Soul at the White Heat

by Joyce Carol Oates

  In his portrayal of the talented but unexceptional athlete who makes of himself through dogged, diligent training a “champion”—(if only junior welterweight)—Mark Wahlberg is quietly compelling, the film’s anchor as he is the film’s core; his is a steady, stolid performance, subtly nuanced in the way of the early, young Al Pacino—a kind of “acting” indistinguishable from “real life.” By contrast—and the contrast is considerable—Christian Bale as Dicky Eklund, Micky’s half-brother and trainer, gives a tour de force of a performance, not unlike the manic LaMotta brother Joey, played by Joe Pesci in his first film role, in Raging Bull. Dicky Eklund is a former boxer himself, whose single moment of glory is his having “knocked down” Sugar Ray Leonard in a match Leonard won, years before; he’s Micky’s trainer, when he manages to show up at the gym, clearly intelligent, shrewd, self-destructive and unreliable—a crack addict, yet charismatic—with the gaunt cheeks and sunken eyes of the doomed. It’s a measure of Christian Bale’s brilliant performance that the viewer can’t look anywhere else when “Dicky” is on-screen, even if our feeling for him verges upon revulsion: there’s a perverse heroism about Dicky, deluded into believing that an HBO film (“Crack Addiction in America”) in which he’s a subject of clinical pathos, is somehow a film about him. Another vibrantly kinetic performance is Amy Adams as Charlene, Mickey’s tough, tenderly protective bartender girlfriend, who, it’s revealed, has a college degree and had been a champion high jumper: Charlene scarcely hesitates before flinging herself into the Ward-Eklund fray, taking on not only Micky’s harridan-mother and manipulative half-brother but Micky’s seven harpie-sisters, irresistibly awful on the screen, yet strangely touching, clearly their mother’s offspring and frightening in the aggregate as figures in a Hogarthian allegory.

  And there is Melissa Leo in the role of her career as the nightmare mother-manager Alice, determined to exploit her boxer-son as she’s sublimely indifferent to the terrible danger she places him in by matching him with opponents who outweigh him by as much as twenty pounds—the demonic mother who sincerely believes that she’s doing the right thing, her witchy face contorted with disbelief that anyone should doubt her good intentions. Bouffant-haired, improbably slim after having borne nine children (!), Melissa Leo’s Alice reminded me of James Joyce’s description of Ireland—“The sow that devours her own children.”

  DESPITE ITS STELLAR ACTING PERFORMANCES, The Fighter is a curious film—mysteriously incomplete in essential ways, over-determined and repetitive in more predictable ways. So sharply reminiscent of Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull that one might expect to see Scorsese’s name among the credits, The Fighter is, like Raging Bull, a portrayal of boxing as the public, professional, and singularly ugly face of what might be called the primal pathology of the human condition—the compulsion to fight, to subject oneself to injury and humiliation, matched with the hardly less perverse compulsion to witness such extremes of human endurance in a catastrophic public place. (Both The Fighter and Raging Bull depict ringside observers reminiscent of those quasi-bestial figures in George Bellows’s early, highly unromantic boxing paintings Both Members of This Club and Stag at Sharkey’s.)

  Unlike Raging Bull, which suggests, in the nightmare-surreal scenes in which the dogged, flailing “bull” middleweight Jake LaMotta is defeated by the superior boxing skills of Sugar Ray Robinson, that there is a transcendent, bitter beauty to this grim sport, The Fighter never suggests that boxing is a sport that allows superior athletes to perform brilliantly and memorably; Micky Ward and his opponents are not athletes of distinction but brawlers in the mode of LaMotta, Rocky Graziano, and Rocky Marciano, working-class heroes of the 1950s, fighting for money, all offense and little defense, as if the crude, coarse savage desire of the crowd were manifest in the ring, never mind how even the winning boxer might be seriously, irrevocably injured—such matches are not boxing, with its myriad skills and particular, cherished histories, but mere fighting. (It’s traditional for boxers, especially young boxers in training, to study films of great boxing matches under the tutelage of their trainers, and in this study, they acquire a reverence for past champions, as well as exemplary models to follow: yet we don’t have a glimpse of Micky Ward in such a context, as if, for him and his entourage, boxing had no history and was essentially a brainless endeavor. There is not even an excited awareness of the reigning welterweight/light-middleweight champion and crowd-pleaser of the era—the spectacular Oscar De La Hoya. The only glimpse we have of a superior boxer, the wily and ingenious Sugar Ray Leonard, is refracted through the coke-blurred memory of Dicky Eklund, whose delusion is that, for a split second at least, he was the equal of one of the great middleweight boxers of the second half of the twentieth century; what pathos then, when Dicky meets Leonard at a boxing match and tries to engage conversation with him, as the celebrity-boxer just barely politely tries to discourage him, before turning and walking away even as, undeterred, Dicky calls happily after him.)

  The most puzzling omission in The Fighter is the trilogy of fights with Arturo Gatti in 2002 to 2003 that made both Ward and Gatti famous—at least, in the netherworld of contemporary boxing, in which both men are enshrined in the way, not exactly condescending but qualified, that LaMotta and Graziano are enshrined in boxing history: boxers who fought heedlessly, desperately, with little defensive skills and much “heart,” to please voracious and unforgiving boxing audiences with a taste for blood. The Gatti-Ward trilogy of fights far better displays Micky Ward’s boxing skills and his indomitable spirit than the abbreviated bouts of The Fighter, for in Gatti, an Italian-born Canadian with a fierce and seemingly unstoppable ring personality, Ward met his just slightly more talented doppelgänger. (Gatti allegedly said, “I always wondered what would happen if I met my twin—now I have.”)* Ending The Fighter before the great brawling fights with Gatti is equivalent to ending King Lear before the blinding of Gloucester and the murder of Cordelia: one might do it, and still have a viable work of art, but—why?

  SINCE ITS RELEASE IN 1980, when it received “mixed” critical reviews, Raging Bull has attained the status of a genuine American classic, not merely a cult film. Admirers of the Scorsese film may see in The Fighter a work of directorial homage that compares respectably with its distinguished predecessor. As Raging Bull begins with the middle-aged, overweight ex-middleweight champion doing his painfully unfunny nightclub comedy routine, then flashes back to 1941 when LaMotta was a young, undisciplined, and audacious fighter, so The Fighter begins with film footage of Dicky Eklund being interviewed for an HBO documentary—only later do we learn the nature of the documentary, having been led to believe, at the outset, that it’s a documentary about the “comeback” of Dicky Eklund, Micky’s half-brother. (These crude-rhyming nicknames are quintessentially working-class Irish, suggesting the playful camaraderie of a pub society in which men remain adolescent and “unattached” through their lives, so long as they don’t return to their homes where wives and mothers exert authority.) As Raging Bull ends with LaMotta as a retired boxer, a figure of pathos whose marriage with a beautiful much-younger woman (played by a first-time actress named Cathy Moriarty) has ended in divorce, and whose life has careened downward since, so The Fighter ends with a return to the Ward-Eklund half-brothers and, in a cinematic sleight of hand that arouses a stirring of pity and terror, a brief film clip of the “real” Micky and Dicky of 2010—the former looking like a slightly older and thicker-bodied Mark Wahlberg and the latter looking much older than the mercurial Christian Bale, his Irish-boy’s face now ravaged and pale as a corpse’s. One would have liked to see the entire Ward-Eklund clan—the ferocious mother Alice and her seven ferociously loyal daughters—and not least Micky Ward’s real-life wife, Charlene.

  Like Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby (2004), a similar amalgam of gritty pathos, unabashed sentiment, and very good boxing footage that earned accolades for its principal actors Eastwood and Hilary Swank, The Fighter is, if not a champion film for all time, a very good
, poignant and commendable film of its era—post-industrial working-class urban America, bereft of history as it is bereft of jobs, strong unions, pride in one’s work. Lowell, Massachusetts, is the ideal setting for this modest fairy tale of an underdog who finally comes out on top—if but temporarily, and with what cost to him, no one quite knows or seems to care. Boxing may be cruel and pitiless to its most ardent practitioners but bountiful to its gifted chroniclers.

  THE MYSTERY OF MUHAMMAD ALI

  “I was determined to be one nigger that the white man didn’t get.”

  —Muhammad Ali, 1970

  For the boxing historian, the greatness of Muhammad Ali is beyond question and it has little to do with the young boxer’s brash self-promotion (“This is the legend of Cassius Clay/The most beautiful boxer in the world today”) or his subsequent fame/notoriety as a convert to the Nation of Islam who repudiated his Christian religion in April 1967 and refused in to be inducted into the U.S. Army to fight in the Vietnam War. Nor has it to do with Ali’s post-boxing career as a public figure of enormous charity, compassion, and integrity.

  Ali is a great champion because he brought to boxing an idiosyncratic early style that was astonishing to witness, as the spectacular ring style of the first black American heavyweight champion Jack Johnson (1908–1915) was astonishing in Johnson’s time. It is difficult to describe the ring presence of the young Ali—“Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee” doesn’t capture the viper-quickness and deadliness of Ali’s technique, nor does it suggest the quickening of the audience’s collective pulse at the very sight of the tall, strongly-built Ali in the ring virtually dancing around his tall, strongly-built but much slower-moving opponents. (An exemplary fight of Ali’s early career is the brilliantly executed, dramatically compressed two-and-a-half-round title match with Cleveland Williams, 1966.)

  The young Olympic medal winner (1960) defied boxing experts from the start, as if it were Ali’s destiny to do things in his unique and exasperating way: holding his gloves defiantly low, as if courting disaster; leaning away from jabs with an air of disdain, instead of slipping them as one is trained; flicking out a jab so light and casual as to seem negligent, cavalier; feinting, clowning, shrugging head and shoulders distractingly; performing a “shuffling” motion to upset opponents and entertain the audience.

  Here was a heavyweight who stood at 6’ 3” and weighed more than 210 pounds but moved with the dazzling ring style of a Sugar Ray Robinson (middleweight), even a Willie Pep (featherweight). His fights were incandescent dramas because they titillated crowds with the possibility of catastrophe for the mouthy Ali—if his opponent could catch him. (As Cassius Clay he’d once met the campy pro wrestler Gorgeous George, who’d impressed upon the young boxer the fact that people will buy tickets to see someone lose as well as to see someone win.)

  At his most playful Ali was a trickster—though not a black, taunting trickster in the style of Jack Johnson (who not only beat his white opponents but ridiculed and humiliated them in the ring, and provoked outrage among whites by publicly flaunting his relationships with white women.) The objects of Ali’s insults were fellow black boxers: he scorned the formidable Sonny Liston as “an ugly, slow bear” and boasted of himself as “pretty”; he jeered at Floyd Patterson in a way that might be considered not-so-subtly racist: “I’m going to put him flat on his back/So that he will start acting black.” Even as a mature boxer, fighting the worthy (and dangerous) opponent Joe Frazier, Ali dared to taunt Frazier in similarly race-tinged ways: “Joe Frazier is a gorilla/and he’s gonna fall in Manila”—“Joe Frazier’s the only n___ in the world ain’t got rhythm.” It was Ali’s maddening and diabolical strategy to make his opponents into some semblance of “white men’s Negroes” in order to isolate them from the black community and enhance himself.

  Cassius Clay, born in 1942, was the grandson of a slave; in the United States of his boyhood and young manhood, the role of the black athlete, particularly the black boxer, was a forced self-effacement and “modesty.”

  White male anxieties were, evidently, greatly roiled by the spectacle of the strong black man, and had to be assuaged. The greater the black boxer (Joe Louis, Archie Moore, Ezzard Charles) the more urgent that he assume a public role of caution and restraint. Kindly white men who advised their black charges to be a “credit to their race” were not speaking ironically.

  And yet, the young Cassius Clay/ Muhammad Ali refused to play this emasculating role. He would not be the “white man’s Negro”—he would not be anything of the white man’s at all. Converting to the Nation of Islam at the age of 22, immediately after winning the heavyweight championship from Sonny Liston, he denounced his “slave name” (Cassius Marcellus Clay, which was also his father’s name) and the Christian religion; in refusing to serve in the U.S. Army he made his political reasons clear: “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Vietcong.” An enormous backlash followed: where the young boxer had been cheered, now he was booed. Denunciations rained upon his head. Such revered publications as the New York Times refused to identify Ali by his Muslim name, and continued to print the “slave name” Cassius Clay for years. Threatened with imprisonment for his refusal to comply with the U.S. draft, Ali stood his ground; he was fined $10,000 and his boxing license revoked so that he could not continue his professional career, in the very prime of that career. In a gesture of sheer pettiness the state department took away his passport so that he couldn’t fight outside the United States. When finally the Supreme Court ruled in his favor, and Ali was reinstated as a professional boxer two and a half years later, he had lost much of his youthful agility. Yet he’d never yielded, he’d never given in.

  The heart of the champion is this: one never repudiates one’s deepest values, one never gives in.

  Though Ali had risen to dizzying heights of fame in the 1960s it was in the 1970s that his greatness was established. Who could have imagined that, being reinstated as a boxer after a lengthy suspension, Ali would expand the dimensions of the sport yet again; that, past his prime, his legs slowed, his breath shorter, out of an ingenuity borne of desperation he would reinvent himself as an athlete on whose unyielding body younger boxers might punch themselves out. He could no longer “float like a butterfly,” but he could lie back against the ropes, like a living heavy bag, and allow an opponent like the hapless George Foreman to exhaust himself in the effort of trying to knock him out. What is the infamous Rope-a-Dope stratagem of 1974 but a brilliantly pragmatic stoicism in which the end (winning) justifies the means (irreversible damage to body, brain). The spectator is appalled to realize that a single blow of Foreman’s delivered to a non-boxer might well be fatal; how many dozens of these blows Ali absorbed, as in a fairy tale in which the drama is one of reversed expectations. In this way, with terrible cost to come in terms of Ali’s health, he won back the heavyweight title at the age of 32, defeating the 25-year-old Foreman.

  Great as Ali–Foreman is, it can’t compare to the trilogy of fights between Ali and Frazier in 1971, 1974, 1975; Frazier won the first on points, Ali the second and third on points and a TKO. These are monumental fights, displays of human stamina, courage, and “heart” virtually unparalleled in the history of boxing. In the first of these, Ali experienced the worst battering of his life, yet he did not give up; in the second and third, Ali won against an exhausted Frazier, at what cost to his health we can only guess—“The closest thing to dying,” Ali said of the ordeal. Yet, incredibly, unconscionably, Ali was exploited by managers and promoters who should have protected him; his doomed career continued until 1981 with a devastating final loss, to the much-younger Trevor Berbick. Ali then retired, belatedly, after 61 fights, with 56 wins.

  The mystery of Muhammad Ali may point to something basic in the human psyche: the deeper, more spiritual, more courageous and transcendental self that emerges, in some, out of a more superficial personality in times of crisis. What does it mean to say that a fighter has “heart”? By “heart” we don’t mean technical sk
ill, nor even unusual strength and stamina and ambition; by “heart” we mean something like spiritual character. A normal person would never struggle to his feet to continue a fight in which he has been terribly hurt; the great champion is one who not only struggles to his feet, but is more dangerous than previously. Though boxing arises out of fighting, and fighting would seem to be universal in our species, yet boxing is contrary to nature, and defies comprehension in terms of Darwinian evolutionary theory. It is not natural to perform with such extraordinary courage, but rather more it is natural to surrender, to retreat, in order to survive. Indeed, the young Cassius Clay came close to quitting in his first fight with Sonny Liston, but was dissuaded by his trainer; if he had quit, we would not be mourning him now, and perhaps by now his name would have faded. The mature Ali persevered in fights in which he might well have lost, and frequently did lose. Out of such stoicism and a sense of destiny, a legend is borne; the cost exacted is one’s health.