On Boxing

1. Boxing Reveals the Essence of Human Struggle

It’s a terrible sport, but it’s a sport…the fight for survival is the fight.

Condensed Drama. Each boxing match is a unique, highly condensed drama without words, showcasing the outermost limits of human physical and psychic power. Even when nothing sensational happens, the drama is psychological, revealing the boxer's capacity for courage, intelligence, and hope. The ring becomes a stage for an absolute experience, a public accounting of one's being.

Beyond Metaphor. Boxing is not merely a metaphor for life's struggles, but a unique, closed world, obliquely akin to severe religions where the individual is both "free" and "determined." Life may be like boxing in many unsettling respects, but boxing is only like boxing. The common denominator of five hundred boxing matches is not of primary interest; each fight stands alone in its drama.

Voyeuristic Intimacy. To enter the ring near-naked and 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. The ceremonial ringing of the bell is a summoning to full wakefulness for both boxers and spectators. It sets into motion, too, the authority of Time.

2. The Boxer's Body is His Identity

Like a dancer, a boxer “is” his body, and is totally identified with it.

Weight Divisions. A boxer's identity is intrinsically linked to their body and, more specifically, their weight. The various weight divisions, from heavyweight to flyweight, define the physical parameters within which a boxer competes. Fighting outside one's weight division invites disaster, as a boxer may not be able to "bring his punch with him."

Physical Transformation. The dedication to making weight can lead to extreme measures, such as fasting or vigorous exercise close to fight time, risking serious injury. Michael Spinks's accomplishment of becoming the first light-heavyweight to win the heavyweight title exemplifies the fanaticism of boxing, as he created a true heavyweight's body through rigorous training and nutrition.

Beyond Words. The body becomes the primary means of expression. Why are you a boxer, Irish featherweight champion Barry McGuigan was asked. He said: “I can’t be a poet. I can’t tell stories…” Each boxing match is a story—a unique and highly condensed drama without words. Even when nothing sensational happens: then the drama is “merely” psychological.

3. Time and Mortality are Ever-Present Adversaries

In the boxing ring, even in our greatly humanized times, death is always a possibility—which is why some of us prefer to watch films or tapes of fights already past, already defined as history.

Time-Bound Existence. Boxers inhabit a curious sort of "slow" time in the ring, where three-minute rounds can feel excruciatingly long. Outside the ring, they inhabit an alarmingly accelerated time, with a twenty-three-year-old boxer no longer considered young and a thirty-five-year-old considered old. This rapid aging makes the experience of watching great fighters of the past radically different from seeing them perform in their prime.

Knocked Out of Time. Time, like the possibility of death, is the invisible adversary of which the boxers—and the referee, the seconds, the spectators—are keenly aware. When 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.

Consuming Excellence. Boxing 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. To expend oneself in fighting the greatest fight of one’s life is to begin by necessity the downward turn that next time may be a plunge, an abrupt fall into the abyss.

4. Pain Transcends its Physicality in the Ring

Pain, in the proper context, is something other than pain.

Redefining Pain. Boxers don't feel pain quite the way we do, as pain, in the proper context, is something other than pain. Gene Tunney's career was built upon pain, as his defeat to Harry Greb taught him how to beat him eventually. Without it, he would never have moved up into Dempsey’s class.

Inviting Injury. Some boxers invite injury as a means of assuaging guilt, in a Dostoyevskian exchange of physical well-being for peace of mind. Boxing is about being hit rather more than it is about hitting, just as it is about feeling pain, if not devastating psychological paralysis, more than it is about winning.

Context is All. The artist senses some kinship, however oblique and one-sided, with the professional boxer in this matter of training. This fanatic subordination of the self in terms of a wished-for destiny. Indeed, it might be said that “context” is all.

5. Boxing is a Homoerotic Dance of Domination

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”.

Erotic Mimicry. Boxing derives much of its appeal from the 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.

Post-Fight Embrace. Most fights, however fought, end with an embrace between the boxers after the final bell—a gesture of mutual respect and apparent affection that appears to the onlooker to be more than perfunctory. Rocky Graziano sometimes kissed his opponents out of gratitude for the fight.

Admiration for Courage. Though many men are loudly contemptuous of weakness a woman is struck by the admiration, amounting at times to awe, they will express for a man who has exhibited superior courage while losing his fight. These are powerful, haunting, unsettling images, cruelly beautiful, inextricably bound up with boxing’s primordial appeal.

6. The Opponent is a Mirror, Reflecting Self-Destruction

Boxing’s claim is that it is superior to life in that it is, ideally, superior to all accident. It contains nothing that is not fully willed.

Dream Distortion. The boxer meets an opponent who is a dream-distortion of himself in the sense that his weaknesses, his capacity to fail and to be seriously hurt, his intellectual miscalculations—all can be interpreted as strengths belonging to the Other. This is dream, or nightmare: my strengths are not fully my own, but my opponent’s weaknesses; my failure is not fully my own, but my opponent’s triumph.

World Model. The old boxing adage—a truism surely untrue—that you cannot be knocked out if you see the blow coming, and if you will yourself not to be knocked out, has its subtler, more daunting significance: nothing that happens to the boxer in the ring, including death—“his” death—is not of his own will or failure of will. The suggestion is of a world-model in which we are humanly responsible not only for our own acts but for those performed against us.

Unique World. Which is why, though springing from life, boxing is not a metaphor for life but a unique, closed, self-referential world, obliquely akin to those severe religions in which the individual is both “free” and “determined”—in one sense possessed of a will tantamount to God’s, in another totally helpless.

7. Anger Fuels the Boxer's Fire

Yet in a deeper sense boxers are angry, as even a superficial knowledge of their lives indicates.

Ennobled Rage. Boxing is fundamentally about anger. It is in fact the only sport in which anger is accommodated, ennobled. It is the only human activity in which rage can be transposed without equivocation into art.

Political Impotence. Yet it is reasonable to assume that boxers fight one another because the legitimate objects of their anger are not accessible to them. There is no political system in which the spectacle of two men fighting each other is not a striking, if unintended, image of the political impotence of most men (and women): You fight what’s nearest, what’s available, what’s ready to fight you.

Transcending Fate. For the most part they constitute the disenfranchised of our affluent society, they are the sons of impoverished ghetto neighborhoods in which anger, if not fury, is appropriate. Boxing may be a way of cruelly assaulting one’s self but it is most immediately a way of transcending one’s fate.

8. Machismo is a Distorted Reflection of Masculinity

To enter the claustrophobic world of professional boxing even as a spectator is to enter what appears to be a distillation of the masculine world, empty now of women, its fantasies, hopes, and stratagems magnified as in a distorting mirror, or a dream.

Adolescent Patriarchy. Boxing is a purely masculine activity and it inhabits a purely masculine world. Which is not to suggest that most men are defined by it: clearly, most men are not. At boxing matches women’s role is limited to that of card girl and occasional National Anthem singer: stereotypical functions usually performed in stereotypically zestful feminine ways.

Reversed Values. Here, we find ourselves through the looking-glass. Values are reversed, evaginated: a boxer is valued not for his humanity but for being a “killer,” a “mauler,” a “hit-man,” an “animal,” for being “savage,” “merciless,” “devastating,” “ferocious,” “vicious,” “murderous.” Opponents are not merely defeated as in a game but are “decked,” “stiffed,” “starched,” “iced,” “destroyed,” “annihilated.”

Poverty and the Warrior. It was once said by José Torres that the machismo of boxing is a condition of poverty. But it is not, surely, a condition uniquely of poverty? I think of it as the obverse of the feminine, the denial of the feminine-in-man that has its ambiguous attractions for all men, however “civilized.” It is a remnant of another, earlier era when the physical being was primary and the warrior’s masculinity its highest expression.

9. Lying is a Strategic Art in Boxing

One of the primary things boxing is about is lying.

Double Personality. It’s about systematically cultivating a double personality: the self in society, the self in the ring. As the chess grandmaster channels his powerful aggressive impulses onto the game board, which is the world writ small, so the “born” boxer channels his strength into the ring, against the Opponent.

Chess Game. After his upset victory against WBC junior welterweight Billy Costello in August 1985 the virtually unknown “Lightning” Lonnie Smith told an interviewer for The Ring that his model for boxing was that of a chess game: boxing is a “game of control, and, as in chess, this control can radiate in circles from the center, or in circles toward the center.

Many Selves. The self in society, the self in the ring. But there are many selves and there are of course many boxers—ranging from the shy, introverted, painfully inarticulate Johnny Owen to the frequently manic Muhammad Ali in his prime.

10. The Referee is the Moral Compass in a Brutal World

The referee makes boxing possible.

Moral Conscience. The “third man in the ring,” usually anonymous so far as the crowd is concerned, appears to many observers no more than an observer himself, even an intruder; a ghostly presence as fluid in motion and quick-footed as the boxers themselves. The referee is our intermediary in the fight. 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; nor need it be a factor in the boxers’ behavior.

Power of Life and Death. The referee holds the power of life and death at certain times since his decision to terminate a fight, or to allow it to continue, can determine a boxer’s fate. In the infamous Benny Paret-Emile Griffith fight of March 1962 the referee Ruby Goldstein was said to have stood paralyzed as Griffith trapped Paret in the ropes, striking him as many as eighteen times in the head. (Paret died ten days later.)

Fighting vs. Boxing. If boxing is frequently, in the lighter weights especially, a highly complex and refined skill, belonging solely to civilization, fighting belongs to something predating civilization, the instinct not merely to defend oneself but to attack another and to force him into absolute submission.

11. Boxing's Allure for Writers Lies in its Unspoken Drama

Writers have long been attracted to boxing, from the early days of the English Prize Ring to the present time.

Wordless Spectacle. Its most immediate appeal is that of the spectacle, in itself wordless, lacking a language, that requires others to define it, celebrate it, complete it. Like all extreme but perishable human actions boxing excites not only the writer’s imagination, but also his instinct to bear witness.

Extravagant Fictions. And boxers have frequently displayed themselves, inside the ring and out, as characters in the literary sense of the word. Extravagant fictions without a structure to contain them.

Intimate Connection. That no other sport can elicit such theoretical anxiety lies at the heart of boxing’s fascination for the writer. It is the thing in itself but it is also its meaning to the individual, shifting and problematic as a blurred image in a mirror. In no other sport is the connection between performer and observer so intimate, so frequently painful, so unresolved.

12. Boxing is a Controversial Sport on the Brink of Oblivion

To the untrained eye most boxing matches appear not merely savage but mad.

Moral Objections. No American sport or activity has been so consistently and so passionately under attack as boxing, for “moral” as well as other reasons. And no American sport evokes so ambivalent a response in its defenders: when asked the familiar question “How can you watch…?” the boxing aficionado really has no answer.

Multimillion-Dollar Business. Since boxing has become a multimillion-dollar business under the aegis of a few canny promoters—the most visible being Don King—it is not likely that it will be abolished, in any case. It would simply be driven underground, like abortion; or exiled to Mexico, Cuba, Canada, England, Ireland, Zaire…

Primitive Proposition. In any case, anger is an appropriate response to certain intransigent facts of life, not a motiveless malignancy as in classic tragedy but a fully motivated and socially coherent impulse. Those whose aggression is masked, or oblique, or unsuccessful, will always condemn it in others. They are likely to think of boxing as “primitive”—as if inhabiting the flesh were not a primitive proposition.

Last updated: February 11, 2025