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| “Boxers are liars,” he said. | | “Boxers are liars,” he said. |
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| Torres believes that boxing is “not really a contest of physical ability.” He elaborated his ideas in a subsequent meeting: “I felt it was a contest always of character and intelligence. And I always felt what made a champion and an ordinary fighter was that, the character, the will to win, more than the physicality. Because when you are up there, among the best, the physicality is the same.” Torres takes evident pleasure in explaining why Ali was not the greatest boxer, but was a genius in the ring. Doing so affords him the opportunity to recall fond memories of Ali and legendary trainer [[w:Cus D’Amato|Cus D’Amato]] while also illustrating his point about boxers being liars. In his book on Ali,
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| he starts the story with D’Amato, the guide to three world champions: Floyd
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| Patterson, Torres himself, and Mike Tyson.“@Ali# is not a good fighter, so says
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| D’Amato, much less a great fighter. But he is champion of the world.Which,
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| believing Cus, and I do, makes Ali a genius....” He continues, in virtually the
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| same words he spoke to me decades after the 1971 book appeared:
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| <blockqoute>Ali is not a great fighter in the conventional sense that Sugar Ray
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| Robinson, Willie Pep and Joe Louis were. Each of these fighters
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| knew every punch and every move and added some tricks to the
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| book, that unwritten book whose teachings are passed on from
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| gym to gym and are the nearest thing we have to our own culture.... We have a man who does not have the physical greatness of the greatest men of other times, yet no professional has been
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| able to beat him.... The explanation is simple. Muhammad Ali
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| is a genius.... Don’t watch Ali’s gloves, arms or legs when he’s
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| fighting. Watch his brains.</blockquote>
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|
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| Other writers have made similar claims in connection with other fighters.
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| Jack Dempsey’s “overwhelming power made many people overlook the calculation that went into every punch he threw,” Roger Kahn writes in A Flame of Pure Fire.“In that regard, he was a thinking, even intellectual boxer.” In the
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| first volume of A Man without Qualities, published not long after Dempsey’s reign as heavyweight champion ended, novelist Robert Musil prefigured Torres and D’Amato with observations like this one: “the tricks and
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| dodges used by an inventive mind in going through the logical operations of
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| a mathematical problem are really not very different from the ring-craft displayed by a well-trained body.” A. J. Liebling, who composed numerous entertainingly digressive, erudite articles on boxing for The New Yorker in the
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| 1950s and early 1960s, distinguishes between “the ruffian approach” and that
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| of “the reasoner inside the ring.”
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| Part of boxers’ “culture,” in the view of Torres and his fellow thinkers, is
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| the ability to lie successfully. As Jeremy Campbell notes in his so-called history of falseness, A Liar’s Tale,“when winning is the important factor, deceitfulness is a kind of ethic....” From a technical standpoint, Ali did plenty
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| “wrong,” but excelled nonetheless because of his cleverness, his ability to con
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| his opponents. He perfected the liar’s ethic.
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| Of course, eventually Ali did meet opponents who could beat him, but
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| even then his genius was evident. Sting Like a Bee ends with Ali’s first
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| bout with Joe Frazier, which Ali lost. Frazier’s trainer, Eddie Futch, told Ali’s
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| biographer, Thomas Hauser, that Ali still successfully tricked his fighter
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| during the bout: “Joe should have knocked him out in the eleventh round,
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| but Ali conned him out of it. We teased Joe about that later, because he
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| didn’t realize at the time that he was being conned. Ali was in trouble.
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| He got hit with a left hook, and was hurt very badly, and he exaggerated the
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| fact that he was hurt like he was clowning. He gave Joe exaggerated moves,
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| and Joe walked casually to Ali all the way across the ring. We call that ‘The
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| Long March.’ It gave Ali extra time and kept Joe from scoring a knockout.
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| By exaggerating, Ali made Joe think that he was fooling. He conned him
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| good.”
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| Ali did eventually regain the championship, and he did so by again digging into his bag of tricks. He prevailed over George Foreman by fighting a
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| very different fight than most expected. Rather than dancing around the
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| ring, using his speed to outmaneuver the famously hard-hitting Foremen, Ali
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| positioned himself on the ropes, allowing Forman to tire himself out throwing punches. While the “rope-a-dope” might not have been a good practice if concern for long-term health had been a primary concern, it was a successful tactic that morning in Zaire. Looking back on “Rumble in the Jungle,” Foreman conceded that Ali had him fooled.
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| The sport, as Ali so skillfully showed, shares elements with confidence
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| games. In The Big Con: The Story of the Confidence Man, David Mauer
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| observes that such deceptions are not as simple as unscrupulous exploitation of the naïve. Con men prey not on the gullible and good but on the
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| devious. A mark must have more than money ready for the taking. As Mauer
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| puts it, “he must also have what grifters term ‘larceny in his veins’—in other
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| words, he must want something for nothing, or be willing to participate in
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| an unscrupulous deal.” The delicious irony of this is that con men are themselves susceptible to swindles. They have the very trait, the “thieves’ blood,”
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| that they try to exploit in others.
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| Confidence games would not be so compelling if they were as simple as
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| taking candy from a baby. Cons, whether big or small, take some ingenuity;
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| otherwise they would be mere thievery. Con men and their targets navigate
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| a world in which not everyone is honest and not everything is as it appears.
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| Thus, confidence games have provided artists such as Herman Melville and
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| David Mamet with material because they entail questions of practical epistemology: Who can you trust? How do you know your information is reliable? And how can you use it to your advantage?
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| The same is true with boxing at its best, at least according to one way of
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| looking at it. Boxing is much more than two brutes beating up on each other.
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| It is also more complicated than one fighter tricking an unprepared dupe:
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| mismatches may be a part of the game, but they are boring.When the fighters are well matched physically and also shrewd strategists, with each seeking to exploit the other’s desire to find an opening, an advantage, a
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| weakness—then the sport rises to the level of art.
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| An art with very real consequences. As Mauer observes, a confidence man
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| “cannot fool his associates for long. Either he takes off the scores or he
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| doesn’t, and he stands or falls in his profession by the record he makes for
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| himself.” The importance of cunning in boxing doesn’t lessen the very real
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| physical perils. Boxing is not professional wrestling; the violence is real. The
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| sport’s mental aspect, which Torres so prizes, comes into play when physical abilities are comparable. Ali, the “Louisville Lip,” was able to back up his
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| bluster, even if he did so with an unorthodox style.
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| The idea that boxers, individuals who choose to engage in a braindamaging game, are smart might strike the uninitiated as peculiar if not
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| ridiculous. Indeed, the strangeness of associating fighters with intelligence
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| cause some to doubt that Torres actually wrote his books ~he also published
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| a biography of Tyson!. A rumor suggested that Mailer actually wrote Torres’s
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| portions of the Ali book. Jonathan Rendell, in his brilliantly titled This
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| Bloody Mary Is the Last Thing I Own, recounts hearing a version of it.“Mailer
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| wrote it for him,” the man on the next barstool explained to Rendell. “That
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| was the deal they had. Torres taught Mailer how to box and Mailer wrote
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| Sting Like a Bee for him. Ain’t that something?” Mailer and Torres were
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| friends, and Mailer admitted to providing editorial aid to the fighter, who did
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| give the novelist some boxing pointers. Still, Mailer insists that the book is
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| genuine and not another instance of a boxer’s con game. For he did share his
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| friend’s views about pugilistic trickery. In his 1975 account of the AliForeman fight, Mailer explicitly invokes the D’Amato-Torres philosophy, a
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| key component of which is that a skilled boxer can block or evade any punch
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| they can see coming. “Champions were great liars,” Mailer explains in The
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| Fight. “They had to be. Once you knew what they thought, you could hit
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| them. So their personalities became masterpieces of concealment.”
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| However, Mailer elsewhere expresses the other widely held view of boxing, the one in which fighters are heroic warriors, which is precisely how
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| Mailer imagined writers, or at least himself. Although the solitary writer
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| slouching at a desk seems worlds apart from a well-conditioned fighter confronting an opponent in a ring, Mailer saw them as very similar. In The
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| Spooky Art, he insists the demands writing makes on a novelist, including
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| physical ones, are much like those a fighter confronts:
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| <blockqoute>Only a writer can know how much damage writing a novel can
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| do to you. It’s an unnatural activity to sit at a desk and squeeze
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| words out of yourself. Various kinds of poisons—essences of
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| fatigue—get secreted through your system. As you age it grows
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| worse. I believe that is one of the reasons I’ve been so interested
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| in prizefighters. I think often of the aging boxer who has to get
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| into shape for one more fight and knows the punishment it will
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| wreak on his body.... Even if he wins the fight—even if he wins
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| it well—he is not going to get a new purchase on life out of a
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| dazzling success, not in the way he did as a young fighter. That’s also true of my profession. Often, you have to make grave decisions: Am I going to attempt this difficult venture or not?</blockquote>
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| Put another way, writing is hard, just as boxing, more obviously, is hard. In
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| this comparison of fighters and writers, Mailer does not invoke cunning and
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| craftiness. Instead, he stresses earnest exertion.
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| Mailer goes even further in his search for commonality, arguing that boxers and writers are similar not only in the rigors they put themselves through
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| but also in their willingness to hurt others:
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| <blockqoute>Just as a fighter has to feel that he possesses the right to do physical damage to another man, so a writer has to be ready to take
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| chances with his readers’ lives. If you’re trying for something at
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| all interesting or difficult, then you cannot predict what the
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| results of your work will be. If it’s close enough to the root, people can be physically injured reading you. Full of heart, he was
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| also heartless—a splendid oxymoron. That can be the epitaph
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| for many a good novelist.</blockquote>
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| Mailer’s “splendid oxymoron” clearly applies to many a good boxer. However, he almost certainly exaggerates both the challenges a novelist faces and
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| the effect he or she can have on a reader. Yet he clearly liked the idea of having a fighter’s heartless heart—his will, determination, drive and
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| competitiveness—beating in his chest. For him, boxing serves as a handy
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| metaphor for what he imagined was his risky, intensely masculine style of
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| writing.
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| Like Mailer, another friend of Torres also gave expression to both conceptions of the sport without achieving a synthesis of them. When the
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| boxing-as-trickery notion was useful, journalist Jack Newfield used it. When
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| he wanted to point to a model of certain virtues, boxing again offered
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| handy examples. Newfield believed the deceitful personalities involved in
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| boxing provide a reason for writers’ unflagging interest in the sport. “As in
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| the record business and horse racing, almost everyone in boxing seems like
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| a character,” he writes in Only in America: The Life and Crimes of Don King.
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| “That’s why writers and filmmakers are drawn to it. Almost everyone in
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| boxing is a colorful story teller with a touch of lunacy or larceny.” It is certainly true that he chose to focus on one of boxing’s colorful characters in King. A former numbers runner who killed two men, King became fabulously wealthy by using the rhetoric of racial solidarity to sign black boxers to his promotional company and then exploit them mercilessly,according to Newfield’s account. Newfield finds conniving and cunning not
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| only on the business side of the sport, but in the fights themselves. He discusses the Ali-Foreman bout in terms very similar to Mailer’s, writing: “Boxing is based on deceit. Fighters are taught to lie—to conceal fatigue, mask
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| pain, disguise intent with a feint, deny an injury, look one way and punch
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| another.” As the fights with Frazier and Foreman illustrate, the trickery
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| extends beyond concealing intentions in order to avoid being hit; for Ali, it
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| also meant baffling expectations.
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| Newfield changes tack when relating his own work to that of boxers, who
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| then become paragons. For instance, in Somebody’s Gotta Tell It, the story of
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| his life as a newspaperman, Newfield, following Mailer’s example, finds
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| fighters worth emulating, but at the keyboard rather than the gym. Boxers’
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| bravery and relentlessness ought to characterize a dogged journalist as well.
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| He promotes what he calls the “Joe Frazier method” of journalism: “keep
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| coming forward. Don’t get discouraged. Be relentless. Don’t stop moving
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| your hands. Break the others guy’s will.”
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| One of Newfield’s intellectual heroes writes about boxing as though it
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| reflects the process of finding or creating meaning in an absurd world.
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| Albert Camus describes boxers as “gods with cauliflower ears,” giving some
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| indication of the respect he has for athletes who, like Sisyphus, persevere
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| through ultimately pointless endeavors. He also transmutes physical combat into the equivalent of a matter of language, viewing a fight as though
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| it were an argument. Fighters’ representative capabilities—their amply
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| documented tendency to be regarded by spectators as the embodiment
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| of a race, an ethnicity or a nationality—offers writers plenty of material
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| to work with beyond mere athleticism. Camus explains how, for those in
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| attendance at a fight he witnessed in Algeria between Amar from Oran and
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| Pérez from Algiers, the boxers became stand-ins for their respective cities
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| and how their bout became an extension of an ongoing rivalry between the
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| two places. “Thus a page of history is unfolding in the ring. And the tough
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| Oranese, backed by a thousand yelling voices, is defending against Pérez a
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| way of life and the pride of a province.” Spectators’ responses to fighters’
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| struggles often have more to do with such allegiances rather than with
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| what the contestants actually do in the ring, and in describing boxers’
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| moves Camus finds a parallel with disputation. “Truth forces me to admit
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| that Amar is not conducting his discussion well. His argument has a flaw:
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| he lacks reach. The slugger from Algiers, on the contrary, has the required
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| reach in his argument. It lands persuasively between his contradictor’s eyes.”
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| What writer wouldn’t want to have such a reach?
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