And so may Ernest or “Papa”—or whatever he felt driven to call himself—rest in peace, a peace he hunted for through sixty-two years of arrogant self-doubt—for Christ’s sweet sake.
[September 1985]
White, Black, and Other Hopes
THE NEW YORK TIMES, that bulky, grey journal of moderation, could hardly wait for Joe Frazier’s butcher-boy arm to be raised in token of vindication victory over the ghost of Cassius Clay, the mythopoeic Muhammad Ali.
After fifteen rounds more closely contested than any “Fight of the Century” in the history of heavyweights under Queensberry rules, the Times had drawn from the phenomenon every possible advantage. A long and crisply reported Sunday Magazine piece. An entire page devoted to pictures of the event. A front-page action-photo and news story. Another full page in the sports section. Then, after all this printable pander, having extracted its last vendable ounce from the most highly publicized fight since Kid Cain flattened Young Abel, the Times retreated to nobility.
In a pious postmortem editorial it decried the fight, calling it “a performance that degrades and dehumanizes the state and society that encourage it.”
When one pauses to think of all the dehumanizing elements in our society, the Pentagon destruction of Asian hamlets, the defoliation of peasant rice-lands, the brutalization of our soldiery that leads them to slaughter old men, women, and children because, like the good Nazis before them, they thought they were carrying out the order of the day, when the Mafia breaks bread with the mayors and the city councilmen, when the state troopers and the National Guard gun down blacks, students, hippies, peace marchers, when great profits are gouged from ceaseless wars and army intelligence spends your money tailing liberal politicians, when the individual is fed like a helpless Charlie Chaplin into the giant maw of the computer, when the ghettos are allowed to fester while billions are squandered on inhuman devices, when corporate profits soar while rats feast on the toes of Puerto Rican children, when known killers and their patrons enjoy the company of film and nightclub celebrities at Caesar’s Palace and the Copa, when the American dream shatters into nightmare, when Tom Jefferson is cruelly transmogrified as George Wallace, and Abe Lincoln as Mayor Daley, when children in a dozen crippled cities stare up at a sky they cannot see and breathe something that once was air, should we not wonder if the good grey Times knows what is dehumanizing whom?
Against this cyclorama of social horrors, a boxing match engaging two finely trained athletes respecting rules of restraint that alas do not apply to Indochina, such a contest as was Frazier vs. Ali a.k.a. Clay should not drive us to despair but give us hope that individual skill, spirit, and courage have not been leveled by the glacier of future shock.
Yet the Times would have us believe that this Queensberry epic, this drama to rival the best theater New York had to offer last season, signals “the declining days of past civilizations.” Having sold its share of newsprint heralding “The Fight,” the bloodless Times moves on to its annual suggestion that professional boxing be outlawed.
This writer once wrote a novel called The Harder They Fall, considered, on what used to be known as Jacobs’ Beach (or Cauliflower Alley), the harshest put-down of boxing ever written in America. It exposed the deliberate exploitation of a manufactured champion, the chicanery, the greed, the casual disregard of fighters’ sensibilities and economic needs that is pugilism at its worst. But our interest was in the reform of boxing, not its execution. In the film, Bogey’s last, liberties were taken in the name of sensationalism posing as poetry: at the curtain Mr. Bogart, actually an odd amalgam of the late fight promoter Hal Conrad and myself, is pounding away at a typewriter that obliges with the conclusion: Boxing must be destroyed. I wrote an answer in Sports Illustrated attacking my own film for trifling with my convictions. Protect it, I said, don’t destroy it. I consider myself a reformer and a muckraker, yes, maybe even of the old school of Tarbell and Steffens and London when he wasn’t racisizing. But I know a good thing when I see it. Fistfighting is a good thing. It is like gold in that it is found in a nugget cluster of baser metals often buried in the mud. “The Game,” as Jack London called it sixty years ago, is full of baseness and immersed in filth. Every great fight is such a rare nugget, and one can only understand a choice encounter of champions if he sees it in this context of gold-rock-mud. To see only the mud, like the editorial preacher, is to stumble over and fail to discover the gold. To see only gold is to accept the worst with the best and to excuse the mendacity so commonplace in our society that we bring it home and lay it on and live with it like wallpaper.
But is the hoary Times really concerned with the immediate evils termiting the house we live in? Evils that are simply reflected in the world of boxing as they are in every other representative walk of American life? It is easy, self-righteous fun to cry, “Outlaw professional boxing!” Just as it was to howl, Outlaw booze! No accident that every time boxing has been outlawed it has persevered in some bootleg form. Like bath tub gin, in a more vicious, disorganized, and dehumanizing form.
If our civilization is indeed declining and if it finally falls, it will not be because Joe Louis clobbered Schmeling or took the measure of Billy Conn. Or because Ali made Bad Sonny Liston quit in his corner. Or because Joe Frazier landed a tremendous, humbling left hook on the controversial jaw of gallant braggadocio Muhammad Ali. We have already suggested other seeds of our possible destruction. And it seems to us that the Times is simplistically wrong in relating boxing to the decline of civilization. It is true, of course, that boxing and civilization—any civilization—stand in delicate balance. But let us first do a bit of roadwork through history and see whose theory, ours or the New York Times’s, has the better of the go. Pugilistica as history we might call it, to cop a Mailerism. The Times has the tail wagging the dog, but the Manly Art or the Sweet Science or the Game or whatever conceit we invent for the most basic and complex of all our sports has merely been a telltale (if you’ll forgive us) appendage to the various dog-shapes civilizations have assumed over the past five thousand years.
The art of fisticuffs was celebrated not only when civilizations were declining and falling but when they were rising and flourishing. Will Durant in The Life of Greece describes the prosperous Cretans of the middle Minoan period more than four thousand years ago packing the amphitheater to see their favorite heavyweights “coddled with helmets, cheekpieces and long padded gloves, fighting ’til one falls exhausted to the ground and the other stands above him in the conscious grandeur of victory.” Cretan predecessors of LeRoy Neiman recorded these contests on vases and bas reliefs. Homer immortalized the victory of Epeus over Euryalus, resorting to verse to describe the blow-by-blow three thousand years before Grantland Rice and Muhammad Ali got into the act.
When boxing came to Rome, it became vulgarized, brutalized, and corrupted like so many Greek arts in tougher Roman hands. There the Times would have been closer to the mark in viewing pugilism as a sign of moral breakdown. What had been sport to the Greeks became bloodlust to the Romans who packed the Colosseum in the days of Nero and Caligula. History and progress were moving in opposite directions. The more humane leather gloves of the early Greeks became vicious cesti weighted with iron knobs and pointed thongs. Greek boxers had been freemen and amateurs. Their Roman counterparts were gladitorial slaves forced to bash and rip each other to death for the titillation of a mob debased in an empire that had begun to stink of glut and glory.
There was a long, dark age for boxing, with no recorded history until the seventeenth century when British manhood took to its stout young heart the sport of bareknuckle prizefights to a finish. Two lads would strip to the waist in a twenty-four-foot ring and pummel each other with their naked fists until one of them could no longer come to scratch, a line drawn in the turf to which the bruiser was required to place his toe within thirty seconds after having been knocked or thrown to the ground. In the eighteenth century this cruel and simple sport came into its own, when formal cham
pionships were established and belt-holders became national heroes. Not on the down side but on the rise was England then, stretching its imperial muscles and staking out its claims to world supremacy. The prize ring was a natural extension of a vital island people bound for glory. The image of the Britisher—his self-image—was of a tough ’un, scrappy, aggressive, never-say-die. British tars liked to think of themselves as the toughest people on earth. The dandies and the poets of the day, the Marquises of Queensberry and the Byrons, were drawn to the boxing rooms where eminent professors of disciplined savagery instructed them in how to hit out and how to parry.
The Industrial Revolution transforming England may have fathered this revival of the Grecian game. For knights were no longer jousting with their lances. Swords were becoming ceremonial. Daggers were not for Elizabethan nobility but for London cutthroats. No sign of decline was boxing to the British Fancy two hundred years ago. As England moved onward and upward, as the London of Nelson and Wellington sang its power like Caesar’s Rome, so did each Anglo-Saxon champion believe himself as invincible as Muhammad Ali before Frazier welcomed him back to the club of nearly mortal men.
“The Fight,” be it Frazier-Ali I or III, is only the latest and most electronic of a long and provocative list bridging the reigns of George III and our own Richard the Counter-Revolutionary. It has always been a magnet for all the flying nails, knives, and needles of racial hostility and social tension. We seem to need our knights to go forth and do battle for us. The technological leap that has taken our astronauts (and astrauthor Norman Mailer) to the moon has failed to develop a human psyche to man the inhuman computer.
No matter how enlightened, a Jew still kvells when his gloved landsman subdues his Irish rival. And African Americans know in their bones that a new world’s a comin’ when one of theirs smotes one of ours. Of course we oversimplify. If Frazier was, as Muhammad needed to believe, “The Great White Hope,” still there were thousands of well-heeled honkies at the Garden and millions around the world holding their breath as the human tank called Frazier, peppered with jabs like buckshot, drove the retreating Black Prince into the ropes. At ringside we heard white cries mingled with the black pleas, “Get off the ropes, Ali! Spin ’im and dance, Ali. Stick and move, Ali, move!”
Yes, the racial and the social lines are never as clear and clean as we moralizers, the eternal simpleminded, would like to have them. Over the centuries there have always been stubborn independents who insist on mucking things up by infiltrating the boundaries of class and race, of culture and nationality. Still, as we shall see, “The Fight” is a convenient shibboleth, a healthy safety valve, and at its best a civilized substitute for war. That is why this timid soul and pacifist finds the spectacle exhilarating rather than debasing, inspiring rather than inhuming. If we cannot exorcise our warlike feelings, our sense of conflict between ins and outs, if man must strike out against the forces from which he feels threatened, then let it be done with fists instead of liquid fire, with educated maulies instead of machine guns. Let our champions go forth and let the innocent look on in closed-circuit television cathedrals instead of from ditches where nearsighted lieutenants can’t tell an attacking hostile from a praying peasant.
Boxing as history and The Fight as catharsis: having seen all the heavyweight champions for fifty years, we move back in time to the outdoor ring where Mendoza the Jew, a middleweight marvel from Whitechapel, is stripping for action against Richard Humphries, the champion of Anglo-Saxon prowess in a day when the Corinthians, hurting with the loss of the brash Yankee colonies, and shaken by the chopping off of noble heads in France, wonder if their destiny lies with victorious Clive in India or defeated Cornwallis in savage America. And now, to cap the anxiety, a Jew of Portuguese beginnings dares to come up to scratch in the British manner and, Lord help Merrie England, swears he will be champion of England, which was to all good Britons one and the same as champion of the world.
But look how the Jew maneuvers! He won’t stand firm and hold his ground and give as good as he takes like any self-respecting British pug. No, he moves his feet, he dances away from punishment, in and out, side to side—“Stand still, you coward!” brave Humphries cries. “Shame, shame, kill the Jew, Dickie my lad!” call the Fancies. The old print in my den comes to life as I write—the great throng, imagine twenty thousand from all over England, aghast as they wonder what the upstart Jew is up to, against the handsome blond darling of the Bloods.
What Daniel Mendoza was up to was nothing less than a Queensberry revolution, for although it was splendidly British to slug it out toe to toe, the rules said nothing about footwork, about retreating or sidestepping to make your opponent pump his fists foolishly into the air while the man of speed circles and torments him. Teaching the old British bulldog new tricks. In three fierce “Fights of the Century,” Mendoza carried the colors. The snobs of London might mimic his East End accent, but eventually they came to his rooms to do their amateur best to imitate his style. Perhaps no heavyweight ever floated like a butterfly in the Olympian manner of Muhammad Ali, but two centuries before Ali’s defensive balletics there was a little man of movement who bloodied the nose of an empire on the threshhold of world domination. The doors of the clubs and the schools and the companies did not open magically to the benighted people of Whitechapel, but to become a Mendoza was to say, “Yes, I can!” to a closed society. Even if “The Jew Champion,” as he was fondly known, was only five feet seven inches in his fighting boots, all the little people of the Jewish Quarter stood a peg taller with his triumphs.
Violence and race, national pride and the undercurrents of history erupted again in 1810 when a new Fight of the Century nearly set jolly England on its ruby red ear. A master of juxtaposition, the God of Boxing knows how to pit overdog against underdog, boxer against slugger, the brute against the bright, the black against the white, the poet against the plodder, the lover against the hater, the warrior against the evader, the philosopher against the rock. Not every championship fight is so neatly cast, but The Fight inevitably levitates itself to the level of allegory. Consider Cribb and Molineaux. Tom Cribb, champion of England, toast of the sporting taverns, houseguest of earls and the stuff of ballads. And in the opposite corner—Tom Molineaux. From where? America! The hated enemy! And if that weren’t bad enough, a man of color, a black, a slave from the colony of Virginia. Audacious Caliban risen from the mud of rebel wilderness. Our Tom will give him what-for! Our Tom will make that black ape wish he had never left the jungle.
As perfectly cast as John Wayne playing fighting colonels winning patriotic wars singlehanded was Tom Cribb, brawny and beefy, hale, hearty, white as the Cliffs of Dover and considered even more durable. And the dark-skinned personification of evil, challenge to Anglo-Saxon pride, was equally well cast for his role—thick-lipped, wirehaired, illiterate, built for heavy work, the British dream or nightmare of the dread savage come to shadow the super race. The mug full of pencils on my desk is decorated with the figures of pink Cribb and dusky Molineaux in knee-breechered fighting stance. Turning the mug we read:
Since boxing is a manly game,
and Britons recreation.
By boxing we will raise our fame,
’Bove any other nation
Throw pistols, pomards, swords, aside.
And all such deadly tools;
Let boxing be the Britons pride,
The science of their schools.
English hopes were banner high. Like Nelson at Trafalgar five years before, every Briton from country squire to London’s growing proletariat knew in his stout British heart that the future was his. Britannia ruled the seas, her fighting men were undeniable, and although the Corsican was still rampaging through Europe, England had the troops and the confidence not only to cut him down but to send a fleet back to the ungrateful colonies and put the muddy capital of Washington to the torch.
It was in this jingo atmosphere that black Tom set to with white Tom—the first Fight of the Century to be rep
orted on both sides of the ocean. Molineaux had won his freedom in the slave fights of Virginia, where plantation owners would pit their champions, betting them in the manner of fighting cocks. There were stories of masters who had lost their entire holdings on the defeat of their black knucklers. A slave’s incentive for winning was the offer of freedom, and it was as a recently freed victor that Molineaux went on to Norfolk, gravitating to the docks, engaging British sailors in their favorite sport and proving so formidable that they decided to take him back to England to test the English trial horses. Now a surprising series of victories had brought him to the scratch line with Cribb, the one and only. The Fancy flocked to the match, the first championship fight of international significance. And it was truly a pocket war, for the British press insisted their man must win against this strange import from Africa by way of the slave block. The sporting weeklies, even the staid Times of London, were aglow with Saxon fury. Nothing less than the honor of the British Empire was at stake.
But what a battering British honor took that winter day on Copthall Commons! The black proved more than a match for Cribb “the unconquerable.” The amazing Molineaux bloodied his mouth and shut his eye. Time after time was Cribb sent reeling to the grass. The confident wagers of the Fancy began to choke in their throats. Ruffians on the fringe of the crowd were pushing closer to the ring. Finally the mighty Cribb was down, and apparently out. As the champion of England lay senseless, a lifeless Union Jack in a dead calm, as bloody black Molineaux waited to be proclaimed the first American and the first of his race to be champion of England, the toughs slashed through the ropes to hurl themselves on the apparent winner. While the exhausted Cribb was dragged to his corner and slowly revived, the thugs saw to it that British honor was avenged. They broke Molineaux’s fingers and tightened their own around his bull-like neck. Twenty minutes later, when order was restored, Cribb was refreshed, Molineaux was done in, and the Union Jack was ever so precariously at the top of the flagpole again.