On Boxing

  Cassius Clay / Muhammad Ali, that most controversial of champions, was primarily a brilliant ring strategist, a prodigy in his youth whose fast hands and feet made him virtually impossible for opponents to hit. What joy in the young Ali: in the inimitable arrogance of a heavyweight who danced about his puzzled opponents with his gloves at waist level, inviting them to hit him—to try it. (What joy, at any rate, in the Ali of films and tapes, even if in somber juxtaposition to the Ali of the present time, overweight, even puffy, his speech and reactions slowed by Parkinson’s disease.) It was the young boxer’s style when confronted with a “deadly” puncher like Sonny Liston to simply out-think and -maneuver him: never before, and never since, has a heavyweight performed in the ring with such style—an inimitable combination of intelligence, wit, grace, irreverence, cunning. So dazzlingly talented was Ali in his youth that it wasn’t clear whether in fact he had what boxers call “heart”—the ability to keep fighting when one has been hurt. In later years, when Ali’s speed was diminished, a new and more complex, one might say a greater, boxer emerged, as in the trilogy of fights with Joe Frazier, the first of which Ali lost.

  Sugar Ray Leonard, the most charismatic of post-Ali boxers, cultivated a ring style that was a quicksilver balance of opposites, with an overlay of street-wise, playful arrogance (reminiscent, indeed, of Ali), and, for all Leonard’s talent, it was only in his most arduous matches (with Hearns and Durán) that it became clear how intelligently ferocious a boxer he really was. Losing once to Durán, he could not lose a second time: his pride would not allow it. Just as pride would not allow Leonard to continue boxing when he suspected he had passed his peak. (Though at the time of this writing Leonard has publicly declared that he wants to return for one major match: he is the only man who knows how to beat Marvin Hagler. A matter of ego, Leonard says, as if we needed to be told.)

  The self in society, the self in the ring. But there are many selves and there are of course many boxers—ranging from the shy, introverted, painfully inarticulate Johnny Owen (the Welsh bantamweight who died after a bout with Lupe Pintor in 1979) to the frequently manic Muhammad Ali in his prime (Ali whom Norman Mailer compared to a six-foot parrot who keeps screaming at you that he is the center of the stage: “Come here and get me, fool. You can’t, ’cause you don’t know who I am”); from the legendary bluster of John L. Sullivan to the relative modesty of Rocky Marciano and Floyd Patterson. (Patterson, the youngest man to win the heavyweight title, is said to have been a non-violent person who once helped an opponent pick up his mouthpiece from the canvas. “I don’t like to see blood,” Patterson explained. “It’s different when I bleed, that doesn’t bother me because I can’t see it.” He was no match physically or otherwise for the next heavyweight champion, Sonny Liston.) For every boxer with the reputation of a Roberto Durán there are surely a dozen who are simply “nice guys”—Ray Mancini, Milton McCory, Mark Breland, Gene Hatcher, among many others. Before he lost decisive matches and began the downward trajectory of his career the young Chicago middleweight John Collins was frequently promoted as a veritable split personality, a “Dr. Jekyll / Mr. Hyde” of the ring: the essential (and surely disingenuous) question being, How can a nice courteous young man like you turn so vicious in the ring? Collins’s answer was straightforward enough: “When I’m in the ring I’m fighting for my life.”

  It might be theorized that fighting activates in certain people not only an adrenaline rush of exquisite pleasure but an atavistic self that, coupled with an instinctive sort of tissue-intelligence, a neurological swiftness unknown to “average” men and women, makes for the born fighter, the potentially great champion, the unmistakably gifted boxer. An outlaw or non-law self, given the showy accolade “killer instinct.” (Though to speak of instinct is always to speak vaguely: for how can “instinct” be isolated from the confluence of factors—health, economic class, familial relations, sheer good or bad luck—that determine a life?) You know the boxer with the killer instinct when the crowd jumps to its feet in a ground swell of delirium in response to his assault against his opponent, no matter if the opponent is the favorite, a “nice guy” no one really wants to see seriously injured.

  There is an instinct in our species to fight but is there an instinct to kill? And would a “born” killer have the discipline, let alone the moral integrity, to subordinate himself to boxing’s rigors in order to exercise it? Surely there are easier ways: we read about them in the daily newspaper. That the fighter, like the crowd he embodies, responds excitedly to the sight of blood—“first blood” being a term from the days of the English Prize Ring—goes without saying; but there are often fight fans shouting for a match to be stopped at the very zenith of the action. My sense of the boxing crowd in a large arena like Madison Square Garden is that it resembles a massive wave containing counter-waves, counter-currents, isolated but bold voices that resist the greater motion toward ecstatic violence. These dissenters are severely critical of referees who allow fights to go on too long.

  (I seem to recall my father urging a fight to be stopped: “It’s over! It’s over! What’s the point!” Was it Marciano battering an opponent into submission, or Carmen Basilio? Kid Gavilan? A long time ago, and in our home, the bloody match broadcast over television, hence sanitized. One cannot really imagine the impact of blows on another man’s head and body by way of the television screen in its eerily flattened dimensions…)

  Granted these points, it is nonetheless true that the boxer who functions as a conduit through which the inchoate aggressions of the crowd are consummated will be a very popular boxer indeed. Not the conscientious “boxing” matches but the cheek-by-jowl brawls are likely to be warmly recalled in boxing legend: Dempsey-Firpo, Louis-Schmeling II, Zale-Graziano, Robinson-LaMotta, Pep-Saddler, Marciano-Charles, Ali-Frazier, most recently Hagler-Hearns. Sonny Liston occupies a position sui generis for the very truculence of his boxing persona—the air of unsmiling menace he presented to the Negro no less than the white world. (Liston was arrested nineteen times and served two prison terms, the second term for armed robbery.) It may be that former champion Larry Holmes saw himself in this role, the black man’s black man empowered by sheer bitterness to give hurt where hurt is due. And, for a while, the Rastafarian Livingstone Bramble, whose vendetta with Ray Mancini seems to have sprung from an unmotivated ill will.

  The only self-confessed murderer of boxing distinction seems to have been the welterweight champion Don Jordan (1958-60) who claimed to have been a hired assassin as a boy in his native Dominican Republic. “What’s wrong with killing a human?” Jordan asked rhetorically in an interview. “The first time you kill someone, you throw up, you get sick as a dog…The second time, no feeling.” According to his testimony Jordan killed or helped to kill more than thirty men in the Dominican Republic, without being caught. (He seems in fact to have been in the hire of the government.) After Jordan and his family moved to California he killed a man for “personal” reasons, for which crime he was sent to reform school, aged fourteen: “I burned a man like an animal…I staked him to the ground. I wired his hands and his arms, and I put paper around him and I burnt him like an animal. They said, ‘You are mentally sick.’” In reform school Jordan was taught how to box: entered the Golden Gloves tournament and won all his matches, and eventually competed in the Olympics, where he did less well. Under the aegis of the Cosa Nostra he turned professional and his career, though meteoric, was short-lived.

  In Jake LaMotta’s autobiography Raging Bull LaMotta attributes his success as a boxer—he was middleweight champion briefly, 1949-51, but a popular fighter for many years—to the fact that he didn’t care whether he was killed in the ring. For eleven years he mistakenly believed he had murdered a man in a robbery, and, unconfessed, yet guilty, wanting to be punished, LaMotta threw himself into boxing as much to be hurt as to hurt. His background parallels Rocky Graziano’s—they were friends, as boys, in reform school—but his desperation was rather more intense than Graziano’s (whos
e autobiography is entitled Somebody Up There Likes Me: a most optimistic assumption). LaMotta said in an interview: “I would fight anybody. I didn’t care who they were. I even wanted to fight Joe Louis. I just didn’t care…But that made me win. It gave me an aggression my opponents never saw before. They would hit me. I didn’t care if I got hit.” When LaMotta eventually learned that his victim had not died, however, his zest for boxing waned, and his career began its abrupt decline. By way of LaMotta’s confession and the film based fragmentarily on it, Raging Bull, LaMotta has entered boxing folklore: he is the flashy gutter fighter whose integrity will allow him to throw only one fight (in an era in which fights were routinely thrown), done with such ironic disdain that the boxing commission suspends his license.

  Traditionally, boxing is credited with changing the lives of ghetto-born or otherwise impoverished youths. It is impossible to gauge how many boxers have in fact risen from such beginnings but one might guess it to be about 99 percent—even at the present time. (Muhammad Ali is said to have been an exception in that his background was not one of desperate poverty: which helps to account, perhaps, for Ali’s early boundless confidence.) Where tennis lessons were offered in some youth centers in the Detroit area, many years ago, boxing lessons were offered in Joe Louis’s and Ray Robinson’s neighborhood—of course. To what purpose would poor black boys learn tennis? LaMotta, Graziano, Patterson, Liston, Hector Camacho, Mike Tyson—all learned to box in captivity, so to speak. (Liston, a more advanced criminal than the others, began taking boxing lessons while serving his second term for armed robbery in the Missouri State Penitentiary.) Boxing is the moral equivalent of war of which, in a radically different context, William James spoke, and it has the virtue—how American, this virtue!—of making a good deal of money for its practitioners and promoters, not all of whom are white.

  Indeed, one of the standard arguments for not abolishing boxing is in fact that it provides an outlet for the rage of disenfranchised youths, mainly black or Hispanic, who can make lives for themselves by way of fighting one another instead of fighting society.

  The disputable term “killer instinct” was coined in reference to Jack Dempsey in his prime: in his famous early matches with Jess Willard, Georges Carpentier, Luis Firpo (“The Wild Bull of the Pampas”), and other lesser known boxers whom he savagely and conclusively beat. Has there ever been a fighter quite like the young Dempsey?—the very embodiment, it seems, of hunger, rage, the will to do hurt; the spirit of the Western frontier come East to win his fortune. The crudest of nightmare figures, Dempsey is gradually refined into an American myth of comforting dimensions. The killer in the ring becomes the New York restaurateur, a business success, “the gentlest of men.”

  Dempsey was the ninth of eleven children born to an impoverished Mormon sharecropper and itinerant railroad worker in Colorado who soon left home, bummed his way around the mining camps and small towns of the West, began fighting for money when he was hardly more than a boy. It was said in awe of Dempsey that his very sparring partners were in danger of being seriously injured—Dempsey didn’t like to share the ring with anyone. If he remains the most spectacular (and most loved) champion in history it is partly because he fought when boxing rules were rather casual by our standards; when, for instance, a boxer was allowed to strike an opponent as he struggled to his feet—as in the bizarre Willard bout, and the yet more bizarre bout with Luis Firpo, set beside which present-day heavyweight matches like those of Holmes and Spinks are minuets. Where aggression has to be cultivated in some champion boxers (Tunney, for example) Dempsey’s aggression was direct and natural: in the ring, he seems to have wanted to kill his opponent. The swiftness of his attack, his disdain for strategies of defense, endeared him to greatly aroused crowds who had never seen anything quite like him before.

  (Dempsey’s first title fight, in 1919, against the aging champion Jess Willard, was called at the time “pugilistic murder” and would certainly be stopped in the first round—in the first thirty seconds of the first round—today. Badly out of condition, heavier than the twenty-four-year-old Dempsey by seventy pounds, the thirty-seven-year-old Willard put up virtually no defense against the challenger. Though films of the match show an astonishing resilient, if not foolhardy, Willard picking himself up off the canvas repeatedly as Dempsey knocks him down, by the end of the fight Willard’s jaw was broken, his cheekbone split, nose smashed, six teeth broken off at the gum, an eye was battered shut, much damage done to his lower body. Both boxers were covered in Willard’s blood. Years later Dempsey’s estranged manager Kearns confessed, perhaps fraudulently, that he had “loaded” Dempsey’s gloves—treated his hand tape with a talcum substance that turned hard as concrete when wet.)

  It was Dempsey’s ring style—swift, pitiless, always direct and percussive—that changed American boxing forever. Even Jack Johnson appears stately by contrast.

  So far as “killer instinct” is concerned Joe Louis was an anomaly, which no biography of his life—even the most recent, the meticulously researched Champion—Joe Louis, Black Hero in White America by Chris Mead—has ever quite explained. If, indeed, one can explain any of our motives, except in the most sweeping psychological and sociological terms. Louis was a modest and self-effacing man outside the ring, but, in the ring, a machine of sorts for hitting—so (apparently) emotionless that even sparring partners were spooked by him. “It’s the eyes,” one said. “They’re blank and staring, always watching you. That blank look—that’s what gets you down.” Unlike his notorious predecessor Jack Johnson and his yet more notorious successor Muhammad Ali, Joe Louis was forced to live his “blackness” in secret, if at all; to be a black hero in white America at the time of Louis’s coming-of-age cannot have been an easy task. Louis’s deadpan expression and his killer’s eyes were very likely aspects of the man’s strategy rather than reliable gauges of his psyche. And his descent into mental imbalance—paranoia, in particular—in his later years was surely a consequence of the pressures he endured, if not an outsized, but poetically valid, response to the very real scrutiny of others focused upon him for decades.

  One of the most controversial of boxing legends has to do with the death of Benny “Kid” Paret at the hands of Emile Griffith in a welterweight match in Madison Square Garden in 1962. According to the story Paret provoked Griffith at their weigh-in by calling him maricón (faggot), and was in effect killed by Griffith in the ring that night. Recalling the event years later Griffith said he was only following his trainer’s instructions—to hit Paret, to hurt Paret, to keep punching Paret until the referee made him stop. By which time, as it turned out, Paret was virtually dead. (He died about ten days later.)

  Though there are other boxing experts, present at the match, who insist that Paret’s death was accidental: it “just happened.”

  At the present time boxing matches are usually monitored by referees and ringside physicians with extreme caution: a recent match between welterweights Don Curry and James Green was stopped by the referee because Green, temporarily disabled, had lowered his gloves and might have been hit; a match between heavyweights Mike Weaver and Michael Dokes was stopped within two minutes of the first round, before the luckless Weaver had time to begin. With some exceptions—the Sandoval-Canizales and the Bramble-Crawley title fights come most immediately to mind—referees have been assuming ever greater authority in the ring so that it sometimes seems that the drama of boxing has begun to shift: not will X knock out his opponent, but will the referee stop the fight before he can do so. In the most violent fights the predominant image is that of the referee hovering at the periphery of the action, stepping in to embrace a weakened or defenseless man in a gesture of paternal solicitude. This image carries much emotional power—not so sensational as the killing blow but suggestive, perhaps, that the ethics of the ring have evolved to approximate the ethics of everyday life. It is as if, in mythical terms, brothers whose mysterious animosity has brought them to battle are saved—absolved of their warrio
rs’ enmity—by the wisdom of their father and protector. One came away from the eight-minute Hagler-Hearns fight with the vision of the dazed Hearns, on his feet but not fully conscious, saved by referee Richard Steele from what would have been serious injury, if not death—considering the extraordinary ferocity of Hagler’s fighting that night, and the personal rage he seems to have brought to it. (“This was war,” Hagler said.) The fight ends with Hearns in Steele’s embrace: tragedy narrowly averted.

  Of course there are many who disdain such developments. It’s the feminization of the sport, they say.

  I was never knocked out. I’ve been unconscious, but it’s always been on my feet.

  —FLOYD PATTERSON,

  former heavyweight champion of the world

  No American sport or activity has been so consistently and so passionately under attack as boxing, for “moral” as well as other reasons. And no American sport evokes so ambivalent a response in its defenders: when asked the familiar question “How can you watch…?” the boxing aficionado really has no answer. He can talk about boxing only with others like himself.

  In December 1984 the American Medical Association passed a resolution calling for the abolition of boxing on the principle that while other sports involve as much, or even more, risk to life and health—the most dangerous sports being football, auto racing, hang gliding, mountain climbing, and ice hockey, with boxing in about seventh place—boxing is the only sport in which the objective is to cause injury: the brain is the target, the knockout the goal. In one study it was estimated that 87 percent of boxers suffer some degree of brain damage in their lifetimes, no matter the relative success of their careers. And there is the risk of serious eye injury as well. Equally disturbing, though less plausible, is sociological evidence that media attention focused on boxing has an immediate effect upon the homicide rate of the country. (According to sociologists David P. Phillips and John E. Hensley, the rate rises by an average of 12 percent in the days following a highly publicized fight, for the hypothetical reason that the fight “heavily rewards one person for inflicting violence on another and is at the opposite end of a continuum from a successfully prosecuted murder trial, which heavily punishes one person for inflicting physical violence on another.”) Doubtful as these findings are in a culture in which television and movie violence has become routine fare, even for young children, it does seem likely that boxing as a phenomenon sui generis stimulates rather than resolves certain emotions. If boxing is akin to classic tragedy in its imitation of action and of life it cannot provide the katharsis of pity and terror of which Aristotle spoke.