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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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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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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Fact-Check: The NY Times on Tyson

Perhaps when The New York Times makes the rare boxing-story assignment, it should select a journalist who knows something about the sport, or at least doesn’t display ignorance of it as a badge of honor.

In “The Suburbanization of Mike Tyson,” a Sunday magazine article posted online on March 15, Daphne Merkin writes, “I have never been particularly drawn to boxing, but there was something about the younger Mike Tyson….”

Knowing a bit more of boxing than only the former heavyweight champion’s ability to attract attention would have almost certainly kept Merkin from claiming Tyson showed her “photographs from the glory days in which he is posing with other boxers (Ali, Rocky Marciano, Jake LaMotta)…” I’d never submitted a comment to the Times website before, but I did remark (somewhat sarcastically) that since Marciano died when Tyson was three years old, it was unlikely that the two ever posed together. The paper subsequently posted the following correction: “An earlier version of this article misidentified a boxer with whom Mike Tyson posed for photographs; it was Rocky Graziano, not Rocky Marciano.” The paper fixed the online text accordingly.

Granted, the two fighters had similar nicknames and a journalist on deadline could have made a simple slip up. Still, a Times editor (like the one whose name is tacked onto Merkin’s article), fact-checker, proofreader – someone! – should have noticed this before I did.

If only the newspaper saw fit to report on the sport on a regular basis…

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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.

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Why Boxing?

When people inclined to share my enthusiasm for soul-sustaining arts like literature and music learn that I’ve written a book partially about boxing, they often ask how I became interested in the sport. (To date, no one has wondered aloud in my presence why I care about the post-ampersand part of the title Fighters & Writers. I don’t know if this means reasons for an interest in books are self-apparent or if reading is simply safe and uncontroversial.) The implied question seems to be: What’s a cultivated, educated individual doing mucking around with something like that? Certainly there are plenty of literary types who share my enthusiasm. I write about many of them in my essays. Yet a lot of people seem to require an explanation.

To some extent, this might have to do with a snobbish attitude toward sports in general. Sports invite dismissal by serious types. Plenty of reasons for righteous condemnation present themselves: they’re dangerous, they bring out the worst aspects of human nature in both participants and spectators, they’ve morphed from wholesome exercise into perverse industry, games waste time, and they ain’t what they used to be.

Boxing especially excites its critics. Amplify the common objections to sports and boxing haters will want to turn up the volume louder still.

Danger? In boxing, fit individuals aim to render opponents unconscious. Injury and death obviously ensue. How can punching at people’s vital organs and making their brains bounce about in their skulls be a good idea? With dispiriting regularity, boxers die after bouts. News of their deaths sparks fleeting outrage among the civilized set, who cannot fathom how society can condone such atavism, and rote calls for reform from those who either don’t wish to see the sport go away or know it never will.

As if the physical damage were not enough, what about the ugliness boxing brings out in people? George Orwell, in a 1945 Tribune column titled “The Sporting Spirit,” objected to sports generally and to boxing in particular for precisely this reason. When games cease to be about fun and fitness and start to shoulder symbolism, things go straight to hell: “as soon as the question of prestige arises, as soon as you feel that you and some larger unit will be disgraced if you lose, the most savage combative instincts are aroused.” Orwell worries especially about athletes becoming national representatives.

At the international level sport is frankly mimic warfare. But the significant thing is not the behaviour of the players but the attitude of the spectators: and, behind the spectators, of the nations who work themselves into furies over these absurd contests, and seriously believe – at any rate for short periods – that running, jumping and kicking a ball are tests of national virtue.

While Orwell frets about football (i.e. soccer) and cricket as well as the Olympics enflaming vicious patriotic passions, he dislikes boxing because race hatred rears up among those seated around the ring. “One of the most horrible sights in the world is a fight between white and coloured boxers before a mixed audience.” He said that in the mid-1940s, and while I’d like to think racism has dissipated somewhat in subsequent decades, fight fans continue to assign some sort of meaning to the color of the skin boxers expose while fighting. When boxers from different countries fight, nationalist fervor invariably intrudes. It even factors into the promotion of events, with bouts pitched explicitly pitched as battles between boxers’ homelands. When Bernard Hopkins threw the Puerto Rican flag on the ground before fighting Felix Trinidad in 2001, he might not have been expressing his feelings about the place so much as trying to get its loyal fight fans to buy tickets. While Don King may have had custom made a characteristically understated jacket featuring a sequined American flag on the back, on fight night he would not be without flags of other nations ready to wave if a boxer from elsewhere were fighting, especially if he won and King wanted to sign him to a promotional contract. I’ve been at fights where it was immediately evident that the loudest shouters (1) didn’t know what they were talking about when it came to boxing itself and (2) based their preferences entirely on criteria not related to athletic ability. Put another way, countless idiots root for who they root for mainly or exclusively for racial or nationalistic reasons.

It’s easy enough to argue that the costs of sports are unjustifiably high. I’ve sat in ringside seats as a correspondent that I never would have been anywhere near if I’d had to pay for a ticket. The prices for fights at major venues can be outrageous. While I don’t think other sports routinely have four-figure prices for the best views, I certainly have heard people complain about how much money it takes to attend an event. Even viewing at home can be ridiculously expensive, whether it means paying fifty dollars or more for a pay-per-view bout or just paying the monthly bill for the multitude of television stations that broadcast sports. And all that time people spend watching TV is time not doing … something.

Besides, boxing, like all sports, was better in the past. Sure, there are good boxers nowadays – always have been, always will be – but they can’t compare to the real greats. Wladimir and Vitali Klitschko? Sure, they’ve got some skills and, between them, won the major sanctioning bodies’ heavyweight champion belts. But they can’t compare with [insert preferred boxing great from earlier era here].

I wouldn’t dispute a single one of these charges. Of course boxing is dangerous. I’ve questioned what I was doing by deliberately witnessing an activity that ended with participants carried out on stretchers. Yes, boxing can bring out ugliness and stupidity in those who base their allegiances on blood and land. I’m fully aware of and utterly disgusted by exploitative practices rife in the business of boxing and despair that the worst predators enrich themselves at the expense of both fighters and paying fans. As far as talk of a Golden Age, or at least a better time, goes, I’ll admit that while I’ve interviewed heavyweight title-holders like Chris Byrd and John Ruiz, I don’t delude myself that this can compare with interviewing, say, Muhammad Ali in the 1960s or 1970s or Joe Louis in the 1930s or 1940s. I’ve viewed the Rumble in the Jungle and the Thrilla in Manila multiple times, but can’t say I’ve ever seen a bout featuring either Klitschko brother that I’d want to sit through again.

So, why boxing? The answer should already be apparent. Put crudely, as something to write about, boxing can’t be beat. As a dangerous, disreputable and dirty endeavor, but also as a demanding, difficult and inherently dramatic activity, it couldn’t be more intriguing to anyone interesting in examining what it means to be human. That fighters risk their lives is no reason to turn away from it. Indeed, their willingness to do so warrants close attention. There’s much about boxing to which sensible, sensitive folks can object. As Orwell knew, this can be done in writing. The characteristics associated with successful promoters – unscrupulousness, double-dealing, disloyalty, “trickeration” – are the stuff that schemes are made of, and they reward scrutiny. Action occurs in the ring, but what happens behind the scenes is another story, or, rather, a never-dry well of stories.

There’s also much to respect – about boxing and especially about boxers. The qualities that define accomplished boxers – determination, dedication, tenacity, “heart” – should never be discounted and cannot be discredited. Boxing, as fight fans habitually have to explain, is not about brutes brawling (though some of the partisans mentioned above might wish it were). It entails technique honed through training. Despite what looks like the elemental simplicity of nearly naked people hitting each other, boxing involves much strategy and thought as well as character and skill. This is no small stuff.

Saddling athletes with more symbolism than anybody can reasonably be expected to bear is a boxing tradition. It may be absurd to take any single person’s punching power or defensive abilities as indicative of the virtue of a race or a nation, but this happens, and when it does it reveals something, perhaps about the boxer, but definitely about the attitudes of those who take him (or her) to be a representative figure.

While boxing has produced countless remarkable individuals of indisputable talent, frequently in combination with great charisma, it has also had moments when the top man in the heaviest weight division fails to inspire. After Jack Johnson comes Jess Willard. After Mike Tyson, Buster Douglas. But even the boxers who never transcend the sport or who never make best-of-all-times lists, do something few people have the guts to do: they test themselves, in public, at the risk of humiliation and physical damage. I can’t help but admire that sort of courage, and all that makes boxing smell disreputable to many people only makes the fighters themselves that much more noble.

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Athos, Porthos and…Ali?

What insight into boxing does The Three Musketeers offer? Well, consider this scene from the Alexandre Dumas novel (as translated by Richard Pevear): D’Artagnan heads to a scheduled duel with Athos – the first of three duels arranged (but not held) with each of the musketeers – worrying that he will not benefit no matter what the outcome. He fears 

that the result of the duel would be what is always the most regrettable result in an affair of this kind, when a young and vigorous man fights against a wounded and weakened adversary: vanquished, he doubles the triumphs of his antagonist; victorious, he is accused of treachery and easy audacity.

Affairs of this kind happen all the time in boxing, and boxers confronting well known but well worn opponents face the same dilemma. I witnessed Larry Donald’s unanimous-decision win over Evander Holyfield at Madison Square Garden in 2004, for example, and tended to agree with the New York State Athletic Commission’s decision afterward that Holyfield shouldn’t be fighting anymore. (He didn’t stop after that, of course.) Donald didn’t emerge looking like the next great champion by beating the former champion long after his prime, but if he had lost… What did Trevor Berbick prove by vanquishing Muhammad Ali in 1981? And what did Larry Holmes accomplish by beating Ali one year earlier?

Dumas may have been writing about swordfights, but when I read that passage I thought about prizefights and the pathos of the aging warrior.

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Still More Mailer

Norman Mailer is by no means the writer I write about most frequently. He makes just part of a large crowd of authors who people their novels with boxers and fuel their nonfiction with fights.

But I can’t deny that I have found much to say about his work. The index to Fighters & Writers lists many writers – more of them than boxers, I’d bet – but there admittedly are quite a few page numbers after Mailer’s name. He even rivals Muhammad Ali in the number of mentions, though the two are often discussed in conjunction.

 As it turns out, Fighters & Writers doesn’t contain all my musings to date on the function of boxing in Mailer’s work. Open Letters Monthly: An Anthology, 2007 – 2010 appeared in print at almost exactly the same time as Fighters & Writers. The “best of” collection from the art and literature review’s first three years includes “Mailer’s Victory,” a survey of the sport’s impact on the writer’s attitude and “moral code” as expressed in multiple books.

I consider ”Mailer’s Victory” a companion piece to “The Fighting Life,” an essay in Fighters & Writers that examines Mailer’s use of boxing in his fiction and compares it with Philip Roth’s use of it in novels including The Human Stain and Exit Ghost.

(The anthology’s cover contains “praise for Open Letters Monthly” including a line – “Astute and meticulous” – that The Millions applied to a particular essay of mine on another novelist, but I don’t mind. Why would I?)

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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.

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