On Boxing
by Joyce Carol Oates
Six years ago this month my wife and I went and saw Million Dollar Baby at the theater. Amongst a myriad of other things that I thought about after seeing that film, one of them was that I needed to read some boxing nonfiction if for no other reason that boxing seems like such a profound metaphor for life. (It is funny how boxing movies and essays can be such visceral things to see/read and, yet, to watch an actual match is typically banal and uninteresting.) To me, Million Dollar Baby is a beautifully painful movie and when I found out that it was partly inspired by and adapted from Rope Burns, a collection of short stories by Jerry Boyd (pen name, F.X. Toole), I was going to buy that book. But it was out of print. And so I looked for other boxing-related books and found that Joyce Carol Oates had written some essays during the ’80′s in a collection called On Boxing. But it was out of print too.[1]
And then I got sidetracked from boxing altogether, opting instead to discover and consume nonfiction from Gladwell and Klosterman and Wallace and Orlean.
Then, a few weeks ago I saw The Fighter.[2] And afterwards I went immediately to the bookstore and picked up a recently republished edition of Joyce Carol Oates’s On Boxing. On Boxing consists of six essays, starting with the 118 page eponymous essay. (Note: it is not a full 118 pages, as random full-page pictures of boxing images are scattered throughout.) The essay “On Boxing” is nothing short of brilliant. Filled with Oates’s own insights that at times have a real air of profundity to them, quotes from boxers throughout the 20th century, and an overall feeling of a literary (yet still accessible) critique of the sport, “On Boxing” is on the short list of greatest pieces of sports writing I have ever read. Think I am exaggerating? Here is an excerpt from pages 12-13:
“Boxing’s claim is that it is superior to life in that it is, ideally, superior to all accident. It contains nothing that is not fully willed.
“The boxer meets an opponent who is a dream-distortion of himself in the sense that his weaknesses, his capacity to fail and to be seriously hurt, his intellectual miscalculations—all can be interpreted as strengths belonging to the Other; the parameters of his private being are nothing less than boundless assertions of the Other’s self. This is dream, or nightmare: my strengths are not fully my own, but my opponent’s weaknesses; my failure is not fully my own, but my opponent’s triumph. He is my shadow-self, not my (mere) shadow. The boxing match as “serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude”—to refer to Aristotle’s definition of tragedy—is an event that necessarily subsumes both boxers, as any ceremony subsumes its participants. (Which is why one can say, for instance, that the greatest fight of Muhammad Ali’s career was one of the few fights Ali lost—the first heroic match with Frazier.)”
To be sure, this excerpt (and this collection of essays as a whole) does not redefine, or shift any paradigms of, sports writing. (Not that Oates is trying to anyway.) Sports writing in general is founded on trying to show you the sport(s) in question in a new, different light—or it attempts to give you the human side of its participants. Or both. And because of this, we as fans and audience are just as capable of caring about the losers and the runners-up in a neutral match/event than we do about the winners and the champions. And, to be sure, this is nothing new. We not only love underdog stories but we love seeing spotlights on new sports, as well as spotlights on the sports we already like/love. Our attachment to these things was why Wide World of Sports ran for so long, why Sports Illustrated is still functioning, and why ESPN was ever allowed to grow from its original plankton form to the whale form that it is today.
At the end of the day, how we digest sports writing—like any other form of review or criticism—depends greatly on presentation. And with these essays, the presentation that Joyce Carol Oates gives is truly outstanding. Outstanding because she is not only a gifted and educated writer and spectator of boxing, but because her insights into boxing and all of its history and its index of metaphors are so precise. “On Boxing” is so thoughtful, so cared for, and so interesting there were many moments where I thought to myself I don’t think that that thought, or observation, can be written any more perfectly. (These are the exact thoughts that went through my head while reading David Foster Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again too: I’ll probably never read anything in my life about fiction, irony, and cruises that will surpass what is in that collection of essays.)
On Boxing includes five other essays with topics such as Mike Tyson (from 1987), Muhammad Ali and Jack Johnson. These essays are indeed terrific, but they were written after “On Boxing” and thus borrow from that source material from time to time. The other essays are definitely worth a read but it is the eponymous essay that is the must-read, the crown jewel of the set.
Even if you are not interested in boxing, On Boxing is something that should be added to your reading queue at some point. The goal as readers when we pick up a piece of nonfiction is to become immersed in someone else’s passion, to see things differently; to read something we’ve never read before and to have it make such naked sense that we feel silly to have never thought of it that way before. “On Boxing” achieves this with ease.
[1] A few words about Million Dollar Baby. Maybe you didn’t like it or maybe you were impartial to it. And I will grant you that the tragedy that befalls Hillary Swank’s Maggie Fitzgerald is maybe a little too unbelievable and/or melodramatic. Whatever. Everything that happens before it, and especially everything that happens after it, is perfect. And when the movie ends with its final shot and Morgan Freeman’s Eddie “Scrap”‘s final narration of the letter that he wrote to Eastwood’s daughter, my wife and I left the theater having our faith restored in Hollywood. (Because, to me at least, movies had taken a considerable collective nose dive in quality after 1999.)
[2] A few words about The Fighter. Overall, a very solid movie. I thought Christian Bale and Amy Adams were outstanding, and that Mark Wahlberg was believable. (Though whenever Mark Wahlberg plays the “underdog” character I find it very hard to separate it from his role as Dirk Diggler.) I thought that the movie did a good job of exploring how family and external forces can potentially ruin an athlete. It shouldn’t win an Oscar for Best Picture but it’s worthy of the price of tickets and popcorn for sure.
