On Boxing by Joyce Carol Oates

Author:Joyce Carol Oates
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9780061846878
Publisher: HarperCollins

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.

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