On Boxing

by Joyce Carol Oates

  With equal sobriety, and a mysterious conviction, Tyson goes on to say that friends, certain friends—“some of them the ones you like best”—can’t be relied upon. “They want to be your friend, or say they do, then the least thing that goes wrong—” He makes a dismissive gesture. “They’re gone.” I suggest that this can’t be the case with people he has known a long time, before he became famous, like Jim and Loraine Jacobs, and Tyson’s face brightens. The Jacobses will always be his friends, he agrees. “No matter if I lost every fight from now on, if I was knocked down, knocked out—they’d always be my friends. That’s right.” He seems momentarily cheered.

  Tyson’s prize possession in Catskill is a young female dog of an exquisite Chinese breed, Shar-Pei, with an appealingly ugly pug face, rippling creases of flesh on its back, a body wildly animated by affection. He’d always wanted one of these dogs, Tyson says, but hadn’t been able to afford it until now. “In China they were bred to hunt wild boars—that’s why they have those wrinkles on their backs,” he explains. “So when the boar bit into them they could twist around to keep on attacking.” As Tyson speaks fondly of this uniquely evolved creature I am reminded of Tyson’s own ring strategy—his agility at slipping an opponent’s blows, ducking or leaning far to one side, then returning with perfect leverage and timing to counterpunch, often with his devastating right uppercut. The “little” warrior dramatically overcoming the larger…. He loves this dog, he says. For the first time today he looks genuinely happy.

  On our way out of the house, Tyson shows me the dining room in which he ate so many meals with Cus D’Amato. The room is handsomely furnished, flooded with sunshine on this clear winter day. “Cus sat here,” Tyson says, indicating the head of the table, “—and I sat here. By his side.”

  When Santayana said that another world to live in is what we mean by religion, he could hardly have foreseen how his remark might apply to the sports mania of our time; to the extraordinary passion, amounting very nearly to religious fervor and ecstasy, millions of Americans commonly experience in regard to sport. For these people—the majority of them men—sports has become the “other world,” preempting, at times, their interest in “this” world: their own lives, work, families, official religions.

  Set beside the media-promoted athletes of our time and the iconography of their success, the average man knows himself merely average. In a fiercely competitive sport like boxing, whose pyramid may appear democratically broad at the base but is brutally minuscule at the top, to be even less than great is to fail. A champion boxer, hit by an opponent and hit hard, may realize the total collapse of his career in less time than it takes to read this sentence. Boxing is not to be seized as a metaphor for life, but its swift and sometimes irremediable reversals of fortune starkly parallel those of life, and the blow we never saw coming—invariably, in the ring, the knockout blow—is the one that decides our fate. Boxing’s dark fascination is as much with failure, and the courage to forbear failure, as it is with triumph. Two men climb into a ring from which, in symbolic terms, only one climbs out.

  After the Berbick fight Tyson told reporters he’d wanted to break Berbick’s eardrum. “I try to catch my opponent on the tip of the nose,” he was quoted after his February 1986 fight with the hapless Jesse Ferguson, whose nose was broken in the match, “because I want to punch the bone into the brain.” Tyson’s language is as direct and brutal as his ring style, yet, as more than one observer has noted, strangely disarming—there is no air of menace, or sadism, or boastfulness in what he says: only the truth. For these reasons Mike Tyson demonstrates more forcefully than most boxers the paradox at the heart of this controversial sport. That he is “soft-spoken,” “courteous,” “sensitive,” clearly thoughtful, intelligent, introspective; yet at the same time—or nearly the same time—he is a “killer” in the ring. That he is one of the most warmly affectionate persons, yet at the same time—or nearly—a machine for hitting “sledgehammer” blows. How is it possible? one asks. And why? Boxing makes graphically clear the somber fact that the same individual can be thoroughly “civilized” and “barbaric” depending upon the context of his performance. “I’m a boxer,” Tyson says. “I’m a warrior. Doing my job.” Murder, a legal offense, cannot occur in the ring. Any opponent who agrees to fight a man of Tyson’s unique powers must know what he is doing—and, as Tyson believes, each boxer takes the same chance: matching his skills against those of his opponent.

  The fictive text against which boxing is enacted has to do with the protection of human life; the sacramental vision of life. Thou shalt not kill (or maim, wound, cause to suffer injury) and Do unto others as you would have them do unto you are the implicit injunctions against which the spectacle unfolds and out of which its energies arise. The injunctions are, for the duration of the “game,” denied, or repressed, or exploited. Far from being primitive, boxing is perhaps the most highly regulated and ritualistic of sports, so qualified by rules, customs, and unspoken traditions that it stands in a unique, albeit teasing, relationship to the extremes of human emotion: rage, despair, terror, cruelty, ecstasy. It is an art, as I’ve suggested, in which the human body itself is the instrument; its relationship to unmediated violence is that of a musical composition to mere noise. There may be a family kinship between Bach and aleatory “music,” but the kinship is hardly the most significant thing about either.

  But what, one wonders, is the purpose of so extreme an art?—can it have a purpose? Why do some men give themselves to it so totally, while others, as spectators, stare in rapt fascination—and pay so much money for the privilege of doing so?

  Wallace Stevens’s insight that the death of Satan was a tragedy for the imagination has no validity in terms of the curious aesthetic phenomenon that is professional boxing. In the boxing ring, elevated, harshly spotlighted, men are pitted against each other in one-on-one mirror-like combat in order to release energies in themselves and in their audience that are demonic by the standards of ordinary—or do I mean noncombative?—life. The triumphant boxer is Satan transmogrified as Christ, as one senses sitting amid a delirium-swept crowd like the one that cheered Mike Tyson on to victory. Yet, even before Tyson began to fight, even before he entered the ring, the crowd was fixed upon him emotionally. (As the crowd was fixed, more evenly, upon Marvin Hagler and Thomas Hearns in their April 1985 match, shrieking as soon as the men appeared and scarcely stopping until the fight itself was stopped after eight very long minutes. Ecstasy precedes stimulus and may, indeed, help bring it into being.) For many, Mike Tyson has become the latest in a lineage of athletic heroes—a bearer of inchoate, indescribable emotion—a savior, of sorts, covered in sweat and ready for war. But then most saviors, sacred or secular, are qualified by a thoughtful “of sorts.” In any case, it’s Tyson’s turn. A terrible beauty is born.

  Other than boxing, everything is so boring.

  —MIKE TYSON

  Las Vegas, Nevada. March 7, 1987. In a ring still stained with blood from the desperately fought heavyweight match that preceded it, Mike Tyson, World Boxing Council champion, at twenty the youngest heavyweight titleholder in boxing history, brings the fight for unification of the title to James “Bonecrusher” Smith, World Boxing Association champion, at thirty-three an aging athlete, and, yet more telling, the only heavyweight titleholder in boxing history to have graduated from college—but Smith will have none of it. He clinches, he backs away, he walks away, he clinches again, hugging his frustrated and increasingly infuriated opponent like a drowning man hugging something—anything—that floats. Referee Mills Lane calls “Break!” repeatedly during the twelve long rounds of this very long fight but Smith seems not to hear; or, hearing, will not obey. For the most part his expression is blank, with the blankness of fear, a stark unmitigated fear without shame, yet shameful to witness. “Fight!” the crowd shouts. “Do something!” In the ringside seats close by me Smith’s fellow boxers Trevor Berbick (former WBC heavyweight champion) and Edwin Rosario (WBA lightweight
champion) are particularly vocal, as if in an agony of professional discomfort. For it seems that the superbly conditioned Smith, who had performed so dramatically only three months ago in Madison Square Garden, knocking out Tim Witherspoon in the first round of his WBA title defense, is now, suddenly, not a boxer: though in that elevated and garishly spotlighted ring with another man, contracted for $1 million to fight him, performing in front of a crowd of some 13,600 people in the Hilton’s newly erected outdoor stadium, and how many millions of television viewers, he cannot or will not fight. His instinct is merely to survive—to get through twelve rounds with no injuries more serious than a bleeding left eye and a bad swelling on the right side of his face; and to go back, professionally disgraced, to his wife, family, and plans for the future (“Being a champion opens lots of doors—I’d like to get a real estate license, maybe sell insurance”) in Magnolia, North Carolina.

  Berbick writhes in the folding chair beside me, muttering, laughing, derisive, very nearly as frustrated as Mike Tyson, and clearly resentful—after all, he is the man who fought Tyson here last November, and so spectacularly (and humiliatingly) lost to him, in the third minute of the second round of that fight. He too had tried to clinch with Tyson, had gripped the young man’s arms and gloves in an effort to hold him back, slow him down, frustrate him, but Berbick had also fought him, or made a game attempt—“I wanted to prove my manhood,” he said afterward, ruefully, “that was my mistake.” In this match Smith’s manhood is not evidently an issue. He has no “machismo” to display or defend; if he is a boxer it must be by default. Minute follows minute, round follows grinding round, as Tyson tries to get inside to throw the rapid-fire combinations for which he is famous, and Smith falls upon him and hugs him, clumsily, defiantly, desperately. Mills Lane, exasperated, penalizes Smith by deducting points from him after rounds two and eight. (“I could have deducted a point from him after each round,” he said afterward, “but you don’t like to do that in a title fight.”) The 6-foot-4-inch 233-pound Smith is a zombie tonight, a parody of a boxer, so resistant to boxing’s visible and invisible rules, that complex of mores that make boxing at once the most primitive and the most sophisticated of contact sports, it is fascinating to watch him—to a degree.

  “I wasn’t prepared for how strong Tyson is, how fast,” Smith will say after the fight. “Tyson has a devastating left hook.” And, defensively: “I did the best I could.” Of current heavyweights Smith has invariably been the most erratic in performance, the most unpredictable—capable, under pressure, of boxing well, yet strangely and unprofessionally susceptible to vagaries of mood. Perhaps because he has no real vocation as a boxer—and no more instinct for fighting than one might expect from a man with a B.A. in business administration (from Shaw College, North Carolina)—he is easily demoralized in the ring, allowing childlike expressions of triumph, hurt, bewilderment, and acute unhappiness to show on his face, as boxers so rarely do; he boxes as an intelligent man might box whose intelligence is his only weapon in an action in which “intelligence” must be subordinated to something more fundamental. He draws upon no deeper reserves of self—no energy, imagination, emotion—beyond those of consciousness.

  As for Tyson: unlike Dempsey, Marciano, and Frazier, those famously aggressive fighters to whom he is often compared, Tyson is not a reckless boxer; he is not willing, as so many boxer-fighters are, to take four or five punches in order to throw a punch of his own. His training is defensive and cautious—hence the peek-a-boo stance, a Cus D’Amato signature: for is not boxing primarily the art of self-defense? of hitting your man, and scoring points, without being hit in return? For two years, which must have been very long years, D’Amato trained Tyson to bob, weave, slip punches from sparring partners without throwing a single punch in response—a conditioning that has made Tyson an anomaly in the ring. His reputation is for power, speed, and aggression, but his defensive skills are as remarkable, if less dramatic. Confronted with an opponent like “Bonecrusher” Smith, who violates the decorum of the ring by not fighting, Tyson is at a loss; he hits his man after the bell, in an adolescent display of frustration; he exchanges insults with him during the fight, makes jeering faces; pushes, shoves, laces the cut over Smith’s eye during a clinch; betrays those remnants of his Brooklyn street-fighting days (Tyson, as a child of ten, was one of the youngest members of a notorious gang called the Jolly Stompers) his training as a boxer should have overcome. In short, his inexperience shows.

  So the pattern of the fight is immediately established: in the entire twelve rounds virtually nothing will happen that does not happen in the first thirty seconds of the first round. The spectator is gripped by stasis itself, by the perversity of the expectation that, against all expectation, something will happen. If this is theater, and boxing is always theater, we are in the slyly teasing anti-worlds of Jarry, Ionesco, Beckett; the aesthetics is that of fanatic tedium, as in John Cage and Andy Warhol. While my press colleagues to a man will report the match boring—“Two interior decorators could have done each other more damage” (Los Angeles Times)—I find it uniquely tense, and exhausting; not unlike the first Spinks/Holmes fight in which the frustrated Holmes carried his right glove for round after round, a talismanic club waiting to be swung. Poor Holmes! Poor Lear! This is the very poetry of masculine frustration—the failure of psychic closure. Such fights end, and are funny, in retrospect; but are never resolved.

  Tyson’s predicament vis-à-vis “Bonecrusher” Smith brings to mind Jack Dempsey, similarly frustrated in his matches with Tunney, shouting at his retreating opponent, “Come on and fight!” But, for all his renown, Dempsey was not a strategic boxer of the sort Tyson has been meticulously trained to be; his ring style was virtually nonstop offense with very little defense, which means that he was willing to take punches in the hope of throwing his own. Outboxed by the more cautious and more intelligent Tunney, he eventually lost both fights. In the Tyson/Smith match there is no question that Tyson is the superior boxer; he will win every round unanimously in what is in fact one of the easiest fights of his two-year career as a professional. But this is hardly the dramatic public performance he’d hoped to give, and the fight’s promoters had hoped to present. No knockout—none of the dazzling combinations of blows for which he is known; very little of what D’Amato taught his protégés was the boxer’s primary responsibility to his audience: to entertain. Winning too can be a kind of failure.

  The fight recalls several previous fights of Tyson’s with opponents who, out of fear or cunning, or both, refused to fight him; yet more worrisomely it recalls Joe Louis’s predicament as heavyweight champion in those years when, after having cleared the heavyweight division of all serious contenders, he was reduced to fighting mere opponents—“Bums-of-the-Month” as the press derisively called them. Worse, Louis’s reputation as a puncher, a machine for hitting, so intimidated opponents that they were frightened to enter the ring with him. (“Enter the ring? My man had to be helped down the aisle,” one manager is said to have said.) For a sport routinely attacked for its brutality boxing has had its share of historically shameful episodes: Louis’s title defense against a long-forgotten challenger named Pastor, whom he chased for ten dreary rounds of running and clutching, running and clutching, is invariably cited. While Rocky Marciano/Jersey Joe Walcott I (September 1952) was notable for both fighters’ courage—this was the fight that gave Marciano the heavyweight title—the rematch eight months later ended with the first punch thrown by Marciano: Walcott sat on the canvas and made no effort to get up as he was counted out. (“After twenty-three years as a professional fighter, the former champion went out in a total disgrace that no excuses can relieve”—Red Smith, a former admirer of Walcott.) Both Muhammad Ali/Sonny Liston title matches were memorable for Liston’s surprising behavior: in the first, in which Liston was defending his title, he refused to continue fighting after the sixth round, claiming a shoulder injury; in the second, he went down with mysterious alacrity at one minute forty-eight
seconds of the first round, struck by a devastating, if invisible, blow to the head. (This defeat disgraced Liston and effectively ended his career: he was never to be offered another championship fight. Even the circumstances of his death some years later at the age of thirty-eight were suspicious.) There was Dempsey’s notorious fight with Tommy Gibbons in Shelby, Montana, in 1923, which made money for Dempsey and his promoter, Kearns, while nearly bankrupting the town; there was the bizarre “Slapsie” Maxey Rosenbloom, world light-heavyweight champion of the early 1930s, a sort of pacifist of boxing, whose strategy was to hit (or slap, gloves open) and run—a boxing style as exciting to watch, it is said, as the growth of tree rings. While no one has ever questioned Marvelous Marvin Hagler’s integrity, his defense of his middleweight title against Roberto Durán some years ago left many observers skeptical—the usually aggressive Hagler seemed oddly solicitous of his opponent. But the most scandalous boxing incident of modern times still remains Durán’s decision, two minutes and forty-four seconds into the eighth round of his welterweight title defense with Sugar Ray Leonard in 1980, to simply quit the fight—“No mas” No more! Leonard had been outboxing him, making a fool of him, and Durán had had enough. Machismo punctures easily.

  Though most of Mike Tyson’s twenty-eight fights have ended with knockouts, often in early rounds, and once (with Joe Frazier’s hapless son Marvis) within thirty seconds of the first round, several opponents have slowed him down as “Bonecrusher” Smith has done, and made him appear baffled, thwarted, intermittently clumsy. “Quick” Tillis and Mitch Green come most readily to mind; and, though Tyson eventually knocked him out, in the final round of a ten-round fight, José Ribalta. Perhaps the ugliest fight of Tyson’s career was with Jesse Ferguson, who, in a performance anticipating Smith’s, held onto him with such desperation after Tyson had broken his nose that even the referee could not free the men. (Ferguson was disqualified and the fight was ruled a TKO for Tyson.) Such performances do not constitute boxing at its finest moments, nor do they presage well for Tyson’s future: to be a great champion one must have great opponents.