The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/Fighters and Writers: Difference between revisions

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 metaphor for what he imagined was his risky, intensely masculine style of
 writing.
+Like Mailer, another friend of Torres also gave expression to both conceptions of the sport without achieving a synthesis of them. When the
+boxing-as-trickery notion was useful, journalist Jack Newfield used it. When
+he wanted to point to a model of certain virtues, boxing again offered
+handy examples. Newfield believed the deceitful personalities involved in
+boxing provide a reason for writers’ unflagging interest in the sport. “As in
+the record business and horse racing, almost everyone in boxing seems like
+a character,” he writes in Only in America: The Life and Crimes of Don King.
+“That’s why writers and filmmakers are drawn to it. Almost everyone in
+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
+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
+pain, disguise intent with a feint, deny an injury, look one way and punch
+another.” As the fights with Frazier and Foreman illustrate, the trickery
+extends beyond concealing intentions in order to avoid being hit; for Ali, it
+also meant baffling expectations.
+Newfield changes tack when relating his own work to that of boxers, who
+then become paragons. For instance, in Somebody’s Gotta Tell It, the story of
+his life as a newspaperman, Newfield, following Mailer’s example, finds
+fighters worth emulating, but at the keyboard rather than the gym. Boxers’
+bravery and relentlessness ought to characterize a dogged journalist as well.
+He promotes what he calls the “Joe Frazier method” of journalism: “keep
+coming forward. Don’t get discouraged. Be relentless. Don’t stop moving
+your hands. Break the others guy’s will.”