Shadow Box by George Plimpton

Author:George Plimpton [Plimpton, George]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-05-28T16:00:00+00:00

15

I worry very much about the fellow who is going to lose, which is neither sophisticated nor practical. Sports journalists are supposed to be inured to defeat (after all, every event they cover has its losers), and in their postperformance interviews their concern is to find out why a man lost—what did he do wrong?—a technical consideration of his performance—not how he was going to be affected by losing, or how he was going to get through the next couple of days.

Losing a prizefight has always seemed to me the ultimate disaster for an athlete—with no one to blame but himself, a nose or brow ridge often damaged in the bargain, his dignity shot, while across the ring his opponent capers about with his arms aloft, his features split in a manic grin, as he prepares to come across to envelop his victim in a sweaty embrace, which in itself must be an ugly indignity. It surprises me that a prizefighter does not take out his disappointment more—perhaps a low chop during that embrace; or, when he gets back in his corner, a knockout blow of frustration at the wizened little man who carries the water bucket; or even assaulting the referee with a quick combination.

But he doesn't. The loser works up a ghastly grin for his opponent during the embrace; he accepts having his hair tousled with the heel of the other fellow's glove. A.J. Liebling once offered an interesting explanation for this behavior: that the fighter, whatever the outcome, always "felt good" after it was over: "A fighter's hostilities are not turned inward, like a Sunday tennis player's or a lady MP's ... they come out naturally with his sweat, and when his job is done he feels good because he has expressed himself."

Dave Anderson, of the New York Times, once told me that George Chuvalo, after his loss to Ali in Vancouver—quite badly nicked up and his face beginning to balloon—looked out at the press people in his locker room and began his interview session by saying, "Gentlemen, I enjoyed the fight..." which would seem to substantiate what Liebling had to say.

Still, it is no fun to lose, however "good" you feel afterward, and my own suspicion is that the nonchalance one watches in a losing fighter is often a desperate posture of bravado to try to show that he truly has not been affected. A fighter named Joe Grim, a second-rate boxer in the early part of the century whose forte was the ability to take punishment, would totter to the ropes at the end of a fight, whatever his state, and call out to the crowd, "I am Joe Grim! I fear no man on earth!" Great panache! In 1903 he was matched against Bob Fitzsimmons, the inventor of the solar-plexus punch, and though beaten and absolutely pulverized by the sixth round, Grim managed to pull himself up at the bell and get himself to the ropes where he mournfully murmured down, "I am Joe Grim.

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