In Rough Country (11 page)

 

From the bare-knuckle era of John L. Sullivan, whose highly publicized reign as heavyweight champion lasted a remarkable decade—1882 to 1892—American boxing was both a marginal sport and big business: it scarcely mattered that, at the start, prize-fighting was “outlawed”—there were fights almost nightly in the New York City area, as in numerous communities in the United States. (See George Bellows's powerful paintings
Club Night
(1907),
Both Members of This Club
(1909),
Stag at Sharkey's
(1909), Goyaesque visions of private boxing clubs like scenes out of hell.) In 1920, boxing was finally legalized, and properly licensed, in the New York area, but its association with gambling, corrupt politicians and criminals flourished. Part of the glamour of prize-fighting has always been its seeming defiance of middle-class Protestant mores and the loathed civilizing “influence” of women; watching other men fight has always been, for men, as for some women, an ecstatic experience not unlike a Dionysian orgy in which large crowds of individuals, likely to be anonymous to one another, are raised to a fever-pitch of bonding. Boddy notes how a “steady stream of middle-class men” in pursuit of the “strenuous” life sparred and worked out in boxing clubs in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; how such artists as the notable Thomas Eakins were drawn to boxing as a screen or scrim of sorts for
the artist's fascination with the young male body. In Eakins's case:

Bellows's struggling boxers of the early 1900s lack all homoerotic allure; they are desperate creatures intent upon “winning”—whatever paltry purse, or meager round of applause. In Bellows's most famous painting,
Dempsey and Firpo
(1924), however, painted when boxing was not only legalized but something of an upper-middle-class spectacle attended by elegantly dressed men and women, the pasty-pale “Dempsey” bears little resemblance to photographs of the actual, dark-tanned and more muscular Jack Dempsey, and the clumsy Argentinian giant Firpo—the much-hyped “Wild Bull of the Pampas”—has a sculpted and serene look utterly alien to the actual Firpo who, by this time in the historic fight, had been knocked down by Dempsey a remarkable seven times. (These were the days when referees did not too quickly intervene in male havoc!) In fact, Bellows had not even seen the championship fight firsthand but painted it from other sources, giving the scene a highly stylized and synthetic air that makes of its ostensible violence a mere aesthetic
frisson
. Bellows seems to be suggesting that, as the violent brawl becomes ever more commodified—and
merchandised—it has come to resemble any other sort of American entertainment, and its practitioners more resemble mannequins than actual boxers. In Boddy's words, “The 1920s are often recalled as a golden age of sport, but it was an age of mass consumption rather than mass participation…Worse still was listening to the radio (‘sport at two removes').” And there was the imminent, yet more voracious age of television which would transform boxing forever by drawing audiences away from local arenas, centralizing (first in New York's Madison Square Garden, then in Las Vegas) what had been essentially a neighborhood sport, and in this way providing for gamblers, and for organized crime, an irresistible source of income. (How ideal television was for boxing: just two near-naked athletes generally in prime physical condition, dramatic opportunities for close-ups, three-minute rounds separated by one-minute intermissions custom-designed for advertisements; what ideal circumstances for betting, and for bribing!) Boddy is especially good in her close analysis of mid-century American
boxiana
, domesticated and exploited in a way very unlike the
boxiana
of Pierce Egan's Fancy: as soon as boxing matches become a Friday-night staple on network television, the savage, sordid underpinnings of the sport faded in public consciousness, and the public was left to admire a sequence of highly promoted though often genuinely talented and idiosyncratic boxing champions.

Boxing has always been dominated by the heavyweight division, as the heavyweight division is dominated by the champion and his highest-ranked contenders; so long as the heavyweight champion is a considerable macho figure, espe
cially if he happens to be handsome, charismatic, and controversial, boxing can be a highly lucrative sport—at least for managers and promoters, if not always for boxers. Boddy succinctly discusses the leading heavyweight champions in terms of their cultural significance: swaggering John L. Sullivan, “the Boston Strong boy,” the very embodiment of Irish-American machismo, who didn't become simply a celebrity during his ten-year reign, but “a screen onto which a wide variety of feelings and attitudes could be projected” his more suave successor “Gentleman Jim” Corbett (heavyweight reign 1892–1897) who ended his career after retirement by staging boxing exhibitions and appearing in a number of plays—“Why a fighter can't be careful about his appearance I don't understand” the controversial Jack Johnson, our first black American heavyweight (1908–1915), whose astonishing dancer-like boxing skills revolutionized the sport and whose yet more astonishing defiance of wholesale white racism would set the tone for Cassius Clay/Muhammad Ali five decades to come; and “The Manassa Mauler” Jack Dempsey (1919–1926) whose brilliant manager Jack Kearnes parlayed his boxer's considerable but limited skills to unprecedented box-office bonanzas like the heavily promoted “Battle of the Century”—with the French lightweight champion Georges Carpentier in 1921, whom Dempsey beat handily in four rounds—the first million-dollar gate in ring history.

A talismanic figure to this day, as a champion, Dempsey fought relatively few contenders. He was shameless about eluding the reputedly best boxer of his era, “The Black Menace” Harry Wills, in 1925; if Dempsey had been a contemporary
of Jack Johnson, he would never have stepped into the ring with the more skilled black boxer, and the great Jack Johnson's name would be but a footnote in American boxing history. In an era of white racism, Dempsey was one of the tribe. Yet, as Boddy points out, like Joe Louis in a very different way, Jack Dempsey became an iconic figure throughout the thirties and beyond “both to those who identified with his losses and failures, and those who felt that they too could one day be champion if only they worked hard enough.”

Divided into nine chapters of different lengths and strategies—among them “‘Fighting, Rightly Understood,'” “Like Any Other Profession,” “Sport of the Future,” “Save Me, Joe Louis; Save Me, Jack Dempsey”—and a conclusion crammed with enough information and ideas to fuel an entirely new book,
Boxing: A Cultural History
must have been a considerable challenge to organize. Obliged to be a history of
culture
and not simply of
boxing
, this prodigious book begins to stagger under the weight of its Sargasso Sea of materials, at about midway, in Chapters 5 and 6. Though the chronological history of boxing is in itself enormously appealing, Boddy's methodology requires her to frequently interrupt it with so much cultural detritus that the story becomes quickly snarled, even to one who is familiar with it; references to Jack Dempsey abound, but we drift far from the core individual, and we're likely to feel mildly cheated—here, as elsewhere when Boddy “covers” such great fights as Louis–Schmeling II, Muhammad Ali–Joe Frazier I, II, III and Muhammad Ali–Foreman—by the relatively scant space spent on
boxing
set beside countless pages of cultural inquiry into, for instance,
boxing posters advertising Hollywood fight films, lengthy exegeses of such texts as Budd Schulberg's novel
The Harder They Fall
, the maelstrom of Black Muslim propaganda and Caucasian America reaction surrounding Muhammad Ali in the tumultuous 1960s. Certainly it is interesting, to a degree, to see to what extent contemporary American culture has been saturated with boxing/fighting references, but the instinct to “fight” is after all a primary human instinct, and might well have manifested itself in any number of other ways apart from boxing. Skilled though Boddy is in literary analysis and paraphrase, so many “examples” of boxing/fighting in culture quickly come to seem numbing, as in this (shortened) excerpt from Jack London's
Martin Eden
in which seemingly sophisticated men revert to the Zolaesque “animal machine”:

It's hardly surprising that Jack London's male protagonists revert to “savagery”—in this and every other work of fiction by the author of the American classic
The Call of the Wild
(1903); such is the inevitable trajectory of their fate. London lacked an imagination beyond the grimly determinist “naturalism” of his time; his “plots” could run in but one direction, like hurtling locomotives. His obsessive themes touch only tangentially
upon the tradition, discipline, and culture of boxing, which is a very different matter from mere savagery, as observers of boxing are frequently required to explain. Boddy concedes, “The boxing ring is only one of many settings in which the validity of naturalist ideas can be tested and observed” but “naturalism” per se can be applied to an infinite variety of human, if not sub-human activities, always drawing the same very few conclusions: life is nasty, brutish, and short.

In her rather too freewheeling association of boxing with mere fighting, which prevails throughout the book, Boddy needs to distinguish more responsibly between the “savage” and “instinctual”—that is, the “untrained” and “unstudied” nature of brute fighting—and what boxing
is
: a not-natural, not-unreflective, not-brainless but assiduously trained and reflective tradition somewhere between a “sport” and an “art” that places far more emphasis than most viewers could guess upon the stratagems of self-defense including indefatigably practiced footwork. To watch a boxer seriously training (as I'd once watched the twenty-year-old heavyweight contender Mike Tyson at his Catskill camp preparatory to Tyson's defeat of Trevor Berbick in November 1986), is to realize firsthand how
contrary to nature
boxing actually is; how one might argue that when practiced on the highest levels, the discipline of boxing bears more relationship to a shrewdly cerebral contest like chess than to anything like street-fighting, and boxing's essential establishment of a mysterious and often profound bond between boxers—all the more brotherly for its being baptized in blood—is a crucial component in boxing culture which is largely invisible to the “public” eye.

Boddy's methodology as a cultural critic reduces what was once
living
to its
symbolic representations
. To some extent this is the natural process of criticism, analysis, quantification. It is the external—“public”—nature of boxing that engages her, the deciphering of large public texts in which individuals figure as mere hieroglyphics:

But how does this distinguish boxing from any other public event? Woodstock or Altamont, the Red Sox winning the World Series, a “historic” event seen “live” on television? Cultural criticism quickly reaches a point of saturation at which all iconographies are equal: those that are “real” (an actual boxing match) and those that are “fiction” (Sylvester Stallone's fairy-tale
Rocky
franchise); those that begin with historic “persons” (Muhammad Ali, Marilyn Monroe) but are transmogrified by art, or a process to which the term “art” is applied (Andy Warhol's 1977 lithograph
Muhammad Ali: Hand on Chin
,
^*
Andy Warhol's 1964 lithograph
Blue Marilyn
). Where the critic's predominant focus is a theory of media manipulation, the subject itself may be irrelevant:

True of boxing but perhaps truer of football, basketball, pop music and national politics. And it might be argued that with the demise of Friday night boxing matches in the 1960s, there are far fewer fights, and fewer boxers involved in the sport; millions of viewers may watch pay-per-view to see a much-hyped championship fight broadcast in Las Vegas, but audiences for boxing overall may well be declining, with the rise of so many competing sports.

What is the most valuable about
Boxing: A Cultural History
isn't its ideas so much as its wonderfully heterogeneous gathering of specifics. To read Boddy's book is to confront dozens—hundreds?—of inspired mini-essays. One has to do with the transformation of dashing young Cassius Clay/Muhammad Ali as a “Muslim Saint Sebastian” in 1966—the “White Liberal Hope”—through the deification of Ali in such films as
When We Were Kings
(1996) and his transformation into a sort of “New Age spiritual guru.” Succumbing to the neurological disorder Parkinson's disease “merely added poignancy to his story” as Boddy observes: in 2005, Ali was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by George W. Bush. (He who'd once been, in the prime of his life, a member of the Nation of Islam and an unabashed black racist!) Another illuminating digression, in a chapter already crammed to
bursting, is the wittily titled “Two Nice Jewish Boys in the Age of Ali”—the “nice Jewish boys” being Bob Dylan and Norman Mailer.