Manny

Appropriately, I think, given the book’s dual subject, I write about the great boxing trainer Emanuel Steward in Fighters & Writers in connection with another author’s work. In the essay “A First-Class Sport” (which takes its name from a comment made by Teddy Roosevelt), I consider how Steward and others used boxing as a way to help youngsters:

This desire to aid children’s development through boxing is common among both trainers and cops. In his memoir, Serenity, Ralph Wiley recalls his early days as a sportswriter on the boxing beat and visits he paid to the New Oakland Boxing Club, where he met a police officer representing the PAL who worked with young fighters. “Boxing breeds respect,” Jerry Blueford told Wiley. “I don’t care if any of these kids ever become pros, or even good amateurs for that matter. I’m trying to get them into something they can work at. Off the streets. If they leave here in a couple of years and rob a bank, at least they didn’t rob it while they were here.” In a section that harkens back to Roosevelt’s remark about tough neighborhoods, Wiley describes visiting Detroit’s Kronk Boxing Club, in “the bottom of the rundown bunker of a recreation center on an otherwise barren lot of the decayed inner city.” Wiley calls the place “a haven of sorts for the children of Detroit” and he cannot help being impressed by its principal, trainer-manager Emanuel Steward, because of “how Emanuel had overcome long odds, and helped his young men overcome long odds, just to be strong and functional.”

Wiley refers to the original Kronk location on McGraw, where Steward taught Tommy Hearns, Hilmer Kenty, Jimmy Paul, Duane Thomas, Dennis Andries, Steve McCrory, Milton McCrory, Michael Moorer, and so many others, not the later location on West Warren, which according to reports started being dismantled almost immediately after Steward’s death on October 25.

Detroit still needs the kinds of havens Steward provided.

 

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News Flash: Obama Is Not Ali; Romney Is Not Spinks

Writing about the second staged exchange between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney Detroit News columnist Nolan Finley exclaims: “This is what a debate should look like — two well-matched heavyweights pounding away at each other, unable to knock each other down, but determined to keep slugging.” He then proceeds, rather lamely, to say, “In the end, who won probably depended on who you wanted to win going in.” (No need to read more of his analysis to know for whom he was rooting…)

Slate’s sampling of newspapers’ coverage of the event features headlines like “No Pulling Punches in Feisty Debate” (Las Vegas Review-Journal), “They Came out Fighting” (New Hampshire Union Leader) and “Obama, Romney Come out Swinging” (Richmond Times-Dispatch).

In his New Yorker blog, John Cassidy manages to liken Obama to both Jake LaMotta and Muhammad Ali before saying, “Enough with the boxing metaphors.” He doesn’t mean it, however. “Truly, though, it’s hard to avoid them,” he continues.

The problem is precisely how easy it is to rely on such clichés. Rather than actually saying something insightful, pundits just reach for the most obvious comparison from sports. Presidential debates are contests between two opponents, and so are boxing matches. Really? You don’t say…

Perhaps it would be worth trying a little harder.

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Healthy & Beautiful

In Fighters & Writers I mention several of the countless writers who expressed interest in, and were inspired by, boxing, such as Lord Byron, Albert Camus, Ernest Hemingway, Norman Mailer, Budd Schulberg and George Plimpton. I could have, but didn’t, name another literary connoisseur of the fight game, Vladimir Nabokov. In a 1925 essay on the sport published in English for the first time this month by The Times Literary Supplement, the author of Laughter in the Dark and Lolita says “there are few spectacles as healthy and beautiful as a boxing-match.”

 

Clearly writing for a non-expert audience, Nabokov points out some salient facts that should be widely know but, even decades later, still are not. For example, it was not “commonplace humanity that led to the appearance of boxing gloves,” he points out, but instead a wish to protect fighters’ hands. He astutely observes that calling Jim Jeffries the “great white hope” hinted that “black boxers were already becoming unbeatable.” He’s a little shaky on dates, estimating that the championship fight between Jeffries and Jack Johnson occurred “twenty-five or more years” before he was writing (when it was 15), but he gets something essential right, something that gets to the heart of what Nabokov call “the art of boxing” and its appeal for writers. Recounting the crowd dispersing after a heavyweight bout, he states his conviction that within the witnesses “there existed one and the same beautiful feeling, for the sake of which it was worth bringing together two great boxers, – a feeling of dauntless, flaring strength, vitality, manliness, inspired by the play in boxing. And this playful feeling is, perhaps, more valuable and purer than many so-called “elevated pleasures.” Even if not everyone who saw the fight Nabokov took in at the Sports Palace in Berlin walked away with this “beautiful feeling,” he and many scribblers before and since certainly did.

 

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Alaa Al Aswany and Other Boxers

Since Fighters & Writers was published, I’ve continued to come across items reaffirming ideas I explore in the book: that boxing’s implicit philosophy rests on qualities, like discipline and tenacity, which writers require and that this results in an ongoing productive relationship between the sport and literature. The January 16, 2012, issue of The New Yorker, for example, includes a profile of Alaa Al Aswany in which the Egyptian novelist likens himself to a boxer:

“I have to feel myself a fighter,” he said, hunching his shoulders, lowering his head, and bringing his fists up to his face…. “I am fighting for my career, for my writing, and for my success,” he went on. “Every day, I wake up early. And often I am tired, and my wife says ‘No, no.’ And I think, ‘I must get up and work.’” It is this determination that keeps him moving: “I tell my wife, ‘I am a boxer.’”

One can imagine Norman Mailer or Ernest Hemingway, some of the authors I discuss in Fighters & Writers, having similar conversations with their spouses.

Although the magazine might not carry as much boxing coverage as it did when A.J. Liebling was on the staff, the same edition of The New Yorker does include several more references to the sport. In a review of Jodi Kantor’s The Obamas, editor (and Muhammad Ali biographer) David Remnick writes that “in many black communities the celebrations surrounding the Obama election victory and the Inauguration were on a par with Joe Louis’s one-round knockout of Max Schmeling, in 1938.” Remnick also invokes “the Italian-American philosopher Rocky Balboa.” An article about efforts to build a football stadium in Los Angeles notes that the planned structure could also stage boxing matches and other events. Demonstrating that scribblers aren’t alone in their pugilistic interests, the magazine’s “Goings on about Town” section decorates its list of art gallery shows with an image created by Jeff Wall showing two gloved boys sparring in a living room. It’s titled “Boxing.”

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Past, Present, Future

It takes determination to excel in boxing, and David Davis has it. He had it as a small ten-year-old who wanted to learn how to box in order to defend himself against bigger kids who picked on him. He persuaded his reluctant mother to let him start working out at the Downtown Boxing Gym in Detroit and competing in amateur boxing tournaments. He displayed it again three years later when, in early October, he became the 85-pound champion at the 2011 PAL Nationals in Toledo, Ohio.

David envisions more accomplishments for himself. In the short term this means more tournaments, finishing up at Nichols Middle School and then high school (at Cass Tech, he thinks). In the long term, this means turning professional and eventually becoming a promoter.

His grades are “good but could be better,” David says. His trainer, Khali, asks him and the other kids he works with to show him their report cards. If his grades weren’t good enough, David told me, Khali would make him “do more push ups” and work with the tutors at the Downtown Boxing Gym.

In addition to his schoolwork, David undertakes research projects of his own. While he admires current-day boxers like Floyd Mayweather, Jr., Manny Pacquiao and Victor Ortiz, David is also a student of boxing history. He looks up fighters on the internet in order to learn their moves. He likes Mike Tyson because he was “strong, competitive and always came forward” and admires Muhammad Ali’s quickness. He sees posters of Ali every day at the gym, and has one on the wall at home. (Regarding the much sought-after Mayweather-Pacquiao match up, he “would pick Floyd to win but would want Manny to win.”)

David admits that he doesn’t especially like to train but goes to the gym Monday through Friday because that’s “part of the sport.” What he does like is hard fights, he says. He also likes that in boxing he doesn’t have to depend on teammates and only has to depend on himself. But he’s quick to praise Khali, his “great coach,” because he “doesn’t want to take all the credit.” Khali not only teaches him and makes sure he exercises; he also arranges for him to travel to different states, picks him up and gets him to where he needs to go.

2011 PAL Nationals Champ David Davis acknowledges one of his boxing heroes

Every sport is dangerous, David concedes. Yet he’s never been hurt in a fight, he claims, though he has been hurt (but “not bad”) in sparring. He believes (as Ali did) that football is more dangerous than boxing. He much prefers boxing to mixed martial arts, which he thinks is far more harmful than boxing. “You can really get hurt in UFC,” he says. “Boxing will always thrive,” he confidently states. “It’s the past, present and future if you ask me.”

His mother, Sheba McKinney, can accept David’s involvement in the sport in the present, but isn’t sure she’ll want to watch him in the ring when he and his opponents are bigger. “You don’t have to box,” she tells him. “You could become a commentator.” If he set his mind to it, I bet he could.

Inside the Downtown Boxing Gym

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Ghost Writers

Over at City Journal, Paul Beston takes the (unlikely) prospect of a fight between boxing’s two biggest stars – Manny Paquiao and Floyd Mayweather, Jr. – as an excuse to revisit U.S. boxing history, from the days of ex-slave Tom Molineaux to the current moment. Given such great material, it’s no surprise that the article is a fascinating read, even if its takes the familiar (if undisputable) view that boxing just doesn’t matter to people the way it once did. I’ve made the same argument myself. Beston convincingly demonstrates another point I’ve also endeavored to make: the sport continues to intrigue writers, as it has consistently done from the very start.

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Henry Rollins, Heavyweight

Henry Rollins in an interview with a newspaper in my old hometown gave a glimpse of the reason why I included an essay about him in my book Fighters & Writers.

While in Michigan for an Iggy and the Stooges show in honor of late band member Ron Asheton, Rollins in April told the Detroit Free Press of his decision not to use drugs or alcohol:

I’ve always been very ambitious, just trying to get somewhere, and I’ve always been a live performer, making my name onstage. It was never going to be record sales with a guy like me. It’s going to be proving it every night…. Every night is the big one; every single night. So why would you go into a heavyweight boxing match drunk and expect to win?

In a piece called “Rollins on the Road,” I note that the former Black Flag and Rollins Band frontman “maintained a fighter’s physique” into middle age and that he likened his preparation for touring to a boxer’s training regimen. I also mention that Rollins compares himself to the Muhammad Ali of 1974’s Rumble in the Jungle in his book A Dull Roar, where he writes: “The show is George Foreman. I am Ali. I am going to take a beating but I will prevail.” In another essay in Fighters & Writers I point out that Ali similarly attributed his success to never smoking or drinking.

Then again, Rollins in the same Free Press interview also calls Iggy Pop “the heavyweight champion of rock” despite Pop’s rather different approach to living.

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Fighters & Writers & Warriors

While in Little Rock for the Arkansas Literary Festival, I did the usual reading followed by questions and answers from the audience and book-signing. But that’s not all I did there.

I’d volunteered for the Writers in the Schools program, and on Friday, April, 8, I spent a few hours at Hall High School. I read from and talked about Fighters & Writers, from which I chose (mostly) different selections than I presented the following day at the Arkansas Studies Institute, including some I’d not previously performed in public. I also talked about writing generally: how one becomes a scribbler, dedication to craft and related matters. (I noticed that students were more familiar with the boxers I mentioned than the authors, which didn’t surprise me, but they asked more questions about writing than sports, which did.) I addressed a group of about 60 or 70 students in the media center/library and visited several classrooms to address smaller groups. Students and teachers took time away from determined preparation for upcoming batteries of standardized testing and attentively listened to what I had to say. I only hope they got as much out of my visit as I did.

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My Barbecued Book Tour

My reasons for participating in both the Scissortail Creative Writing Festival and the Arkansas Literary Festival were not purely literary. They were also culinary.

I knew that by spending ten days in Oklahoma and Arkansas I would not only meet fellow writers and readers, which I did, but that I would also enjoy some fine barbecue, which I also did. I gave presentations related to Fighters & Writers three times during my miniature Southern tour, but had barbecue in half a dozen different places. Indeed, the main reason my wife and I stopped in Arkadelphia was because our Arkansas guidebook proclaimed a joint there, Allen’s BBQ, to be the best in the state. Folks in Little Rock disagreed. Some said Famous Dave’s was superior (even though it’s a franchise operation headquartered in Minnesota); others pointed to Sims (which has local roots). We tried both. I won’t say which I think is number one because I think it would take more than one meal at each restaurant to judge fairly. If I get another chance to do further research, I’ll surely take it. (Ron Settlers, proprietor of Sims, told us that the reason we can’t get comparable ribs in Portland, Oregon, is because proper preparation requires the hickory wood that grows in the South.)

Appropriately enough, Rex Nelson, the moderator of my Saturday afternoon session at the Arkansas Literary Festival, writes about barbecue, boxing, books and other shared interest at his blog, Southern Fried.

Discussing boxing and books with Rex Nelson at the Arkansas Literary Festival, April 9, 2011

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Baseball & Books

I don’t like baseball. I offer my thoughts on the game in an essay called “Opening Day Shutout.” I received an email from nonfiction editor Caleb Thompson on Thursday, March 31, regarding plans for The Monarch Review to run the piece.

The timing could not have been better. I was sitting in Estep Auditorium at East Central University in Ada, Oklahoma, on the opening evening of the 6^th annual Scissortail Creative Writing Festival. Susan Perabo was just about to read a short story. Perabo, I learned, views baseball rather differently than I do. Indeed, she described learning of a plaque at the Baseball Hall of Fame that named her as the first woman to play NCAA baseball. A little over a week later, I read from Fighters & Writers as part of “The Sports Book” panel at the Arkansas Literary Festival. Bob Reising joined me. His book, Chasing Moonlight, is about – what else? – baseball.

Despite all the writerly affection for the sport, I remain baffled by its popularity.

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