The Frazier Method

An excerpt from “Ink,” an essay in Fighters & Writers:

Jaguars have a distinctive style of killing their prey, which can include virtually any other creature, since jaguars eat mammals, reptiles and fish. While other large cats rely on throat holds to strangle other beasts, jaguars can kill with a single bite through the neck – or right through the skull. One theory of the etymology of their name is that it derives from the word used by the Guarani Indians of the AmazonBasinin Brazil: yaguara, meaning an animal that can kill with one leap.

In his memoir Somebody’s Gotta Tell It, Jack Newfield outlines what he calls the “Joe Frazier method” of journalism. For him, the boxer “represented discipline, tenacity, courage, and maximizing whatever talent God gives you.” These qualities can be used as the foundation for an approach to writing: “keep coming forward. Don’t get discouraged. Be relentless. Don’t stop moving your hands. Break the others guy’s will.” Such an approach could also be seen as jaguar-like, since the cats display all the qualities Newfield describes.

 After his too-early death, Frazier’s legacy lives on.

Read Full Post »

Jaguars’ Fighting Chance

Jaguars are awesome creatures. Anyone who has read my book Fighters & Writers knows of my personal interest in them. In the essay “Ink” I liken the cats to boxers, specifically comparing their fierce aggression to heavyweight Joe Frazier’s relentless ringmanship. A fascinating story in the October 2011 Smithsonian also makes the feline/fighter connection. Journalist Sharon Guynup describes a team of researchers in Brazil examining a tranquilized jaguar:

It takes five men to heft the cat onto a scale: He weighs 203 pounds. They measure his length, girth, tail and skull. He bears evidence of fighting, probably battling another male over territory. [Veterinarian Joares] May dabs salve on half-healed cuts covering the cat’s massive head and paws. He’s also missing half an ear. The team nicknames him “Holyfield,” after Evander Holyfield, the boxer who lost a portion of his ear to Mike Tyson’s teeth in 1997; certainly the jaguar’s compact, muscular body radiates the power of a prizefighter.

Regarding the much-needed conservation efforts Guynup chronicles, one of her sources reflects, “the jaguar really has a fighting chance.” Sounds about right.

Read Full Post »

Norman Mailer and…Martin Amis?

Certain authors are so closely identified with boxing that it becomes difficult to write about them without mentioning the sport. Ernest Hemingway, for example, not only wrote about boxing; he fancied himself as something of a boxer too. Indeed, boxing factored hugely in how he thought of himself both as a man and as a writer. “My writing is nothing,” he ventured, “my boxing is everything.” Though “Hemingway couldn’t box worth his hat,” as critic Wilfrid Sheed says of the novelist’s ring prowess, that unacknowledged deficiency didn’t lessen his personal and artistic investment in the sport. 

Other writers aren’t generally associated with boxing but still end up writing about it when they consider literary fight aficionados. Martin Amis, for instance, has written numerous reviews of books by Norman Mailer, which means he at least briefly touches on boxing, a subject Mailer returned to frequently. In doing so, Amis reveals an uncharacteristic uncertainty. Or, to put it another way, he doesn’t know what he’s saying. “In 1975 he wrote The Fight, an extended waffle on the Ali-Frazier match,” Amis writes in a piece included in The Moronic Inferno (1986). As anyone familiar with boxing history knows, there was not just one Ali-Frazer fight, and as anyone who’s actually read The Fight knows, Mailer covered Muhammad Ali’s fight with George Foreman. (Arthur Ashe makes the same mistake in A Hard Road to Glory.)

Amis also looks over the ring ropes to assess Mailer’s boxer poses. In The War against Cliché (2001), he judges an often-reproduced image taken in a boxing gym to be “the second worst photograph of Mailer ever published.” He says the worst picture decorated the back of Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967), and it’s hard to disagree with him there.

Still, Amis’s superficial and sometimes inaccurate glances at boxing lore led me to conclude the he had “no special interest in clashes where the Queensbury Rules apply,” as I phrase it in Fighters & Writers (where I also invoke Ali in an essay on Amis). But then – apropos of my comments on unlooked-for references to boxing – I found this in The Pregnant Widow (2010): “male disaffection was mere male sullenness, with its Queensbury rules….” It’s not much, granted, this suggestion that men (unlike women) have clearly regimented rituals for resolving disputes, and that the regulated violence of boxing is one of them, but it suggests that Amis may have picked something up from Hemingway and Mailer, who also linked boxing and masculinity.

Read Full Post »

Fighters & Writers is at the printer!

As I write this post, Fighters & Writers is at the printer. Here’s a bit of background on my forthcoming book.   

Fighters & Writers is neither a traditional sports book nor a conventional collection of literary essays. It blends literary criticism, journalism and memoir and considers both the lively body of literature directly related to boxing and the ways the sport relates to writers not usually identified with it.

Essays in Fighters & Writers discuss works about boxing by authors such as Albert Camus, W.C. Heinz, A.J. Liebling, Norman Mailer, Joyce Carol Oates, George Plimpton, Philip Roth, New Yorker editor David Remnick, Darin Strauss and José Torres – a boxing champion who became a writer – as well as the cultural impact made by boxers like Muhammad Ali, Max Baer, James Braddock, George Foreman, Joe Frazier, Larry Holmes, Joe Louis and Mike Tyson. Rodwan also considers the sport in connection with figures such as Martin Amis, Christopher Hitchens, John McCain, Ian McEwan, George Orwell, Henry Rollins and Oscar Wilde.

The title essay surveys a selection of the mammoth body of literature involving boxing in addition to writing on closely related topics such as confidence games. “The Ali Act” considers writers’ undiminished interest in one extraordinary boxer. “The Fighting Life” looks at two prominent writers’ use of boxing in their fiction. “A First-Class Sport” assesses boxing’s frequently overlooked positive aspects by examining the memoirs and autobiographies of several boxing enthusiasts, including a former heavyweight champion, a well-known trainer and television analyst, and prominent public figures including a former president and a U.S. senator. Other pieces in the collection explore how boxing inserts itself in writers’ imaginations even when they write about other subjects. Essays on diverse topics such as book dedications, Orwell’s Spanish Civil War memories, digressions, tattoos and weight loss reveal the close, if not always recognized, connections between fighters and writers.

Carlo Rotella, author of Cut Time: An Education at the Fights, called Fighters & Writers “a spirited and far-ranging meditation on boxing that’s also a thoughtful inquiry into the relationship between the writer’s craft and the fighter’s.”

Read Full Post »