The Pugilist: A Boxing Column (#4)

[The poem] is a specific kind of event, a specific kind of trauma. It is an experience entered into voluntarily. Unlike an aerial attack, a poem does not come at one unexpectedly. One has to read or listen, one has to be willing to accept the trauma.

—Carolyn Forché

I have never attended a fight live and in person. Or rather, I should say I haven’t attended a fight in person yet, because I plan to make attendance a New Year’s Resolution for 2020. I can’t speak to what it feels like to sit in the crowd of a fight, to be a spectator directly, and I’m not going to pretend that I can or bore you with my imaginings of what it might feel like. In her book On Boxing, Joyce Carol Oates describes the experience of watching a fight live as voiceless, unmediated. Without words to structure the action, she writes, it becomes difficult to know, from second to second, precisely what is happening.

When watching recorded boxing matches, I often watch them with the sound off. This is true especially if I am writing about the fight (I began using this technique while writing about the fights of Mike Tyson for my book Revelation). The immediate effect is to cut out the fight commentators, to lose what Oates calls their homey, formulaic ways of talking about boxing that serve to domesticate the action. In the beginning, the voiceless fights were indeed bewildering, the fighters’ movements seemingly faster than I could comprehend. But my eyes soon adjusted, and freed from the narratives spun by commentators, I was able to see details I would have overlooked. It felt not unlike when, after years in a relationship, you are able to catalog your partner’s tiniest quirks and idiosyncrasies, habits invisible to the untrained eye but now entirely clear to your own. I began to see the fights, and even their violence, differently.

Boxing ritualizes violence, writes Oates, to the degree to which violence becomes an aesthetic principle. This is precisely what I saw. Of course I remained aware of what I knew about the boxer’s biographies, what I knew about their shared history of pre-fight trash talking, and the trajectories of their separate careers and how this fight could impact both (these sorts of topics are what fills much of the time for commentators—interesting and anecdotal, but hardly central to the action). In the silence, these narratives slid away, eclipsed by physicality, bodies slipping and weaving and dancing on the screen. Focused on the visual, the underlying principles—the logic and art of each movement—made themselves more apparent. A commentary tends to break up the action, presenting a succession of small, individuated scenes. Watching in silence changed all that. The unlike bodies of the two fighters with all the idiosyncratic violence inherent in their gestures were anthologized together, my eyes following the uninterrupted ebb and flow of fists and feet around the ring.

I could also better gauge my own reactions to the fights. I could hear my own voice. All my wincing, cheering, guffawing, grunting, jeering. A personal onomatopoeia, a guttural and uninhibited vocabulary, call and response to the violent testimony being presented. My reactions, and not the commentators’, became central to my experience. The vaguely unsettling passivity of being told what I was seeing was gone, replaced by a more active, self-directed viewership.

Try it for yourself. Watch Thomas Hearns’ 1984 fight against Roberto Durán. It’s a short fight and easy to follow, ending inside a couple of brilliant, action-packed rounds. Try it with the sound off if you want, and see how you react. I watched it again while writing this and, while knowing the outcome and knowing the ferocity of its delivery, I still exclaimed when that final cannonball landed.

Did you watch the fight? Seriously, give yourself a few minutes and do it, especially if you haven’t watched much boxing before. You can skip the pre-fight commentary if you like and jump right into the fight itself at about 3:25 in the video. Volume on or off, the fight is far more electric than this column, I promise you.

I’m all for boxing, although I admit that the existence of boxing says something about our society and the violence that it needs.

—Floyd Patterson

Carolyn Forche’s 1993 anthology Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness collected poems from around the world relating to what she termed conditions of historical and social extremity. These extreme situations included war, state censorship, exile, and occupation, among others. As a collection, it is both harrowing and heartening. She also authored an introduction outlining what she meant by this poetry of witness, looking at the thematized violence that extremity impresses upon the poetic imagination.

Violence in the ring is real, no question. It is knuckle-breaking, eye-bleeding, brain-rattlingly real. Two fighters pushing their bodies and their wills to the absolute limit; this is an extreme situation. And while it is in no way comparable to the violence and extremity described in Forche’s Against Forgetting, I do think we have an obligation to consider what it means to witness such violence, to attest to what we see.

To witness the violence of boxing is to share something with the other witnesses, share even a little with the fighters themselves. It may seem strange, but for me, witnessing the violence means not retreating from it, and through that act of witnessing, not retreating into the solitude of myself. To enter into the social, that common agreement of experiencing together, to witness the mock death and the relationship between triumph and tragedy, is to hold a commonality with strangers, to accept our place within a common narrative, even if the social is a wordless narrative, an unspoken agreement: We are here for this. Even if we cannot articulate it. We accept this specific kind of need.

The recognition that the violence is real, but at the same time symbolic, is one of boxing’s most stirring paradoxes. It is savage yet civilized. This ambivalence allows the sport to be exactly what it is, but to also become something more. Literal and figurative. Both interpretations are accurate and correct, coexisting in the ring. The flesh and the spirit. The physical veracity of boxing’s violence is sincere, honest. But its symbolic disposition allows it to circulate, allows it to take a multitude of forms, to perform a myriad of tasks.

“The Fight” is a convenient shibboleth, a healthy safety valve, and at its best a civilized substitute for war. That is why this timid soul and pacifist finds the spectacle exhilarating rather than debasing, inspiring rather than inhuming. If we cannot exorcise our warlike feelings, our sense of conflict between ins and outs, if man must strike out against the forces from which he feels threatened, then let it be done with fists instead of liquid fire, with educated maulies instead of machine guns. Let our champions go forth and let the innocent look on in closed-circuit television cathedrals instead of from ditches where nearsighted lieutenants can’t tell an attacking hostile from a praying peasant.

—Budd Schulberg

Boxing is, like the kind of poem described by Forche, a specific kind of event, a specific kind of trauma. It is entered into willingly, voluntarily, by both the fighters and the witnesses. Boxing, brutal though it may be, is never the war; it is the poem.

It is not unusual for sportswriters or commentators to refer to the rounds in boxing as “stanzas.” I don’t know when or how this practice originated, though I’m sure it’s a great story (and if you do know, for heaven’s sake please tell me). For now, I just take it as proof that boxing is the body’s brutal literature, that within those rounds lies narrative and poetry, storytelling that speaks with the sound of the bell and the strike of the fist.


Andrew Rihn Author
In addition to The Pugilist, Andrew Rihn is the author of Revelation: An Apocalypse in Fifty-Eight Fights (Press 53, 2020), a full-length book of prose poems about Mike Tyson. He lives in Canton, OH.
follow me

6 Comments

  1. A number of upcoming fights worth noting: Daniel Jacobs vs. Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. on December 20, Tony Harrison rematches Jermell Charlo on December 21, Gervonta Davis fights Yuriorkas Gamboa on December 28, and Claressa “T-Rex” Sheilds takes on Ivana Habazin on January 10.

  2. Curious myself as to who started calling rounds “stanzas” first, my brief research led me to an interesting book. Though it did not reveal any answers it seemed right up your alley none the less. ‘The Art and Aesthetics of Boxing’ by David Scott it is called.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

Previous Story

2019 Fiction Prize: Winners and Shortlisted Writers

Next Story

‘The Rise of Skywalker’ Manages to Satisfyingly Conclude Epic ‘Star Wars’ Saga

Latest from The Pugilist