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 By exaggerating, Ali made Joe think that he was fooling. He conned him
 good.”
+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 very different fight than most expected. Rather than dancing around the
+ring, using his speed to outmaneuver the famously hard-hitting Foremen, Ali
+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.
+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.
+Confidence games would not be so compelling if they were as simple as
+taking candy from a baby. Cons, whether big or small, take some ingenuity;
+otherwise they would be mere thievery. Con men and their targets navigate
+a world in which not everyone is honest and not everything is as it appears.
+Thus, confidence games have provided artists such as Herman Melville and
+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?
+The same is true with boxing at its best, at least according to one way of
+looking at it. Boxing is much more than two brutes beating up on each other.
+It is also more complicated than one fighter tricking an unprepared dupe:
+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
+weakness—then the sport rises to the level of art.
+An art with very real consequences. As Mauer observes, a confidence man
+“cannot fool his associates for long. Either he takes off the scores or he
+doesn’t, and he stands or falls in his profession by the record he makes for
+himself.” The importance of cunning in boxing doesn’t lessen the very real
+physical perils. Boxing is not professional wrestling; the violence is real. The
+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 brain damaging 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 Ali Foreman 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>