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

{{Byline|last=Rodwan Jr.|first=John G.|abstract=A banner hanging on a wall at Gleason’s Gym testifies to boxing’s enduring appeal for writers. Norman {{NM}} and José Torres (light heavyweight champion and author) were friends, and Mailer admitted to providing editorial aid to the fighter, who did give the novelist some boxing pointers. Mailer did share his friend’s views about pugilistic trickery. In his 1975 account of the Ali-Foreman fight, Mailer explicitly invokes the D’Amato-Torres philosophy, a key component of which is that skilled boxers can block or evade any punch they can see coming.

|url=https://prmlr.us/mr02rod}}

{{quote|Ali is not a great fighter in the conventional sense that Sugar Ray Robinson, Willie Pep and Joe Louis were. Each of these fighters knew every punch and every move and added some tricks to the book, that unwritten book whose teachings are passed on from 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 able to beat him.... The explanation is simple. Muhammad Ali is a genius.... Don’t watch Ali’s gloves, arms or legs when he’s fighting. Watch his brains.}}

Part of boxers’ “culture,” in the view of Torres and his fellow thinkers, is 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 “wrong,” but excelled nonetheless because of his cleverness, his ability to con his opponents. He perfected the liar’s ethic.

Of course, eventually Ali did meet opponents who could beat him, but even then his genius was evident. ''Sting Like a Bee'' ends with Ali’s first bout with Joe Frazier, which Ali lost. Frazier’s trainer, Eddie Futch, told Ali’s biographer, Thomas Hauser, that Ali still successfully tricked his fighter during the bout: “Joe should have knocked him out in the eleventh round, but Ali conned him out of it. We teased Joe about that later, because he didn’t realize at the time that he was being conned. Ali was in trouble.

He got hit with a left hook, and was hurt very badly, and he exaggerated the fact that he was hurt like he was clowning. He gave Joe exaggerated moves, and Joe walked casually to Ali all the way across the ring. We call that ‘The Long March.’ It gave Ali extra time and kept Joe from scoring a knockout. By exaggerating, Ali made Joe think that he was fooling. He conned him good.”

The sport, as Ali so skillfully showed, shares elements with confidence games. In ''The Big Con: The Story of the Confidence Man'', David Mauer 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 devious. A mark must have more than money ready for the taking. As Mauer puts it, “he must also have what grifters term ‘larceny in his veins’—in other words, he must want something for nothing, or be willing to participate in 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,” that they try to exploit in others.

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

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

{{quote|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?}}

 

{{quote|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.}}

 

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.

a character,” he writes in ''Only in America: The Life and Crimes of Don King''.

then become paragons. For instance, in ''Somebody’s Gotta Tell It'', the story of

documented tendency to be regarded by spectators as the embodiment of a race, an ethnicity or a nationality—offers writers plenty of material to work with beyond mere athleticism. Camus explains how, for those in attendance at a fight he witnessed in Algeria between Amar from Oran and Pérez from Algiers, the boxers became stand-ins for their respective cities and how their bout became an extension of an ongoing rivalry between the

Joyce Carol Oates, for one, expresses impatience with the sort of “hellish-writerly metaphor” in which boxing serves to stand for something else. She concedes that skill, courage and intelligence can all be observed in a boxing match. She even “can entertain the proposition that life is a metaphor for boxing.” However, boxing itself is, quite simply, “the most primitive and terrifying of contests.” Her ''On Boxing'' does not offer extravagant assertions of fighters as avatars of artistry or as unrecognized geniuses. She briefly surveys other writers’ writing on boxing and is impressed by little of it. She dislikes Liebling and does not think Ernest Hemingway’s boxing stories rank among his best. She admires aspects of Mailer’s work on the subject, but

Rendell fell into the Johnson camp, the camp that sought truth in the sport, only to conclude that viewing boxing as expressive of some deep meaning can only lead to disappointment. In ''This Bloody Mary'', his memoir of experiences in the boxing world, he recalls being a teenager looking at the photos in ''Ring'' magazine of ritualistic post-fight events—the announcement of the decision and the victor consoling the vanquished—and thinking: “It was as if all of them, the winners and losers and the managers and trainers, had touched something that only they could know about, something big, like truth.” Later, when the romance was gone and he’d seen enough of the fight game, he concludes that its connection to the truth was very different than he’d initially thought. “Boxing had been leading me to a truth after all, but only to the truth about boxing. And the truth was just a story itself, the first addictive dance under the chandeliers, and then the doomed roller coaster ride on thousands of blue curves.” The sort of truth he discovers is fighters dying in their twenties or living but with irreparable damage. For him, too, Ali becomes symbolic of boxing’s truth. Rendell describes meeting the former champion, who required an hour to eat a bowl of soup. The fighter once famous for his quickness and

prowess now had to move carefully, deliberately, and slowly in order not to dribble.

The competing views of boxing—the notion that it is an honest expression of man’s nature versus the belief that it entails artful deception as well as the more obvious physical challenges—also appear in W. C. Heinz’s 1958 novel ''The Professional''. Doc Carroll, a boxing manager, holds both, without acknowledging the paradox of viewing boxing as essentially truthful and involving much trickery. Explaining why he likes boxing, Doc says he sees the “truth of life” in it, and that truth includes “that remnant of the animal in man.” He says, “I find man revealing himself more completely in fighting than in any other form of expressive endeavor. It’s the war all over again, and they license it and sell tickets to it and people go to see it because, without even realizing it, they see this truth in it.” Later he tells his fighter, Eddie: “There’s only so many punches. Everybody knows what they are. You’ve got to con the other guy into walking into them. It’s thinking, first of all.” If Doc’s theories of boxing can be reconciled at all, it is by concluding that the essential truth, as revealed by boxing, is that man is a thinking beast, violent and clever, basic in animal desires and inclined toward misdirection to satisfy them. Doc favors the fundamental-honesty-of-boxing school, regarding cons as tactical rather than essential elements of the game. Eddie, who admits to Doc that he had not realized role of trickery despite his nine years in boxing, loses the fight at the end of the book.

The contending views of boxing as either the brutal violence it immediately appears to be or something akin to art and equally complicated and ultimately irreducible to any simple explanation will not be settled for as long as human beings stage combat for enjoyment’s sake. Given that boxing’s roots can be traced back hundreds of years before Virgil and that writers continue to find something of themselves in fighters long after the sport’s

heyday in the twentieth century, imminent resolution seems unlikely. That does not mean the match is even, however. The conclusion of Paul Johnson and José Torres’s well-rehearsed account of their college speaking engagement has the union organizer wondering if he never became a better fighter than he did because he was too honest. It may be that writers and other successful practitioners of artifice (such as Ali) do not suffer from such scrupulousness. An indication of which perspective appears to have the upper hand might be found at Gleason’s, a deliberately spare gym in a once-gritty neighborhood that later transformed itself into one filled with galleries, boutiques, and pricy loft apartments. Almost every time I have visited the place to talk with its proprietor, Bruce Silverglade, there have been camera crews filming movies or commercials or taking photographs of models. Athletes still train there, but meaning-making and spectacle-creation simultaneously occur amid the sparring and shadow boxing. Artifice, whether dignified or not, should never be underestimated.