Sparring With Hemingway: And Other Legends of the Fight Game Read Online Free PDF Page A

hoary Times really concerned with the immediate evils termiting the house we live in? Evils that are simply reflected in the world of boxing as they are in every other representative walk of American life? It is easy, self-righteous fun to cry, “Outlaw professional boxing!” Just as it was to howl, Outlaw booze! No accident that every time boxing has been outlawed it has persevered in some bootleg form. Like bath tub gin, in a more vicious, disorganized, and dehumanizing form.
    If our civilization is indeed declining and if it finally falls, it will not be because Joe Louis clobbered Schmeling or took the measure of Billy Conn. Or because Ali made Bad Sonny Liston quit in his corner. Or because Joe Frazier landed a tremendous, humbling left hook on the controversial jaw of gallant braggadocio Muhammad Ali. We have already suggested other seeds of our possible destruction. And it seems to us that the Times is simplistically wrong in relating boxing to the decline of civilization. It is true, of course, that boxing and civilization—any civilization—stand in delicate balance. But let us first do a bit of roadwork through history and see whose theory, ours or the New York Times’s, has the better of the go. Pugilistica as history we might call it, to cop a Mailerism. The Times has the tail wagging the dog, but the Manly Art or the Sweet Science or the Game or whatever conceit we invent for the most basic and complex of all our sports has merely been a telltale (if you’ll forgive us) appendage to the various dog-shapes civilizations have assumed over the past five thousand years.
    The art of fisticuffs was celebrated not only when civilizations were declining and falling but when they were rising and flourishing. Will Durant in The Life of Greece describes the prosperous Cretans of the middle Minoan period more than four thousand years ago packing the amphitheater to see their favorite heavyweights “coddled with helmets, cheekpieces and long padded gloves, fighting ’til one falls exhausted to the ground and the other stands above him in the conscious grandeur of victory.” Cretan predecessors of LeRoy Neiman recorded these contests on vases and bas reliefs. Homer immortalized the victory of Epeus over Euryalus, resorting to verse to describe the blow-by-blow three thousand years before Grantland Rice and Muhammad Ali got into the act.
    When boxing came to Rome, it became vulgarized, brutalized, and corrupted like so many Greek arts in tougher Roman hands. There the Times would have been closer to the mark in viewing pugilism as a sign of moral breakdown. What had been sport to the Greeks became bloodlust to the Romans who packed the Colosseum in the days of Nero and Caligula. History and progress were moving in opposite directions. The more humane leather gloves of the early Greeks became vicious cesti weighted with iron knobs and pointed thongs. Greek boxers had been freemen and amateurs. Their Roman counterparts were gladitorial slaves forced to bash and rip each other todeath for the titillation of a mob debased in an empire that had begun to stink of glut and glory.
    There was a long, dark age for boxing, with no recorded history until the seventeenth century when British manhood took to its stout young heart the sport of bareknuckle prizefights to a finish. Two lads would strip to the waist in a twenty-four-foot ring and pummel each other with their naked fists until one of them could no longer come to scratch, a line drawn in the turf to which the bruiser was required to place his toe within thirty seconds after having been knocked or thrown to the ground. In the eighteenth century this cruel and simple sport came into its own, when formal championships were established and belt-holders became national heroes. Not on the down side but on the rise was England then, stretching its imperial muscles and staking out its claims to world supremacy. The prize ring was a natural extension of a vital island people bound