Preface to Sting Like a Bee: Difference between revisions

'''By [[Norman Mailer]]'''<ref>From {{cite book |last=Torres |first=José |date=1971 |title=…Sting Like a Bee: The Muhammad Ali Story |url= |location=New York |publisher=Abelard-Shuman |page= |isbn= |author-link= }} Reprinted by Project Mailer with permission of the estate of Norman Mailer. ([[71.26]])</ref>

Anyone who knows prizefighters and does not have to make his living by writing about them too often, knows that they are usually intelligent men. Of course, the worst of them get deadened in their intelligence — it is not that what they say is stupid, but they have blank spots. In the process of reasoning from A to B then to C and to D, they are likely to miss a couple of letters. Their brains get damaged from punches, but essentially in the way a good engine whose spark plugs are gone will sound spotty in its timing. The popular assumption that professional boxers do not have brains comes from sportswriters (but then sportswriters’ brains are in their tum damaged by the obligation to be clever each day). The quantities of booze necessary to lubricate such racing of the mental gears ends up giving the sportswriters the equivalent of a good many punches to the head. So most of them duck their task. They do not try to comprehend fighters. They prefer to treat them in tried and true ways, as rather heroic but silly fellows, or as clowns with a penchant for off-beat or gnomic remarks. It makes good copy, and it satisfies the average man who finds it bad enough after all that these boxers take him in a street fight without having to swallow the added gall that boxers might be smarter as well. The fact that fighters who become champions are most intelligent men with a marvelous sense of balance in their estimate of changing events under high pressure is an idea so painful, that it doesn’t even get whispered about. Nonetheless, it is true — champions are most intelligent men — and the reason so many of the remarks of Muhammad Ali and Sonny Liston and Floyd Patterson, of Sugar Ray Robinson, and Jake LaMotta and Rocky Graziano, of Carmen Basilio and Joe Frazier and Rocky Marciano and Gene Fullmer all sound so peculiar in that their original words were usually economical, astute, and cut into the middle of what was absurd in a particular situation. But the occasion was poorly reported, the remark (usually obscene) was cleaned off in the old dishwater of copy desk good taste, and the point was invariably shifted to another point which was less interesting. All those sportswriters punch drunk on twenty years of booze! So fighters, full of instinctive metaphor, come through like bugs who speak. It is as if we insist that athletes who are great in the ring should have for civilized balance no real stature outside.