Joyce Carol Oates on “The Fighter” in NYRB

Joyce Carol Oates offers a sometimes-insightful review of The Fighter in the March 10, 2011, issue of The New York Review of Books. In it she balances valid criticism and praise for the actors but shows little regard for fight fans.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about the biopic, at least for viewers familiar with the real-life Micky Ward’s boxing career, is that it ends before his three action-packed bouts with Arturo Gatti. Oates invokes Shakespeare to suggest the dimension of the omission:

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 moving story, but why?

One obvious answer is that Ward lost his second and third fights with Gatti, which would deny the film its upbeat ending, but the rhetorical question still makes a legitimate point. As Oates observes, the trilogy made both fighters famous.

Oates also says Ward and Gatti are “enshrined in boxing history” as “boxers who fought heedlessly, desperately, with few defensive skills and much ‘heart,’ to please voracious and unforgiving boxing audiences with a taste for blood.” This seems unnecessarily insulting to the pair’s many admirers, who include people not usually deemed indifferent to boxers’ welfare, such as Senator John McCain, a sincere boxing reform advocate. In a conversation I write about in Fighters & Writers, McCain told me that the “magnificent display of courage” offered by Ward and Gatti represented one of the “uplifting things about boxing.” One needn’t have coarse, savage desires to respect fighters like Ward, as Oates contends.

Even so, Oates confirms the governing premise of my book when she says boxing is “bountiful to its gifted chroniclers.”

Read Full Post »

Pardon Jack Johnson!

In early February, when I recommended several biographies of boxers for reading during Black History Month, I also urged renewal of the effort to pardon Jack Johnson, who endured the injustice and indignity of exile and prison for what essentially were private matters. So I was pleased to see the news that Senator John McCain and Representative Peter King, resolute backers of a pardon, plan to reintroduce a resolution to absolve Johnson of his absurd Mann Act conviction. Presented with a second chance to do the long-overdue right thing, President Obama should sign the bill.

Read Full Post »

Boxing & Black History

Boxing history affords many fascinating ways to consider twentieth-century American history, including the evolution of attitudes about race, numerous boxers’ indirect and direct challenges to racist structures, and, of course, many remarkable achievements against the odds.

In acknowledgement of Black History Month, here are several recommendations of books about boxers and much, much more.

Jack Johnson, the first black heavyweight champion and a defiant disregarder of racial stereotypes, is the subject of at least two exceptional biographies, Papa Jack by Randy Roberts and Unforgivable Blackness by Geoffrey C. Ward. (I relied on both of these, among other sources, when readying my presentation at the 100^th anniversary commemoration of Johnson’s 1910 fight with Jim Jeffries, which appears in the fall 2010 edition of The Nevada Review.) By the way, this month would be a great time to renew the call for a posthumous pardon for Johnson, who suffered a patently unjust 1913 conviction for violating the so-called White Slave Traffic Act (a.k.a. the Mann Act). Senator John McCain unsuccessfully pushed multiple times for such a pardon, which should be granted before the centennial of this miscarriage of justice arrives.

Thirty years after his death, it’s hard to imagine a boxer having the social impact that Joe Louis did. During his climb up the heavyweight ranks and his long, record-breaking (and still record-holding) reign as champion (1937-1949), he inspired pride in millions of people. His defeat of Max Schmeling, a boxer popularly associated with the Nazis, soon before World War II (in which Louis served as a soldier) became an event of profound national and international importance. David Margolick offers an exhaustive account of Louis’s two fights with Schmeling in Beyond Glory. Chris Mead and Roberts, among others, penned solid biographies of Louis. (I write at length about these and other books about Louis in an essay disseminated by Americana: The Institute for the Study of American Popular Culture.)

Sugar Ray Robinson, who like Louis grew up in Detroit, garnered much admiration for his style both in and out of the ring during the 1940s and 1950s, when he won titles as both a welterweight and a middleweight. In Sweet Thunder, Wil Haygood looks at Robinson’s life, along with the lives of peers such as trumpeter Miles Davis, poet Langston Hughes and singer Lena Horne. Looking back on the 1940s, Davis notes in his autobiography that “Joe Louis had been heavyweight champion of the world for a long time by then, and he was every black person’s hero – and a lot of white people’s, too. Sugar Ray Robinson wasn’t far behind him in popularity.” The jazz giant takes these boxers’ eminence as indication that “things were beginning to happen for black people in this country.”

Though usually regarded as an anti-hero rather than a hero, Charles “Sonny” Liston, the mob-backed devastating puncher who preceded then-Cassius Clay on the heavyweight throne, has a story worth telling, and Nick Tosches tells it in colorful fashion in The Devil and Sonny Liston. (Looks like this one is out of print, but it’s worth seeking out.)

I’ve heard it said that more has been written about Abraham Lincoln than any other president, and I would not be surprised if Muhammad Ali generated more ink than any other boxer. This makes it difficult to name just a few worthy books, but The Muhammad Ali Reader, edited by Gerald Early, gives a good sampling of numerous authors’ take on the man and his significance, and Thomas Hauser’s Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times remains the unbeaten biography.

Of course, many more boxers and many more books deserve attention, this month and year round. In the list of sources in the back of Fighters & Writers, I name more essential works of literature and history.

Read Full Post »

No Neutral Corner in LA

No Neutral Corner – a documentary my wife and I made about the business of boxing – has been accepted into the 2010 All Sports Los Angeles Film Festival.

Professional boxing is a job, and the movie looks at the sport as a form of work. The problems plaguing boxing are legion. They range from the obvious (and not-so-obvious) health hazards to corruption and organizational chaos. But there’s little agreement on how to solve them (hence the title No Neutral Corner). At the same time, however, there are several ongoing efforts to improve the situation. The documentary doesn’t dwell only on the negatives. Numerous people in the boxing world – including current and former professional boxers, writers and broadcasters, lawmakers and doctors – have faced the challenges of reforming the sport. (Essays in Fighters & Writers to varying degrees grew out of research I conducted while working on the movie.)

Over the course of 13 “rounds” (corresponding to the 12 rounds of a championship bout, plus one “round” about life after boxing), No Neutral Corner explores various moves to improve boxers’ working conditions. Shot in New York, New Jersey, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Washington, DC, the documentary features footage from professional boxing matches, boxing gyms, and a weigh-in preceding a major championship bout as well as from interviews with dozens of well-know individuals, including former heavyweight champion Larry Holmes, U.S. Senator John McCain, on-air boxing analysts and commentators Steve Farhood, Teddy Atlas and Max Kellerman, and writer Thomas Hauser.

The All Sports Los Angeles Film Festival promotes the art of filmmaking in the world of sports and competition. Its jury and judges include people from both the film and sporting industries. The festival’s selected documentaries, feature films and shorts will be screened at Raleigh Studios in Hollywood on July 10 and 11.

No Neutral Corner, a Rodwan Productions film, also won the Las Vegas Film Festival’s Silver Ace Award.

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 »