oldest twenty-one-year-old on record?) Tyson has said that he doesn’t think in the ring but acts intuitively; like his great predecessor Joe Louis, but unlike, for instance, Muhammad Ali, he gives the chilling impression of being a machine for hitting, and in this most rococo of his fights a machine for rapid and repeated extra-legal maneuvers—low blows, using his elbows, hitting after the bell. Never has a fight, in my limited experience at least, been so oppressively communal…as if we were all trapped inside the ring’s foursquare geometry, with no way out except to be knocked through the ropes, as Biggs would be, at last, in the seventh round. And no way to be saved from annihilation except to succumb to it.

  The tension generated by a typical Tyson fight—meaning one controlled and dominated by him—must be experienced to be understood. Tyson/Biggs struck its tone of high expectancy even before Tyson entered the arena (robeless, but wearing the three oversized and absurdly ornamental belts that are the warrior-symbols of his three titles) and built steadily, in some quarters very nearly unbearably, to its climax in the seventh round, when the blood-bespattered referee, Tony Orlando, stopped the fight after the second knockdown without counting over Biggs. Tyson’s ring style, pitiless, forward-moving, seemingly invincible, evokes odd behavior in presumably normal people. Do most men identify with Tyson-as-potential-killer? Do most women identify with Tyson’s victims? Or is “identification” in terms of the fight, the spectacle, the playing-out-of-action itself? When a great fight occurs—and Tyson has not yet had a great fight, for the reason that he has not yet had a worthy opponent—the spectator experiences something like the mysterious catharsis of which Aristotle wrote, the purging of pity and terror by the exercise of these emotions; the subliminal aftermath of classical tragedy.

  These fights do linger in the mind, sometimes obsessively, like nightmare images one can’t quite expel, but the actual experience of the fight, in the arena, is a confused, jolting, and sometimes semihysterical one. The reason is primary, or you might say primitive: either Tyson is hitting his man, or he is preparing to hit his man, and if nothing nasty happens within the next few seconds it will not be for Tyson’s not trying. (For a man of Tyson’s physical build he is extraordinarily fast with his hands, and he hits in combinations.) In the average boxing match, contrary to critics’ charges of “barbarism,” “brutality,” et al., nothing much happens, as boxing aficionados affably accept, but in Tyson fights (with one obvious exception—the 7 March 1987 title fight with “Bonecrusher” Smith) everything can happen, and sometimes does.

  Thus individuals in the audience behave oddly, and involuntarily—there was even a scuffle or an actual fight at the rear of the Convention Hall during the third or fourth round of the fight in the ring, not suggested by the television coverage, and a matter of some confused alarm until security guards broke it up. Some women hid their faces, some men emitted not the stylized cries of “Hit him!” or even “Kill him!” but parrotlike shrieks that seemed to be torn from them—perhaps the “womanlike” shrieks Tyson amusingly described coming from Biggs when he was hit. The boxing commissioner for New York State, ex-world lightheavyweight champion José Torres, seemed to forget himself as he shouted out commands to Tyson (who was oblivious to him as to everyone and everything outside the ring) and to Tyson’s cornermen (who were too far away to have heard, should they have wished to hear). Torres’s violent hand signals and shouted commands—“Six-five!” was one—would have seemed quite mysterious, if not deranged, had one not known that Torres, like Tyson, is a former D’Amato protégé, and had one not guessed that the ex-champion simply could not resist participating in the mesmerizing action. Strangest of all—and discreetly ignored by HBO television cameras—a fight threatened to ensue between Biggs’s chief cornerman, the redoubtable Lou Duva, and the fight’s promoter, Don King himself, at the immediate conclusion of the match; each man had to be forcibly restrained from rushing at the other. While television audiences watched the triumphant Tyson striding about the ring, and the dazed Biggs sitting on the canvas, attended by a physician, most of us were watching fascinated as the portly, not-young Lou Duva tried to climb through the ropes to get at Don King at ringside, the two gentlemen shouting at each other, for reasons only a few insiders would know: King had wanted the fight stopped immediately after the first knockdown, fearing “slaughter,” but Duva had insisted that the fight continue, no matter the risk to Biggs. Duva had his way, and the fight continued a few more seconds, as if to fulfill its premise—Biggs deserved to be hurt, and to be hurt “real bad” by Tyson.

  Boxing’s spectacle is degrading, no doubt—in the most primary sense of the word: a degrading of the self; a breaking-down, as if one’s sensitive nerve-endings were being worn away. That the losing, failing, staggering boxer will not quit is very much a part of the degradation process, for boxing is as much about losing as winning, about being hurt as doing hurt, and even the most macho of spectators is roused to sympathy with the boxer who, though losing, has displayed that “grace” and “courage” of which, in another context, Hemingway spoke.

  When the fight was over people remained for some minutes in their seats as if spellbound or dazed, like Biggs; or exhausted—the twenty minutes of action had seemed rather more like twenty hours. The prospect of surrendering Mike Tyson’s display of control to the quotidian controllessness of the world seemed daunting, but we made our way, a crowd of thousands, milling and surging, headless, directionless—the yellow-clad ushers, so much in evidence earlier, seemed now to have entirely vanished—through dour dirty passageways with no EXIT signs and into cul-de-sacs of some terror, for what if, we were all thinking, what if there is a fire? a sudden panic? and we stampede one another to death? a fate some might consider only just, since we had all been witnesses to an action of indefensible savagery?—but, by sheer blind groping instinct, a sort of Brownian movement of human molecules, we made our way out to the street, or into underground passageways that led to the swanked-up tackiness of the Trump Plaza, where figured carpets in primary colors jolted the optic nerve and functionless silly mirrored columns blocked pedestrian movement, showing us what we could not have wanted much to see, our own faces. The fight being over, the “real” world floods back, and the powerful appeal of Mike Tyson, as of his great predecessors, is that, in however artificial and delimited a context, a human being, one of us, reduced to the essence of physi
cal strength, skill, and ingenuity, has control of his fate—if this control can manifest itself merely in the battering of another human being into absolute submission. This is not all that boxing is, but it is boxing’s secret premise: life is hard in the ring, but, there, you only get what you deserve.

  THE CRUELEST SPORT

  And if the body does not do fully as much as the soul? And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul?

  —WALT WHITMAN, “I Sing the Body Electric”

  A boxer’s victory is gained in blood.

  —GREEK INSCRIPTION

  Professional boxing is the only major American sport whose primary, and often murderous, energies are not coyly deflected by such artifacts as balls and pucks. Though highly ritualized, and as rigidly bound by rules, traditions, and taboos as any religious ceremony, it survives as the most primitive and terrifying of contests: two men, near-naked, fight each other in a brightly lit, elevated space roped in like an animal pen (though the ropes were originally to keep rowdy spectators out); two men climb into the ring from which only one, symbolically, will climb out. (Draws do occur in boxing, but are rare, and unpopular.) Boxing is a stylized mimicry of a fight to the death, yet its mimesis is an uncertain convention, for boxers do sometimes die in the ring, or as a consequence of a bout; their lives are sometimes, perhaps always, shortened by the stress and punishment of their careers (in training camps no less than in official fights). Certainly, as in the melancholy case of Muhammad Ali, the most acclaimed and beloved heavyweight in boxing history, the quality of the boxer’s post-retirement life is frequently diminished. For the great majority of boxers, past and present, life in the ring is nasty, brutish, and short—and not even that remunerative.

  Yet, for inhabitants of the boxing world, the ideal conclusion of a fight is a knockout, and not a decision; and this, ideally, not the kind in which a man is counted “out” on his feet, still less a TKO (“technical knockout”—from injuries), but a knockout in the least ambiguous sense—one man collapsed and unconscious, the other leaping about the ring with his gloves raised in victory, the very embodiment of adolescent masculine fantasy. Like a tragedy in which no one dies, the fight lacking a classic knockout always seems unresolved, unfulfilled: the strength, courage, ingenuity, and desperation of neither boxer have been adequately measured. Catharsis is but partial, the Aristotelian principle of an action complete in itself has been thwarted. (Recall the fury of young Muhammad Ali at the too-readily-defeated Sonny Liston in their second, notorious title fight, of 1965: instead of going to a neutral corner, Ali stood over his fallen opponent with his fist cocked, screaming, “Get up and fight, sucker!”) This is because boxing’s mimesis is not that of a mere game, but a powerful analogue of human struggle in the rawest of life-and-death terms. When the analogue is not evoked, as, in most fights, it is not, the action is likely to be unengaging, or dull; “boxing” is an art, but “fighting” is the passion. The delirium of the crowd at one of those matches called “great” must be experienced first-hand to be believed (Frazier-Ali I, 1971, Hagler-Hearns, 1986, for instance); identification with the fighters is so intense, it is as if barriers between egos dissolve, and one is in the presence of a Dionysian rite of cruelty, sacrifice, and redemption. “The nearest thing to death,” Ali described it, after his third title match with Joe Frazier, in 1975, which he won when the fight was stopped after the fourteenth round. Or: “This is some way to make a living, isn’t it?” as the superlightweight Saoul Mamby said, badly battered after a title fight with the champion Billy Costello, in 1984.

  A romance of (expendable) maleness—in which The Fight is honored, and even great champions come, and go.

  For these reasons, among others, boxing has long been America’s most popularly despised sport: a “so-called” sport, even a “meta-” or an “anti-” sport: a “vicious exploitation of maleness” as prostitution and pornography may be said to be a vicious exploitation of femaleness. It is not, contrary to common supposition, the most dangerous sport (the American Medical Association, arguing for boxing’s abolition, acknowledges that it is statistically less dangerous than speedway racing, Thoroughbred racing, downhill skiing, professional football, et ah), but it is the most spectacularly and pointedly cruel sport, its intention being to stun one’s opponent’s brain; to affect the orgasmic communal “knockout” that is the culminating point of the rising action of the ideal fight. The humanitarian argues that boxing’s very intentionality is obscene, which sets it apart, theoretically at least, from the purer (i.e., Caucasian) Establishment sports bracketed above. Boxing is only possible if there is an endless supply of young men hungry to leave their impoverished ghetto neighborhoods, more than willing to substitute the putative dangers of the ring for the more evident, possibly daily, dangers of the street; yet it is rarely advanced as a means of eradicating boxing, that poverty itself be abolished; that it is the social conditions feeding boxing that are obscene. The pious hypocrisy of Caucasian moralists vis-à-vis the sport that has become almost exclusively the province of black and ethnic minorities has its analogue in a classic statement of President Bush’s, that he is worried by the amount of “filth” flooding America by way of televised hearings and trials: not that the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearing and the William Kennedy Smith rape trial revealed “filth” at the core of certain male-female relations in our society, but that public airings of such, the very hearings and trials, are the problem. Ban the spectacle, and the obscenity will cease to exist.

  The aesthetics of boxing is in sharp contrast to its ethics. Abjured by the referee, “Fight a good, clean fight, boys!” the boys need not ponder why a “good, clean fight” is, in fact, morally different from any other. Black boxers from the time of Jack Johnson (the first and most flamboyant of the world’s black heavyweight champions, 1908-1915) through Joe Louis, Sugar Ray Robinson, Muhammad Ali, Larry Holmes, Sugar Ray Leonard and Mike Tyson have been acutely conscious of themselves as racially other from their audiences, whom they must please in one way or another, as black villains, or honorary whites. (After his pulverizing defeat of the “good, humble Negro” Floyd Patterson, in a heavyweight title match of 1962, Sonny Liston gloated in his role as black villain; when he lost so ingloriously to Muhammad Ali, a brash new-style black who drew upon Jack Johnson, Sugar Ray Robinson, and even the campy professional wrestler Gorgeous George for his own public persona, Liston lost his mistique, and his career soon ended.) To see race as a predominant factor in American boxing is inevitable, but the moral issues, as always in this paradoxical sport, are ambiguous. Is there a moral distinction between the spectacle of black slaves in the Old South being forced by their white owners to fight to the death, for purposes of gambling, and the spectacle of contemporary blacks fighting for multi-million-dollar paydays, for TV coverage from Las Vegas and Atlantic City? When, in 1980, in one of the most cynically promoted boxing matches in history, the aging and ailing Muhammad Ali fought the young heavyweight champion Larry Holmes, in an “execution” of a fight that was stopped after ten rounds, did it alleviate the pain, or the shame, that Ali was guaranteed $8 million for the fight? (Of which, with characteristic finesse, promoter Don King cheated him of nearly $1 million.) Ask the boxers.

  Boxing today is very different from boxing of the past, which allowed a man to be struck repeatedly while trying to get to his feet (Dempsey-Willard, 1919), or to be knocked down seven times in three wholly one-sided rounds (Patterson-Johansson I, 1959), or so savagely and senselessly struck in the head with countless unanswered blows that he died in a coma ten days later (Griffith-Paret, 1962); the more immediate danger, for any boxer fighting a Don King opponent, is that the fight will be stopped prematurely, by a zealous referee protective of King’s investment. As boxing is “reformed,” it becomes less satisfying on a deep, unconscious level, more nearly resembling amateur boxing; yet, as boxing remains primitive, brutal, bloody, and dangerous, it seems ever more anachronistic, if not in fact obscene, in a society with pretensions of
humanitarianism. Its exemplary figure is that of the warrior, of some mythopoetic time before weapons were invented; the triumph of physical genius, in a technologically advanced world in which the physical counts for very little, set beside intellectual skills. Even in the gritty world of the underclass, who, today, would choose to fight with mere fists? Guns abound, death to one’s opponents at a safe distance is possible even for children. Mike Tyson’s boast, after his defeat of the 12-1 underdog Carl Williams in a heavyweight title defense of 1989, “I want to fight, fight, fight and destruct the world,” strikes a poignantly hollow note, even if we knew nothing of subsequent disastrous events in Tyson’s life and career.

  Consider the boxing trainer’s time-honored adage: They all go if you hit them right.

  These themes are implicit in Thomas Hauser’s Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times and The Black Lights: Inside the World of Professional Boxing; but it is only in the latter work that theoretical, historical, and psychological issues are considered—Hauser sees boxing as “the red light district of professional sports” in which individuals of exceptional talent, courage, and integrity nonetheless prevail. His Ali is the heftier and more ambitious of the two, befitting its prodigious subject—the most famous athlete of all time, until recent years the most highly paid athlete of all time. An authorized biography, it would appear to be definitive, and is certainly exhaustive; Hauser spent thousands of hours with his subject, as well as approximately two hundred other people, and was given access to Ali’s medical records. The text arranges these testimonies into a chronological history in which (is this New Age biography?) the author’s voice alternates with, but rarely comments upon, still less criticizes, what these others have said. Compassionate, intelligent, fair-minded, Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times might have benefited from further editing and paraphrase. Specific subjects (an imminent fight, financial deals, Ali’s marital problems, Ali’s health problems, the Nation of Islam, et al.) become lost in a welter of words; frequently, it is difficult to locate dates, even for important fights. And no ring record of Ali in the appendix!—a baffling omission, as if Ali’s performance as an athlete were not the primary reason for this book.