Book Review – On Boxing, by Joyce Carol Oates

09 Friday May 2014

Posted by matthewjbailey in Book Reviews

Tags

Baruch Spinoza, Joyce Carol Oates, Lennox Lewis, Mike Tyson, Nigel Collins, Paul Celan

By any standards, Joyce Carol Oates’ On Boxing is one of the high-water marks of boxing writing[1]. It routinely appears on lists of greatest boxing books[2], usually near the top. Largely on the strength of this one piece (though she has written others on the subject), no less a figure than Nigel Collins, long-time editor of The Ring (when that title really meant something), has named her as one of his two favourite living boxing writers.

But Oates is not just a boxing writer: far from it. Her output is as varied and as torrential as it is highbrow. The author of over forty novels, she has also produced plays, novellas and poetry, as well as non-fiction: she has won a hatful of literary awards, and has twice been nominated for a Pulitzer. In her spare time she is also, somehow, a professor at Princeton.

The reader who fears that a bluestocking in an ivory tower could never get to grips with the dirty world of boxing may take encouragement from The New York Review of Books’ description of her work as “a kind of Grand Guignol of every imaginable form of physical, psychological and sexual violence: rape, incest, murder, molestation, cannibalism, torture and bestiality”. In addition, although the nitty-gritty of the boxing business is not her principal topic, she shows a genuine understanding of it, remarking wryly “[t]hat boxing is our most controversial sport, always, it seems, on the very threshold of oblivion, has not prevented it from having become a multimillion-dollar business.”

What is true, however, is that the present work is not necessarily aimed at the general boxing fan. Indeed, it is not clear that On Boxing is “aimed” at anyone at all in particular. It seems, rather, to be a very personal attempt on Oates’s part to come to grips with her own responses to boxing, and with some profound questions that, she feels, boxing raises. These are:

what is boxing? (in particular, is it, as it is usually unthinkingly described, a sport?)
why do we watch it? why do we like it?
what does this tell us about ourselves, the audience? what does it make us?

Oates’s attempt to address these questions is serious and substantial. Her conclusions are unorthodox and sometimes profound. They deserve the attention of anyone who takes boxing seriously. But they are not immune to challenge.

On Boxing displays several flaws common when literary writers take on topics which are, for want of a better word, philosophical. Firstly, she often says things that simply are not, and sometimes cannot possibly be true. The very first sentence of the preface reads “[n]o other subject is, for the writer, so intensely personal as boxing”, a sentiment unlikely to be endorsed by anyone who has read, for example, Paul Celan (as Oates surely has)[3]. This habit forces the reader to work hard: if she can’t mean, or believe, what she says, what does she want to say? Secondly, she has a habit of overblowing what turn out to be mundanities. She writes, for example, that to the boxer, his opponent 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 . . . 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.” Even after multiple readings, it is not clear to me that this passage expresses any more than the truism that a boxer can only measure himself against an opponent. Thirdly, she contradicts herself, sometimes spectacularly: early on, she writes “[l]ife is like boxing in many unsettling respects. But boxing is only like boxing”, then spends large parts of the rest of the book discussing the ways in which boxing is like, among other things, religious ceremonies, story-telling, dance, music, pornography, and sex (straight and homosexual). And finally, she is maddeningly imprecise in her use of terminology, including some of the terms most important to arriving at grasp of her views.

This dense and complex work is hard enough to follow as it is without these offputting habits, which may be a consequence of Oates’s methods of composition. She herself describes the essay as “mosaic-like”, apparently foregoing a single narrative theme as she tries to build a picture from scattered, individual elements which do not always cohere with each other.

However, with effort, some key themes emerge, as follows.

Boxing is, or expresses, something ancient and primitive (“Boxing inhabits a sacred space predating civilization”): it may be anti-civilization and anti-rational, or even insane (“[t]he boxing match is the very image . . . of mankind’s collective aggression: its ongoing historical madness . . . “’Free’ will, ‘sanity’, ‘rationality’ – our characteristic modes of consciousness – are irrelevant, if not detrimental, to boxing in its most extraordinary moments . . . the great boxer must disrobe himself of both reason and instinct’s caution as he prepares to fight”).
Boxing is not normal or natural; indeed it is “contrary to nature” in that “’normal’ behaviour in the ring would be unbearable to watch, deeply shameful: for ‘normal’ beings share with all living creatures the instinct to persevere, as Spinoza said, in their own being”, that is, to survive and avoid damage or destruction.
For this reason boxing gives rise to a “theoretical anxiety” about our self-image. (“Clearly, boxing’s very image is repulsive to people because it cannot be assimilated into what we wish to know about civilized man . . . [boxing] violates a taboo of our civilization”).
The fighter is essentially physical (“a boxer ‘is’ his body, and is totally identified with it”), and essentially masculine (“[t]he physical self, the maleness, one might say, underlying the self”). The masculinity boxing reflects is “unthinking, unforced . . . beyond all question”.
Oates has “no difficulty justifying boxing as a sport because I have never seen it as a sport”: rather, boxing is more like an art form, with a fight being compared to a story (albeit one “without words”), to music, to dance, and to tragic theatre.
There is nothing metaphorical about boxing: it is something real. “Nor can I think about boxing in writerly terms as a metaphor for something else . . . as a symbol of something beyond itself . . . For boxing isn’t metaphor, it really is the thing in itself”.
Watching (self-destructive, masculine) boxing and particularly thinking and writing about it, puts us in touch with “the lost ancestral self”, and forces us “to contemplate not only boxing, but the perimeters of civilization – what it is, or should be, to be human”.
Boxing makes spectators into voyeurs of violence. “Boxing as a public spectacle is akin to pornography: in each case the spectator is made a voyeur, distanced, yet presumably intimately involved, in an event that is not supposed to be happening as it is happening”.
But as viewers, we too seek not just to watch but to participate in the contact with our pre-civilized selves: “the desire is not merely to mimic but, magically, to be brute, primitive, instinctive and therefore innocent. One might then be a person for whom the contest is not mere self-destructive play but life itself; and the world, not in spectacular and irrevocable decline, but new, fresh, vital, terrifying and exhilarating by turns, a place of wonders”.

Firstly, a boxing match is nothing like a “story”, and the boxer is nothing like the writer. A story is separate from, and tells us about, the thing or events about which it is a story. But a boxing match doesn’t represent or depict anything, and doesn’t point to, or tell us about, anything outside itself (this is why boxing cannot serve as a metaphor for other things: it is, in Oates’s Kantian formulation, “the thing in itself”). While not representative of anything, boxing can certainly be expressive, what it expresses being facts about the nature of the participants & audience in particular, and (perhaps) humanity in general. In this sense, as Oates says, “boxing as performance is more clearly akin to dance or music than narrative”, though since it is improvised and unpredictable, more like jazz than the orchestral music Oates alludes to (and again, nothing like a story – a story can be retold, but a boxing match cannot be refought).

These ideas are highly suggestive. But then what does boxing “express”? In the first instance, and most directly, it expresses something profound about the fighters. Oates is characteristically exaggerating when she says boxing “contains nothing that is not fully willed” – there are plenty of accidents in the ring – but, I think, on the right lines, when she says that in boxing “[a]ll is style”[4]. Style can consist only of willed actions, and so expresses character, something which boxing is uniquely able to reveal.

On the other hand, it is important to understand that Oates is simply wrong to depict boxing (as she does repeatedly) as something purely physical or corporeal. There is more to a person, and certainly more to a fighter, than his body. Firstly, boxing’s cognitive element is surely indispensable: without concentration, strategy and intelligence a fighter is lost. Oates herself admits as much, when she discusses how “intelligently ferocious” Sugar Ray Leonard was, or how one boxer seeks to profit from the “intellectual miscalculations” of another. Secondly, boxing’s demands are as much conative as cognitive: while it may be true that boxing “dramatizes the limitations . . . of the physical”, it – surely – can only do so by dramatizing, equally, the overcoming of the (merely) physical, through (to use Oates’s own word) will, or (to use an alternative term) heart, which ranks among boxing’s highest virtues. It is a complete human being who fights, not just a body, and there is no such thing as “the physical self . . . underlying the self”.

The question of will gives rise to some other issues. As we saw above, for Oates, boxing is abnormal and “contrary to nature” because it is unnatural to “seek out” pain. But elsewhere she writes that the boxer “must learn to exert his will over his merely human and animal impulses, not only to flee pain but to flee the unknown”. So which “nature” is the boxer overcoming by this act of will: his civilized, learned nature, or his pre-civilized, “animal” nature?

The answer, of course, is that the fighter needs to overcome both his instinctive and rational fears, and thus to control both his “atavistic” and civilized “selves” (if such there be). It is clear, therefore, how we should answer Oates’s question whether boxing is “[m]adness? – or merely discipline? – this absolute subordination of the self”. Boxing requires discipline, not madness, and epitomizes self-control, which is the very opposite of insanity. It is exactly backwards to say “the great boxer must disrobe himself of both reason and instinct’s caution as he prepares to fight”.

Similar considerations apply to Oates’s association of physicality, irrationality and anti-civilization with an “unthinking” masculinity. “Values are reversed, evaginated: a boxer is valued not for his humanity but for being a ‘killer’, a ‘mauler’, a ‘hitman’, an ‘animal’, for being ‘savage’, ‘merciless’, ‘devastating’, ‘ferocious’, ‘vicious’, ‘murderous’”. But it is a poor, indeed etiolated vision of masculinity that only includes brute, irrational, physical violence: men, after all, had a hand in the creation of civilization, and are no less masculine for it. If there is something masculine about boxing – and I think Oates is undeniably right that there is – it lies precisely in boxing’s requirement for what she calls the “absolute subordination of the self”, in applying one’s reason and will to control and exploit (to use a Nietzschean term, “sublimate”) one’s own urges (both for fight and for flight) in order to take on one’s opponent.

It is for all these reasons that Oates is wrong to say that boxing “is about being hit rather more than it is about hitting, just as it is about feeling pain . . . more than it is about winning . . . the boxer prefers physical pain in the ring to the absence of pain that is ideally the condition of ordinary life”. In fact it is almost never true that boxers want to be hit (and in fact when they do – one thinks of Oliver McCall against Lennox Lewis, and perhaps also Mike Tyson against the same opponent – not only are they are not boxing, they risk disqualification for breaching the referee’s explicit instruction to “defend yourself at all times”). It is one thing to accept pain as the price of success, quite another to prefer it. So it feels like Oates’s line of thinking here reduces to the commonplace that fighters understand the need, and are willing, to suffer (both in training and in the ring) in order to succeed. Apart from being less than revelatory, this surely finally refutes the suggestion the boxer is irrational – what could be more rational than enduring something now in return for future reward? – as well as the suggestions that fighters are “unnatural”, “abnormal” or “other”.

There are further difficulties with Oates’s treatment of the relationship between boxing and civilization, a crucial term, but one which she uses loosely. So, at one point, she draws a distinction between boxing, “a highly complex and refined skill, belonging solely to civilization”, and fighting, “something predating civilization, the instinct not merely to defend oneself . . . but to attack another and to force him into absolute submission”. Everywhere else in the book, however, Oates uses the two terms interchangeably – rightly so, since a boxing match is always a fight, and as she says boxing “isn’t metaphor, it is the thing in itself”. Consequently, and for all the reasons given above for doubting that boxing (or fighting) is something irrational, unthinking or primitive, it does not seem to me that there is any reason to locate boxing, or the source of its appeal, outside, or prior to, “civilization”.

I have suggested elsewhere that it is because a boxing match is a real (if stylized) fight that boxing should not be regarded as a sport. Sport is what we do instead of fighting, and in this sense a sporting event, unlike a boxing match, is a metaphorical fight (this is how I read George Foreman’s oft-repeated aphorism, quoted by Oates, that “boxing is the sport all other sports aspire to be”).

However, Oates’s own arguments against regarding boxing as a sport are weak, based as they are on the observation that “[b]aseball, football, basketball – these quintessentially American pastimes are recognizably sports because they involve play: they are games. One plays football, one doesn’t play boxing”. True enough: but then you don’t “play” swimming, running, cycling, diving, or ice-skating either, and they are certainly all sports. This is partly, but not only, a question of English grammar: someone engaging in sports whose name comprises the gerund “Ving” is said to “V”, not to “play Ving” (we run, swim and cycle, we don’t play swimming, running or cycling[5]). But these other sports don’t “involve play” either, and not all sports are games. Someone running a marathon or riding a bicycle up an Alp is engaged in a sport, but not a game, and isn’t playing. Likewise, anyone claiming that boxing isn’t a sport or a game because it “cannot be assimilated into childhood” hasn’t spent much time around children lately.

More promising is Oates’s suggestion, referred to above, that boxing is, or is akin to, an art. We suggested above that boxing may be disqualified from being representative art by virtue of being something real (i.e., a match is a real fight), rather than symbolic, but allowed that it might be more correctly described as expressive, at least of the character of the fighters. We have rejected Oates’s characterizations of boxing as (in her sense) masculine, abnormal and unnatural, essentially because we cannot see it as irrational or “brute, primitive and instinctive”, as something essentially predating “civilization”. What is left?

Just as there is no such thing as a “physical self”, there is no such thing as an “atavistic self” which might be opposed to a “civilized self”. There are only complete human beings, physical, intellectual and moral – and of course human nature, which varies with the times, but which also involves the permanent truths and values that make us human. And it is because boxing (at its best) can express those truths and embody those values so uniquely well that Oates is right to say it displays the “full spectrum of the human condition”, and (it seems to me) why it is so appealing. As Oates writes, a great fight is “a joint response to the will of the audience which is always that the fight be a worthy one so that the crude paraphernalia of the setting – ring, lights, ropes, stained canvas, the staring onlookers themselves – be erased, forgotten. (As in the theatre or the church, settings are erased by way, ideally, of transcendent action.)”

This, I think is what Oates is driving at when she talks about boxing being “superior to life”, and also what gives it its artistic character. Fighters are pushed to the limits of human existence in a way other humans are not, and can show us those limits in a way no one else can. So, “[b]oxers are there to establish an absolute experience, a public accounting of the outermost limits of their beings; they will know, as few of us can know of ourselves, what physical and psychic power they possess – of how much, or how little, they are capable”. In other words, boxing’s appeal lies in the fact that what it expresses and embodies is not something ancient – after all, why should we care about that? – but something timeless[6].

Great boxing expresses the dignity of man through the extremes of life: in other words, exactly what Greek tragedy expresses. We may therefore disagree with the route by which she gets there, but still agree with Oates’s conclusion that “[i]n the brightly lit ring, man is in extremis, performing . . . for the mysterious solace of those who can participate only vicariously in such drama: the drama of life in the flesh. Boxing has become America’s tragic theatre”. The comparison can be pushed too far – boxing expresses these things through athleticism rather than plot – but we need not pull back from it entirely, as Oates elsewhere seems to, when she suggests (contrary to her comparisons between boxing and writing, dance and music) that boxing is “an art form . . . with no natural analogue in the arts”. (Indeed, it is when she draws out this comparison that Oates is arguably at her best. Certainly, it is hard to think of a better sentence in boxing writing than this: “If boxing is a sport it is the most tragic of all sports because more than any human activity it consumes the very excellence it displays – its drama is this very consumption.”)

It follows, however, that the appeal of boxing to its audience does not simply reside in a desire “to be brute, primitive, instinctive and therefore innocent”. Indeed, if this were so it would be hard to see how an audience could “will” that a fight should be “worthy” or “transcendent”. It is true that a fight crowd responds to the violence, but also that an audience admires athleticism, heart, courage, intelligence, determination and skill: the highest of humanity, and not only the lowest.

A final consideration. While fighting may express the whole of humanity, its “transcendence” can lead us to see the fighters themselves as somehow other than human, even superhuman. This is especially true given the nature of boxing, where the opponent is not “merely” an opponent, but also, as it were, stands in for both the ball and the goal. Without measures to protect the fighters (from themselves, their opponents and the “will of the audience”) the dangers of their being pushed beyond what is humanly bearable are obvious. This, I think, is what Oates means when she writes that “so central to the drama of boxing is the referee that the spectacle of two men fighting each other unsupervised in an elevated ring would seem hellish, if not obscene”. But there is something deeply unsettling in Oates’s further observation that “[t]he referee makes boxing possible . . . . He is . . . our moral conscience extracted from us as spectators so that, for the duration of the fight, ‘conscience’ need not be a factor in our experience”. If we spectators have to be thus temporarily parted from our “moral conscience” to enjoy boxing, what does that make us? More than voyeurs, I would suggest: and this, I think, rather than any roots in “pre-civilization”, is the source of the “theoretical anxiety” that boxing certainly gives rise to in the thinking observer.

On Boxing is not an easy read, and not only because it deals with difficult topics. There is much in the book to disagree with. Oates arrives at her insights via questionable routes, and often appears not fully to appreciate their true meaning or importance. But it is, nonetheless, both deeply insightful and deeply important. A boxing fan who has not read it and thought carefully about its themes is missing a lot, and in a way is doing a disservice both to himself as a spectator and to boxing’s participants. For all these reasons, it is one of the few works on the subject that can truly be described as indispensable.

[1] In its most recent edition, the essay On Boxing is anthologized with some of Oates’ other writings on the subject, notably her pieces on Tyson and Ali and her review of Unforgiveable Blackness, Geoffrey Ward’s immense biography of Jack Johnson. The present review will deal only with the original essay.

[2] For example, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/feb/08/top-10-boxing-books-markus-zusak; http://www.goodreads.com/list/show/6672.Best_Books_on_Boxing_and_Boxers; http://www.proboxing-fans.com/merchandise/best-boxing-books/

[3] Celan, whose parents died in an internment camp in Transnistria in 1943 after he had failed to persuade them to flee, most famously wrote Todesfuge as a response to Theodor Adorno’s suggestion that “after Auschwitz, to write a poem is barbaric”.

[4] Which is not the same as saying that, in boxing, “all is stylishness”, a distinction apaprently missed by Anatole Broyard in his New York Times review (http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/07/05/specials/oates-boxing.html ), in which he surprisingly asks “can the word ‘style’ be applied to Rocky Marciano or Mike Tyson?”.

[5] Interestingly, one can be said to “play” the Celtic sports of hurling and curling (but note that these are also games, and the players neither hurl nor curl).

[6] Oates, it seems to me, misses the importance of her own comment that “[t]he fight itself is timeless”, which she makes in her discussion of the importance of time to boxing. (For example, “[w]hen a boxer is ‘knocked out’ it does not mean, as it’s commonly thought, that he has been knocked unconscious, or even incapacitated; it means rather more poetically that he has been knocked out of Time”.)

Book Review – War & Peace, by Ricky Hatton

24 Thursday Apr 2014

Posted by matthewjbailey in Book Reviews

≈ 1 Comment

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Billy Graham, Floyd Mayweather, Kosta Tszyu, Leo Tolstoy, Manny Pacquiao, Martin Amis, Mike Tyson, Ricky Hatton, Tris Dixon

A commissar in one of post-revolutionary Russia’s regions once proudly told a visiting dignitary that, thanks to the glorious victory of communism, the area now boasted over 200 published writers, whereas previously there had been only one. Oh really, responded the dignitary: and who was the lone pre-communist exception? The commissar gave an embarrassed shrug and said “Well, . . . Tolstoy”.

There was only one Leo Tolstoy, but, thanks to the putatively similarly unique Ricky Hatton, there is now a second War and Peace. On reading Tolstoy’s original, Flaubert famously exclaimed “What an artist, and what a psychologist!”. Readers of the present work are unlikely to echo these sentiments.

First, the “artistry”. Ricky Hatton’s immense popularity rested on two things. Firstly, he was tremendously exciting to watch: an all-action, face-first, hyper-aggressive fighter with a tough chin, willing to take on the very best, who was notorious for knocking opponents out with spectacular bodyshots. His 2005 home-town victory over Kosta Tszyu remains one of the greatest achievements, and one of the greatest nights, in UK boxing history. It is hardly a criticism (though, as we shall see, Hatton himself does not agree) that when he came up against the absolute elite, in the shape of Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao, he was comprehensively pancaked. It certainly did not impair his public appeal: when Hatton announced his ill-fated comeback fight, three and a half years after being knocked out by Pacquiao, 19,000 tickets were sold within hours, even though no opponent had been named. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, his fans could see that he was, indisputably, one of them. War and Peace attests to this repeatedly in its content – so, here’s Ricky, holidaying in Marbella, Tenerife and on cruise ships; here’s Ricky, playing practical jokes on his mates from the gym; here’s Ricky, ignoring invitations to fancy showbiz events in favour of a night playing darts and downing endless pints in his local; here’s Ricky, enthusing wildly about the ghastly Las Vegas. But more obviously and more often, indeed in almost every sentence, it is embodied in the book’s style. Hatton is clearly determined to underscore his status as the People’s Champion, and ghostwriter Tris Dixon, editor of Boxing News, is equally clearly under strict instructions to stick, as far as possible, to Hatton’s uneducated Mancunian vernacular. So, Hatton’s brother Matthew is described as having “a right mouth on him”; Hatton himself does not wish to be seen as a “head-up-my-own-arse big-time Charlie”. This is unfortunate, for a number of reasons.

An author who is stuck with an inarticulate narrator faces a formidable challenge in remaining linguistically inventive enough to retain the reader’s interest. Irvine Welsh managed it in Trainspotting, as did Martin Amis, triumphantly, in Money. Dixon addresses, and comprehensively fails, this test, with a combination of Olympian swearing and endless clichés. A big fight is “an acid test”; an upset Hatton has “lost the plot”; at the announcement of his comeback he is “bursting with pride”; and so on, and so on. However, like most writers who lean heavily on dead metaphors, Dixon sometimes doesn’t even get these right: Hatton describes being “put through the ringer” in training. Martin Amis this is not.

One consequence is that whenever the register does rise above the plebeian, even if only as far as the mildly polysyllabic, the effect is as jarring as – at the risk of delivering another cliché – a left hook to the floating rib. Hatton claims, wholly implausibly, to have addressed the following post-fight encouragement to an early victim: “I don’t want to sound patronizing . . . but I was quite shocked you’d only had eight fights . . . Don’t be disheartened.” Patronizing? Quite shocked? Disheartened? Is this the same person who supposedly wrote the sentence “When you get cut in the first round of a twelve-round title fight you think ‘Fucking hell’”?

Worse still, this man-of-the-people style too often simply becomes a licence to write badly. Whatever the restrictions placed on an author, there is simply no excuse for sentences as lazy as this: “Then, in the ninth round, I suppose I got that frustrated that I had not been able to nail him flush that I took a run-up as if to say ‘Fuck it’ and I flew at him with a left hook, and it was probably the hardest punch I ever threw. It’s a wonder he’s still not there now”. This being Ricky Hatton’s own version of his own story, rather than a guess at what someone else might have been thinking, there is no warrant for the use here of the qualifier ‘I suppose’; the self-conscious use of the colloquial ‘that’ instead of ‘so’ (i.e., ‘so frustrated that . . .’) is clumsy and ugly in written English; if you are pretending to be transcribing written speech, ‘had not’ (rather than ‘hadn’t’) is completely out of place; and there is no way of construing ‘it’s a wonder he’s still not there now’ to mean what it is supposed to mean (viz., presumably, ‘it’s a wonder he’s not still there now’, strangled as that formulation would have been). The same sort of wearying analysis could be applied to many similar sentences.

The indolence is not restricted to syntax. A young Hatton describes himself watching Manchester City’s lavishly talented Georgi Kinkladze and thinking “how great it would be to be a sportsman that excites people”. Then, later – mirabile dictu! – “whenever I put an opponent up against the ropes, I could hear the crowd take a sharp intake of breath . . . it’s . . . how it was at Maine Road all those years ago when I was on the terraces and Georgi Kinkladze picked up the ball”. So cheap is this device that the reader almost fails to register the ugliness of “take a sharp intake of breath”. Almost.

Some may think it unfair to expect a punch-drunk recovering alcoholic and substance-abuser to maintain tolerable standards of literacy. I disagree. Firstly, that’s what ghostwriters (and editors) are for. Secondly, it wasn’t beyond, say, Jake La Motta & Rubin Carter. And finally, where the offences against grammar and style are as egregious as this, a book becomes almost unreadable.

This is a shame, because there are some good things in War and Peace. The account of rising through the UK’s amateur and then professional worlds, facing opponents from juniors, to journeymen, to “crossroads” fighters, to the absolute elite, is entertaining and informative. And the book really comes alive whenever Hatton is in the ring: the depictions of the fights are often exciting, and usually reasonably objective. Hatton is good on explaining how a top-level fighter approaches a particular opponent, developing a strategy and, where necessary, improvising improvements in the ring. Even when he fights poorly (by his own estimation) Hatton rarely fails to tell us something worth hearing about the experience and its aftermath and effects (in one memorable scene Hatton goes for treatment on facial scar tissue that repeatedly opens during fights: on investigation, it turns out that the Vaseline applied to the original wound is still there under the skin). And of course, few fighters have been in the ring with both Mayweather and Pacquiao, the two outstanding stars of the present generation, making the insights Hatton provides into their styles truly compelling.

So much for the artistry. What of the psychology?

It was Leon Festinger who first coined the term “cognitive dissonance” for the mental distress experienced by an individual who holds contradictory beliefs, ideas or values. On the basis of War and Peace it is clear that Hatton’s capacity for cognitive dissonance is as impressive as his appetite for ale and pies.

Some examples are relatively harmless. It is a common peculiarity of people who come from the North West of England that they can, like Hatton, casually mention that they grew up 200 yards from the house where the Moors Murders were committed, went to school with the son of Harold Shipman (the UK’s worst mass murderer), then immediately aver, without the barest hint of irony, that “[s]ome of the nicest people in the world come from the area but sadly it’s not known for that”. Also not uncommon among British working class young men is Hatton’s account of his career in football. Taken on as a junior by his beloved Manchester City, then dropped because he spent too much time at the boxing gym and not enough at the training ground, he writes “it always makes you wonder, could I have done it?”, but immediately answers his own question: “there were some players in my class who stood out a mile . . . and I wasn’t one of them”.

Other examples of this phenomenon are less amusing. Hatton was notorious for gaining a great deal of weight, sometimes as much as ninety pounds, between fights (so much so that he claims his doctor warned him about heart attack risk[1]), then enduring impossibly hard training camps in order to get it all off. Hatton says he would never let a fighter he was training get away with this, and also that if he could change one thing about his career it would be his behaviour between fights, even blaming it for his defeat against Senchenko. However, he bizarrely also says that he was “quite proud of being called Ricky Fatton”, even claiming it as a sort of strength: “to do what I did and get my body from where it was to what it became on fight night, I think that showed the ultimate dedication”.

Perhaps this is not that unusual. Many fighters are prone to self-delusion of one kind or another: after all, how many convince themselves that they have a chance against a palpably superior opponent, or that they still have it when they are clearly shot? And how many would agree with Hatton when he says of his son that “if I had a choice, I would rather he didn’t box, but . . . it’s the best sport in the world”?

Less commonly, indeed perhaps uniquely among fighters, Hatton seems unable straightforwardly to report his own achievements, or attempt a positive evaluation of his abilities: instead, even after all these years, and all his successes, he endlessly reports what others (“people”, “observers”, or “writers”) say or said about him. It is as if he can’t believe anything, even about himself, unless someone else says it. “As a schoolboy, people were saying ‘There’s this kid from Manchester who can’t half body punch’ . . . more people had started talking about me: I wasn’t just steamrolling people, I was doing it in a certain manner, and with moves that were impressing observers . . . one writer even said I was ‘showing the footwork of a young Roberto Durán’ . . . I could get nasty if I had to. The guys at Sky Sports would say they could see it in the changing rooms before my fights”. He records apparently every instance where someone of note mentions him as a prospect, from George Foreman to “Scotland’s former world lightweight champion and Sky Sports commentator Jim Watt”. And it is not enough for him to complain that Joe Cortez didn’t give him a chance to fight Mayweather on the inside: he has to add that “Oscar de la Hoya . . . and Bernard Hopkins at ringside were incensed”.

Where he does not have an authoritative third party opinion on himself, he instead offers an excess of justificatory evidence. So, on turning professional, he can’t simply say “I was good enough to go straight to the major promoters”: instead, we get “[a]s a ticket-seller who had boxed for England, won about seventy of seventy-five fights, had won the ABAs and was turning professional as the number one in my weight class in the country, I had earned an audience with the country’s biggest promoters”, even though he has just spent the whole of the book thus far telling us precisely this story.

Why does Hatton do this? Firstly, there is his acute self-consciousness, which manifests itself in a chronic fear of being seen to be big-headed or arrogant. He just cannot bring himself to say “I was good”: rather, it has to be “look – these people think I am good”. It is, I suspect, the same self-consciousness which is at the root of his obsession with his “critics”, who for example, “had been asking ‘Well, he’s all right, but has he got any boxing ability?’ I’d ticked those boxes against Tackie, now demonstrating I could fight and win with bad cuts . . . and that I was not just a body puncher . . . I not only proved I could stand there and have it out with him, punch with him, but at times that I could outbox him, jab and move and display my boxing ability”. Does Hatton really believe that he proved all this in a single fight, but had never adequately done so in the thirty-three professional wins he had before meeting Ben Tackie, or in becoming “the number one in my weight class in the country” as an amateur?

Secondly, Hatton obviously doubts that readers will trust his judgment without independent verification (after all, he doesn’t appear to trust them to know who Jim Watt is). But as the book goes on it becomes ever clearer that Hatton also has no faith in his own judgment. His obsession with “critics”, and in particular with repeatedly proving them wrong, betokens a broader lack of self-confidence, which is only ever temporarily ameliorated , but apparently never eroded, by positive assessments from third parties of his achievements in the ring. Even after handily beating Tszyu, widely regarded at the time as one of the best fighters in the world, he imagines his critics saying “‘Oh, he’s beaten Tszyu? That was a fluke.’ ‘He’s a one-hit wonder.’” Revealingly, he goes on to add that, as a result, for his next fight, “[t]here was no lack of motivation”. Similarly, on visiting the Kronk gym in Detroit he says “I think some of the fighters there were quietly taking the piss out of me. Then Billy and I got in the ring on the bodybelt . . . afterwards all of the other fighters came up to me, asking me my name and what my record was. It had gone from ‘Who’s this little, pale-faced white kid grunting like an idiot?’ to all of a sudden thinking ‘Fucking hell. That’s not bad, is it?’ That was quite pleasing.”

In other words, Ricky Hatton’s psychology comprises the following elements: a lack of self-awareness so complete that he is able to answer his own questions without realizing it; a self-consciousness so crippling as to make him incapable of expressing a positive opinion about himself without adducing extensive corroborating evidence; a resultant complete lack of self-confidence; and, therefore, an obsession with the views of other people so profound that eliciting positive opinions and disproving negative ones are his principal sources of, on the one hand, self-esteem, and on the other, motivation.

Any sportsman with this outlandishly fragile psychological profile is likely to react badly to defeat. But the issues are multiplied a thousandfold in boxing, where public outings are relatively rare, where undefeated records are so highly prized, and where the physical as well as moral consequences of a single defeat can be career-ending.

It is against this background that Hatton entered the ring to face Floyd Mayweather, where he lost every round before being dispatched head-first into a cornerpost by a perfectly-timed check hook. The psychological consequences of that defeat become particularly murky, not to say Freudian, when Hatton subsequently decides to abandon long-time trainer and supposed “best mate” Billy Graham in favour of none other than Floyd Mayweather Sr. Hatton explains this decision by reference to Graham’s declining physical ability, citing in particular his inability to work the pads without painkilling injections to his hands. Given everything that has come before, it is no surprise when it becomes clear that the idea of dumping Graham was put into Hatton’s mind by “some members of the team”. Hatton himself seems characteristically confused about his own motivations for going with Mayweather, Sr. in particular: “There was no rhyme or reason behind my going with Floyd; I wanted to add a few new facets to my game.” So, there was no reason; but here’s the reason.

At any rate, subsequent less-than-entirely-convincing victories over Juan Lazcano and Paulie Malignaggi achieved little beyond qualifying Hatton and his psyche for an even more spectacular two-round battering at the hands of Manny Pacquiao (following which he is, in turn, abandoned by Mayweather, Sr.).

What follows is a journey (documented extensively on the pages of the UK’s tabloids) into alcoholism, substance abuse, depression, and (allegedly[2]) infidelity that is deeply unsavoury even by the low standards set by other boxers. Worse still, despite his repeated protestations to the contrary, it is not clear that Hatton is or ever could be equipped to deal with his demons. Finding himself in the Priory, he refuses to accept that he is an alcoholic, insisting rather that he drinks so much because he is depressed. This is obviously nonsense, not only for the implication that other alcoholics are any more cheerful, but because, by his own account, he remained depressed after leaving even though he (and, presumably, the Priory staff) managed to bring his drinking under control.

The true basis of Hatton’s malaise surely lie in his own longstanding emotional weaknesses, which, as detailed above, are visible on every page of War and Peace. Having based his entire self-image on remaining undefeated in the ring, in order to silence the “critics” and thus cope with his own low self-esteem, he was utterly destroyed by his comprehensive losses to Mayweather and Pacquiao. This is clearly what is behind his complaints that no one at the Priory understood him because none of them “had been embarrassed in front of millions like I had”, and his melodramatic claim that “[m]y sense of invincibility had now gone, having been an unstoppable force for so long, and I was forced to think about how I had let a nation down”.

Hatton claims that alternative therapies (from Tony Adams’ “Sporting Chance” clinic) have helped him: if so, they have done nothing to address his utter lack of self-knowledge. This much is clear from two topics addressed at the end of this long book. Firstly, in his lengthy discussion of his embarrassing falling-out with his parents and other relatives (mainly due to unspecified money problems) Hatton never considers the difficulties his family may have had dealing with a drunken, suicidal, substance-abusing, grossly overweight son. And secondly, in his ponderings on the possible impact his career in boxing may have on his future health, it never occurs to him to wonder whether his current and historic emotional problems may have been caused, or at least aggravated, by the fact that he has spent so much of his life being punched in the head.

In these latter stages of the book there is a strong echo of the ending of Mike Tyson’s Undisputed Truth, in which Tyson waxes lyrical about the new sober life he has found through therapy and the love of a good woman – then admits, in a self-pitying epilogue added at the last minute, that nothing could be further from the truth. So far Tyson seems to have found a way to stay alive and achieve some sort of peace, mainly by distancing himself from the man he used to be. The reader of this sometimes unreadable, sometimes compelling, multiply flawed autobiography cannot help but fear that Ricky Hatton will lack the emotional strength to achieve even this uneasy settlement with himself and his past.

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/sport/2012/nov/23/ricky-hatton-vyacheslav-senchenko

[2] Hatton admits to all the listed failings except this one, though he has apparently taken no legal action against his accuser, Emma Bowe. http://www.mirror.co.uk/3am/celebrity-news/ricky-hatton-had-11-month-affair-with-me-251286

On Ending One’s Career

26 Wednesday Mar 2014

Posted by matthewjbailey in Philosophy

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

Amir Khan, Dan Rafael, Danny García, Erik Morales, Floyd Mayweather, Jorge Paez, Jr., Larry Holmes, Marco Antonio Barrera, Mike Tyson, Paul Magno, Paulie Malignaggi, Sergio Martinez, Steve Bunce, Steve Kim, Tim Starks, Vivian Harris, Zab Judah

Last weekend, in Monterrey, Mexico, the little-known[1] Vivian Harris (31-9-2 prefight) fought and beat one Jorge Paez, Jr. (37-4-1). Several writers have expressed their shock and outrage, not at Harris’s win, but at the fact he was allowed to fight at all. Harris had previously retired following an ugly series of knockout losses, saying he no longer had the “desire and hunger” to be a fighter, and since his comeback he had been denied a licence to box in the UK[2].

So, Tim Starks, writing at http://queensberry-rules.com, said “Harris should not have a license to box in Mexico or anywhere else”[3]. Dan Rafael of ESPN worked himself into a positive frenzy, declaring that the fight was “everything that is wrong with boxing . . . Harris is damaged goods”[4]. Steve Kim of MaxBoxing declared “Harris [is] a fighter that should be put down. If he were a horse, he’d either be taken to stud or the glue factory”[5].

This being boxing, others have taken a contrary view. Paul Magno of http://theboxingtribune.com called this “canned outrage” and “blind grandstanding”, quoting with approval Sam Geraci of http://www.fightnews.com, who said he could not understand “how any person with ethics can write something that harms the earning potential of a fighter without having verified information on why a fighter may have been denied a license in one region and granted one in another ”[6].

This is an unedifying debate. I cannot be the only one who finds something distasteful about suggesting a fighter is fit only for breeding or the glue factory, or describing him as “damaged goods”, especially when the writer professes a sanctimonious concern for the same fighter’s welfare. Nor can I be alone in detecting a whiff of condescension, or even colonialism, in the bald statement that “in Mexico, where suspensions in the United States or England are usually ignored, the standards are lax”. Some pretty questionable fights are sanctioned, and licences granted, in other places, the UK and US not excluded. On the other hand, I am not convinced of the “ethics” of saying a fighter should be allowed to go jurisdiction shopping in the interests of making a buck. But there are some important, more general issues here that are worth airing.

The boxer who won’t quit when he should, or comes back when he shouldn’t, is a dreadful cliché. Boxing writers, podcasters, et al, tired of the same old stories, groan and roll their eyes. Of course he can’t quit: the idiot spent all his money, and he can’t bear to leave the limelight! But there is more to it than this.

From the beginning, a fighter is taught that the decision to stop a fight is for his trainer, or the referee, or the doctor, but not for the fighter himself. His job is to keep going, to keep punching, to defend himself at all times (and, not coincidentally, there is perhaps no worse insult in all of boxing than that of “quitter”). The quid pro quo is that he trusts his handlers to take the tough decisions and look after his best interests.

This being so, it is asking a lot of a fighter that he alone make the judgement to end his entire career once and for all. However, due to boxing’s usual grotesque conflicts of interest – that is, absolutely everyone else’s interests exactly conflict with those of the fighter – often there is no one for him to turn to for help[7]. A retired fighter isn’t going to make any money for anyone. What’s more, a rich fighter is much likelier to retire: yet another reason, in case they needed one, for unscrupulous handlers to screw boxers out of their earnings and – a point less often noted – to encourage fighters to blow what money they do get their hands on.

There is another respect, less obvious, in which boxers are different. In most elite sports, and especially team sports, and most especially of all sports that are very physically demanding or where performance is very objectively measured, the absolute demand for positive results and the economic imperatives that accompany such demands generally ensure that players who are past their best are kept well away from the action. Enthusiasts may wax nostalgic about big names from the past, and sports clubs may like nothing more than to trumpet their history and tradition, but no one, from the fans, to the other players, to the managers, to the team owners, wants to see a has-been step up to take a last-minute penalty, bowl the final over of a one-day international, or (perhaps most relevantly) attempt to block a charging defensive tackle. But one of the many perverse facts about the economics of boxing is that the opportunities and rewards available to a fighter may increase after his peak.

It takes time and money to get to, or near to, the top in boxing. Having reached it, a guy may only stay there for a short time. But having made his name, especially if he has won one of boxing’s worthless “titles”[8], he can often make good money by hanging around (or coming back) to fight against, and polish the records of, young prospects. This is how a 35-year old Marco Antonio Barrera ended up in the ring with the 22-year old Amir Khan, and why a 38-year old Larry Holmes met Mike Tyson when he was 21 and terrifying. More recently, a badly faded Erik Morales fought & lost to Danny Garcia twice, despite giving away eleven and a half years, and Zab Judah (who once held WBC, WBA and IBF welterweight titles simultaneously) has become a sort of specialist celebrity loser, having now succumbed to Paulie Malignaggi as well as both García and Khan.

But let’s say our fighter does have the strength of will to stop. Let’s say he isn’t tempted to come back. And let’s assume he doesn’t have enough money to “retire” in the good way. What is he going to do with himself? And what is he going to live on?

Many retired sportsmen go on to a career in the sports media. But this requires a certain public profile. The historic decision to shift the most important fights to subscription-only channels or pay-per-view may have meant sustainable boxing revenues for broadcasters & promoters, because it ensures that the core audience ponies up, but it is a disaster for individual fighters trying to make a name for themselves in the wider world. There are people outside boxing’s hardcore support who have heard of the Klitschkos, Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao, but how many have heard of such extraordinary athletes as Sergio Martinez, Tim Bradley, Andre Ward, or Guillermo Rigondeaux, all of whom are regularly listed among the pound-for-pound top ten fighters in the world? What chance do they have of presenting a boxing show on TV, much less getting a gig in the wider sports media?

Of course, there are other qualifications for a job of that kind. A presentable appearance, a degree of literacy and a civilized manner are three of them. These are not areas in which retired fighters typically excel. It would be easy, but lazy and wrong, simply to put this down to their backgrounds: plenty of retired sports stars have had high-profile public careers despite humble beginnings. Rather, in their own short-term financial interest, promoters always permit and often encourage boxers to remain essentially feral, their public appearances often comprising little more than sullen misbehaviour and graphic and obscene threats of violence. A recent low point came when Adrien Broner and Paulie Malignaggi publicly destroyed the reputation of one of Malignaggis’ female conquests. It is impossible to imagine a young soccer, baseball or NFL star, carrying the reputation of his club and also of his sport, being allowed to carry on like this with impunity. In boxers it appears to be the norm.

And this limits boxers’ opportunities in other ways than stopping them getting a gig on Fox Sports. Many retired sportsmen become coaches: but who wants to be trained (and which parents want their kids to be trained) by someone like that? Some become “spokesmen”, or travelling salesmen, for companies: but what business is going to want a boxer’s “endorsement” if he doesn’t know how to speak, dress or behave? For the same reasons, and others besides, what employer is going to hire him?

It isn’t hard to see why we admire fighters: they step into the ring alone, almost naked, armed only with their talent, their conditioning and their determination, and put their lives at risk in the name of glory (and our entertainment). But if we expect these lone warriors to be superhuman outside the ring, too, I suggest we expect too much. Fighters, by temperament, training and culture, are ill-suited to determine when to end their careers. The people around a fighter are incentivized to extend his career as far, and make retirement as unappealing, as possible. Economic forces encourage him to box on past his prime. Fighters are encouraged to develop antisocial personas making them ill-suited to life, especially working life, after boxing. And this is before we consider the difficulty anyone might have in “leaving the limelight” (or just something they were good at) at an early age.

Perhaps, then, when they find it difficult to leave the ring for good, fighters deserve a little more understanding and compassion than they get from the likes of Rafael and Kim. Equally, before we trumpet a fighter’s right to seek out a regulator with low standards so he can make a living, we might like to reflect on why that might be necessary.

[1] This is another way of saying I’d never heard of him.

[2] http://www.boxingscene.com/fighting-words-vivian-harris-danger-success–75950

[3] http://queensberry-rules.com/uncategorized/weekend-afterthoughts-on-vivian-harris-health-face-off-manny-pacquiao-vs-timothy-bradley-ii-more.html

[4] http://espn.go.com/blog/dan-rafael/post/_/id/8068/harris-should-not-be-fighting

[5] http://www.maxboxing.com/news/max-boxing-news/requiem-for-a-repeat

[6] http://theboxingtribune.com/2014/03/vivian-harris-and-the-licensing-lynch-mob/

[7] Of course, this isn’t always true, and as the always-readable Steve Bunce points out (http://www.espn.co.uk/boxing/sport/story/187155.html) managers & promoters often intervene, even against the fighters’ wishes, to protect their charges by suggesting their licence be withdrawn. This does not change the point, which is that fighters are too dependent on the goodwill of people whose economic interests are opposed to their own.

[8] Vivian Harris is a former WBO light welterweight champion.

Book Review – In The Red Corner: A Journey Into Cuban Boxing, by John Duncan

19 Wednesday Mar 2014

Posted by matthewjbailey in Book Reviews

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Cuba, Don King, Felix Savón, Fidel Castro, Frank Warren, John Duncan, Kid Chocolate, Mike Tyson, Teófilo Stevenson

Everyone knows the same handful of facts about Cuba. Cubans make the world’s best cigars. They drive American cars left over from the 1950s. Their extravagantly-bearded revolutionary leader Fidel Castro used to make immensely long speeches. Americans can’t visit Cuba, in spite of their supposedly constitutionally-guaranteed freedom of travel (strictly speaking, they are allowed to visit, but they aren’t allowed to spend any money if they do, so in practice they can’t). And in amateur boxing, Cubans win everything in sight.

The reason for starting with this list of appalling clichés is that it appears to comprise the sum total of John Duncan’s knowledge of Cuba, and Cuban boxing in particular, prior to embarking on the writing of this book. This does not stop him abandoning his job as a sports writer at the Guardian and persuading Frank Warren, of all people, to provide financial support for his quixotic attempt to arrange a fight between Cuban heavyweight Felix Savón and Mike Tyson, despite the facts that, firstly, professional boxing is illegal in Cuba, and secondly, a previous attempt at exactly the same thing ended in failure, despite a $10m offer to the Cuban from its rather-better-qualified author, Don King.

Long experience teaches the reader to be wary of any book whose subtitle begins “A Journey Into . . .”, since it more or less guarantees that the book will be much more concerned with the journey, or more specifically the journeyer, than with whatever subject into which it is putatively a journey. This book is no exception. In the early stages Duncan agonizes over, among other things, his decision to leave the Guardian and the arrangements he needs to make to let his property in London, topics which are of interest to exactly nobody. His attempts to arrange meetings with Frank Warren are also related in excessive, and occasionally fawning, detail, emphasizing Duncan’s own inexperience and unsuitability for the job at hand. Self-deprecation done well can be charming: when it is overdone, as here, the reader cannot help but ask why he should not take the author at his own estimation, and give up on him entirely.

Matters improve when Duncan arrives in Cuba. He does a fair job of sketching how, through a mixture of rum, humour, compassion, and a complete disregard for rules and regulations, Cubans survive poverty, oppression and endless bureaucracy. More importantly, despite the utter implausibility of his mission, Duncan makes impressive progress in meeting and interviewing boxers and administrators of all levels, all the way up to the likes of Savón himself and fabled national coach Alcides Sagarra. He is even included (though it is not clear whether he is invited) on the Cuban team’s trip to the World Championships in Hungary in 1997.

But all this says much more about the openness and friendliness of the Cubans than it does about Duncan’s nose for, or grasp of, his story. So limited is his understanding of boxing and its culture that one wonders whether the reason for his suggestion of a Savón-Tyson bout is that Mike Tyson is the only boxer he has ever heard of. It is clear to the outsider that his failure to make more progress than he does is down to the fact that he is just not equipped for the task, and the Cubans know it. He is genuinely amazed to discover that boxing involves skill and strategy, and that boxers are capable of both enjoying it and discussing it in detail. When Felix Savón holds out a friendly fist for Duncan to “bump”, he pathetically wraps his hand round it. In the face of this sort of ineptitude, no amount of self-deprecation can suffice.

However, it is not all bad news: and given that the history of Cuban boxing is full of great fighters, great characters, and great fights, how could it be? Many boxing fans, especially the casual fans at whom the book is apparently aimed, will find much of interest in Duncan’s portraits of a handful of figures from Cuban boxing history, notably Kid Chocolate and Teófilo Stevenson (though these are scarcely revelatory, and were probably more interesting and useful in the days before Wikipedia, Boxrec and the other numerous online sources that were not available when this book was published in 2000).

Better still – much better, in fact – are the lengthy interviews Duncan carries out with less well-known figures in Cuban boxing, where he mostly keeps the focus off himself and on his interviewees. The embittered Angel Espinosa, retired, divorced, penniless and living with his mother, complains of how the system treats those who serve it loyally: conversely, Joel Casamayor, pining for his 5-year old daughter in Miami, and struggling to get either a break or a fair deal from professional boxing’s often commercially-minded judges (Cuban boxers, unlike Mexicans and Puerto Ricans, almost never draw big crowds), shows the sacrifices and painful uncertainty of a life in exile. Most affectingly of all, Duncan tracks down the ex-wife of the near-legendary Kid Gavilán. Gavilán too was mistreated and exploited by the Cuban system, but was eventually given permission to leave at short notice: his wife was not. He departed, never to return, and after waiting seventeen years in Cuba, she finally and sadly petitioned for divorce. “Our story is a true love story,” she says, “but Cuba got in the way”. As so often in boxing, the toughest chins don’t necessarily belong to the boxers.

But these undoubted high points do not compensate for the book’s other flaws. For one thing, the writing itself is often clumsy. There is the occasional solecism: Duncan writes “The day of the final [of the 1978 World Championships] built to a crescendo for the Cubans.” Any competent writer (and his editor) knows that you don’t build to a crescendo: the crescendo is the building. Elsewhere, Duncan gives a long, tedious account of the process of finding Kid Chocolate’s grave, presumably to give the reader an idea of just how long and tedious a process it was. It would have been much, much better simply to write “it was a long and tedious process”. And he writes of Savón: “he has so much bulk around his shoulders and back that it looks as if he has a giant armpit ringed by muscle”. What does this mean? Does he have a giant armpit ringed by muscle – just the one? Or does it just look like that? But then what does that look like, if it doesn’t look like someone’s muscled back – which is what was supposed to be the subject of the description in the first place?

For another thing, Duncan just doesn’t display enough curiosity. More than once, he inexplicably fails to follow obviously promising suggestions from his interviewees. Perhaps he is too self-obsessed, or perhaps talking to the Cubans generally is so easy that he forgets that his job is to ask for more than is straightforwardly offered. Sagarra suggests, surely absurdly, that Cubans’ proclivity for boxing is related to their love of dancing. This is passed over without comment. Casamayor hints that other boxers are keen to join him in Miami and turn pro but don’t because they are afraid of the consequences – but, writes Duncan, “He didn’t elaborate . . . I didn’t push him”. Why not?

But the biggest problem is the condescension inherent in the very project itself. Boxing plays a huge part in Cuba’s national history and identity, but from the start Duncan treats the country, its boxing history and even its boxers as something akin to a school summer project. He appears to think that trumpeting his own lack of qualifications is endearing, when the effect is quite the reverse.

We started with a list of clichés, and we close with another. There is
undoubtedly a great book to be written on boxing in Cuba. But, despite its
numerous high points, “In the Red Corner” isn’t it.

Book Review – The Last Great Fight, by Joe Layden

11 Tuesday Mar 2014

Posted by matthewjbailey in Book Reviews

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Don King, Evander Holyfield, James "Buster" Douglas, Joe Layden, Lennox Lewis, Mike Tyson

Anyone who enjoys boxing has to ask himself a number of questions. One is whether or not it is really a sport. Another is whether it should even be permitted.

But the most personal and pressing of all is this: why do I like it? In my case there are three reasons.

Firstly, while boxing is a deeply dirty business, it possesses an unmatched and redemptive purity. Thrown fights, bent promoters, destitute, brain-damaged fighters, absurd scorecards, performance-enhancing drugs, loaded gloves, and so on, and so on: all is forgiven and forgotten when boxing hits its frequent peaks. Bringing acute danger, requiring perfect focus, for both participant and observer fighting at its best is transcendent in its intensity.

Secondly, I have always been fascinated by places where the normal rules of civilized society simply don’t apply. The ropes of a boxing ring effectively demarcate another dimension, outside our reality: once they pass into it, two men quite legitimately attempt to incapacitate each other, and if one dies, as sometimes happens, the other is not culpable. What could be more dramatic than that?

Finally, while I like boxing, I love reading. It is widely accepted, quite correctly in my view, that the quality of writing about boxing far exceeds anything else available in the sports section. Nothing beats a great fight story.

On all three counts, Joe Layden’s The Last Great Fight, telling the story of James “Buster” Douglas’s astonishing defeat of Mike Tyson, has a lot going for it.

Firstly, no fighter has ever embodied boxing’s purity and intensity better than the young Mike Tyson. Self-conscious about his place in boxing’s history, which he had studied closely under mentor Cus D’Amato, he chose a deliberately timeless appearance – black trunks and boots, short back and sides, no gown, no tassels, not even a pair of socks. Then he scared his opponents half out of their wits before the bell, and knocked them out of the remainder a few seconds later.

Further, it is hard to think of another public figure, even another fighter, who lived so far outside civilized society, and who belonged so obviously in that “other dimension”, as did Tyson. Raised in a ghetto by an alcoholic single mother, he was fighting grown men for money at 11 years old. A childhood consisting almost exclusively of crime took him into the penal system, where he and boxing discovered each other. An early coach passed him onto D’Amato, who, seeing in Tyson the possibility of revenge over his many enemies, explicitly trained the boy to be an “antisocial champion”. D’Amato was the first, but not the last, to have an interest in making of Tyson a barely human fighting machine. Along the way others tried to do the right thing, but they stood no chance against the reptiles of the boxing world. Joan Morgan is surely right to say that Tyson’s life was filled with “nothing but opportunistic motherfuckers from D’Amato to [Don] King who claimed to love him yet allowed him to remain sick and uneducated for the sake of riding a $100million gravy train”. And Tyson also repeatedly found new ways of putting himself yet further beyond the pale, from getting a facial tattoo, to converting (if less than convincingly) to Islam, to biting lumps out of Evander Holyfield’s ears, to (most notoriously) being convicted for the rape of Desiree Washington.

Finally, James Layden has taken on one of boxing’s great stories: namely, how a little-known, unfancied fighter outfought and finally knocked out the so-called “baddest man on the planet”. The consequences of this momentous, astonishing outcome are still felt in boxing today. As Tyson’s former trainer Kevin Rooney put it, “since Tyson lost to Douglas, nobody has cared about boxing, other than the hardcore boxing fan. That was the beginning of the end.”

It certainly was for Tyson. He won big fights after his loss to Douglas, but he was never the same, especially after his time in prison. To an extent, of course, decline comes to all fighters: the interesting issue in this case is that hardly any boxer’s reputation has been as badly affected as Tyson’s by the defeats he suffered later in his career after his loss to Douglas. Conversely, and ironically, the reputations of those who defeated the older, unrated Mike Tyson lean heavily on those very defeats. Thus, in 1998 The Ring Magazine put Tyson at just 14th on the list of all-time great heavyweights, while Evander Holyfield (who first beat Tyson in 1996) made third place. The elevated assessment enjoyed by Lennox Lewis, the last undisputed heavyweight champion, rests at least in part on his victory over an exhausted, ageing, dispirited, out of shape Tyson. (Note that Lewis, the last Undisputed Heavyweight Champion, was the victim of two upsets, at the hands of Oliver McCall and the almost-unknown Hasim Rahman, but no one is writing books about those events twenty years later.) Yet the downgrading of Tyson’s achievements continues today, with one of the biggest sports websites in the world calling him the most overrated fighter of all time.[1]

There are a number of reasons why his reputation has fallen so low. Tyson having been rated so highly – he often appeared on “pound-for-pound” lists, a rarity for heavyweights – it is possible that opinion simply overshot in the other direction once the myth of his invincibility was exposed. What’s more, besides losing high-profile fights that the younger Tyson would have won, he fought more and more dirtily, culminating in his disgraceful behaviour in the second fight against Holyfield. His behaviour outside the ring was, if anything, worse: drinking and driving, fighting people in the street, and treating every woman he met as no more or less than a potential conquest (the fact that so many of these women concurred so enthusiastically is no defence).

All of this made him pretty hard to like (a sentiment with which today’s Tyson would agree), but should really have no bearing on his ranking as a fighter. But there’s another issue. Hardcore fans don’t like uneducated part-timers deciding who is good and who isn’t, so they sneer at popular fighters, particularly ones with a spectacularly violent, pleb-pleasing style.

But sometimes the public is right regardless of their technical expertise. Mozart was wildly popular (although it wasn’t only the purported philistine Joseph II who complained of “too many notes”). Bobby Fischer[2] was treated like a rock star. Tyson was no Bobby Fischer and certainly no Mozart, but all three had this in common (besides being child prodigies in one way or another): they were the real thing, and everyone could see it. That’s what I call a musical genius: that’s what I call a Grandmaster: and that’s what I call the Heavyweight Champion of the World. It was this, I suggest, that gave rise to the extraordinary public and media fascination with Tyson and his private life. Among public figures generally, only Ali can really compete for global recognition (Tyson was mobbed in places as exotic as Chechnya just as he was in Japan or the UK), and Ali, unlike Tyson, had the advantages of looks, wit, charm and sheer showmanship as well as talent and charisma. Tyson captured the public imagination in an entirely different way.

At any rate, this revisionism has given rise to a number of myths, which are worth examining.

MYTH #1: Tyson was a one-dimensional brawler, who couldn’t adapt his style

Tyson could certainly brawl when the occasion called for it, and he invariably started a fight with extreme aggression, clearly seeking, and often achieving, an immediate knockout. But on the equally many occasions when this did not work he had many other strengths to call upon. The young Tyson possessed a blend of speed, agility and balance that allowed him to deliver combinations of breath-taking power and effectiveness. He also maintained an impeccable defence. Everyone notes how Tyson held his hands in front of his face in D’Amato’s “peek-a-boo” style, but commentators rarely mention Tyson’s ability to slip a punch, perhaps because he could do it without disruption to his offensive rhythm: consider the way he knocks out Carl Williams, in a single instantaneous motion deftly avoiding a left, settling his weight, and launching a blow that lifted the unprotected Williams off his feet. Observe also his extraordinary upper body movement against Trevor Berbick, who hardly lays a glove on Tyson, even while Tyson is hammering him at will.

(Tyson is not the only fighter whose all-round athleticism is underappreciated. One reason for this is that, unlike basketball, track and field or soccer, boxing is not well suited to the use of slow-motion replays. During a live round such replays are impossible, but even between rounds there is so much going on in the fighters’ corners, and so much potential for drama, that there is barely time to review more than a couple of seconds’ worth of action.)

Tyson was also a thinking fighter. Both Tyrell Biggs and Tony Tucker started strongly against Tyson, Biggs dodging, dancing and jabbing, Tucker brawling back and showing good movement, and both men tying Tyson up whenever he looked like getting inside. But in the second round of both fights Tyson slowed the pace and focused on throwing jabs and body shots, always maintaining his forward motion, refusing to be frustrated, and ultimately wearing his opponents down to nothing. Others including ‘Bonecrusher’ Smith & Mitch Green did a better job of tying Tyson up, ultimately going the distance, but Tyson again focused on maintaining his momentum & movement and using his superior technique and conditioning to outbox his opponent decisively.

MYTH #2: Tyson had trouble with taller fighters.

Tyson, while certainly a natural heavyweight, was only 5’10” or so (though his given height was always 5’11½”), and therefore always fighting taller fighters. For a short man, always at a reach disadvantage, he had an extremely effective jab, which he used as a weapon in its own right, in combination with hooks, and – of course – as a tool to back fighters up and get inside, where he could do such damage with his uppercut. He also developed the counterintuitive strategy of ducking out of reach of taller fighters, making himself even smaller, before coiling and then launching himself, his smooth glistening form relentlessly diving and surfacing as well as weaving from side to side. The left hand that knocks down Alfonso Ratliff, for example, seems to come from floor level. Partly for this reason, he in fact performed well against taller fighters, notably Biggs (then-undefeated Olympic superheavyweight gold medallist), Tucker and Larry Holmes.

MYTH #3: The young Tyson always fought bums: whenever he fought anyone any good, they “gave him trouble”

Like every prospect, at the start of his career Tyson fought lesser names. Less common was the ease and relish with which he dispatched them (in his first 16 fights he fought just 23 rounds, and only 8 of them complete, for a total of just 41 minutes and 21 seconds). When he started meeting a better class of competition, it sometimes – though only sometimes – took longer. In fact, the heavyweight division contained some solid competition back then. Biggs, Tucker, Tubbs, Thomas, Berbick, Spinks, Smith, Bruno and Williams may not bear comparison with Ali, Frazier and Foreman but most of them would have been competitive against any other generation of heavyweights[3], and certainly compare favourably with today’s (and, for what it is worth, they had plenty of titles and Olympic medals between them). It seems to me that, much as the reputations of Lewis and Holyfield in particular have been enhanced by beating the later Tyson, the reputations of many of these fighters have been diminished by the way the younger Tyson crushed them. At any rate, taken together they presented a range of different challenges: Tyson rose to all of them.

All this material on Tyson is, or should be, familiar to any fight enthusiast: Layden does a good job of setting it all out, albeit without really adding anything to our understanding of Tyson the fighter, the man, or the hypercelebrity. His sections on the less well-known Douglas, however, are equally good, and therefore unsurprisingly more informative and more enjoyable.

The young Buster was a gifted athlete with an ambivalent attitude to boxing – he appears to have effectively given up, or lost interest, in at least two of his early fights. His career proceeded in fits and starts, a couple of wins, sometimes good ones, being followed by a disappointing defeat. The explanation for this pattern of great promise followed by frustrating capitulation appears to lie in the conflict within Douglas’s support team, comprised initially of his father, redoubtable middleweight Bill “Dynamite” Douglas, his mother’s brother J.D. McCauley and manager John Johnson. These three appear to have spent more time arguing with each other than training their fighter.

One hot streak led to his first title shot against Tony Tucker. In camp, Bill and J.D. set about each other with golf clubs, and in the fight Buster again appeared to give up after being ahead. After this debacle, Douglas finally sacked his father, won another string of fights, this time beating some genuinely highly-rated opponents (including Oliver McCall and Trevor Berbick), and finally set up his fateful meeting with Tyson.

Layden’s treatment of the fight itself is detailed, but is lacking in two important respects. Firstly, it tiptoes too cautiously around the dirty side of the fight, and Douglas’s persistent fouling in particular. Layden fails to question John Russell, who was originally brought in as cut man for the Tyson fight though it appears he took on a much bigger role as trainer, when he makes the absurd statement that Tyson “hit James in the second round, with an elbow or something dirty, and Buster gave it right back to him, and [Tyson] never did it again in the fight. That, to me, was the turning point.” On the contrary: as the fight went on, Tyson continued to do “something dirty” at every opportunity, repeatedly banging Douglas with his elbows, his forearms and particularly his head[4]. It is absolute nonsense to suggest Mike Tyson would be put off fighting dirty just because someone did it back to him. In reality, Tyson was always a dirty fighter, and referees – perhaps because he was such a star – let him get away with it as a matter of course. Douglas was smart enough to realize this, and to turn the tables on Tyson, throwing his left elbow and punching on the break as early as the first round. After all, if referees were not going to stop Tyson fighting dirty, they could hardly do the same to his opponents (Evander Holyfield would later draw the same conclusion, using repeated head-butts to drive Tyson literally crazy).

Secondly, Layden never really answers the most important question of all: just how did Buster Douglas beat Mike Tyson? The book sets out the usual list of purported reasons for Tyson’s defeat, again without really adding to our knowledge or understanding. So, Tyson had lost two father figures in D’Amato and his manager Jim Jacobs, and had parted with his long-term trainer Kevin Rooney. His marriage to Robin Givens had ended in a traumatic divorce. His corner displayed comical ineptitude during the fight, and had failed to persuade Tyson to do much by way of training beforehand (unless you count shagging Japanese cleaning ladies).

But Layden, like so many other commentators, fails to point out that some or all of these factors applied before many of Tyson’s other fights. Tyson may not have done much training for the Douglas fight but he certainly looked pretty good – I wish I could get that “out of shape” – and while he did tire as the fight went on he was still fighting in the tenth round, and managed a tremendous knockdown at the end of the eighth. Tyson’s marriage was falling apart throughout 1988, but that didn’t stop him brutalizing Larry Holmes (in four rounds), Tony Tubbs (in two), Michael Spinks (in one), Frank Bruno (in five) or Carl Williams (one again). Similarly, Tyson was so disillusioned in the period leading up to the Tony Tucker fight that he abandoned training and announced his retirement before having the financial consequences explained to him. During an interview with Jerry Izenberg before the Spinks fight (which lasted 91 seconds) Tyson burst into tears while discussing D’Amato. And while his corner was worse than useless in the Douglas fight, the same personnel were there when he battered Bruno and Williams.

What is more, while surveying this array of dubiously explanatory “reasons” for Tyson’s loss, it is hard not to be struck by the way that the same commentators who blame Tyson’s loss on his personal problems cite Douglas’s very similar problems as reasons for his win. While Tyson had lost D’Amato and Jacobs, Douglas’s mother famously died while he was training for the fight. At the same time the mother of his son was very seriously ill. Like Tyson, Douglas had recently separated from his partner. And while Tyson may or may not have been out of shape, on the day of their fight Douglas was certainly suffering from a heavy cold.

These issues exemplify a recurring flaw in this otherwise excellent book. Layden’s approach is generally journalistic, usually attempting no more than to set out the facts for (presumably) the reader to make up his own mind. But in the face of such a huge upset, just “setting out the facts” seems inadequate. Beating Tyson was boxing’s equivalent of running the four minute mile. Focusing on the personal issues of the two fighters – and what boxer’s life is not in perpetual chaos? – means Layden, like so many others, simply understates Douglas’s achievement.

So how did he do it? In fact, Layden does mention both key factors. In the first place, Douglas had developed the right strategy. He didn’t run, like Biggs and Tucker did. Nor did he make Berbick’s fatal error of attempting to stand toe to toe with Tyson. He jabbed, with tremendous power and accuracy. He followed up with accurate, powerful combinations (on the TV broadcast Jim Lampley refers repeatedly to Douglas’s “right hand leads”, but many of these look to me more like the second half of the old one-two, following a firm left). He evaded punches with sideways movement, turning Tyson around and preventing him from getting planted enough to throw his most powerful shots. And then – again and again – he stepped back in for more. In other words, he put on an exhibition of high-class boxing.

Equally importantly, he was perfectly focused and confident. Douglas himself says “it wasn’t like I thought, Oh good, [Tyson]’s not ready; maybe I’ll have a chance. I was just ready.[5]” This isn’t just bravado, or post-fight rationalization. The main evidence for its truth is, of course, Douglas’s win, since no one could have beaten Tyson without complete self-belief. But Douglas’s “readiness” is also totally obvious in his pre-fight body language. Most of Tyson’s opponents before Douglas look terrified – some terrified-but-determined, but others just scared witless. Spinks and Berbick in particular were clearly beaten before they even entered the ring. Douglas, by contrast, bounces on the balls of his feet and rolls his neck and shoulders: nervous, perhaps, but he’s there to fight.

It also cannot be denied that Tyson was not his usual self. Perhaps he was distracted by his personal problems, though again, it is hard to think of a reason why that might be truer here than in other fights. Perhaps he was thinking ahead to the already-mooted fight with Evander Holyfield, which promised to be a huge payday. Certainly, before the fight, he doesn’t look as if he particularly wanted to be there. Quite the irony, again: Buster Douglas, renowned quitter, raring to go; and Mike Tyson, the human fighting machine, not really feeling like it. From the opening seconds to the moment in the tenth when a crushing uppercut and rhythymic volley of vicious hooks leave Tyson on his knees, scrabbling pathetically for his mouthguard, Douglas is so far on top that a viewer who didn’t know who was who (and who turned the TV commentary off) would never guess who was the champion and who was the challenger. The fact that one judge had the fight even at 86-86, and one had Tyson ahead 87-86, only confirms what we already knew about the preposterous way boxing is scored.

Layden’s account of Douglas’s life after the fight is as fascinating as any car crash. Tyson later reported that whenever he watched footage of the fight, as Douglas repeatedly battered him with heavy, accurate punches, he shouted at the screen “Duck, dummy!”. Throughout this latter part of the book, one wants to scream something similar at Douglas. Layden describes, in painful detail, Douglas’s utter misery during his time as champion: suffering chronic homesickness while being taken on money-spinning tours of the nation by his party-loving manager; spending less time training than in negotiating terms with the odious Don King; losing his title in one more pathetic capitulation, this time to Evander Holyfield; ballooning to almost 400 pounds and the edge of diabetic coma, before making a typically half-hearted comeback and then slipping out of the limelight, winding up back in his hometown – cheeringly, and unusually, still in possession of his good humour, his marbles and at least some of his money.

However, this part of the book suffers from a different version of the same flaw discussed above. It is obvious that Layden spent a lot of time with Douglas and Russell: it is equally obvious from his overindulgence of Douglas’s great and many weakness during this last period that he has great affection for the man. Just as Layden’s non-judgmental, fact-stating style diminishes Douglas’s achievement in the fight, it masks his failings thereafter. In this regard, it may be worth noting that Layden specializes in ghost-writing celebrity memoirs: much of this part of the book has the feel of a “Life-Of, As-Told-To . . .”. If nothing else, however, Layden makes one thing abundantly clear: Buster Douglas was up to beating Mike Tyson, but he wasn’t up to being the Man Who Beat Mike Tyson, nor to being Heavyweight Champion of the World.

[1] http://bleacherreport.com/articles/796919-top-10-most-overrated-fighters-of-all-time#articles/796919-top-10-most-overrated-fighters-of-all-time/page/12

[2] The parallels between Fischer and Tyson are intriguing. Both were from Brooklyn; there are questions about the paternity of both (and neither bears the name of his real father); both were brought up by a distant mother (Tyson’s due to alcoholism, Fischer’s due to an obsession with medical education); both became very fussy about their appearance after being mocked as children; and so on. Fischer even once threatened, Ali-style, to beat an opponent in 24 moves (he in fact took 25). Tyson once said “I just want to conquer people and their souls”: Fischer’s most famous line is “I like the moment when I break a man’s ego”.

[3] Another way of making the same point is this: Joe Louis is routinely described as the greatest heavyweight of all time. How many of the fighters he beat can you name?

[4] Like many other commentators, Layden remarks on the way Tyson’s cornerman, Aaron Snowell, repeatedly whispers in his fighter’s ear between rounds, but does not consider the obvious possibility that he was transmitting “advice” that he’d rather not share with the TV microphones (or the judges).

[5] P.90

The Rumpus Compass

~ Exploring Boxing

Tag Archives: Mike Tyson

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Book Review – The Last Great Fight, by Joe Layden

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