The Bittersweet Science: Fifteen Writers in the Gym, in the Corner, and at Ringside - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 022634620X ISBN 13: 9780226346205

Verlag: University of Chicago Press, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

Weighing in with a balance of the visceral and the cerebral, boxing has attracted writers for millennia. Yet few of the writers drawn to it have truly known the sport—and most have never been in the ring. Moving beyond the typical sentimentality, romanticism, or cynicism common to writing on boxing, The Bittersweet Science is a collection of essays about boxing by contributors who are not only skilled writers but also have extensive firsthand experience at ringside and in the gym, the corner, and the ring itself.

Editors Carlo Rotella and Michael Ezra have assembled a roster of fresh voices, ones that expand our understanding of the sport’s primal appeal. The contributors to The Bittersweet Science—journalists, fiction writers, fight people, and more—explore the fight world's many aspects, considering boxing as both craft and business, art form and subculture. From manager Charles Farrell’s unsentimental defense of fixing fights to former Golden Glover Sarah Deming’s complex profile of young Olympian Claressa Shields, this collection takes us right into the ring and makes us feel the stories of the people who are drawn to—or sometimes stuck in—the boxing world. We get close-up profiles of marquee attractions like Bernard Hopkins and Roy Jones Jr., as well as portraits of rising stars and compelling cornermen, along with first-person, hands-on accounts from fighters’ points of view. We are schooled in not only how to hit and be hit, but why and when to throw in the towel. We experience the intimate immediacy of ringside as well as the dim back rooms where the essentials come together. And we learn that for every champion there’s a regiment of journeymen, dabblers, and anglers for advantage, for every aspiring fighter, a veteran in painful decline.

Collectively, the perspectives in The Bittersweet Science offer a powerful in-depth picture of boxing, bobbing and weaving through the desires, delusions, and dreams of boxers, fans, and the cast of managers, trainers, promoters, and hangers-on who make up life in and around the ring.

Contributors: Robert Anasi, Brin-Jonathan Butler, Donovan Craig, Sarah Deming, Michael Ezra, Charles Farrell, Rafael Garcia, Gordon Marino, Louis Moore, Gary Lee Moser, Hamilton Nolan, Gabe Oppenheim, Carlo Rotella, Sam Sheridan, and Carl Weingarten.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Carlo Rotella is director of the American Studies Program at Boston College.  His books include Playing in Time:  Essays, Profiles, and Other True Stories and Cut Time: An Education at the Fights, both also published by the University of Chicago Press. He writes for the New York Times Magazine, and he has been a regular op-ed columnist for the Boston Globe and radio commentator for WGBH. His work has also appeared in the New Yorker, Harper's, the Believer, Washington Post Magazine, and Best American Essays. Michael Ezra is professor of American multicultural studies at Sonoma State University. His books include Muhammad Ali: The Making of an Icon and The Economic Civil Rights Movement: African Americans and the Struggle for Economic Power. His work has been published by Deadspin, Al Jazeera, Politico, and the Guardian.
 

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The Bittersweet Science

Fifteen Writers in the Gym, in the Corner, and at Ringside

By Carlo Rotella, Michael Ezra

The University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2017 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-226-34620-5

Contents

Introduction: Bittersweetness, Carlo Rotella and Michael Ezra, 
Good Enough to Get Hurt, Donovan Craig, 
Throwing in the Towel, Gordon Marino, 
The Real Million Dollar Baby, Sarah Deming, 
Why I Fixed Fights, Charles Farrell, 
Plaster of Torrance: Unwrapping the Meaning of Antonio Margarito, Rafael Garcia, 
Darius, Hamilton Nolan, 
Post-Primes and Career Arcs: Navigating Boxing's All-Time Rankings, Michael Ezra, 
Bernard Hopkins, Prefight and Postfight, Carlo Rotella, 
Toxic Non-Avengers: Boxing's Quarter Century of Acceptable Losses, Gary Lee Moser, 
What Boxing Is For, Sam Sheridan, 
The Myth of Dempsey-Wills, Carl Weingarten, 
My First Stripe, Robert Anasi, 
Jimmy Bivins and the Duration Championship, Louis Moore, 
The Masters of Stylishness, Gabe Oppenheim, 
Roy Jones Jr.'s Long Good-Bye, Brin-Jonathan Butler, 
Contributors, 
Footnotes, 

CHAPTER 1

GOOD ENOUGH TO GET HURT

Donovan Craig

People will tell you that fear and pain are the worst things you have to deal with in life, but this is wrong. Fear is energy. Fear can sharpen you, and people even get addicted to it. Pain also has its uses. It's the easiest thing in the world to understand, and because it's so clear, it's a powerful teacher. Sometimes, because people mistake pain for the valuable things it reveals, they will begin to look for it, especially if they think there's not enough of it in their lives.

The main danger, the most implacable adversary you face in this world, is not fear or pain but confusion. Nobody ever got addicted to being confused or sought it out for its own sake. But part of the danger of confusion is that people get used to being confused and eventually they forget what it feels like to be unconfused or if, in fact, they've ever seen clearly at all.

Confusion was my vocation for many years. I was a stockbroker, and back in 2000, during the last gasps of the dot-com bubble, I had a penthouse in downtown Atlanta that I couldn't afford, a wife I shouldn't have married, and a job I couldn't stand. Most people might once or twice in their lives become grimly aware that large impersonal forces control their destiny. I was reminded of this all day, every day, by the dozens of red, white, and green stock symbols blinking on the screen in my office. In addition, the business skewed all communication toward closing the sale, which means that it didn't matter what I said, just that I said it in the right tone of voice and to enough people.

I was a pretty good closer back in the day, but I began to realize that, although I spent most of my waking hours on the phone, I never talked to anybody about anything. I just kept going around and around with them. "Blah, blah, blah, fear and greed, yada yada," ask for the sale, "blah, blah, blah, you're going to miss it, yada yada," ask for the sale, etc. Over and over. The object was to keep them in a specific frame of mind until enough hot buttons got pushed or enough little bells rang that a switch in their mind flipped and they bought.

You could make a lot of money doing this, and it could also drive you a little crazy, make you a kind of highly functioning psychotic; that's what happened to me, at least. Eventually, I began to recognize the same manipulative games of persuasion I was playing on the phone at work were everywhere, pushing and pulling me the way I was pushing and pulling everybody else. In my heart of hearts, I considered myself a con man, and eventually the world felt like one huge con, a jabbering cloud of half-assed rhetoric, brute propaganda, and the lies and low cunning of the marketplace. All of it was for the sole purpose of chasing money, with that game being the biggest bamboozle of them all.

Thankfully, I lived within walking distance of the only honest place I knew, the boxing ring. There was a small gym run by a man named Johnny Gant, whose claim to fame was that he had once gone eight rounds with Sugar Ray Leonard. Atlanta was a hotbed for boxing, and Johnny's gym was where everybody came to train. When I found out about it, I started going in after work and on Saturday mornings, and, although I had boxed during college, it was at Johnny's gym where I really learned what the sport of boxing was all about.

I started boxing late. I was almost eighteen when I had my first amateur match, but I'd been a fan my whole life. As a kid my great hero was Jack Dempsey; later I liked Marvin Hagler, Mike Tyson, and Julio Cesar Chavez. I always liked the fighters who were aggressive and indomitable. I grew up in a small town in South Georgia where nobody else cared about the sport and only a few people even had cable, so I followed boxing mainly by reading about it in books, magazines, and newspapers. It was easier to mythologize the sport back in those days and project what you wanted or needed onto your idols. While my friends wanted to throw touchdowns, hit home runs, or play in a band, I always looked up to boxers. I wanted to be tough, like the fighters I read about in The Ring magazine or An Illustrated History of Boxing, a beautiful, oversized book with giant photographs from all the great old fights. My most prized possession back in those days was a well-used paperback copy of Jack Dempsey's book Championship Fighting: Explosive Punching and Aggressive Defense in which Dempsey explained the mechanics of punching, how to train your body to get the most power out of it, and how to always be on the attack, looking for the finish, even when defending. I read this book so many times that this last part became the closest thing I had to a worldview.

* * *

When the bell rings, anxiety disappears and you experience a sense of relief, a denouement long delayed, as societal constraints come off and you meet, maybe for the first time, your basic self. You get a similar sensation in a street fight, but usually a street fight is over so quickly that you don't have time to appreciate it. In a boxing match, and even more so in the many hours of sparring that fighters go through in the gym, you have time to appreciate what's going on and to understand the nature of physical violence and your reactions to it. I drank up my time in the gym. Outside the gym, I was an onlooker to my own life, swallowed up by the world. Inside Johnny's, it was different. There, I could see a clear and direct line between what I did and what was going on around me. Like Hamlet in reverse, when I boxed, the barriers between thought and action disappeared.

A good sparring partner is rugged and tough, has good stamina, and is just dangerous enough to keep the other fighter on his toes, but not so dangerous as to represent a real threat. I fit the bill, so I always got a lot of work when I hung around Johnny's gym. Over the years, I sparred with a lot of really good boxers and a few who were actually world class.

Two of the best fighters I trained with were rising stars when we started working together in the ring. O'Neil Bell was a cruiserweight with ten knockout wins in his ten pro fights. Steve Cunningham was the 178-pound national amateur champion who was about to turn pro. Because all of us were about the same weight, and I had a reputation around the gym as being a good worker, we three trained together...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Chicago Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2017
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 022634620X
• ISBN 13: 9780226346205
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 274
• Herausgeber: Rotella Carlo, Ezra Michael
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: The University of Chicago Press; https://press.uchicago.edu/index.html; ; 5801 S. Ellis Avenue; Chicago; IL; 60637; USA
• Verantwortliche Person: Buchbär; info@buchbaer.de; ; Weberstr. 67; Osnabrück; 49084; Deutschland