In Rough Country (10 page)

Boxing: A Cultural History
by Kasia Boddy

I
n the brilliant and unsettling fragment “Homer's Contest,” found among Nietzsche's unpublished writings after his death in 1900, the philosopher returns to obsessive themes originally explored in his first book,
The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music
(1872): namely, that contrary to the reigning morality of his time—a Protestant-Christian morality, at least officially—it is not “natural” not to fight; it is not “natural” not to fight to the death, in the service of “allowing…hatred to flow forth fully” indeed, a “noble culture” is one that, like the ancient Greek culture, arises from “the altar of the expiation of murder.” Far from being barbaric, the stylized Greek, or Homeric, contest gives a crucial ritualistic form to mankind's most murderous instincts, in this way containing the horror of anarchic violence: not brutality per se but the brutality of chaos is the true horror of humankind. In
the Homeric world—the world of stylized art—we encounter “artistic deception” of a kind, that renders such horror bearable. But

Out of the struggle with mankind's most brutish instincts there evolves a ritualistic appropriation of uncontrolled violence, whether the competition—the “contest”—is athletic, aesthetic, pedagogic; as the youths of Athens were educated through contests with one another, so their teachers and trainers were also engaged in contests with their peers. Where nineteenth-century sentiment disapproves of the “personal fight” in an artist, the Greek, in Nietzsche's interpretation, knows the artist “
only as engaged in a personal fight.
” Orators, philosophers, sophists, dramatists as well as athletes and warriors must claim, as in these (imagined) words of Plato: “Look, I too can do what my great rivals can do; indeed, I can do it better than they…Only the contest made me a poet, a sophist, an orator.” To remove the “contest” from Greek life is to “immediately look into that pre-Homeric abyss of a terrifying savagery of hatred and the lust to annihilate.” Without the expulsion of the basest emotions in competition, “the Hellenic city, like the Hellenic man, degenerates.”

Though Kasia Boddy's ambitious
Boxing: A Cultural History
frequently blurs the lines between boxing and fighting, her interest in the mythic underpinnings of this oldest and most controversial of “sports” is not extensive. Her introduction begins with a disappointingly literal (and dubious) statement:

And, at her conclusion, a quote attributed to Sonny Liston: “It's always the same story—the good guy versus the bad guy.” (Liston, who fought exclusively for money, whether in the effort of winning or in the expediency of losing, was invariably the “bad guy” in the Caucasian press, but acquired a darkly glamorous outlaw status elsewhere; one of his devotees, if not his avatar, is ex-heavyweight champion Mike Tyson.) Yet Boddy's own close readings of the careers of John L. Sullivan, Jack Johnson, Jack Dempsey, Joe Louis, Muhammad Ali among others, and such spectacular boxing matches as Joe Louis–Max Schmeling I and II, Muhammad Ali–Joe Frazier I, II, III. Muhammad Ali–George Foreman, challenge the simplicity of such statements. The most cursory examination of boxing as a phenomenon of social/ethnic/racial significance reveals that far from being bluntly “Manichean,” boxing has always been steeped in ambiguity: “good” and “evil”/“bad” are hardly absolutes, but entirely matters of perspective. There can be no single “meaning” of any boxing match and it is impossible to completely decode
the significance of the greatest and most iconic matches, that have come to acquire with time the aura of legend. Of athletic contests, boxing has always been the sport that isn't “played”: one plays games, but boxing isn't a game so much as a mimicry of a tragic human action layered in irony, mystery, and the unspeakable or obscene; the most mesmerizing fights are those that repel as they attract, as if the spectator were being forced to participate in the violation of a sacred taboo. The roots of boxing would seem to be near-identical to those roots of ancient Greek tragedy that so fascinated Nietzsche as the noblest dramatization of man's essential divided and murderous soul.

 

At nearly five hundred densely packed pages, this investigation into “the intricate conceptual and iconographic constructions” that surround boxing has the heft of a work twice its length—the equivalent, in book form, of the old-style championship boxing matches that ran to as long as thirty rounds, often in the broiling sun. Despite the author's disclaimer of being “highly selective” in assembling her heterogeneous material,
Boxing: A Cultural History
would seem to include everything that has ever been written, depicted, or in any way recorded about boxing no matter how obscure, whimsical, or trivial; a treasure trove for boxing historians and
aficionados
, that might evoke vertigo in less committed readers. By immersing herself so indiscriminately in her subject, Boddy seems to be suggesting that boxing is so foundational and magnetic a presence in Western culture that its metaphors, however random and scattered, are of sufficient significance to be noted, though the critic acknowledges no especially personal experience with
or interest in her subject other than its rich possibilities for critical appropriation. Still, this is not an objection: in theory, we can imagine a work of insightful scholarship about the cultural history of music, for instance, by a critic who has never really listened to music, or a definitive ornithological work by an individual who has never seen a live bird. I found most of
Boxing: A Cultural History
fascinating if exhausting: for where else within a single volume could one locate pages of plot summaries of Hollywood boxing films from the classic (James Cagney's
Winner Take All
, 1932) to the forgotten and forgettable (
Never Come Morning
, 1942); where else such a gathering of boxing pictures, from reproductions of classic works of art by Théodore Géricault, Thomas Eakins, John Sloan, George Bellows to numerous crude cartoons, a witty little drawing of Jack Dempsey by Djuna Barnes, and “Sturdy Young Bodies and Stout Young Hearts,” a promotional postcard of Father Flanagan's Boys' Home in Nebraska in the 1930s. It is instructive to be informed that “the first report of a prize fight in literature” is included in the account of the funeral games for Patroklus in Homer's
The Iliad
, and that the story of Dares in Virgil's
Aeneid
(19
B.C
.) is “one of the first fight stories in which the restraining referee is the hero” in
The Odyssey
, in the confrontation of Odysseus with the duplicitous suitors of his wife Penelope, we have the “first instance of spectators as villains in a boxing story: unwilling to fight themselves, but vicariously enjoying the risks someone else will run, and gambling on the outcome.” In the
Memoirs
(1816) of the British pugilist Daniel Mendoza we have what is possibly the “first ghost-written” sports autobiography; the “first boxing match recorded in a
newspaper,
The Protestant Mercury
, took place in 1681, in the presence of the Duke of Albermarle,” the first boxing film was made in August 1894 (“six rounds of a minute each between minor [American] prize-fighters Mike Leonard and Jack Cushing”). It's a novelty fact, or factoid, that fight fixing began at the ninety-eighth Olympics, according to Pausanias's
Guide to Greece
(170
A.D
.) and that Ernest Hemingway's 1927 story “The Killers” is one of the first stories to “explore the relationship between boxing and organized crime” the first “boxing kangaroo” was exhibited in London in 1892. It is unsurprising perhaps but not uninteresting to learn that many early British boxers were also butchers and that the most vocal of the early Dadaists, Tristan Tzara, issued the manifesto in 1918: “Every man must shout and use his fists…there is great destructive, negative work to be done.”

More instructive perhaps is the revelation that nineteenth-century British poets, in particular the hyper-macho Byron, were enthralled by the “Fancy” (an insider upscale term for boxing); poor doomed John Clare in his Northampton madhouse was seen “shadow-boxing in his cell, crying out ‘I'm Jones the Sailor Boy,' and ‘I'm Tom Spring'” while the more genteel William Wordsworth “enjoyed a rare immunity to ‘boximania.'” Like a magnet that draws all objects to it, Boddy's boxing-as-metaphor proliferates alarmingly, prevailing through poetry of widely varying merit from the time of Sophocles (“Whoever challenges Eros to a match/Like a boxer fist-to-fist, he is out of his wits”) to the “proletarian” Horace Gregory in “Dempsey, Dempsey” of 1935 (“I can't get up, I'm dead, my legs/are dead, see, I'm no good,/they got me and
I'm out,/down for the count./I've quit, quit again,/only God save Dempsey, make him get up again,/Dempsey, Dempsey”) and our most celebrated precursor of rap music Cassius Clay/Muhammad Ali (“It started twenty years past./The greatest of all was born at last.”) And it is illuminating to learn the degree to which boxing, “or street-fighting with pretensions to boxing” as well as “linguistic pugnacity” are predominant themes in James Joyce's
Ulysses
: “While parodying its postures and patois, Joyce relished the dramatic possibilities of boxing.” Indeed, as Boddy's masterwork of bricolage sweeps on there comes to be something wonderfully Joycean—oceanic, indefatigable, just slightly deranged—in the very quantity of data Kasia Boddy has amassed. One thinks of those notorious miles-long fishing nets of the Pacific so fine-meshed as to catch everything and anything in its path.

 

Of all athletic “contests” it is likely that none predates boxing, or pugilism. Highly stylized images of “boxing boys” on Eastern Mediterranean pottery date back to the late Bronze Age and allusions to such combat extend through the “classical golden age”—in the earliest of Greek works, Homer's
The Iliad
and
The Odyssey
(eighth century
B.C
.) athletic games are described that allegedly occurred at the time of the Trojan War (circa 1200
B.C
.), like the funeral games for Anchises staged in Virgil's
The Aeneid
(19
B.C
.), in which the compelling tale of Dares is recounted (“Dares had youth on his side and speed of foot. Entellus had the reach and the weight, but his legs were going…Like hailstones from a dark cloud rattling down on roofs, Entellus battered Dares with a shower of
blows from both hands and sent him spinning.” In her concise opening chapter “The Classical Golden Age,” Boddy notes that boxing was crucial to the great Panhellenic festivals of ancient Greece—the Olympian, the Pythian, the Nemean, and the Isthmian. (The most prestigious games, the Olympic, began in 776
B.C
., and boxing was introduced in 688
B.C
.) From the start, there seemed to be the fear that boxing might degrade its audience as well as its participants: women were confined to the back rows of such events, or banned altogether; in one of Lucilius's sneering epigrams, not respect for the veteran pugilist is portrayed but cruel contempt: “Having such a mug, Olympicus, go not to a fountain nor look in any transparent water, for you, like Narcissus, seeing your face clearly, will die, hating yourself to the death.” The predominant image of Boddy's first chapter is the famous fourth-century statue of a battered boxer,
The Pugilist at Rest
, a sculpture of surpassing if brutal beauty that, many centuries later, would be evoked in Thom Jones's most powerful work of fiction,
The Pugilist at Rest
(1993):

It is in the classical era, Boddy argues, with its mixture of savagery and “philosophy,” that the “inextricable mixture in pugi
lism of high decorum and low cunning, of beauty and damage, of rhetoric and bodily fluids” that will recur through subsequent centuries is first sounded.

By the time of the English Golden Age of boxing—approximately 1780 to Queen Victoria's accession in 1837—boxing's Greek origins had long been forgotten. Prize-fighting—“the Fancy”—flourished as “a truly
British
art”—“an antidote to ‘
foreign Effeminacy
'” in alliance with gambling, another fancy of the times. British aristocrats, including the Prince of Wales, patronized the sport and writers as various as Pierce Egan (
Boxiana; or Sketches of Ancient and Modern Pugilism
;
Life in London
, 1821), Washington Irving (
Tales of a Traveller
, 1824), Thomas DeQuincy (articles in
Blackwood's
), Byron (
Don Juan
, notably canto 11), John Hamilton Reynolds (
The Fancy
, 1820), William Hazlitt (“Jack Tars,” 1826; “The Fight,” 1822) were inspired to write about it, often with dazzling results. Both William Hogarth and Théodore Géricault depicted boxing scenes of exceptional interest. “The spectre of effeminacy was constantly evoked,” Boddy says, in the “rhetoric of nationalist masculinity.” Yet “effeminacy” would triumph by the time of Victoria's reign when the Fancy sharply plummeted in popularity as a consequence of scandals and the withdrawal of aristocratic patronage. In the new, Victorian era, middle-class Protestant values held sway, repelled by the “unruly sport favored by an alliance of the working and upper classes (the ‘bawling, hustling, and smashing Populace' and the ‘great broad-shouldered Barbarians,' as Matthew Arnold put it)” as Boddy suggests. From this time onward, though boxing/fighting—“fistic phraseology”—would figure promi
nently in several of Charles Dickens's novels, and in occasional work by A. Conan Doyle (reputedly an excellent amateur boxer himself) and other British writers, the disreputable sport's center of gravity would shift triumphantly to America, where it remains to the present time.