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  …Down there in the stable a hollow square of faces in the lantern light, the white faces on three sides, the black faces on the fourth, and in the center two of [Sutpen’s] wild negroes fighting, naked, fighting not as white men fight, with rules and weapons, but as negroes fight to hurt one another quick and bad.

  —from WILLIAM FAULKNER’S ABSALOM, ABSALOM!

  Some time ago one of the southern states adopted a new method of capital punishment. Poison gas supplanted the gallows. In its earliest stages, a microphone was placed inside the sealed death chamber so that scientific observers might hear the words of the dying prisoner…The first victim was a young Negro. As the pellet dropped into the container, and gas curled upward, through the microphone came these words: “Save me, Joe Louis. Save me, Joe Louis. Save me, Joe Louis…”

  —MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR., quoted in Chris Mead, CHAMPION—JOE LOUIS, BLACK MAN IN WHITE AMERICA

  It’s hard being black. You ever been black? I was black once—when I was poor.

  —LARRY HOLMES,

  former WBC heavyweight champion

  One’s first impression is that professional boxers fighting together appear to be angry with each other, since their actions mimic anger, even rage. Why else hit, and try to injure, another person? Naturally this initial impression is misleading—boxing is “work” to most boxers and emotion has little part in it, or should have little. Indeed, highly successful champions from Jack Dempsey to Larry Holmes have insisted they fought only for money. To acknowledge other motives would suggest machismo’s vulnerability.

  Yet in a deeper sense boxers are angry, as even a superficial knowledge of their lives indicates. And boxing is fundamentally about anger. It is in fact the only sport in which anger is accommodated, ennobled. It is the only human activity in which rage can be transposed without equivocation into art.

  Some observers—among them men—believe that boxers are angry because they are men; and anger, for men, is a means of asserting dominance over other men—a tool, one might say, of the manly trade. Yet it is reasonable to assume that boxers fight one another because the legitimate objects of their anger are not accessible to them. There is no political system in which the spectacle of two men fighting each other is not a striking, if unintended, image of the political impotence of most men (and women): You fight what’s nearest, what’s available, what’s ready to fight you. And, if you can, you do it for money.

  If boxers as a class are angry one would have to be willfully naïve not to know why. For the most part they constitute the disenfranchised of our affluent society, they are the sons of impoverished ghetto neighborhoods in which anger, if not fury, is appropriate—rather more, perhaps, than Christian meekness and self-abnegation. (It was only in prison that Sonny Liston, one of twenty-five children born to a sharecropper’s family in rural Arkansas, had enough to eat.) Where there is peace, Nietzsche theorizes, the warlike man attacks himself, but what precisely is “peace”? and where, in ghetto neighborhoods of unspeakable squalor and malaise, is it to be located? Boxing may be a way of cruelly assaulting one’s self but it is most immediately a way of transcending one’s fate. Going to war, like Marvin Hagler, and making millions of dollars from it, is distinctly American.

  The history of boxing—of fighting—in America is very much one with the history of the black man in America. It hardly needs to be said that the armed services of recent times are comprised disproportionately of black youths; this was particularly evident in the Vietnam War. Perhaps it is less well known that in the American South, before the Civil War, white slave owners commonly pitted their Negro slaves against one another in combat, and made bets on the results. To prevent the slaves’ escape, or, perhaps, to make poetically graphic the circumstances of the black men’s degradation, iron collars resembling dog chains were fixed about their necks and attached to chains. Often the fights were to the death. The onlookers, of course, were white; and male.

  “Fighting slave collars,” as they are called, are sometimes exhibited as artifacts of a specifically American/Southern history; sometimes as instruments of torture.

  At the present time, when most outstanding boxers are black, Hispanic, or Mexican, purely “Caucasian” men begin to look anemic in the ring; a white-skinned champion (the enormously popular Barry McGuigan, for instance) is something of an anomaly, and white-skinned contenders (Gerry Cooney, Matthew Hilton, Gene Hatcher, et al.) very much in demand. One of the most popular athletes in Canada is the young welterweight Shawn O’Sullivan, so alarmingly white a figure in the ring, in the first fight of his televised for an American audience, the viewer sensed almost at once that his more experienced black opponent, Simon Brown, would handily defeat him. The anxieties of an earlier era—that black men would prove more “manly” than white men if allowed to fight them in fair, public fights—would seem to have come true.

  It is perhaps not commonly known that a Negro heavyweight championship title existed from 1902 to 1932 when many white champions (including John L. Sullivan, Jim Jeffries, Jack Dempsey) refused to fight blacks. (In 1925 Dempsey pointedly refused to meet Harry Wills—“The Black Menace”—in a title fight urged upon him by many observers.) One wonders: who were the true world’s champions in those years? And of what value are historical records when they record so blatantly the prejudices of a dominant race? As recently as 1982, after decades of exemplary black boxers—from Jack Johnson to Joe Louis to Sugar Ray Robinson to Muhammad Ali—heavyweight champion Larry Holmes drew racist slurs and insults when he defended his title against the overrated and overpromoted White Hope challenger Gerry Cooney (whose prefight picture, and not Holmes’s, ran on the cover of Time magazine). It is said that on the day of the match in Las Vegas President Reagan’s Secret Service installed a special telephone hookup in Cooney’s dressing room so that the white boxer could be immediately congratulated if he won; there was no matching telephone in the black champion’s dressing room.

  Much has been made of Holmes’s legendary bitterness, as if having earned millions of dollars—and millions of dollars for others—should tidily erase the humiliations of the past. Surely this is a psychological impossibility? Lashing out against the memory of Rocky Marciano after the first of his two controversial losses to Michael Spinks, Holmes may well have been lashing out against all white champions: “—to be technical: Rocky Marciano couldn’t carry my jockstrap.”

  Men and women with no personal or class reason for feeling anger are inclined to dismiss the emotion, if not piously condemn it, in others. Why such discontent? why such unrest? why so strident? Yet this world is conceived in anger—and in hatred, and in hunger—no less than it is conceived in love: that is one of the things that boxing is about. It is so simple a thing it might be overlooked.

  Those whose aggression is masked, or oblique, or unsuccessful, will always condemn it in others. They are likely to think of boxing as “primitive”—as if inhabiting the flesh were not a primitive proposition, radically inappropriate to a civilization supported by and always subordinate to physical strength: missiles, nuclear warheads. The terrible silence dramatized in the boxing ring is the silence of nature before man, before language, when the physical being alone was God.

  In any case, anger is an appropriate response to certain intransigent facts of life, not a motiveless malignancy as in classic tragedy but a fully motivated and socially coherent impulse. Impotence takes many forms—one of them being the reckless physical expenditure of physical potency.

  What time is it?—“Macho Time”!

  —HECTOR “MACHO MAN” CAMACHO/, WBC lightweight champion

  I don’t want to knock my opponent out. I want to hit him, step away, and watch him hurt. I want his heart.

  —JOE FRAZIER, former heavyweight champion of the world

  A fairy-tale proposition: the heavyweight champion is the most dangerous man on earth: the most feared, the most manly. His proper mate is very likely the fairy-tale princess whom the mirrors declare the fairest woman on
earth.

  Boxing is a purely masculine activity and it inhabits a purely masculine world. Which is not to suggest that most men are defined by it: clearly, most men are not. And though there are female boxers—a fact that seems to surprise, alarm, amuse—women’s role in the sport has always been extremely marginal. (At the time of this writing the most famous American woman boxer is the black champion Lady Tyger Trimiar with her shaved head and theatrical tiger-striped attire.) At boxing matches women’s role is limited to that of card girl and occasional National Anthem singer: stereotypical functions usually performed in stereotypically zestful feminine ways—for women have no natural place in the spectacle otherwise. The card girls in their bathing suits and spike heels, glamour girls of the 1950s, complement the boxers in their trunks and gym shoes but are not to be taken seriously: their public exhibition of themselves involves no risk and is purely decorative. Boxing is for men, and is about men, and is men. A celebration of the lost religion of masculinity all the more trenchant for its being lost.

  In this world, strength of a certain kind—matched of course with intelligence and tirelessly developed skills—determines masculinity. Just as a boxer is his body, a man’s masculinity is his use of his body. But it is also his triumph over another’s use of his body. The Opponent is always male, the Opponent is the rival for one’s own masculinity, most fully and combatively realized. Sugar Ray Leonard speaks of coming out of retirement to fight one man, Marvin Hagler: “I want Hagler. I need that man.” Thomas Hearns, decisively beaten by Hagler, speaks of having been obsessed with him: “I want the rematch badly…there hasn’t been a minute or an hour in any day that I haven’t thought about it.” Hence women’s characteristic repugnance for boxing per se coupled with an intense interest in and curiosity about men’s fascination with it. Men fighting men to determine worth (i.e., masculinity) excludes women as completely as the female experience of childbirth excludes men. And is there, perhaps, some connection?

  In any case, raw aggression is thought to be the peculiar province of men, as nurturing is the peculiar province of women. (The female boxer violates this stereotype and cannot be taken seriously—she is parody, she is cartoon, she is monstrous. Had she an ideology, she is likely to be a feminist.) The psychologist Erik Erikson discovered that, while little girls playing with blocks generally create pleasant interior spaces and attractive entrances, little boys are inclined to pile up the blocks as high as they can and then watch them fall down: “the contemplation of ruins,” Erikson observes, “is a masculine specialty.” No matter the mesmerizing grace and beauty of a great boxing match, it is the catastrophic finale for which everyone waits, and hopes: the blocks piled as high as they can possibly be piled, then brought spectacularly down. Women, watching a boxing match, are likely to identify with the losing, or hurt, boxer; men are likely to identify with the winning boxer. There is a point at which male spectators are able to identify with the fight itself as, it might be said, a Platonic experience abstracted from its particulars; if they have favored one boxer over the other, and that boxer is losing, they can shift their loyalty to the winner—or, rather, “loyalty” shifts, apart from conscious volition. In that way the ritual of fighting is always honored. The high worth of combat is always affirmed.

  Boxing’s very vocabulary suggests a patriarchal world taken over by adolescents. This world is young. Its focus is youth. Its focus is of course macho—machismo raised beyond parody. To enter the claustrophobic world of professional boxing even as a spectator is to enter what appears to be a distillation of the masculine world, empty now of women, its fantasies, hopes, and stratagems magnified as in a distorting mirror, or a dream.

  Here, we find ourselves through the looking-glass. Values are reversed, evaginated: a boxer is valued not for his humanity but for being a “killer,” a “mauler,” a “hit-man,” an “animal,” for being “savage,” “merciless,” “devastating,” “ferocious,” “vicious,” “murderous.” Opponents are not merely defeated as in a game but are “decked,” “stiffed,” “starched,” “iced,” “destroyed,” “annihilated.” Even the veteran sportswriters of so respectable a publication as The Ring are likely to be pitiless toward a boxer who has been beaten. Much of the appeal of Roberto Durán for intellectual boxing aficionados no less than for those whom one might suppose his natural constituency was that he seemed truly to want to kill his opponents: in his prime he was the “baby-faced assassin” with the “dead eyes” and “deadpan” expression who once said, having knocked out an opponent named Ray Lampkin, that he hadn’t trained for the fight—next time he would kill the man. (According to legend Durán once felled a horse with a single blow.) Sonny Liston was another champion lauded for his menace, so different in spirit from Floyd Patterson as to seem to belong to another subspecies; to watch Liston overcome Patterson in tapes of their fights in the early 1960s is to watch the defeat of “civilization” by something so elemental and primitive it cannot be named. Masculinity in these terms is strictly hierarchical—two men cannot occupy the same space at the same time.

  At the present time twenty-year-old Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato’s much-vaunted protégé, is being groomed as the most dangerous man in the heavyweight division. He is spoken of with awe as a “young bull”; his strength is prodigious, at least as demonstrated against fairly hapless, stationary opponents; he enters the arena robeless—“I feel more like a warrior”—and gleaming with sweat. He does not even wear socks. His boxing model is not Muhammad Ali, the most brilliant heavyweight of modern times, but Rocky Marciano, graceless, heavy-footed, indomitable, the man with the massive right-hand punch who was willing to absorb five blows in the hope of landing one. It was after having broken Jesse Ferguson’s nose in a recent match that Tyson told reporters that it was his strategy to try to drive the bone back into the brain…

  The names of boxers! Machismo as sheer poetry.

  Though we had, in another era, “Gentleman Jim” Corbett (world heavyweight champion, 1892-97); and the first black heavyweight champion, Jack Johnson (1908-15) called himself “Li’l Arthur” as a way of commenting playfully on his powerful physique and savage ring style. (Johnson was a white man’s nightmare: the black man who mocked his white opponents as he humiliated them with his fists.) In more recent times we had “Sugar Ray” Robinson and his younger namesake “Sugar Ray” Leonard. And Tyrone Crawley, a thinking man’s boxer, calls himself “The Butterfly.” But for the most part a boxer’s ring name is chosen to suggest something more ferocious: Jack Dempsey of Manassa, Colorado, was “The Manassa Mauler”; the formidable Harry Greb was “The Human Windmill”; Joe Louis was, of course, “The Brown Bomber”; Rocky Marciano, “The Brockton Blockbuster”; Jake LaMotta, “The Bronx Bull”; Tommy Jackson, “Hurricane” Jackson; Roberto Durán, “Hands of Stone” and “The Little Killer” variously. More recent are Ray “Boom-Boom” Mancini, Thomas “Hit-Man” Hearns, James “Hard Rock” Green, Al “Earthquake” Carter, Frank “The Animal” Fletcher, Donald “The Cobra” Curry, Aaron “The Hawk” Pryor, “Terrible” Tim Witherspoon, “Bonecrusher” Smith, Johnny “Bump City” Bumphus, Lonnie “Lightning” Smith, Barry “The Clones Cyclone” McGuigan, Gene “Mad Dog” Hatcher, Livingstone “Pit Bull” Bramble, Hector “Macho Man” Camacho. “Marvelous” Marvin Hagler changed his name legally to Marvelous Marvin Hagler before his fight with Thomas Hearns brought him to national prominence.

  It was once said by José Torres that the machismo of boxing is a condition of poverty. But it is not, surely, a condition uniquely of poverty? Or even of adolescence? I think of it as the obverse of the feminine, the denial of the feminine-in-man that has its ambiguous attractions for all men, however “civilized.” It is a remnant of another, earlier era when the physical being was primary and the warrior’s masculinity its highest expression.

  We fighters understand lies. What’s a feint?

  What’s a left hook off the jab?

  What’s an opening? What’s thinking one thing and doing
another…?

  —JOSÉ TORRES,

  former light-heavyweight champion of the world

  One of the primary things boxing is about is lying. It’s about systematically cultivating a double personality: the self in society, the self in the ring. As the chess grandmaster channels his powerful aggressive impulses onto the game board, which is the world writ small, so the “born” boxer channels his strength into the ring, against the Opponent. And in the ring, if he is a good boxer and not a mere journeyman, he will cultivate yet another split personality, to thwart the Opponent’s game plan vis-à-vis him. Boxers, like chess players, must think on their feet—must be able to improvise in mid-fight, so to speak.

  (And 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.)

  After his upset victory against WBC junior welterweight Billy Costello in August 1985 the virtually unknown “Lightning” Lonnie Smith told an interviewer for The Ring that his model for boxing was that of a chess game: boxing is a “game of control, and, as in chess, this control can radiate in circles from the center, or in circles toward the center…The entire action of a fight goes in a circle; it can be little circles in the middle of the ring or big circles along the ropes, but always a circle. The man who wins is the man who controls the action of the circle.” Smith’s ring style against Costello was so brazenly idiosyncratic—reminiscent at moments of both Muhammad Ali and Jersey Joe Walcott—that the hitherto undefeated Costello, known as a hard puncher, was totally demoralized, outclassed, outboxed. (As he was outfought some months later by a furious Alexis Arguello, who “retired” Costello from the ring.)