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.

Torres believes that boxing is “not really a contest of physical ability.” He elaborated his ideas in a subsequent meeting: “I felt it was a contest always of character and intelligence. And I always felt what made a champion and an ordinary fighter was that, the character, the will to win, more than the physicality. Because when you are up there, among the best, the physicality is the same.” Torres takes evident pleasure in explaining why Ali was not the greatest boxer, but was a genius in the ring. Doing so affords him the opportunity to recall fond memories of Ali and legendary trainer [[w:Cus D’Amato|Cus D’Amato]] while also illustrating his point about boxers being liars. In his book on Ali, he starts the story with D’Amato, the guide to three world champions: Floyd Patterson, Torres himself, and Mike Tyson. “[Ali] is not a good fighter, so says D’Amato, much less a great fighter. But he is champion of the world. Which, believing Cus, and I do, makes Ali a genius....” He continues, in virtually the same words he spoke to me decades after the 1971 book appeared:

Jack Dempsey’s “overwhelming power made many people overlook the calculation that went into every punch he threw,” Roger Kahn writes in ''A Flame of Pure Fire''. “In that regard, he was a thinking, even intellectual boxer.” In the first volume of ''A Man without Qualities'', published not long after Dempsey’s reign as heavyweight champion ended, novelist Robert Musil prefigured Torres and D’Amato with observations like this one: “the tricks and dodges used by an inventive mind in going through the logical operations of a mathematical problem are really not very different from the ring-craft displayed by a well-trained body.” A. J. Liebling, who composed numerous entertainingly digressive, erudite articles on boxing for ''The New Yorker'' in the 1950s and early 1960s, distinguishes between “the ''ruffian'' approach” and that of “the ''reasoner'' inside the ring.”

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 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.

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.