Customer Reviews

On Boxing (P.S.)

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

The sport of Boxing, on the surface at least, does not automatically come to mind as obvious subject matter for the premier writing talents of Joyce Carol Oates; even though Ms. Oates certainly can get down and dirty with the best of them as in her "Man Crazy" or "Zombie."
But as Oates explains in her 1987 collection of essays (revised in 1994), "On Boxing":"No one whose interest began as mine did in childhood--as an offshot of my father's interest is likely to think of boxing as something else, a metaphor...Life is like boxing, in many respects. But boxing is only like boxing."
Oates is a boxing fan and a great writer and it was inevitable that these two facets of her life would converge.
"On Boxing" is really 3 separate essays: "On Boxing," "On Mike Tyson" and "The Cruelest Sport."
The first essay is so crammed full of fascinating, revelatory statements about the nature and function and the social and psychological nature of boxing that it is hard to pick out only a few to quote here. But I will try: "To enter the ring near-naked and to risk one's life is to make of one's audience voyeurs of a kind: boxing is so intimate. It is to ease out of sanity's consciousness and into another, difficult to name. It is to risk, and sometimes to realize, the agony of which "agon" (Greek, "contest") is the root."
In Oates view, the boxer brings more than his body to bear in the ring...he also brings his soul: "There are some boxers possessed of such remarkable intuition, such uncanny prescience, one would think they were somehow recalling their fights, not fighting them as we watch."
"On Boxing" the essay is also a boxing history lesson highlighting the careers of Jack Dempsey,Joe Louis, Muhammed Ali,Sugar Ray Leonard, Roberto Duran, etc.: their careers, their boxing styles, their defeats and in some cases their lives after the boxing ring: "the drama of life in the flesh. Boxing has become America's tragic theater."
The second essay, "On Mike Tyson," written in 1988 predates all of Tyson's legal troubles, court cases and incarceration. And so Oates, who had extensive access to Tyson, writes of his home,his dog and his friends in glowing terms.With Oates, Tyson is soft-spoken, courteous, sensitive, thoughtful and intospective. Things that in 2002 we do not normally associate with Mike Tyson. Never a pushover, Oates also quotes Tyson after his 1986 fight with the hapless Jesse Ferguson, whose nose was broken in the match, "I want to punch the bone into the brain...Tyson's language is as direct and brutal as his ring style, yet as more than one observer has noted, strangely disarming--there is no air of menace, or sadism, or boastfulness in what he says: only the truth."
Oates also speaks of a boxing match as a "catharsis" as Aristotle wrote: "the purging of pity and terror by the exercise of these emotions; the subliminal aftermath of classical tragedy."
The third essay, "The Cruelest Sport" details in part the physical toll of boxing. For example the 1980 Ali/Holmes fight in which Ali takes a tremendous beating from Holmes: in Sylvester Stallone's words, the fight was "like watching an autopsy on a man who's still alive." This as well as the Ali/Foreman fight in Zaire in 1974 began irreversible loss for Ali: progressive deterioration of Ali's kidneys, hands, reflexes and stamina.
"On Boxing" is Joyce Carol Oates's Ode to Boxing and by extension her father's interest in boxing, the smokiness of the arena, the smell of the hair oil and the hot dogs.And, even if you are not a boxing fan you cannot help but revel at the insights and amazing depth of feeling she brings to this subject and it's denizens.

I am still stunned that a person who has never been in the ring could have gained insights into boxing as powerful as the ones Oates pulled together in this book. And I'm grateful (and stunned) that a woman could be as sympathetic, not just to fighters, but to men and manhood, as Oates has managed to be in this book.

I am a serious amateur fighter and a sparring partner to the professional fighters I train with. I do gym work or road work five days a week with a former-professional trainer who was also a two-time NY Golden Gloves champion and junior Olympian. I spar Glovers and pros and I love it. I understand boxing and the love for boxing. The gist of my review here is this: After I read this book I realized I didn't understand my love for boxing -- where it comes from and what it all means and what it is I'm doing exactly -- as well as Joyce Carol Oates does. This woman is amazing to me. I've never read her fiction, but I will.

The first section of this book, the one in which Oates seemingly tries to take on boxing and what it means from every imaginable angle, is best. This is one of those very, very few books that made me fold down corners so that I can easily return to specific passages. I don't know if non-fighters will really understand this book, or if many fighters will ever bother to read it. But I'm damned glad I did and damned glad Ms. Oates is out there writing.

I don't know what it is about Oates that makes so many, be they critics, fellow writers, or just average Joes and Janes, instinctively start spewing superlatives. Granted, some of what she's written is very good, but there are also those rather mediocre titles that seem to be praised to the skies for no other reason than that they're supposed to be, and that indeed appears to be the case with this little piece. It's amusing and it's informative, sure, but some kind of masterwork? Please.

`On boxing' is best when Oates focuses on the hard facts, like who did what where and when. That was not was I was looking for when I first got my hands on it, but it's still better - by far - than the parts where she tries to decipher the meaning of it all, which read like undergraduate assignments in pretentiousness. As is common with knowledgeable writers, Oates cannot help involving complex notions to say simple things. A boxer is not knocked out, he is knocked out of Time (yes, big `T'). The opponent is not the opponent, he is the Other (yes, big `O'). This is a practice I absolutely loathe. What we've got here is supposed to be a book about boxing, and if I wanted `Being and Nothingness' I'd have bought it. Don't get me wrong - certainly boxing could make for some profound commentary on the nature of humanity, which, I presume, is what she was aiming at (although I don't think she'd admit it). I'm just saying that with what she finally came up with you just keep wondering why she can't stick to the point, namely, that two people are trying to beat each other up.

Some people say this is the best that has ever been written on boxing. Obviously, they haven't looked very hard - even the Mailer quote on page 103 is enough to see why this is so.

Give it three stars for the moderately enjoyable journalism and, I almost forgot to say it, some beautiful photographs.

Where the most eloquent writers display their best prose is through passion. And the seeds of passion thrive in sex, exploitation, and violence. The human condition, written about by every writer but only successfully by a minority, is dissected and shaved away and exposed layer by layer until one gets to the core of what the soul is, of what separates us from our basest instincts. To that end, boxing is the true display of the human condition and the greatest writers have recognized this and have poured forth their own souls to capture the brutality that occurs inside the squared circle.

Joyce Carol Oates at first seems like an odd choice as an expert on the sport. A frail academic known for her moving stories of family interaction, she wouldn't at first strike you as a devotee to a sport that most academics abhor. But she is a lifelong fan. Her father was a fan and it seems that it runs in the blood. She's been going to matches and watching them on film since she was a young girl, and due to her thoughtful approach and extraordinary access she manages to coax the true spirit of the athletes from a myriad of interviews.

Many spectacular authors have written about the sport. Jack London, Ernest Hemingway, Norman Mailer, and A.J. Liebling are a few that come to mind. None of those giants bring to the sport a cautious sensitivity that Oates does. Her prose are so rich that when reading this book, I had to frequently set it down and digest what I'd read. Like a rich chocolate, too much at one time would overload my senses, dulling me and causing me to miss nuance and ramble through the poetry. Her book is a treat, slowly and steadily read. It's a beautiful, sad, witty communique from someone who recognizes that we need the outlet, the raw power and relentless destruction that representatives of all of us can administer. Trained to the height of physical perfection, but unrestrained by conscience, boxers show us what we are all capable of doing, what we are all capable of enduring.

Her prose? Check this out:

"No sport is more physical, more direct, than boxing. No sport appears more powerfully homoerotic: the confrontation in the ring--the disrobing--the sweaty heated combat that is part dance, courtship, coupling--the frequent urgent pursuit by one boxer of the other in the fight's natural and violent movement toward the "knockout": surely boxing derives much of its appeal from this mimicry of a species of erotic love in which one man overcomes the other in an exhibition of superior strength and will. The heralded celibacy of the fighter-in-training is very much a part of boxing lore: instead of focusing his energies and fantasies upon a woman the boxer focuses them upon an opponent. Where Woman has been, Opponent must be."

This book, to me, is an inspirational, a prayer book, a series of thoughts meant to get me through life more positive and more in tune with my soul.

Livingstone Brambles, of whom I have acquaintance and of whom Oates writes glowingly, when told that she'd written about him in On Boxing said, "Man, she loves me."

Yes, she does, Champ. She loves all men who've donned gloves and tested their instincts in the ring, but more than most, she loves men like you who held nothing back, who gave their entire being over to training and instinct and sacrificed everything to survive and conquer. She loves you Livingstone, because you are who we all wish to be.

CV Rick

And she's had long meaningful conversations with a pre-incarceration Mike Tyson. Before the ear biting and the crotch grabbing etc. The two chapters (actually essays) I highly recommend here are the one about Tyson and "Boxing: The Cruelest Sport." This is essentially a collection of essays Oates has written about boxing so they're a mixed bag. But it's worth getting for the two I mentioned.

Six years of bouts with local bruisers and grainy films of Marciano and Louis, and I retired with my fascination intact. Before I chanced upon Oates no book on boxing quite took me beyond the physical. An extraordinary insightful book that subtly find its way to the soul of this controversial sport.

I agree with the Swedish reviewer. This book is too cosmic for my tastes. In a funny way I think Oates is aware of the trap she has set for herself. At the outset she says, "if you have seen five hundred boxing matches you have seen five hundred boxing matches and their common denominator, which certainly exists, is not of primary interest to you. `If the Host is only a symbol,' the Catholic writer Flannery O'Connor once remarked, `I'd say the hell with it.'" (Pp. 4-5.)

Having said that a fight is a fight, that generalizations are secondary, that symbolism is worthless, she proceeds to play philosopher for half the book. There is no relief from the earnestness. However, when she gets around to Mike Tyson, the pre-road-rage Tyson, I found a lot more to grab onto. Her rather sweet portrayal of the young champ is satisfyingly concrete, and certainly a kind of bizarre period piece in light of subsequent events in Tyson's life.

Coincidentally I read the following passage in American Heritage Magazine while I was reading this book. It's from an interview with sportswriter W.C. Heinz, now 86. Without coming within ten feet of a word like "homoerotic," it illustrates one of Oates's points and finishes with a memorable, upbeat image:

"When two fighters fight a hell of a battle, there's later a liking between them. This was true of Joe Walcott and Rocky Marciano. Marciano took him out in the thirteenth round of their great first championship fight, but Joe also knocked down Rocky in the first round. Rocky had never been down before, and the next day I was interviewing him and I asked him, "What were you thinking when you went down?" He had a wonderful fighter's remark. He said: "I was thinking, `This guy can really punch. This will be one hell of a fight.'"

I enjoy this kind of writing better. To my way of thinking, the deep thoughts come off better when left unstated, or sprinkled in carefully within more definite imagery like this.

This book deals mostly with why boxers compete and what draws the public to the spectacle. Has some excellent historical moments and some great insight. As a long time boxing fan the book can however get somewhat boring. This book has always received rave reviews, the book is very well written, but I was a little disappointed overall. About halfway through I started losing interest.

Joyce Carol Oates, On Boxing (Doubleday, 1987)

The blurbs on the back of this book gush. A lot of very talented, very famous writers were quite enamored with Joyce Carol Oates' meditation on boxing, and they should have been. This is not only Oates writing with her best critical eye, but it's also Oates at her most approachable; this is easily as readable as any of her fiction, and more so than a good portion of it. She responds to the art of pugilism both, and often simultaneously, with a critical and an emotional eye. It's quite a nice little book, and as someone who knows nothing about boxing myself, I can attest that Oates' writing is not just for the aficionado; if you're old enough to remember the names Marvin Hagler and Tommy Hearns, you'll find this interesting and often enlightening. Another solid entry in the Oates canon. ****

Oates works out her essay style with boxing. Absent blood and bruises she has something to offer