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

for glory. The image of the Britisher—his self-image—was of a tough ’un, scrappy, aggressive, never-say-die. British tars liked to think of themselves as the toughest people on earth. The dandies and the poets of the day, the Marquises of Queensberry and the Byrons, were drawn to the boxing rooms where eminent professors of disciplined savagery instructed them in how to hit out and how to parry.
    The Industrial Revolution transforming England may have fathered this revival of the Grecian game. For knights were no longer jousting with their lances. Swords were becoming ceremonial. Daggers were not for Elizabethan nobility but for London cutthroats. No sign of decline was boxing to the British Fancy two hundred years ago. As England moved onward and upward, as the London of Nelson and Wellington sang its power like Caesar’s Rome, so did each Anglo-Saxon champion believe himself as invincible as Muhammad Ali before Frazier welcomed him back to the club of nearly mortal men.
    “The Fight,” be it Frazier-Ali I or III, is only the latest and most electronic of a long and provocative list bridging the reigns of George III and our own Richard theCounter-Revolutionary. It has always been a magnet for all the flying nails, knives, and needles of racial hostility and social tension. We seem to need our knights to go forth and do battle for us. The technological leap that has taken our astronauts (and astrauthor Norman Mailer) to the moon has failed to develop a human psyche to man the inhuman computer.
    No matter how enlightened, a Jew still kvells when his gloved landsman subdues his Irish rival. And African Americans know in their bones that a new world’s a comin’ when one of theirs smotes one of ours. Of course we oversimplify. If Frazier was, as Muhammad needed to believe, “The Great White Hope,” still there were thousands of well-heeled honkies at the Garden and millions around the world holding their breath as the human tank called Frazier, peppered with jabs like buckshot, drove the retreating Black Prince into the ropes. At ringside we heard white cries mingled with the black pleas, “Get off the ropes, Ali! Spin ’im and dance, Ali. Stick and move, Ali, move !”
    Yes, the racial and the social lines are never as clear and clean as we moralizers, the eternal simpleminded, would like to have them. Over the centuries there have always been stubborn independents who insist on mucking things up by infiltrating the boundaries of class and race, of culture and nationality. Still, as we shall see, “The Fight” is a convenient shibboleth, a healthy safety valve, and at its best a civilized substitute for war. That is why this timid soul and pacifist finds the spectacle exhilarating rather than debasing, inspiring rather than inhuming. If we cannot exorcise our warlike feelings, our sense of conflict between ins and outs, if man must strike out against the forces from which he feels threatened, then let it be done with fists instead of liquid fire, with educated maulies instead of machine guns. Let our champions go forth and let the innocent look on in closed-circuit television cathedrals instead of from ditches where nearsighted lieutenants can’t tell an attacking hostile from a praying peasant.
    Boxing as history and The Fight as catharsis: having seen all the heavyweight champions for fifty years, we move back in timeto the outdoor ring where Mendoza the Jew, a middleweight marvel from Whitechapel, is stripping for action against Richard Humphries, the champion of Anglo-Saxon prowess in a day when the Corinthians, hurting with the loss of the brash Yankee colonies, and shaken by the chopping off of noble heads in France, wonder if their destiny lies with victorious Clive in India or defeated Cornwallis in savage America. And now, to cap the anxiety, a Jew of Portuguese beginnings dares to come up to scratch in the British manner and, Lord help Merrie England, swears he will be champion of England, which was