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

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 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
+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
-also heartless—a splendid oxymoron. That can be the epitaph
 for many a good novelist.</blockquote>
+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.”
+One of Newfield’s intellectual heroes writes about boxing as though it
+reflects the process of finding or creating meaning in an absurd world.
+Albert Camus describes boxers as “gods with cauliflower ears,” giving some
+indication of the respect he has for athletes who, like Sisyphus, persevere
+through ultimately pointless endeavors. He also transmutes physical combat into the equivalent of a matter of language, viewing a fight as though it were an argument. Fighters’ representative capabilities—their amply
+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
+two places. “Thus a page of history is unfolding in the ring. And the tough
+Oranese, backed by a thousand yelling voices, is defending against Pérez a
+way of life and the pride of a province.” Spectators’ responses to fighters’
+struggles often have more to do with such allegiances rather than with
+what the contestants actually do in the ring, and in describing boxers’
+moves Camus finds a parallel with disputation. “Truth forces me to admit
+that Amar is not conducting his discussion well. His argument has a flaw:
+he lacks reach. The slugger from Algiers, on the contrary, has the required
+reach in his argument. It lands persuasively between his contradictor’s eyes.”
+What writer wouldn’t want to have such a reach?