Playing in Time: Essays, Profiles, and Other True Stories by Carlo Rotella

Author:Carlo Rotella
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2012-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

“I think we’re a little spoiled,” Hasim Rahman said last August. “We make too much money too quick. We lose sight of the grand prize.” Rahman, who preceded Briggs as America’s heavyweight Black Hope, had just surrendered his belt to Maskaev, who completed the Eastern European sweep of the four titles. The new champion, for his part, said, “This is a message to everyone: European fighters are tough.” Or, as Vyacheslav Trunov, Maskaev’s former manager, once put it, “We fight like it’s Stalingrad in 1942. We never surrender, and take no prisoners.”

You hear this kind of talk these days in the fight world and beyond. It’s not really just about boxing; it’s about what used to be called national character. Eastern Europeans, the story goes, are tougher than Americans, who, spoiled by money and comfort, have gone soft in their gated community of a nation. The former Soviet bloc, by contrast, is like a vast gray housing project, stretching from the Balkans to the Bering Strait, from which issue streams of do-or-die strivers: fighters, basketball players, musicians, dancers, writers, hustlers, beauties, entrepreneurs, gangsters, all flowing toward the big money in the decadent West. Both halves of this story, the American decline and the rise of the Russians, are more mythic parable than serious analysis, but they’re widely repeated and accepted, even by American boxers.

Larry Holmes, for instance, calls the post-Soviet heavies “ordinary fighters” but rates them well ahead of their American counterparts. Our guys, he says, exhibit “no dedication, no sacrifice. They want to party, be a star, play all that in limousines. That’s not only in boxing, but in other sports, in society, and that’s what’s happening to young athletes—to fighters, too.”

Like most Jeremiahs, Holmes makes a moral crisis out of a structural problem. Football, basketball, and baseball (which has also become a big man’s game) snap up the quick, strong, determined 200-plus-pounders in this country. The decline of boxing into a niche sport during the latter part of the 20th century coincided with the growing hegemony of the major team sports, with their high-profile professional leagues and school-based amateur networks. A big kid who likes to bang is likely to be shunted into peewee football, and from there he can work his way up through the sport’s well-regulated layers without ever coming near a boxing gym.

Meanwhile, the American boxing network has continued to shrink since its heyday in the first half of the last century, when no prize in sports rivaled the heavyweight title. Industrial society honored men who were good with their hands, and almost every working-class neighborhood had at least one gym. But in postindustrial America, a would-be boxer has to go well out of his way to find one of the few remaining gyms. The underfinanced national amateur system regularly comes up short in international competitions and produces few prospects who live up to their signing bonuses.

Boxing offers a path of greater resistance for American big men. (It’s different in the lower weight classes, where

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