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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
 bluster, even if he did so with an unorthodox style.
+The idea that boxers, individuals who choose to engage in a braindamaging game, are smart might strike the uninitiated as peculiar if not
+ridiculous. Indeed, the strangeness of associating fighters with intelligence
+cause some to doubt that Torres actually wrote his books ~he also published
+a biography of Tyson!. A rumor suggested that Mailer actually wrote Torres’s
+portions of the Ali book. Jonathan Rendell, in his brilliantly titled This
+Bloody Mary Is the Last Thing I Own, recounts hearing a version of it.“Mailer
+wrote it for him,” the man on the next barstool explained to Rendell. “That
+was the deal they had. Torres taught Mailer how to box and Mailer wrote
+Sting Like a Bee for him. Ain’t that something?” Mailer and Torres were
+friends, and Mailer admitted to providing editorial aid to the fighter, who did
+give the novelist some boxing pointers. Still, Mailer insists that the book is
+genuine and not another instance of a boxer’s con game. For he did share his
+friend’s views about pugilistic trickery. In his 1975 account of the AliForeman fight, Mailer explicitly invokes the D’Amato-Torres philosophy, a
+key component of which is that a skilled boxer can block or evade any punch
+they can see coming. “Champions were great liars,” Mailer explains in The
+Fight. “They had to be. Once you knew what they thought, you could hit
+them. So their personalities became masterpieces of concealment.”
+However, Mailer elsewhere expresses the other widely held view of boxing, the one in which fighters are heroic warriors, which is precisely how
+Mailer imagined writers, or at least himself. Although the solitary writer
+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
+Spooky Art, he insists the demands writing makes on a novelist, including
+physical ones, are much like those a fighter confronts:
+<blockqoute>Only a writer can know how much damage writing a novel can
+do to you. It’s an unnatural activity to sit at a desk and squeeze
+words out of yourself. Various kinds of poisons—essences of
+fatigue—get secreted through your system. As you age it grows
+worse. I believe that is one of the reasons I’ve been so interested
+in prizefighters. I think often of the aging boxer who has to get
+into shape for one more fight and knows the punishment it will
+wreak on his body.... Even if he wins the fight—even if he wins
+it well—he is not going to get a new purchase on life out of a
+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>
+Put another way, writing is hard, just as boxing, more obviously, is hard. In
+this comparison of fighters and writers, Mailer does not invoke cunning and
+craftiness. Instead, he stresses earnest exertion.
+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
+but also in their willingness to hurt others:
+<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
+chances with his readers’ lives. If you’re trying for something at
+all interesting or difficult, then you cannot predict what the
+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
+also heartless—a splendid oxymoron. That can be the epitaph
+for many a good novelist.</blockquote>
+Mailer’s “splendid oxymoron” clearly applies to many a good boxer. However, he almost certainly exaggerates both the challenges a novelist faces and
+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
+competitiveness—beating in his chest. For him, boxing serves as a handy
+metaphor for what he imagined was his risky, intensely masculine style of
+writing.