Reading

★★★☆☆ | Sports | Digital | Borrow | StoryGraph

Joyce Carol Oates might be the least likely person ever to write a book about boxing. And yet she did. Like me, she developed a lifelong appreciation for the sport, ultimately growing to love it, by watching fights with her father as a child. But it’s clear that she feels a natural disquiet with her own fascination with the sport, and the essays in this book circle and dance around that central premise: why, in our modern, civilized society, is boxing still a thing? Why wasn’t this sport banned decades ago?

Oates doesn’t think boxing should be banned. She points out that sports like football and motor racing are statistically more dangerous. On the contrary, she sees boxing as something much larger; a deep-seated religion with its rules and ceremony, taking the audience out of their normal lives into a different plane of existence.

A brilliant boxing match, quicksilver in its motions, transpiring far more rapidly than the mind can absorb, can have the power that Emily Dickinson attributed to great poetry: you know it’s great when it takes the top of your head off. (The physical imagery Dickinson employs is peculiarly apt in this context.)

I’ve been a boxing fan for so long that I’ve taken for granted its many bizarre aspects. In her poetic and literary style, she deftly dissects the sport and considers its strangest aspects and its larger-than-life participants (I still cannot imagine the diminutive and acerbic Joyce Carol Oates interviewing Mike Tyson during his early days as a young champion).  For example, why is there a need for a referee? The combat demands a witness, and it would be simply too barbaric to allow the fighters to slug each other without some paternal oversight.

My complaint with the book relates to editing. Many of the points made in the title essay, On Boxing, were repeated again and again in later essays. These were standalone magazine articles that were never meant to be published together in a book.

Favorite Highlights

All athletes age rapidly but none so rapidly and so visibly as the boxer.

Spectators at public games derive much of their pleasure from reliving the communal emotions of childhood but spectators at boxing matches relive the murderous infancy of the race.

One might compare the time-bound public spectacle of the boxing match (which could be as brief as an ignominious forty-five seconds—the record for a title fight!) with the publication of a writer’s book. That which is “public” is but the final stage in a protracted, arduous, grueling, and frequently despairing period of preparation.

The primary rule of the ring—to defend oneself at all times—is both a parody and a distillation of life.

Mailer’s strength lies in his recognition that the boxers are other—though he does not say so, even in the long extravagant meditation of The Fight (its title in homage to Hazlitt’s great essay),

We who write live in a kaleidoscopic world of ever-shifting assessments and judgments, unable to determine whether it is revelation or supreme self-delusion that fuels our most crucial efforts.

Surely it is championship chess, and not boxing, that is our most dangerous game—at least so far as psychological risk is concerned. Megalomania and psychosis frequently await the grand master when his extraordinary mental powers can no longer be discharged onto the chessboard.)

In one study it was estimated that 87 percent of boxers suffer some degree of brain damage in their lifetimes, no matter the relative success of their careers.