Andrew Rihn

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.

The Pugilist: A Boxing Column (#21)

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The bell is one of our oldest musical instruments. Ancient and almost primal, bells are central to religious ceremonies the world over. They adorn the churches and temples of multiple faiths, hung in steeples or over doorways. In ceremonies, bells are used to signal or signify. In the Catholic Mass, for instance, an altar bell is rung when the host is presented, what the faithful believe to be a miraculous event; it is a joyful noise.

The bell has its secular uses, of course. They could be tied around the neck of livestock such as cows or sheep, or used in clocks to signal the passage of time. In boxing, a round lasts for three minutes. One hundred and eighty seconds and then a bell is rung. The fighters drop their gloves and walk to their corners where cornermen set to work with water and advice and sometimes a little coagulant to stop the bleeding.

All of this talk of bells is a roundabout way to say that this month’s column of The Pugilist will be the last.

The earth is as full of brutality as the sea is full of motion.

Jack London

The Sea Wolf

 

Writing The Pugilist for the past two years has been an incredible experience. I began thinking about a column after I completed the poems that made up my book Revelation: An Apocalypse in Fifty-Eight Fights. I wanted to extend and externalize the conversation I was having with myself about boxing and art, a conversation I dubbed the brute poetics of the boxing ring. I am immensely grateful to Into the Void for providing this strange project a home. My heartfelt thanks goes out to editor-in-chief Philip Elliott for his constant support and spot-on advice. And also to Jim Trainer, for modeling the kind of unflagging courage in writing I aspire to.

Looking back at the past columns of The Pugilist, I am so proud of the ground this column has covered. I wrote about Deontay Wilder, Vasiliy Lomanchenko. and Marvelous Marvin Hagler. I re-wached Rocky and Million Dollar Baby, I looked at Frazier-Ali I, Hagler-Hearns, and Johnson-Jeffries. And I brought in the wisdom of Carolyn Forché, Jean-Paul Sartre, Joyce Carol Oates, and Maggie Nelson.

Most of all, I’m proud of the interviews I was able to put together. I got the chance to speak with visual artist Damien Burton; scholar and author Todd Snyder; actor and filmmaker Sam Upton; and architectural writer Paul Shepheard. Truly a diverse—and dare I say unique—group of interviewees. Each one brought incredible enthusiasm and insight to this column and I am so grateful for their willingness to share their time with me.

Ancient legends can still live again in the art of today, concentrated in the simplicity of mighty gestures.

Hans-Georg Gadamer

 

In my fumbling attempts to understand what I meant when I first wrote the term brute poetics, I focused on witnessing and what Carolyn Forché called “the partisanship of humanity.” Boxing is hardly perfect. But it suits me in its stark imperfection, its absence of camouflage. It is a sport which bears little apology, though it may have much to apologize for. “The drama of life in the flesh,” as Joyce Carol Oates called it.

Boxing, more than most sports, is infatuated with its past. Perhaps there’s a connection between the immediacy of its brutality in the moment, what Sartre called “human violence exploding publicly,” and the romanticism of the past. Perhaps we desire moments that have been experienced more than we desire to actually experience those moments ourselves. As spectators of a sport without seasons, we can jump in and out of any decade. blast open the continuum of history (to lift a phrase from Walter Benjamin). In re-watching “these fierce manly contests” as Walt Whitman called them,  I’m reminded of a line from T. S. Eliot: “for history is a pattern/ of timeless moments.”

In his book The Relevance of the Beautiful, German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer describes the experience of looking at a work of art. We can stay with the work, sit with it, revisit it, all without getting bored because the more time we spend with art, “the more it displays its manifold riches to us.” Perhaps, Gadamer suggests, the way art can explode our temporal experience “is the only way that is granted us finite beings to relate to what we call eternity.”

Once more—for it is hard to be finite upon an infinite subject, and all subjects are infinite.

Herman Melville

And so I return to the sound of the bell.

In boxing, the bell signals the end of the round. But the very same bell signals the start as well. It is cyclical, recurrent. (Perhaps circular. Consider the imposed geometry: the ring, the rounds.) Boxing’s structure ties together its beginning and its end, the alpha and omega.

And so as I end this final column of The Pugilist, I am both mourning for its ending and looking forward to new beginnings. Today is less the end of a match and more like a rest between rounds. There are good things on the horizon.

A final note to you, the reader who has stuck with me month after month, to everyone who has read, shared, commented, or connected with me about this column, I cannot express how much it has meant to me. I couldn’t (and wouldn’t) have had half the energy to sustain this column without your support. Thank you.

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The Pugilist: A Boxing Column (#20)

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Marvelous Marvin Hagler, legendary middleweight champion, died just over a month ago. The outpouring of emotion from within the boxing community was immediate and raw. There was sadness and shock. Hagler had been as near to indestructible in the ring as a body can be. In 62 fights spanning 14 years, he’d only been knocked down once—and upon review, it’s clear that knockdown was actually a slip. Marvin Hagler couldn’t simply die. It was far too human a fate for a fighter who had so often appeared superhuman.

Losing Marvelous Marvin Hagler has been tough, even though I never knew him personally. Remembrances from people who knew Hagler, or interacted with him, flooded the internet, testifying that he was a genuine and decent man who lived passionately and didn’t prevaricate. His presence looms large in how I think about boxing. Whenever I watch one of his fights, I feel as though I’ve learned something new about myself. There’s a purity to his ring action, a consistency, that is difficult to put into words but which never ceases to make me look within myself, to confront my own frailty, my own shortcomings.

There are details of Hagler’s life that I return to time and again in search of meaning: That he stayed with the same manager and trainer his entire career, Pat and Goody, the Petronelli brothers. That he never moved weight classes in fourteen years. That he trained by running on the frozen sand of Cape Cod in the off season. That he was unique right down to his grammar, coining the idiosyncratic motto “Destruction and Destroy.” That he was so anxious about journalists disrespecting him that he had his name legally changed to “Marvelous Marvin Hagler” so they would always have to say at least one positive word about him.

You have three strikes against you: You’re black, you’re a southpaw, and you’re good.

Joe Frazier

speaking to Marvin Hagler

It is true that we can never feel the pain of another person. But when we look carefully, I think we can begin to see how their pain manifests itself. When my head hurts, I press my fingers to my forehead. If my foot hurts, I limp. Though certainly able to deliver pain to his opponents, Hagler seemed always to carry some hurt deep within himself, a pain we could not feel but sometimes could sense. Some of his frustration was quite public: his long road to a title fight against Vito Antuofermo and the injustice of the judges’ decision (a draw when most believed Hagler won). And the next year, finally winning the middleweight championship but having to do it in England instead of the US and being booed by the crowd for his victory, rained upon with beer bottles and slurs, escorted from the ring before they could even present the belt. And yet from Hagler there emanated a deeper sense of animus, a feeling of  unspoken and dramatic tragedy, a Greek chorus behind those leather gloves.

What made Hagler all the more shocking was not this indignation, a pain which many fighters feel, but how it manifested itself. Yes there was rage, but it was never an uncontrolled lashing out of fury. Hagler’s was a disciplined rage, a ferocity that curved back inward, pushing him to work harder and train longer. Pain and fury seemed to only strengthen his resolve, and with this combination of natural talent and superhuman work ethic, he came to look like a man cast perfectly by Fate to play the prizefighter.

In the ring, he was straightforward. No frill and no flash, which is not to say he didn’t have a deep toolbox. He simply had no desire to show off. The Marvelous One was Spartan in his efficiency, as if allergic to unnecessary or extraneous movement. Under the bright lights, his eyes lock squarely on his target, the rest of the world melting away. He entered the ropes with a single purpose, to separate soul from skeleton. And he knew how to do it. Of his 62 wins, 52 came by way of knockout – often from his leaping right hook.

I love fighting. I always say you have to enjoy it like a boy but play it like a man.

Marvelous Marvin Hagler 

Hagler fought in the 70s and 80s, and will be remembered as one of the “Four Kings,” a term applied to four of the top fighters from those years after Muhammad Ali’s decline and before the rise of Mike Tyson: Hagler, Tommy Hearns, Roberto Durán, and Sugar Ray Leonard. True to form, Hagler fought them all. He beat Durán by universal decision in a tough battle in 1983. He fought Hearns in 1985, winning inside of three rounds. Their first round is considered by many to be the single greatest three minutes in the history of boxing. And in 1987, he took on Sugar Ray Leonard, losing by a still-controversial split decision.

After that loss, and with Leonard unwilling to rematch, Hagler retired from boxing. Always taking a unique and unexpected path, he moved to Milan and began acting in Italian action movies. Content to let his resume speak for itself, he was never lured back into the ring.

A personal anecdote: before my divorce, the last thing my wife and I did together was bid on an auction from the International Boxing Hall of Fame. I won a poster autographed by Marvelous Marvin Hagler. It arrived some weeks later, after I had moved out. I couldn’t bring myself to open the package. It sat unopened in my closet for more than a year. When I heard about his passing on March 13, I decided it was time to open the package. It’s a beautiful fight poster from Hagler-Hearns, signed by both fighters. “Wow,” I said out loud to no one, “That is cool.” I haven’t gotten it framed yet, but soon. Soon it will hang on my wall, a small reminder of one man’s quest for something greater than himself.

I like to see the smiles on people’s faces when I show them I can do the impossible.

Marvelous Marvin Hagler 

 

If you’re interested in reading more about Marvelous Marvin Hagler, I suggest starting with this relatively short 1981 article from the New York Times. And especially this Sports Illustrated story from 1982.

If you want to catch a glimpse of his in-ring presence, here is a solid compilation of his knockouts and boxing analyst/genius Lee Wylie breaks down some of what made Hagler so good in this analysis video.

For a full fight, there’s no better place to start than with the epic Hagler-Hearns fight. Or try Hagler-Mugabi if you want to see a more sustained Hagler performance.

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The Pugilist: A Boxing Column (#19)

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In an earlier column, I stated that to be a boxing fan is to be a person who watches a tremendous amount of a certain kind of violence. I struggled then, as I struggle now, with what to say about a sport that “ritualizes violence to the degree to which violence becomes an aesthetic principle” (Oates). One path I’ve found constructive is to consider the “thematized violence” (Forché) of a poetry of witness, to consider boxing to be the body’s brutal literature, a contribution to Forché’s notion of the partisanship of humanity.

That earlier column was reflecting, in part, on the Black Lives Matter movement and police brutality. State violence continues into 2021 of course, across the US of A, executed through the hands of police and ICE agents. Plus a myriad of other continued violences: economic, cultural, environmental, etc.

On January 6, we saw another type of violence brought to bear upon the US Capitol, a type of violence aimed as much against the abstract notions of truth or democracy as against the physical. We had already seen so-called “isolated” cases of similar violence: Charleston, Kyle Rittenhouse, the Pizzagate attack, or against the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, or in the words of Tucker Carlson and his slimey ilk. One recalls Steve Bannon’s call for heads-on-pikes.

I struggle with the fact that disturbed as I am by violence on the news, I am then soothed by watching violence in my sports. It is difficult to reconcile. Is this fact indicative of some deep contradiction in my nature? Or at the very least a glaring logical inconsistency?

It was in July when I earlier considered what it means to watch a tremendous amount of violence, and so I wrote about the “Fight of the Century,” Jack Johnson vs. Jim Jeffries, a 1910 fight that pitted the controversial Black champion against a “Great White Hope.” (Johnson won.) This month, as I again struggle for a subject, is the anniversary of another “Fight of the Century,” Ali vs. Frazier I, March 8 1971.

(An aside: a boxing-related definition of Modernism might be holding a “Fight of the Century” every decade. Post-Modernism would be a “Fight of the Century” every week.)

So much has been written about Ali-Frazier already, and with the 50th anniversary of the fight just a week passed, I don’t know what else I can possibly add to what is generally agreed upon as the single biggest sporting event-as-social-happening of the 20th century. Both Ali and Frazier were undefeated. And both had claim to the heavyweight title. Ali had been stripped of the belt in a move that history looks unfavorably upon, for his refusal to serve in Vietnam. His title was passed on to lesser fighters who were subsequently beaten by Frazier. He held the title officially when he and Ali met at Madison Square Garden in 1971.

The fight was such a huge cultural moment that it was actually used as cover for an important burglary. A group of political activists broke into a Pennsylvania FBI office and stole documents proving the existence of COINTELPRO, a covert and illegal FBI program designed to spy on, intimidate, and threaten domestic political groups, mostly left-wing and pro-racial justice. The activists believed FBI security would be too busy listening to Ali vs. Frazier I on their radios to notice the break-in. They were successful.

As someone who’s first memory of Muhammad Ali is seeing him light the Olympic Cauldron in Atlanta in 1996, a man celebrated as a national hero, it is jarring to realize that in the late ’60s and early ’70s, Ali was one of the most hated men in America.

It is instructive to think about the public backlash against Colin Kaepernick, the football player who kneeled during the National Anthem in recognition of police brutality and racial inequality. Although Kaepernick was quarterback of the San Francisco 49ers, he was nowhere near the public figure Muhammad Ali was, nor was he arguably as talented as Ali in their respective sports. And Kaepernick’s message was nowhere near as radical as Ali’s—Kaepernick is recognizing the well-known facts of racism and police brutality; Ali had changed his name, joined the Nation of Islam, was close friends with Malcolm X, and refused to serve in a war he deemed racist and imperialist.

The fact is we’ll never know how good a quarterback Colin Kaepernick could have been, because the backlash robbed him of his prime years in the sport. So too for Ali, who didn’t fight for three and a half years, his mid- to late-twenties, a boxer’s prime. When Muhammad Ali returned to the ring in 1970, he was a noticeably different fighter. Gone were the youthful reflexes, but in their place was a new kind of resolve, a willingness to be battered, to absorb the hatred and the punishment.

Ali vs. Frazier I is a hard fight to watch. It is grueling and unrelenting. It feels claustrophobic, less Coliseum and more foxhole. It is thrilling but it is not a fight I want to return to often. It demands all of one’s attention. The task of merely watching it is fatiguing. Ali lost the fight (his first loss), but he and Frazier fought twice more. Ali won both rematches, saying of their final fight that it “was the closest thing to dying that I know.”

As I continue my line of questioning about violence and brutality, I’ve been thinking about the distinction that Maggie Nelson makes in her book The Art of Cruelty. There, she looks at what could be described as the moral component of art that depicts violence, and though she rejects making definitive claims about the subject, she raises the possibility that one can have violence without cruelty and that for her, this distinction has meaning.

Perhaps for me, boxing—even when violent to the point of oppressive, as with Ali vs. Frazier I—is always a part of Forché’s “partisanship of humanity.” That is to say, by placing their violence within the ropes, by giving it shape, boxers are free to be brutal without necessarily being cruel. Isn’t that why fouls in boxing are often so shocking? The low blows, punches thrown after the bell, intentional headbutts. They’re unduly cruel, born of a different desire.

On the other hand, police culture and white supremacist/QAnon/death-cult conservatism enact their violence against the human body, but also against the very notion of humanity itself. Through this distinction, they begin to enact what Forché calls “extremity.” It is in this way they become cruel.

Does this line of thinking reconcile the contradiction I feel being a person who watches a tremendous amount of a certain kind of violence? I’m not sure. Perhaps reconciliation, in this case, is not the goal.

 

 

 

 

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The Pugilist: A Boxing Column (#18)

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The movie Million Dollar Baby was the surprise hit of 2004. Directed by Clint Eastwood and starring Hilary Swank, Clint Eastwood, and Morgan Freeman, it was nominated for seven Academy awards, winning four (Best Picture, Director, Actress, and Supporting Actor) and nabbing a prestigious César award in France. Roger Ebert declared it the best picture of the year, calling it “a masterpiece, pure and simple, deep and true.” It was easily the most successful boxing picture since Rocky in 1976. But often overlooked is the fact that Million Dollar Baby was based on a collection of short stories.

Published originally under the title Ropes Burns: Stories from the Corner and written by F.X. Toole, the collection was released in 2000. It comprised of six stories and an introduction by the author, clocking in around 235 pages. (After the movie’s success, subsequent editions bear the title Million Dollar Baby, and include an additional three stories.) Toole’s story “Million $$$ Baby” provided much of the basis for the movie, but screenwriter Paul Haggis mined the entire collection for character, plot, and in-ring anecdotes.

The two main characters—Maggie and Frankie—are found together in the original “Million $$$ Baby.” In the movie, Frankie has a sweet tooth for lemon pie, but that’s a detail lifted from the narrator in “The Monkey Look,” as is a character named Big Willie. In “Million $$$ Baby,” Frankie is blind in one eye; for the movie, that detail slips over to Freeman’s character, Scrap. Scrap appeared in the book in a different story, “Frozen Water,” which also featured the dim-witted character “Danger,” who appears in the movie as well. Movie Frankie has an estranged daughter he writes letters to which always return unopened. “Million $$$ Baby” doesn’t mention Frankie having a daughter, though a similar character, Mac in the story “Rope Burns,” has lost contact with two daughters, so we can assume he could spare one for the movie.

There is a great little scene in the movie that Haggis lifted from Toole’s introduction. Toole worked as a “cutman” for years before the publication of Rope Burns. Writing about the “magic” of boxing, he describes the magic of working a fighter’s cuts in the corner. He’s inserting a cotton swab soaked with liquid adrenaline into the fighter’s nostril. He tells the story in second person:

You tell the boy to inhale, so the adrenaline will flood the broken tissue and constrict the vein and widen the blow hole. But the boy doesn’t inhale. You say, “Inhale!” Nothing. You say it again, “Goddamn it!” Time is running out, and then you see the boy looking at you like you’ve been speaking Gaelic or Hebrew. So then you understand, and you say “Breathe in!”

Toole goes on to explain:

Part of you has traveled to the place where the boy lives, to the place where no one uses words like inhale. That’s magic, too, but it’s the kind that hurts you, the kind that makes you better for hurting.

Haggis slips this scene into a fight sequence, with Maggie (Swank) in the ring and Frankie (Eastwood) in the corner, tending to her cuts and shouting Inhale! and then Breathe! In the movie, that moment passes without the explication Toole provides in his Introduction, but it reveals the fidelity to which screenwriter Haggis showed Rope Burns in capturing the world as described by Toole.

Rope Burns’ opening story, “The Monkey Look,” is about an unnamed cutman, older, white, and Catholic—a stand-in for Toole himself—whose visage appears in the collection under different names: He is Frankie in “Million $$$ Baby.” He’s Mac in “Rope Burns.” In “Fightin in Philly,” he’s named Con Flutey, and he goes to the Church of Saint Francis Xavier to say a prayer for Ernest Hemingway. And he’s the anonymous narrator and cutman in “The Monkey Look,” the only story to have been published on its own, in the literary journal ZYZZYVA. That publication led to some interest in New York, and eventually to the publication of the collection. I’m curious to what degree Toole intended these stories to be published together as whole. Did he conceive of them as a collection or were they just what he happened to have finished at the time “The Monkey Look” began getting eyes on it?

One thing I admire in Toole’s book is how he layers the insider information about boxing through the stories. For instance, “The Monkey Look” begins with one strong, short line: I stop blood. before the narrator lays out the struggles of actually stopping the blood as it flows between rounds:

But you can’t always stop it. Fight guys know this. If the cut’s too deep or too wide, or maybe you got a severed vein down in there, the blood keeps coming. Sometimes it takes two or three rounds to stop the blood, maybe more—the boy’s heart is pumping so hard, or he cuts more. Once you get the coagulant in there, sometimes it takes another shot from the opponent right on the cut itself to drive the blood far enough from the area so the stuff you’re using can start to work. What I’m saying is there are all kinds of combinations down in the different layers of meat. 

Now, compare that opening line— I stop blood—to the last line of the story, in which the narrator is explaining his taste in pies: I like tart. Look at what Toole is doing here. He uses cadence to provide not only a through-line for the story, but a sense of character for the unnamed narrator. With just a few gruff syllables, we understand he is short and to-the-point, but not without depth of meaning, and perhaps, of metaphor.

The second story, “Black Jew,” contains passages about the training it takes for a fighter to control his breathing while swinging and punching during a fight. The narrator is a trainer named Earl Jeter, called “Jeet.” There’s an old white Irish stand-in for Toole named Pats Mora, but Jeet is the narrator and Toole has written the story in Black Vernacular English. Jeet and Pats are working a fighter named Reggie’s corner:

I say, “And breathe, baby, relax and breathe, hyuh?”

Reggie bob his head, he know. He know if you don’t breathe like a fighter suppose to breathe, you get tired. You hold you breath when you punch, you going to wear down. You get tired, and now you in the other man’s pocket. It happen to him his last loss. He don’t train hard because he think it be a easy fight. Oher boy put pressure on Reggie, bang him to the body, and Reggie tense up and don’t breathe. The ref stop the fight when Reggie get hurt and he too tired to punch back.

Toole is providing this information about breathing in the collection’s second story. With this background information, combined with the description of coagulants in the first story, Toole can drop references to cutmen and breathing throughout the later stories safe in the assumption the reader is armed with the requisite insider knowledge (assuming the reader reads the stories in order, of course). Screenwriter Haggis zeroed in on both these details and lifted them for the screenplay. The cutman commentary goes to Scrap (Freeman) during the voice-over narration while Frankie explains the breathing to Maggie.

The choice to narrate a story in BVE is a bold one for a white writer, perhaps problematic. It invites the question of how the story was received in 2000 versus the speculation of how it might be received today. Recall the 2018 controversy around a poem in BVE written by Anders Carlson-Wee, who is white. Toole writes about race more directly in Rope Burns‘ eponymous story, the longest and least used in the movie adaptation. The story is set in Los Angeles during the time of the Rodney King verdict. The man character is a trainer, Mac, who is white. And a retired cop. The story takes us inside his head as he thinks about the trial while talking with his young fighter, Henry “Puddin” Pye:

“But my mama says, what is makin everybody crazy, is all this Rodney King mess. Say it a field a land mines, say all peoples end up cripple they don’t watch they step.”

No doubt, thought Mac, but he also knew that there were people out there of every color who loved those land mines. The verdicts from the first Rodney King cop trial hadn’t come in yet, but Mac thought about the charges every day. All of Los Angeles did. From the Valley to the Harbor, from the beaches to the mountains, the city was like a stretched womb, most people waiting silently, afraid of the monster that might be born.

Toole sets imperfect characters in an imperfect world. There is a sense he is interested in provocation, in occasionally poking the bear. If he’s guilty of anything, it is perhaps invoking boxing as a too-easy panacea for racial and cultural divides. In Rope Burns, boxing is a place you can earn respect, and that respect expunges quite a lot. Romanticism is a north star that guides much boxing writing, and the over-romanticism of violence, of poverty, of criminality—by writers one suspects have never faced such hardships—is a constant sin. But Toole’s stories and provocations intentionally reject easy answers…until he provides one himself. It’s an uneasy contradiction, but also maybe a little satisfying. Why should we demand fiction be consistent or logical when life so rarely is? Toole’s romanticism of the ring may be sometimes disagreeable but is by no means a fatal flaw. We forgive him when we encounter characters who are complex and flawed, dialogue that feels honest and true, and heartache that feels earned.

A final note: I think it’s worth noting that “F.X. Toole” is a nom de plume. The writer’s real name is well-known and found easily online; see this well-written piece from Sports Illustrated, for example. He worked for decades as a cutman, trainer, and all-around boxing junkie while secretly honing his skill with the pen. I see people write about his book and use his real name, but that doesn’t strike me right. I figure, he published as Toole and since I’m only referring to the book, I’m going to keep calling him Toole here. Sadly, he passed away between the publication of Rope Burns and filming of Million Dollar Baby, so he never saw the acclaim and success of his adapted stories. He left behind a nearly-completed novel, Pound for Pound, which was published posthumously (also under the name Toole).

The Pugilist: A Boxing Column (#17)

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If you’re reading this: Congratulations—you made it through 2020!

It was quite a year, to put it mildly. And so far 2021 here in the U.S. has been…something. It is safe to say we’ll be dealing with the racist death cult of Donald Trump for some time. And we’re still seeing COVID-19 numbers peaking around the world. Of course there are connections that are worth looking into—Trump’s role in hosting boxing cards in the ’80s or ’90s, for instance. Or the impact of COVID-19 on the boxing community (detailed here by the inestimable Patrick Connor). But that’s not what I’d like to use this month’s column for.

On a personal note, my book of prose poetry on Mike Tyson was published one year ago today. I can honestly say that in hindsight, releasing my first book on the cusp of a global pandemic was probably not the most business-savvy move an author can make. Live and learn, right? (But seriously—if you enjoy reading this column, I’d love it if you’d consider purchasing a copy. Email me or leave a comment and I will send you a personalized copy.)

Shameless plug out of the way, I’d like to use this first column of 2021 to highlight a few bright points from the chaotic, unpredictable year that was 2020.

 

Fighter of the Year: Teófimo López

In October, Teófimo López, a 23-year-old Brooklyn native, took on Vasiliy Lomachenko, undisputed lightweight champion and perhaps the best active fighter in the world. López rose to the challenge. From the opening bell he pressed forward, keeping Loma on his back foot, and physically dominated the smaller, older fighter. Although the veteran came to life in the second half, in the end it was López who got the unanimous decision win. López took a risk facing Loma. A big risk. And for that, he has earned not only the belts but the glory. Young, strong, and brash: López has all the potential makings of a bright future in boxing.

 

Round of the Year: Fury-Wilder II, Round 3

Everybody loves a good rematch. With their first outing ruled a draw, Fury-Wilder II was a virtual inevitability. Deontay Wilder promised he would score the KO that slipped though his leather-bound hands in the last minutes of Fury-Wilder I. For his part, Tyson Fury changed trainers and promised to bring a more aggressive style to their February rematch. On the day, it was Fury who delivered. Fury walked his man down from the opening bell, stepping forward with a stiff left jab, pushing Wilder back, disarming him. Round Three was the pivotal round. Fury followed his jab with a right hook and then BAM! One shot just behind the left ear of Wilder and the WBC champ was down. His legs wobbled, Wilder was without a steady base, unable to hoist that petard of a right hand. This round made evident which fighter had the actionable gameplan; which fighter shepherded the will to win; which fighter was able to make good on his promises. In the third, the fight was effectively ended for Wilder. From that knockdown one, Fury came in at will, dominating the bloodied Wilder through the seventh round, when Wilder’s trainer Marc Breland mercifully threw in the towel.

 

K.O. of the Year: Povetkin-Whyte

A lot of folks have said the knockout of the year was Gervonta Davis clocking Leo Santa Cruz, and they’re not wrong—it was a great fight, a great win, and a great KO by a rising star. But back in August, the perennial top ten ranked heavyweights Dillian “The Body Snatcher” Whyte and Alexander Povetkin faced off, after re-scheduling more than once. Although already 32, Whyte was the younger man by nearly a decade and the odds-on favorite to win. Povetkin was coming off a string of uninspiring bouts, and at nearly 41 years old, many considered him on his way out. Whyte controlled the first few rounds, knocking the older man down twice in the third. Then in the fourth, seemingly out of nowhere Povetkin launched a mortar-shell of a uppercut, laying Whyte low and ending the match. A come-from-behind KO of the year.

While not taking anything away from Povetkin, I have to also give a shout out to M.M.A. fighter Joaquin Buckley’s absolutely bananas KO of Impa Kasanganay with a superhero-style jumping spinning back kick.

And if you’re the type fight fan who can’t get enough heavy leather, here’s half a dozen more highlight reel KOs from 2020: Kownacki-Helenius, Linares-Morales, Alvarez-Seals, Martin-Washington, Joshua-Pulev, George-Esudero. And this punishing body shot from Ergashev-Estrella.

 

Event of the Year: Mike Tyson vs Roy Jones, Jr

I approached this exhibition fight with more than a little skepticism. It was being held by an untested online entity called “Triller.” Worst case scenario, this was going to be the pay-per-view equivalent of the Fyre Festival. I also worried how the spotlight might affect Tyson’s mental health. He’s spoken at length about how his fight career allowed his destructive ego to run rampant. In the lead-up, the old Iron Mike seemed to re-appear, and there was talk of killing and dying in the ring. “The gods of war have reawakened me, ignited me, and want me to go to war again,” Tyson said.

Both fears seem to have been blessedly unfounded, however. Triller delivered a great event. They made use of the “no audience” restriction and the ring looked placed in the set of a slick music video. The undercard struck a happy balance between decent action and bizarre spectacle. Between fights, they had musicians perform. Snoop Dogg provided fight commentary. It was a fun night. And after the exhibition was over, Mike Tyson was all smiles. When the host focused on Roy Jones, Tyson joked “Why nobody care about my ass?”

 

Fight of the Year: Ioka-Tanaka

Nearly everyone in the boxing community has chosen the Zepada-Barynchk fight as Fight of the Year. An astounding eight knockdowns in five rounds, distributed evenly between the two warriors, it crammed the ring with fan-friendly, raw action. Another favorite, Nakatani-Verdejo, followed a similar arc of give-and-take, but the boxing is technically and stylistically cleaner and more polished than in Zepada-Barychk. A comparison of those two fights could make a good lesson in the finer points of the sweet science.

I had originally picked Zepada-Barynchk, but that changed on New Year’s Eve, when the Fight of the Year took place in Tokyo between Kazuto Ioka and Kosei Tanaka. Both fighters have been making New Year’s Eve fights a tradition: this was Tanaka’s fourth and Ioka’s ninth. Because a lot of publications rush end-of-year decisions to the middle of December, Ioka-Tanaka was already excluded from many a list. There is a also a level of bias against the smaller weight divisions; Ioka and Tanaka fight at junior bantamweight (112-155 lbs). Plus there is bias in the boxing world against fighters from Japan (and Asian fighters more broadly). Not a single U.S.-based network or streaming service even carried the Ioka-Tanaka fight, although it was highly anticipated amongst boxing-heads.

Fighting for Ioka’s W.B.O. junior bantamweight belt, the younger Tanaka was a slight favorite going in. He held his own against the more experienced Ioka in the early rounds, but Ioka was making adjustments and refining his strategy throughout the fight. In the end, Tanaka was unable to keep up, shaking off a clean knockdown in the fifth but was ultimately finished by a left hook in the seventh. Through it all, Tanaka never backed down and Ioka stayed composed. I love a slugfest as much as the next fella, but Ioka-Tanaka is the kind of fight I enjoy the most: two undeniably talented fighters pushing each other into the deep waters, revealing depth of their talent layer by layer. Where the winner displays mettle, strength, and grace in equal measure. And where by witnessing that performance, I don’t simply forget the reality of my own averageness, but rather learn to face it “with greater courage, with more hope.”

Happy 2021 everyone! Stay strong.


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The Pugilist: A Boxing Column (#16)

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Novelist and boxing writer Katherine Dunn describes what happens to the human animal in the course of a fight: “You have to go down into the place where whatever you truly, truly are is all that’s left.” There are echoes of Flannery O’Connor in that, but what I’m interested in at the moment is “the place” referred to by Dunn. She was being interviewed about boxing, so the phrase “to go down into” means she’s talking metaphorically here, about accessing one’s ontological guts rather than about the physical entrance to a boxing ring, which is always a raised platform.

But it is the ring that interests me—the place where boxing happens. It is iconic enough that the “Bible of Boxing” is called The Ring magazine. Nabakov called it a “luminous cube.” Joyce Carol Oates: “an altar of sorts.” I’ve been racking my brain looking for a way to write about the ring for a while now. Some days, I struggle even simply to understand it.

Metaphors confound more than they clarify. The empty ring, say, as “blank canvas.” Or the ring-as-theater, the ropes as a proscenium laid flat. I even conslt the avant-garde Russian painter Kazimir Malevich’s enigmatic statements about painting a black square: “the square = feeling; the white field = the void beyond this feeling.”

I try approaching the ring as architecture. The history and theory of architecture interests me but quickly reveals my own ignorance. It is a subject I am woefully unschooled in. But it seems key to understanding the place—the space of the ring, to understanding the ring as space. I reached out to author Paul Shepheard, whose writing on architecture holds my fascination and whose talks on YouTube reveal a charitable sense of humor. Though not especially a boxing fan, he agreed it could be interesting to be interviewed on a subject outside his area of expertise. Bless him for putting up with me.

 

AR: Before we dive in to the boxing questions, it might help to give the readers just a little context for your work/background. How would you describe yourself? Your work? 

PS: I’m a writer. I write about the material world. Writing is really about people so my thoughts are transmitted through characters, which gives my writing a fictional aspect. The material world is not a fiction, so there’s a tension there that I enjoy.

I trained as an architect and worked as one for twenty years, so that’s the subject I know most about. I started writing about halfway through that twenty years and was first published in 1994 by the MIT Press. A book about architecture! Called What is Architecture? The subtitle was an essay about landscapes, buildings and machines, and that set the scope of the book. Architecture is not everything, but it’s more than just buildings. It’s the art of the land. Since then there are five more books: The Cultivated Wilderness, about landscape (MIT 1997); Artificial Love, about machines (MIT 2003); How To Like Everything, about everything (Zero 2013); Buildings, about buildings (Circa Press 2016) and Slogans and Battlecries, about intention, use and material. The last is just out and available from Canalside Press. 

I taught architecture all along as well, so my writing has a philosophical bent. Starting with the Architectural Association when I was 25, via the University of Texas at Austin, the Academie van Boukunst in Amsterdam and finishing at Artesis in Antwerp eight years ago when I was 65.

 

AR: What is your prior experience with boxing? Have you ever attended a fight?

PS: No. I’ve seen simulacrums on film and TV but never attended the full visceral. The women’s boxing at the 2012 Olympics was the first time it caught my considered attention. I think of it as a blood sport, but between consenting adults. I think that dog fights and cockfights are also done with consent, unlike other blood sports, for example bear baiting and foxhunting, which are oppressive.

 

AR: Something I love about boxing is how for me, it brings a number of paradoxes to the forefront. One is that “the ring” is obstinately a square. In boxing, “the ring” stems from its impromptu and illegal history. People in the crowd would actually hold the rope that demarcated “the ring.” They would actually “build” the ring with the presence of their bodies. Can architecture embrace paradox, or by being so concrete does architecture tend to actually resolve paradox? What do you see as the role of living bodies, space, and building? Are there other precedents for similar constructions?

PS: I think it’s a question of function and form. DNA functions, bodies forms. Are functions and forms ideals or physical presences? And doesn’t the ring start with the bullring? The first bullring was in Minoan Crete at the time of the Minotaur, when boys and girls danced with the bulls instead of killing them. There is a complex counterpoint there, as the circus was a clearing in the plan of the palace at Knossos which was made up of many masonry cells; hence the ‘labyrinth’. Alongside the labyrinth that caged the Minotaur the circular dancing floor was where the conquest of the beast was symbolically evoked. While the labyrinth was entirely made of walls, the dance floor had none. The labyrinth was all function and the dance floor was all form. It released the dancers to function, to perform their dance, and as they did so, the dance itself became the form.

I think sporting events are not theatrical in as much as they are not rehearsed, or, beyond the rules, predictable. Maybe that is why the rings and the stadiums (and the cockpits) are in the round. Prosceniums would be problematic for sports spectators. Except that: the prologue to Shakespeare’s Henry 5th refers to the globe theatre as the ‘wooden O’. And except that: the old operating theatres had seats arranged in the round. Theatre stems from the Greek for ‘behold’ so my distinction here between sporting events and dramas maybe a bit too nice.

 

AR: Boxing also has a history of fight-specific venues—constructions built specifically for one big fight. I’m obsessed with this image from 1921 of a wooden stadium built for Jack Dempsey versus Georges Carpentier. It took two months to build, 1000 men, and reportedly 60 tons of nails. It held 91,000 people that day. Last year, they built a 15,000 person stadium in Saudi Arabia for “Clash in the Dunes,” a heavyweight title fight (it reportedly took the same amount of time to build). Massive structures, but temporary. I’m curious what you think about venues like stadiums, purpose-driven spaces, and what is built to last.

 

PS: That 60 tons of nails is a great statistic. I once saw a picture of a football stadium in the thirties, up North, Bolton Bury and Blackburn country, which was simply a berm of earth surrounding the field. It must have been 20 meters high. There was enough slope on the berm for people standing to see over the heads of the people in front. Hundreds of them, maybe thousands. No seats, nothing but this slope. That was probably a temporary building, but I don’t know how long it lasted. How long is temporary? The sloping piazza at Sienna where the Palio horse race is staged works in a similar way. That’s several hundred years old but presumably won’t last for ever. One of the reasons stadiums have seats is they’re much safer. Imagine a high stakes boxing match with twenty thousand standing spectators. Riotous.

The open roofs are important. The colosseum in Rome was the archetypal stadium. I’ve heard that it was the ambition to be altogether in one place, all Roman citizens together under the sky, that formed it.

 

AR: One of the terms I encountered first in your book What Is Architecture? Was the “charged void.” In my mind immediately flashed the image of the boxing ring, a charged void at the center of a raucous, swirling crowd. Could you speak a little to what that term entails in architecture, and if I am out of line in applying this term to the boxing ring?

PS: The “charged void” was coined by Vincent Scully, an old school architectural historian from Philadelphia—maybe middle school would be a better term: late fifties. He noticed that the temple plans of ancient Greece were apparently random collections of buildings unrelated to each other. The Greeks surmised that the landscapes that surrounded them had been made by the gods, and had a collection of stories that we know as myths, that described the events that had taken place. I think they compare to the aboriginal songlines of Australia: Scully noted that these songlines were the script that explained the temple relationships. He said that the buildings had been set down not in relation to each other but into a void charged with these stories.

Poet-boxer Arthur Cravan

I think that those brooding cinematic images of empty race tracks and boxing rings, pregnant with the promise of events to come, are similar. The image of the void in the centre of the crowd is coming across strongly here, isn’t it? I’m guessing it’s one of the things that’s attractive to you, being part of the emotional swell of that crowd. My editor at MIT was the boxing commissioner for Maine and was keen on the relation between Dada and boxing. One of Dada’s inspirations was Arthur Cravan, the poet-boxer. Why Dada and boxing? Perhaps it is that boxing is the art of the moment.

 

AR: Also in the book, you say that unlike literature, architecture cannot be ambivalent “because space is exclusive. No two things can be in the same space at the same time.” That’s also a pretty elemental definition for boxing: two fighters enter the ring, but only one can remain as victor, the other is knocked “out.” What can we learn from this aspect of space and sport? 

PS: It’s complicated by the introduction of points scoring – a boxer can win on a majority as while as outright. Spatial exclusivity is an ontological actuality, no special cases allowed (and does that mean no ethics are non spatial?). Unless you’re going to quote quantum theory and the particle wave phenomenon at me – it seems to me that that is a very provisional explanation and needs a lot more work. Theories of uncertainty are plentiful just now, maybe we could do with more knockouts.

 

AR: In the ring, boxers can fight in ways that would be illegal outside of those ropes. I’m very curious about how space affects people. We understand to be quiet in a library and we can shout in a stadium. What is it about space that affects us? Or, what is it about people that we can so readily morph without feeling schizophrenic?

I don’t know if you saw the recent movie THE SQUARE. It’s about an art installation, a square on the ground, that says people are to behave a certain way while within that space, very similar to the artist Carey Young’s piece “Declared Void,” which views space as contractual. I’m curious about the implications and the ethics of viewing space in this way.

PS: You can always draw a chalk circle on the ground and declare it different from the rest of the floor. What’s of interest is not the space, but the systems of agreement and policing that come about. I doubt if the declaration in Young’s piece that the constitution does not apply within that square would hold up in court, which makes it pointless. I’m a hardliner on this. ‘Hell is other people’ is not a spatial description of hell, and rules and regulations are about use, they borrow space but don’t make it. I guess one answer to your what is it about people question is that we crave conformity.

I have a friend at Kansas State University who’s researching neuroscience and architecture, with the aim of proving that some of the intangibles of the subject, like the ones you raise, can be subject to science and thus become actualities. You never know, I like the intangibles intangible.

 

AR: In her book/essay On Boxing, Joyce Carol Oates says that boxing has become our “tragic theater.” She was writing about what we can learn from tragedy, but I’m curious about what we can learn from the theater aspect of the ring. Specifically, thinking of the ring as a kind of prostrated proscenium, the fourth wall turned on its side. The space plays with reality and fiction, at the same time it creates spectators, it brings people together while also separating them.  

I’ve written about “witnessing” the violence of boxing fights and the role of the audience. Audiences used to actually produce “the ring.” Then they began filling stadiums with tens of thousands of fight fans, And now, with COVID-19, we’re seeing boxing return without audiences. What do you make of these developments?

PS: Theatre again. Prison makes prisoner, dance floor makes dancer and theatre makes spectator. I’ve many times as a young man seen bands on stage and wished I was in the band and not in the audience. Does the boxing audience want to be on stage slugging it out? Or is the other version, that they’re there to witness the craft of the boxers, make as much sense? I guess the former. I once wrote that space exploration being done by robots was pointless, as human activities need human involvement to be meaningful. I imagined robot race cars on a race track, and found the track to be empty of meaning. Since then I’ve witnessed the result of deep space explorations and realize that the humans are there but further back in the chain, their remoteness turning the whole operation into a kind of conjuring trick. Or is it magic? I want to know. WH Auden had a line on magic that it was based on wishes, and that once granted, the wish was fixed and could go nowhere else. No progress, no development, just happy ever after. Life on Mars.

 

AR: Any questions, musings, or reflections about boxing you’d like to ask or share?

PS:

  1. I’d like to know why boxing is called boxing. The dictionaries don’t tell me, origin unknown, they say. Perhaps it is this mystery of the meaning of the ring that you bring up that is the box? Or is it the constricted space the fight takes place in? When animals fight it’s open ended so the vanquished can escape with their lives, no ref needed. My neighbor’s son is a cage fighter, he says. Is the cage an extreme box?
  2. Another little nexus of meaning: The “Great White Way” at the turn of the last century was a nick name for Broadway, NY, which was newly lit by arc lamps. At that time, boxing was dominated by Jack Johnson, which signaled the inevitable end of segregation; the forces against integration wanted to find the white man who could beat Johnson. This mythical figure was called the “Great White Hope,” and he never materialized. Interesting that boxing is more effortlessly integrated than, say, the US police departments.
  3. In U.S. academic life, plaudits are loaded on those who can slug it out in an argument and be the last man standing. They’re called “heavyweights.” Jeff Kipnis is a heavyweight. I’d like to know more about the standing of other weights, for example ‘featherweight’. My impression is that they are materially realistic terms, and that a skilled feather is as rewarding to watch as a skilled heavy. In this reading Gertrude Stein was a featherweight.
  4. Lastly, Muhammed Ali and the Shaking Palsy. I am interested in the disease and have a number of Parkinson’s heroes, of whom Ali must be one—but to see him in his last years shaking and bowed in a wheelchair, was something terrible.

AR: Oh, these are great points of entry. Let me take them in reverse order.

I don’t know if the science has ever conclusively linked boxing to Parkinson’s or not, but there is plenty of evidence connecting the sport to chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE—first called informally “punch drunk syndrome” and later the slightly more medical-sounding “dementia pugilistica.” 

RE: heavyweights, lightweights, middleweights, etc.—you’re exactly correct. These categories correspond to specific weights. So much boxing terminology has bled into English, but in this case it gets a little twisted whenever we call someone a lightweight as a pejorative. There is nothing “lesser” about quality in lower weight classes. And most of the historically best fighters—Harry Greb, Sugar Ray Robinson, Roberto Duran—weren’t heavyweights.

Boxing has a history that is famously reflective of race in society, particularly in the United States. As you point out, it has it’s bright spots but it’s also quite often ugly and contorted. Jack Johnson was railroaded in court and jailed under the Mann Act. He was officially pardoned in 2018 by then-President Donald Trump, himself a “great white hope” of sorts, aka a huckster and racist demagogue. Not new for Trump; he regularly hosted fights in his hotels and casinos (before they went bankrupt), a long sordid history of appropriating the sport of boxing personally and politically to assuage his fragile masculinity and paper over his own moral, ethical, and physical shortcomings.

Why is boxing called “boxing”? I’ve looked in to this several times and never found a definitive answer. Some histories suggest the term is less related to the obvious “boxiness” of the ring and instead descends from the verb “to box,” as we might still say “to box your ears.” But even that connection is murky. As to boxes, my mind drifts first to Joseph Cornell and his assemblages of found objects–collections of unlikely pairings, articles cast aside by society and re-purposed for display. In that regard, yes, combat sports might be said to take place in “extreme boxes.”

I like the indiscernibility here, and I can appreciate the circularity of a column that began by wondering what “the ring” means and ends on the recognition that we don’t even know what “boxing” means. I want to thank Paul Shephard so much for his knowledge and time and willingness to share both. 

For more information, visit Paul Shepheard’s webpage and consider ordering his latest book, Slogans and Battlecries from Canalside Press.

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The Pugilist: A Boxing Column (#15)

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I’ve seen the movie Rocky, I don’t know, like a hundred times. (OK not really, but still a lot.) Despite the repeated viewings, there are two scenes I always misremember.

The first is the opening shot. Set in a church’s social hall, a boxing ring has been set up for a series of “smokers.” Before the camera cranes down to show Rocky fighting a pug named Spider Rico, it opens on a painting of Jesus on the church wall. My memory says the painting is of the Crucifixion, but I am mistaken. The painting is of Jesus, but not Jesus crucified. Instead Jesus holds a Eucharist, offering Communion.

The other scene involves Adrian’s older brother Paulie. I remember the scene this way: Rocky is at Adrian’s and Paulie’s house for Thanksgiving dinner. Paulie is drunk and resentful and brandishing a baseball bat. He pulls the turkey from the oven and with the bat he smashes the (ex)bird. But this is incorrect. I have conflated two separate scenes. Paulie does wield a bat (and Christmas wreath), but instead of a turkey he smashes a tea set. And he does defile the Thanksgiving turkey, but instead of a bat he uses his hands to throw it into the alley (saving a leg for himself).

So what of it?

Some moments in life, and they needn’t be very long or seem very important, can make up for so much in that life; can redeem, justify, that pain, that bewilderment, with which one lives

— James Baldwin

Communion is a sacrament, a Catholic ritual. The visible form of an invisible grace, to paraphrase St. Augustine. At the heart of Communion is the Eucharist, in which the substance of the bread has been transformed into the real substance of Christ, taken and ingested by each participant. Communion is a way for believers to link this physical world to those impenetrable mysteries so central to their faith. The Eucharist is about becoming more-than-flesh.

The Thanksgiving turkey is, in its way, something of an opposite. Defenestrated by Paulie, what once was living is now a diminished thing, a reduction. Not just an object, but an object of scorn, disdain, derision. Paulie holds on to the leg bone, ragged and torn, waving it about. Flesh-made-meat, the turkey is something degraded, less-than-flesh.

Violence is inherent to both these scenes. For the turkey, this is obvious—the bird has been killed, cooked, and torn apart. The sacrament of Communion is not in itself violent until one recalls that Jesus broke the bread and spoke the words “Take, eat, this is my body” at the Last Supper, himself fully prepared for the violence of crucifixion and bodily death.

Speaking to the Catholic nature of her fiction, author Flannery O’Connor explains that violence in her stories is never the end itself, but rather a vehicle for revealing essential truths about her characters, truths obscured by the ordinary and everyday. “The man in the violent situation,” she writes, “reveals those qualities least dispensable to his personality, those qualities which are all he will have to take into eternity with him.”

She continues: “In my own stories I have found that violence is strangely capable of returning my characters to reality and preparing them to accept their moment of grace. Their heads are so hard that almost nothing else will do the work.”

 

some moments teach one the price of the human connection

— James Baldwin

If O’Connor’s position can be said to be punching up, to represent the “violence as greater-than” position, then painter Francis Bacon may be emblematic of punching down, of “violence as less-than.” Severe and jarring, Bacon’s images do not present characters preparing “to accept their moment of grace.” Instead, he offers an unusually intense portraiture of flesh-made-meat. The lack of hesitancy is startling. “Only by going too far,” Bacon said, “can you go far enough.”

Both O’Connor and Bacon present their works fully formed, as true believers, similarly firm in their differing convictions. Rocky is less definitive. It offers us an account of ambivalence, the struggle with this meat-made-metaphor. Both Paulie and Rocky are mired in a world of less-than. Rocky dreams of exceeding his circumstances while Paulie seems enamored by, or content to wallow in, that diminished world.

Rocky is described as a “leg breaker” for loan shark Tony Gazzo. “It’s a living,” Rocky tells his trainer Mickey. “It’s a waste of life,” Mickey yells back. A man is alive; meat is not. Gazzo’s driver dislikes Rocky; he calls him a “meat bag.” Paulie asks repeatedly about getting a job with Gazzo; he is eager for that violent world. Rocky equivocates. When Gazzo tells him to break a man’s thumb, Rocky refuses.

Paulie works at Shamrock Meats, and trying to be helpful in the ways he knows, Paulie cuts a steak and wraps it in butcher’s paper for Rocky. Later, while fighting Apollo Creed, Rocky suffers a hematoma over his left eye, a swelling that blocks his vision. “Cut me,” he instructs his cornermen. They oblige by slicing the meat.

In one memorable scene, Rocky visits Paulie in the frozen meat locker of Shamrock Meats. There, punching a side of beef, Rocky breaks its ribs. A camera crew is brought in to film a puff piece on the local fighter. After slamming his fists into the frozen meat, the newscaster holds up Rocky’s left hand. The wrappings are soaked with blood.

Francis Bacon: “Every time I go into a butcher’s, I’m surprised that it’s not me hanging there.”

 

if one can live with one’s own pain, then one respects the pain of others, and so, briefly, but transcendentally, we can release each other from pain.

— James Baldwin

We live with the fear that our body (and soul, whatever that may be) will degrade into powerless, silent meat. We also live with the hope of becoming something more. Picking up on the difference between these two orientations is not always so simple. Cultural critic and author Maggie Nelson: “What looks like meaningful, divine suffering to one person often looks like brutal, preventable violence to another.”

This column began with two scenes from Rocky: a painting of Jesus presenting the Eucharist and Paulie throwing out a Thanksgiving turkey. The word Eucharist comes from the Greek eucharistia. It means “thanksgiving.”

I saw a quote recently, attributed to Wyatt Earp, that destiny is what we are drawn to and fate is what gets in our way. Many view Rocky as little more than two hours of cliché. But in its cinematic suffering and violence, I see the push and pull of opposing worldviews, violence punching up and punching down, the clash of less-than and greater-than. It’s a conflicted and confusing state of being that I can identify with. Rocky‘s storytelling is strongest when dealing with its existential crisis: the fear and the hope that we are either fated to this fallen world or destined to exceed it.

 

 

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The Pugilist: A Boxing Column (#14)

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It will likely surprise no one for me to say that I love boxing movies. And I do. A lot. (Though it is true many boxing purists don’t enjoy the movies, frustrated by the inaccuracies and mischaracterizations, much the same way many scientists are frustrated by science fiction or English teachers are unnerved by DEAD POETS SOCIETY.) Boxing (the sport) is a form of highly regulated brutality, and as I’ve written before, I love the sport for its embrace of that incongruity, the layering of man-made rules upon animal aggression. I love boxing movies for much the same reason: the genre places the “rules” of boxing’s limited palette onto the creativity of artists (the writers, directors, actors, cinematographers, etc.). It forces an artist to do a lot with a little.

The last ten years have seen a number of successful boxing movies. In addition to the CREED pictures, there was THE FIGHTER (2010), HANDS OF STONE (2016), BLEED FOR THIS (2016), and JAWBONE (2017) among others (oh how I wish 2016’s CHUCK had been better executed!). Without a doubt, one of the most affecting boxing movies I’ve seen recently is 12 ROUND GUN, an independent picture written, directed, and starring Sam Upton. It’s a story about an ex-fighter (Joe) who returns to the ring after his is blinded in an unfair fight. Within the framework of the comeback, Upton explores his character’s alcoholism, his lack of self-worth, and the struggle to find something like redemption. He also introduces a character Jimmy, played by Mark Boone Junior, an unforgettably rough-hewn individual who pushes Joe towards his better path. Jimmy is like Buddha, if Buddha had acquired his wisdom in barfights instead of under the Bodhi tree.

I had the opportunity to speak with writer, director, and actor Sam Upton, and get the inside scoop one what it is like making a boxing movie. 

On the director’s commentary for CINDERELLA MAN, Ron Howard says that star Russell Crowe described boxing movies as being the screen actor’s equivalent to how stage actors feel about Hamlet. Does that sound accurate to you?

Sam Upton: Never heard that one. I fucking love it. Yes, I would agree.

Taking on a boxing movie is serious undertaking and you approached it as writer, director, and star. What motivated you to take on that challenge? And was there one aspect that was more appealing to you?

SA: Taking on any film is a massive challenge no matter what the subject matter. Getting get a movie made is nothing short of a miracle. The challenges are monumental, the problems are endless, the stress is insane – so those challenges are ubiquitous with every film – not to mention making a film on a shoestring budget – that is way harder than any large studio film – the stakes are so much higher on every level. I have to say that I am eternally attracted to EVERY aspect of the filmmaking process – an in actuality, making 12 ROUND GUN was the most fulfilled artistically I have every felt – because I was able to align all of my passions and all of my talents into a single vision.

Mark Boone Junior has an unforgettable role in 12 ROUND GUN as Jimmy, a friend who pushes the fighter to read Marcus Aurelius. He’s someone who Italian thinker Antonio Gramsci might have called an “organic intellectual.” What was the inspiration for that character?

SA: Most of the dialogue between Jimmy and Joe (my character) are things that my therapist has said to me. Their scenes were mined from the countless hours I’ve spent in her office, working on my own problems, issues, neurosis, etc. The first lesson in writing is to “write what you know” – so I literally did just that. I put my blood on the page. My own life. My own words. Then I was able to creatively manipulate and tweak them to fit perfectly into the film and I think it worked quite well. I do have to say that Boone is hands down the most incredible actor I’ve ever worked with (and I’ve worked with Pacino, Walken, McConaughey, Anthony Mackie, Ben Affleck just to name a few). Boone embodied Jimmy to the extent that there was no separation between living and acting. He just WAS him. It was totally incredible. Working with him was by far one of the most fulfilling and incredible experiences I’ve ever had. He makes the movie. There is no movie without him in that part. I’ll never forget it.

12 ROUND GUN is notable for its grit and its grime. It’s boxing sequences are vicious, brutal visual poems. When it came to shooting those sequences, what were your concerns? How did you achieve the look and feel of 12 ROUND GUN?

SA: I knew that I wanted the fight scenes to feel real. Visceral. I wanted it to bombard the viewer. I wanted the audience to be immersed in the fight. I worked for 125 hours on our sound design with my sound designer, Johnny Martini – that’s 125 hours ON TOP of the work he did. I did this because I knew that sound is so subliminal in film – and it would be the glue between our super real kinetic hand held frames. I also used REAL fighters in the film. Derek Zugic (Miguel) is a 3 time Golden Glove Champ from Chicago – so most of the punches you see are real punches… Especially the Slow motion punches – I used a Phantom Flex camera to slow the footage down to 2000 FPS (frames per second) I took REAL punches to the face for those shots – we didn’t have any tricks or budget for vfx so you are seeing me take a huge bomb to the face at 2000FPS – and I directed with a minor concussion the rest of the day. But it was fucking worth it! We also rehearsed a TON at Freddie Roach’s gym Wild Card West (Now Churchill Boxing Club). We really workshopped everything so that on the day I knew exactly what shots and sequences I needed for the edit. I even used the greatest round in boxing history – Castillo Vs. Corrales as my inspiration for Joe’s final round Vs. Miguel.

There are a number of similarities to the tragic and true story of boxer Billy Collins Jr. Were you aware of his story? As a writer, how did you handle the responsibility to use that inspiration ethically?

SA: Love that you know about this Andrew! I drew on Billy’s story for sure. Pablo Picasso said “good artists copy, great artists STEAL.” I did just that. I took a little bit of Billy’s story, and expanded on it.

Are there allusions to any in 12 ROUND GUN to other boxing movies? Any inspirations? Or tropes you wanted to avoid?

SA: Honestly, I didn’t set out to make a boxing movie. I think if you set out to make a boxing film, you will die. I wanted to make a very dark, deeply personal character driven drama about alcoholism, fathers and sons and redemption – all of this set in the grimy, gritty, iconic world of boxing. I would be lying if I didn’t say how much ROCKY inspired me for this film. Both the story and the story behind the story. How Sly was offered $1M by Burt Reynolds for the script –they didn’t want him to play the part – he told them to fuck themselves, and believed in himself and went and made his movie. That, along with the absolute genius of the film acted as a huge inspiration for me.

Online, I’ve seen you’re also a talented drummer. Any connections between percussion and writing, or drumming and boxing? Is there overlap? Escape? Something else?

SA: It’s all connected. If you express yourself honestly as an artist and stay true to it… then everything you do is connected – overlapped – related. Playing the drums is really no different than boxing or screenwriting or acting – so many of the same rules apply. The key is to do what you love in life. DO WHAT YOU LOVE, and don’t give up. It sounds sort of cliché, I know, but at the root of it… its pretty much the truth.

Changing technology (video on demand, streaming) has been altering the movie-going landscape, and COVID-19 has been a real problem for movie theaters. What do you make of this shifting situation? Any predictions, insight, experiences, etc?

SA: I am extremely worried about movie theaters. It would be a global tragedy if theaters didn’t make it through this. The same sort of thing happened in 1920 after WWI – theaters were in a horrible state – but then Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton almost single handedly revitalized the cinema. I hope that we can do the same almost 100 years later.

From a filmmaker standpoint, I think that this massive shift will break open the window for smaller movies with smaller crews to make a large splash. Faster shoots. Smaller budgets. Less risk. Those are all assets I think will be more valuable than ever.

Favorite boxing movie?

SA: ROCKY or THE CHAMP

If you could go back in time to see any fight live, which fight would it be and why?

SA: I’m a big Tyson fan – well, let me be specific – EARLY TYSON – when he was with Cus D’Amato. He was basically the UFC before the UFC existed. The whole earth stopped and we all thought that someone might die when Tyson fought. I would have loved to see him when he was 19, no socks, just a towel with a hole cut in it, and lightning in his hands. I can vividly remember watching those fights on Pay Per View with my pops – but I would love to have seen it live.

Being creative in a multi-faceted way, I imagine you have some irons in the fire right now. Any projects you’d like to speak of?

SA: Yes. I just finished a short film I wrote and directed. I’m also very excited about my next feature I am gearing up for… its about a drummer. Imagine that? 😉

I also have a docu-series I’ve created (also in the world of music) and I have a feeling we are going to get to make that soon so that’s pretty incredible.

 

12 ROUND GUN is available for streaming on Amazon Prime. It is a hell of a ride and 100% worth seeking out. Follow Sam Upton on Instagram @mrsamupton

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The Pugilist: A Boxing Column (#13)

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A few weeks ago I went to a sports bar. ESPN was airing a U.K. fight card and I had convinced a friend to come along (provided the place wasn’t too crowded and had reasonable social distancing protocols, of course). The bar itself was nondescript. Locally owned, minimally decorated. The floor plan was wonky as tables had been pushed away from each other and distanced as best they could. The server wore a mask. We let her know we were there to watch the fight and ordered our appetizers.

Two fighters from Belfast were on the card that afternoon, former world champion Carl Frampton and undefeated Michael Conlan (famous for flashing middle fingers to Olympic judges after bad judging cost him the fight in 2016). They both fought well and won their bouts. But of course when I think back to that afternoon, it isn’t really about the fights so much as it is about the experience. Even after just a few months of lockdown, the experience of sitting in a sports bar feels . . . I don’t know. Luxurious? Alien? Risky?

Fights are coming back. With more regularity and with bigger names. Top Rank ran it’s “bubble” for six weeks back in June and July, the test run needed to prove that quality boxing could be produced safely and entertainingly with minimal staff. And no audience.

Other sports have started back as well. Football season has begun in the U.S., and baseball’s abbreviated season ends in a few weeks. Without fans in the stadiums, baseball has been filling in seats with cardboard cutouts. Scott O’Connor writes in The Paris Review that these empty stadiums are liminal spaces. “That line between the dream of the game and the waking world of the fans has blurred.” And though it feels to him that the connection between fans has been broken, he also recognizes that this is a time of forging new ways to connect.

Imprisoned in a flattened universe bounded by the screen of the spectacle that has enthralled him, the spectator knows no one but the fictitious speakers who subject him to a one-way monologue about their commodities and the politics of their commodities.

Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

While baseball’s been filling empty seats with the faces of actual fans, boxing has gone a slightly different route. One promotion projected posters from their past fights. Another used screens with images of fans—but rather than individuals, they opted for out-of-focus, blurred fans. Blobs of color really, symbolically the shape of fans and accompanied by artificially piped-in cheers.

I have to admit: as much as I was poised to reflexively dislike this simulacrum, it works. It’s hardly the most imaginative workaround to the “problem” of empty stands, and it is easy to read gloomy symbolism into viewing fans as a blurry, indistinct mass of blobs, but it does make for a watchable night of fights. Even the fake cheers, which some unseen character raises and lowers following the action like the canned laughter of a sitcom, even that works.

Unlike big team sports, boxing doesn’t operate on a seasonal basis. Fighters are relatively free to determine their own schedules, their own pace. And while promoters are careful not to overlap pay-per-view fights, there is no widespread choreographed scheduling in place.

To some degree, however, the coronavirus lockdowns did enforce such pre-planning. Fighters were forced to take six months off and as a result, this fall now feels a little like “boxing season.” Organizations are releasing their schedules, and there are quality fights practically every weekend for the foreseeable future. Lubin vs. Gausha should be a good show this weekend. And identical twins Jermall and Jermell are co-headlining a stacked card on Sept 26. But without a doubt, the biggest fight is Lomachenko vs. Lopez, set for “the bubble” at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas on October 17.

I wrote an earlier column about the boxer Vasily Lomachenko. He’s one of the best ring technicians there is right now, maybe the best. A year ago, he was coming off a win against Olympic gold medalist Luke Campbell. The fight went the distance and I suggested in my column that Loma needed to face a different type of fighter, one who would make him dig deep and who, through the ferocity of the fight, would better reveal Loma’s greatness.

He has found such an opponent in Teofimo Lopez. The staple saying in boxing is that styles make fights. That could be amended to say that contrasting styles make for more exciting fights. A clash of styles provides that mysterious X factor the quickens the pulse of fight fans. It makes the outcome difficult to predict and makes the process all the more provocative.

Lopez is young, just 23. A few years shy of the typical fighter’s peak years. By contrast Loma is 32, approaching the north side of the prime years. Lopez is known as a heavy hitter. He has an 80% KO record. Loma is strong but is known more for his accuracy, footwork, and nearly superhuman agility. They’re both great fighters, both near-enough their primes. It’s experience vs. youth. A tactician against a slugger. The best fighting the best.

Fans love this type of match-up. Seven years ago, a 23-year-old Saul “Canelo” Alvarez took on 36-year-old Floyd “Money” Mayweather. Mayweather won that fight on a split decision, Canelo’s only loss to date.

And just last year, a 26-year-old Naoya “The Monster” Inoue faced off against 37-year-old Nonito Donaire “The Filipino Flash,” which was declared Fight of the Year by many. The younger Inoue was able to get the decision over the older Donaire, proving his supporters right and securing his place in the pound-for-pound top-ten lists.

Boxing is like jazz. The better it is, the less people appreciate it.

George Foreman

That’s one loss and one win for the younger fighters. 50/50. That’s pretty much the consensus on Loma vs. Lopez. It’s a “pick ’em” fight. Anything is possible. But I still lean towards a Lomachenko victory. Experience is key, but the biggest mitigating factor will be the layoff—whichever fighters enters the ring at less than 100% is going to be made to pay.

The real joy is that this potential fight of the year isn’t going to be a pay-per-view event. Acknowledging the financial hardships faced by many this year, ESPN is broadcasting the fight for free. Anyone with basic cable can watch from home. And sports bars will be able to show it as well, assuming they are open. (In my home state of Ohio, for instance, bars and restaurants are currently banned from serving alcohol after 10 P.M. in an effort to curb the spread of the virus.) The fight will likely go on without a live audience, although promoters continue to hope that will change.

A while back, I wrote that one of my goals was to attend a live fight this year. Little did I know then what 2020 would turn out to be. I’m comfortable letting go of that goal. For now. I do love the sport, but safety is worth much more. Filling a stadium in the U.S. right now is a bad idea, even for a good fight. Revenue streams and profit margins simply aren’t worth people’s lives. Maybe now, with the challenges presented by the coronavirus, sports networks and promoters will get creative and find the next evolution in delivering live sports to fans.




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The Pugilist: A Boxing Column (#12)

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The boxing world is often presented as—and it often is—a noir-ish sort of space, a landscape of bright lights and deep shadows. For every name glowing on the marquee there are a dozen or more toiling nameless, faceless somewhere out of sight. This high-contrast world takes on a certain tenor, attracts a certain population that understands if you want to play beautiful music, you have to play the black and the white notes together (if I may paraphrase Nixon).

A century ago and more, fans of boxing were known as The Fancy. “A union of all ranks,” wrote Pierce Egan in 1812, “from the brilliant of the highest class in the circle of Corinthians, down to the Dusty Bob gradation on society, and even a shade or two below that.” We have since dropped the collective designation of The Fancy, but this “union of all ranks” persists, as does our fascination with it. Take as evidence this article from Sports Illustrated, focused solely on the opulence and criminality that beset Las Vegas in the hours before Tyson-Holyfield II, “Fear and Clothing in Las Vegas: The Finery and Thuggery of a Fight-Week Crowd.”

All this to say that boxing is a unique environment that attracts a unique crowd. And to extend that, the boxing crowd is comprised of spectacularly unique individuals. This column is about two of those individuals: Drew “Bundini” Brown, associate of Muhammad Ali who coined the phrase “float like a butterfly and sting like a bee,” and Todd Snyder, a writer and boxing scholar who is also Bundini’s biographer.

I harangued the poor fellow with some questions about himself and his upcoming and highly-anticipated book. He responded graciously to my intrusions.

Let’s start at the beginning. How did you first get into boxing and how did you start getting into writing about boxing?

Todd Snyder: The sport of boxing has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. My father, Mike “Lo” Snyder, ran a small town boxing gym in Cowen, West Virginia. He trained mostly teenage amateurs but had a few low-level professionals in his gym as well. My earliest memories of my father are him hitting the heavy bag, working with local guys on the mitts. My Saturday nights were always spent watching fights on television or at local boxing cards. In high school, I boxed for a few years as well. As a young man, this was my normal. In hindsight, I recognize the extent to which my life revolved around boxing.

How I came to write about the sport is a completely different story. It wasn’t until my first year as an Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Writing at Siena College (my first post-graduate school academic position) that I tried my hand at writing about boxing. A colleague of mine, Nate Leslie, took note of the black and white boxing photography that decorated my office walls and asked if I had ever written anything about boxing. In graduate school, I was writing about Plato, Socrates, and Gorgias, scholars such as Victor Villanueva and Ira Shor. As a working-class scholar, it hadn’t occurred to me that I was now free to write about any subject of my choosing. Nate gave me a nudge in that direction and it completely transformed my career.

I really enjoyed 12 Rounds in Lo’s Gym. Insightful but a remarkably pleasurable read. You described many fighters, but one description really stood out. You wrote: “He looked like Alexis Arguello might look if Alexis Arguello had grown up in Appalachia and was hooked on elephant tranquilizers.” There’s so much specificity there, but also so much space for imagination. As a nonfiction writer, how do you go about constructing scenes, describing people, etc.? What considerations do you weigh? What is that process like for you? 

TS: That particular reference is about my Uncle Donald, who was my father’s pugilistic muse. In some respects, I plagiarized that line from my father. One day we were watching his old VHS tape of Pryor vs. Arguello II. I was probably thirteen-years-old. During the first round, my father paused the tape and said, “that is exactly what your Uncle Donald used to look like when he was young.” Donald was long and lanky, built with lean muscles and ropey arms. My father and grown up in the shadow of Donald’s small town reputation as a fierce street fighter. The Donald I had grown up with was a recovering drug addict who spoke in soft whispers. It was hard to imagine Donald as the great Alexis Arguello. The description stuck in my mind regardless. When it came time to write about Donald for 12 Rounds in Lo’s Gym, it felt the way to go.

In regard to my personal writing style, I think you said it best. You give the reader certain visuals, you direct their imaginations. However, as writers, we can’t forget that readers get to take part in the meaning-making process. I always like to leave a little space for their imaginations as well. When you over-describe a scene or a person you limit the potential of that meaning-making magic.

You’ve written across many genres—academic/scholarly writing, memoir, biography, and sociology. How does genre affect your writing? Or conversely, how does your writing affect genre?

TS: I’m a rhetoric scholar by training, so I approach everything I write with audience-awareness in mind. Genre conventions tell a writer what the audience expects. We can break those rules, of course, but we must consider the effect this rule-breaking might potentially have on folks who harbor such expectations. I spent all of my 20s in college (four years working on my undergraduate degree, two years working on my master’s degree, and five years working on my Ph.D.). If I can be honest, writing academic discourse is easy and a little boring. My first book, The Rhetoric of Appalachian Identity, was, for the most part, a traditional academic text.

My most recent work is more heavily influenced by the Appalachian oral tradition that shaped my childhood and adolescence. I grew up in a family of storytellers. I think telling stories in your own voice (regardless of genre) is equally as important as learning the conventions of a field of study or genre of writing.

Tell me a little about your new book. Who is Bundini? And should we believe the hype?  

TS: My next book is a biography of Drew Bundini Brown, Muhammad Ali’s enigmatic cornerman. The title of the book is Bundini: Don’t Believe the Hype. The title is a play on words, borrowing from Public Enemy’s famous hip-hop anthem “Don’t Believe the Hype.” As you know, Bundini served as the architype for what we would today consider a “hype man.” The biography will be released by Hamilcar Publications on August 25, 2020. It will be available wherever books are sold. Hamilcar also plans to release a mini-documentary in conjunction with the book. I was a part of that process as well.

In regard to Bundini, the hype is real. He lived an amazing American life. How many corner men can say they worked with Sugar Ray Robinson, Muhammad Ali, Shaft, Steven Spielberg, and appeared in a Superman comic book? His life story is one that even the best Hollywood writers couldn’t have invented. I cannot wait to share these stories with the world.

In addition to boxing, you’re a hip-hop scholar as well. So academics, boxing, and hip-hop—how do you balance all of these interests/ communities? Is there conflict? Confluence?

TS: Boxing was my father’s first love, hip-hop was mine. In many ways, hip-hop was my literacy sponsor. It made poetry cool. It fostered my imagination and verbal creativity. My love of hip-hop sent me down the path to becoming a writer. I write about the contradictory worlds that I inhabit so none of it feels like a contradiction to me.

In addition to your own writing, you also teach. Any advice you would give aspiring writers out there?

TS: My advice to aspiring writers is to write about what you love and write consistently. If you write about what you love, it’ll have more pathos. Writing isn’t all that different than boxing. I wouldn’t suggest a newcomer to the sport attempt boxing in a twelve round championship bout. It takes years of consistency and dedication to make it to that level. If you want to be a boxer, you must make boxing a part of your daily life. The same goes for writing. There is no off season in either medium.

Any future projects you’d like to talk about?

TS: At the moment, I am working on a book tentatively titled Beat Boxing: How Hip-Hop Changed the Fight Game. This book is an ultimate passion project for me. It will explore the symbiotic relationship that exists between both cultures. In many ways, this feels like the book I was born to write.

Who’s a current hip-hop artist readers should be listening to?

TS: Lately, I have been inspired by contemporary artists such as Kendrick Lamar, J. Cole, and Rapsody. But, I don’t think contemporary listeners should only listen to contemporary artists. I’m from the Dr. Dre, Tupac, Biggie, Nas, Jay-Z, Wu-Tang, and OutKast era. I still love Public Enemy, Slick Rick, Rakim, and Run-DMC. Hip-hop doesn’t have a monolithic sound or a singular message. There is something for everyone.

If you could recommend just one fight for someone to watch, which fight would you pick? And why?

TS: Pernell Whitaker was my favorite fighter when I was a teenager. I would argue that Whitaker vs. Chavez demonstrates the artistic beauty of the sport, as well as the ugly side of boxing politics. It gives you a lot to appreciate and much to ponder.

If you could go back in time and sit ringside at any fight in history, who would you see?

TS: Muhammad Ali was my father’s hero. I grew up idolizing Ali because my father did. He firmly believed Ali was the greatest boxer to ever lace up a pair of gloves. That is partially why being given the opportunity to write about Ali’s right hand man was a such a blessing. If I had to pick just one Ali fight, I suppose I’d choose to be ringside with my father and Bundini Brown at the Rumble in the Jungle.

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