The variegated history of boxing reform is very likely as old as boxing itself. As I mentioned earlier, in the days of Pierce Egan’s Boxiana the Prize Ring was in fact outlawed in England—though the aristocracy, including the Prince Regent, regularly attended matches. Boxing has been intermittently illegal in various parts of the United States and campaigns are frequently launched to ban it altogether. Like abortion it seems to arouse deep and divisive emotions. (Though activists who would outlaw abortion are not necessarily those who would outlaw boxing: puritanical instincts take unpredictable forms.) The relationship between boxing and poverty is acknowledged, but no one suggests that poverty be abolished as the most practical means of abolishing boxing. So frequently do young boxers claim they are in greater danger on the street than in the ring that one has to assume they are not exaggerating for the sake of credulous white reporters.
It is objected too that boxing as a sport is closely bound up with organized crime. Investigations on the federal and state level, over the decades, but most prominently in the fifties, have made the connection unmistakable, though the situation at any time is problematic. One wonders about “suspicious” decisions—are they fixed, or simply the consequence of judges’ prejudices? As in Michael Spinks’s second, highly controversial win over Larry Holmes, for instance; and the Wilfredo Gomez-Rocky Lockridge match of May 1985 (when judges gave a world junior-lightweight title to a Puerto Rican hometown favorite). And recent televised performances by former Olympic Gold Medalists and their handpicked opponents have struck the eye of more than one observer as not entirely convincing…
Not long ago I saw a film of a long-forgotten fixed fight of Willie Pep’s in which Pep allowed himself to be overcome by an underdog opponent: the great featherweight performed as a boxer-turned-actor might be expected to perform, with no excess of zeal or talent. It occurred to me that boxing is so refined, yet so raw a sport that no match can be successfully thrown; the senses simply pick up on what is not happening, what is being held back, as a sort of ironic subtext to what is actually taking place. You can run but you can’t hide.
Not boxing in itself but the money surrounding it, the gambling in Las Vegas, Atlantic City, and elsewhere, is the problem, and a problem not likely to be solved. I have made an attempt to read the 135-page single-spaced document “Organized Crime in Boxing: Final Boxing Report of the State of New Jersey Commission of Investigation” of December 1985 and have come to the conclusion that the Commission, which has moved to abolish boxing in New Jersey, was wrongheaded in its initial approach: it should have been investigating organized crime in New Jersey, in which Atlantic City boxing/gambling figures. That the Commission would vote to abolish boxing altogether because of criminal connections suggests a naïveté shading into sheer vindictiveness: one would then be required to abolish funeral parlors, pizzerias, trucking firms, some labor unions. And if gamblers can’t gamble on boxing they will simply gamble on football, basketball, baseball—as they already do.
Since boxing has become a multimillion-dollar business under the aegis of a few canny promoters—the most visible being Don King—it is not likely that it will be abolished, in any case. It would simply be driven underground, like abortion; or exiled to Mexico, Cuba, Canada, England, Ireland, Zaire…Boxing’s history is one of such exigencies, fascinating for what they suggest of the compulsion of some men to fight and of others to be witnesses.
The 1896 heavyweight title match between Ruby Robert Fitzsimmons and Peter Maher, for instance, was outlawed everywhere in the States, so promoters staged it on an isolated sandbar in the Rio Grande River, four hundred miles from El Paso. (Can one imagine?—three hundred men made the arduous journey to witness what was surely one of the most disappointing title bouts in boxing history when Fitzsimmons knocked out Maher in ninety-five seconds.) During Jack Dempsey’s prime in the 1920s boxing was outlawed in a number of states, like alcohol, and, like alcohol, seems to have aroused a hysterical public enthusiasm. Dempsey’s notorious five minutes with the giant Argentinian Firpo was attended by eighty-five thousand people—most of whom could barely have seen the ring, let alone the boxers; both Dempsey’s fights with Gene Tunney were attended by over a hundred thousand people—the first fought in a downpour during which rain fell in “blinding sheets” for forty minutes on both boxers and onlookers alike. Photographs of these events show jammed arenas with boxing rings like postage-sized altars at their centers, the boxers themselves no more than tiny, heraldic figures. To attend a Dempsey match was not to have seen a Dempsey match, but perhaps that was not the issue.
When Jack Johnson won the heavyweight title in 1908 he had to pursue the white champion Tommy Burns all the way to Australia to confront him. The “danger” of boxing at that time—and one of the reasons worried citizens wanted to abolish it—was that it might expose and humiliate white men in the ring. After Johnson’s decisive victory over the White Hope contender Jim Jeffries there were in fact race riots and lynchings throughout the United States; even films of some of Johnson’s fights were outlawed in many states. And because in recent decades boxing has become a sport in which black and Hispanic men have excelled it is particularly vulnerable to attack by white middle-class reformers (the AMA in particular) who show very little interest in lobbying against equally dangerous Establishment sports like football, auto racing, thoroughbred horse racing.
The late Nat Fleischer, boxing expert and founder of The Ring magazine, once estimated that tens of thousands of injuries have occurred in the ring since the start of modern boxing in the 1890s—by “modern” meaning the introduction of the rules of the Marquis of Queensberry requiring padded gloves, three-minute rounds, one minute’s rest between rounds, continuous fighting during rounds. (The bare-knuckle era, despite its popular reputation for brutality, was far less dangerous for fighters—fists break more readily than heads.) Between 1945 and 1985 at least three hundred seventy boxers have died in the United States of injuries directly attributed to boxing. In addition to the infamous Griffith-Paret fight there have been a number of others given wide publicity: Sugar Ray Robinson killed a young boxer named Jimmy Doyle in 1947, for instance, while defending his welterweight title; Sugar Ramos won the featherweight title in 1963 by knocking out the champion Davey Moore, who never regained consciousness; Ray Mancini killed the South Korean Duk Koo-Kim in 1982; former featherweight champion Barry McGuigan killed the Nigerian “Young Ali” in 1983. After the death of Duk Koo-Kim the World Boxing Council shortened title bouts to twelve rounds. (The World Boxing Association retains fifteen. In the era of marathon fights, however—1892 to 1915—men often fought as many as one hundred rounds; the record is one hundred ten, in 1893, over a stupefying seven-hour period. The last scheduled forty-five-round championship fight was between the black title-holder Jack Johnson and his White Hope successor Willard in 1915: the match went twenty-six rounds beneath a blazing sun in Havana, Cuba, before Johnson collapsed.)
To say that the rate of death and injury in the ring is not extraordinary set beside the rates of other sports is to misread the nature of the criticism brought to bear against boxing (and not against other sports). Clearly, boxing’s very image is repulsive to many people because it cannot be assimilated into what we wish to know about civilized man. In a technological society possessed of incalculably refined methods of mass destruction (consider how many times over both the United States and the Soviet Union have vaporized each other in fantasy) boxing’s display of direct and unmitigated and seemingly natural aggression is too explicit to be tolerated.
Which returns us to the paradox of boxing: its obsessive appeal for many who find in it not only a spectacle involving sensational feats of physical skill but an emotional experience impossible to convey in words; an art form, as I’ve suggested, with no natural analogue in the arts. Of course it is primitive, too, as birth, death, and erotic love might be said to be primitive, and forces our reluctant acknowledgment that the most profound experiences of our lives are physical event
s—though we believe ourselves to be, and surely are, essentially spiritual beings.
I ain’t never liked violence.
—SUGAR RAY ROBINSON,
former welterweight and middleweight champion of the world
To the untrained eye most boxing matches appear not merely savage but mad. As the eye becomes trained, however, the spectator begins to see the complex patterns that underlie the “madness”; what seems to be merely confusing action is understood to be coherent and intelligent, frequently inspired. Even the spectator who dislikes violence in principle can come to admire highly skillful boxing—to admire it beyond all “sane” proportions. A brilliant boxing match, quicksilver in its motions, transpiring far more rapidly than the mind can absorb, can have the power that Emily Dickinson attributed to great poetry: you know it’s great when it takes the top of your head off. (The physical imagery Dickinson employs is peculiarly apt in this context.)
This early impression—that boxing is “mad,” or mimics the actions of madness—seems to me no less valid, however, for being, by degrees, substantially modified. It is never erased, never entirely forgotten or overcome; it simply sinks beneath the threshold of consciousness, as the most terrifying and heartrending of our lives’ experiences sink beneath the level of consciousness by way of familiarity or deliberate suppression. So one knows, but does not (consciously) know, certain intransigent facts about the human condition. One does not (consciously) know, but one knows. All boxing fans, however accustomed to the sport, however many decades have been invested in their obsession, know that boxing is sheerly madness, for all its occasional beauty. That knowledge is our common bond and sometimes—dare it be uttered?—our common shame.
To watch boxing closely, and seriously, is to risk moments of what might be called animal panic—a sense not only that something very ugly is happening but that, by watching it, one is an accomplice. This awareness, or revelation, or weakness, or hairline split in one’s cuticle of a self can come at any instant, unanticipated and unbidden; though of course it tends to sweep over the viewer when he is watching a really violent match. I feel it as vertigo—breathlessness—a repugnance beyond language: a sheerly physical loathing. That it is also, or even primarily, self-loathing goes without saying.
For boxing really isn’t metaphor, it is the thing in itself. And my predilection for watching matches on tape, when the outcomes are known, doesn’t alter the fact that, as the matches occurred, they occurred in the present tense, and for one time only. The rest is subterfuge—the intellectual’s uneasy “control” of his material.
Impossible to see the old, early fights of Dempsey’s and not to feel this frisson of dread, despite the poor quality of the films, the somewhat antic rhythms of the human figures. Or, I would guess, the trilogy of Zale-Graziano fights about which people speak in awe forty years later. For one man of my acquaintance it was a fight of Joe Louis’s, against a long-forgotten opponent. For another, one of the “great” dirty matches of Willie Pep and Sandy Saddler—“little white perfection / and death in red plaid trunks” as the poet Philip Levine has written of that infamous duo. There was Duk Koo-Kim, there was Johnny Owen, in an earlier decade luckless Benny Paret, trapped in the ropes as referee Ruby Goldstein stood frozen, unable to interfere—
And Paret? Paret died on his feet. As he took those eighteen punches something happened to everyone who was in psychic range of the event. Some part of his death reached out to us. One felt it hover in the air. He was still standing in the ropes, trapped as he had been before, he gave some little half-smile of regret, as if he were saying, “I didn’t know I was going to die just yet,” and then, his head leaning back but still erect, his death came to breathe about him. He began to pass away. He went down more slowly than any fighter had ever gone down, he went down like a large ship which turns on end and slides second by second into its grave. As he went down, the sound of Griffith’s punches echoed in the mind like a heavy ax in the distance chopping into a wet log.
(NORMAN MAILER, “Ten Thousand Words a Minute”)
For one friend of mine it was a bloody fight fought by the lightweight contender Bobby Chacon that filled him with horror—though, ironically, Chacon came back to win the match (as Chacon was once apt to do). For another friend, a fellow novelist, enamored of boxing since boyhood, it was the Hagler-Hearns fight of 1985—he was frightened by his own ecstatic participation in it.
At such times one thinks: What is happening? why are we here? what does this mean? can’t this be stopped? My terror at seeing Floyd Patterson battered into insensibility by Sonny Liston was not assuaged by my rational understanding that the event had taken place long ago and that, in fact, Patterson is in fine health at the present time, training an adopted son to box. (Liston of course has been dead for years—he died of a heroin overdose, aged thirty-eight, in “suspicious” circumstances.) More justified, perhaps, was my sickened sense that boxing is, simply, wrong, a mistake, an outlaw activity for some reason under the protectorate of the law, when, a few weeks ago in March 1986, I sat in the midst of a suddenly very quiet closed-circuit television audience in a suburban Trenton hall watching bantamweight Richie Sandoval as he lay flat and unmoving on his back…very likely dead of a savage beating the referee had not, for some reason, stopped in time. My conviction was that anything was preferable to boxing, anything was preferable to seeing another minute of it, for instance standing outside in the parking lot for the remainder of the evening and staring at the stained asphalt…
A friend who is a sportswriter was horrified by the same fight. In a letter he spoke of his intermittent disgust for the sport he has been watching most of his life, and writing about for years: “It’s all a bit like bad love—putting up with the pain, waiting for the sequel to the last good moment. And like bad love, there comes the point of being worn out, when the reward of the good moment doesn’t seem worth all the trouble…”
Yet we don’t give up on boxing, it isn’t that easy. Perhaps it’s like tasting blood. Or, more discreetly put, love commingled with hate is more powerful than love. Or hate.
The spectacle of human beings fighting each other for whatever reason, including, at certain well-publicized times, staggering sums of money, is enormously disturbing because it violates a taboo of our civilization. Many men and women, however they steel themselves, cannot watch a boxing match because they cannot allow themselves to see what it is they are seeing. One thinks helplessly, This can’t be happening, even as, and usually quite routinely, it is happening. In this way boxing as a public spectacle is akin to pornography: in each case the spectator is made a voyeur, distanced, yet presumably intimately involved, in an event that is not supposed to be happening as it is happening. The pornographic “drama,” though as fraudulent as professional wrestling, makes a claim for being about something absolutely serious, if not humanly profound: it is not so much about itself as about the violation of a taboo. That the taboo is spiritual rather than physical, or sexual—that our most valuable human experience, love, is being desecrated, parodied, mocked—is surely at the core of our culture’s fascination with pornography. In another culture, undefined by spiritual-emotional values, pornography could not exist, for who would pay to see it?
The obvious difference between boxing and pornography is that boxing, unlike pornography, is not theatrical. It is not, except in instances so rare as to be irrelevant, rehearsed or simulated. Its violation of the taboo against violence (“Thou shalt not kill” in its primordial form) is open, explicit, ritualized, and, as I’ve said, routine—which gives boxing its uncanny air. Unlike pornography (and professional wrestling) it is altogether real: the blood shed, the damage suffered, the pain (usually suppressed or sublimated) are unfeigned. Not for hemophobics, boxing is a sport in which blood becomes quickly irrelevant. The experienced viewer understands that a boxer’s bleeding face is probably the least of his worries, and may, in fact, mean nothing at all—one thinks of Rocky Marciano’s garishly bloodied but always tr
iumphant face, Marvin Hagler’s forehead streaming blood even as he outfought Thomas Hearns. The severely bleeding boxer and his seconds are anxious not about his cut face but about the possibility of the fight being stopped, which means a TKO victory for the opponent. Recall Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini in his second match with Livingstone Bramble, in which he desperately tried to wipe away with his gloves blood pouring from inch-long cuts in his eyelids: twenty-seven stitches were needed to sew up the cuts afterward. (Bramble, pragmatic like all boxers, naturally worked Mancini’s damaged eyes as frequently as he could. Of 674 blows struck by Bramble 255 struck him in the face.)