Boxing Books

I’ve been mulling over writing a short review of two recent books that feature boxing as a main theme. One is Michael Winkler’s Grimmish (2021) which I wrote about here, and the other is Red Shuttleworth’s Eclipse of the Sun: boxing poems published this year by University of Nevada Press. 

Boxing, of course, has long represented a metaphor for all sorts of modern situations most of which can be reduced to capitalism: alienation, suffering, work, struggle, and so on. Boxing speaks to our awareness that life is experienced as an individual, but we’re also aware that people outside the ring often limit our choices and put their thumb on the scale to determine outcomes (to paraphrase Marx’s hackneyed observation). Shutteworth is 79 and claim to be the oldest active boxer. I have no interest in disputing this. Winkler inserts himself into his book enough to let us know he watches boxing and cares about the sport and its competitors. For him, writing may be a metaphor for boxing or at least they both require equal shares of suffering.

If I were to write a review of Grimmish and Eclipse of the Sun, I think that I might lead a comment that boxing has reentered the public sphere through any number of venues. I think that I might mention Terrance Blanchard’s opera Champion which appeared at the Metropolitan Opera in April to solid reviews. I might even observe that Hemingway’s story “Fifty Grand” entered the public domain in January perhaps stoking interest in literary boxers. I suppose I could even note that the general increase in popularity of MMA and “combat sports,” as well as the rise of cross over competitors such as Jake Paul probably bolstered the status of the sport in the public eye. On the other hand, the recent decision by HBO and Showtime to shut down their respective boxing franchises and the ongoing issues surrounding Olympic boxing has perhaps put boxing in the spotlight for the wrong reasons. Whatever the case, people are talking about boxing some these days and perhaps these books shine a bit brighter as a result.

I think that I might also comment on the kind of tragic nostalgia that suffuses Grimmish and Eclipse of the Sun. Grimmish describes a boxer who was touring Australia in 1908-1909. His main claim to fame was his ability to endure a tremendous beating without being knocked out. Apparently the great heavyweight champion Jack Johnson knocked him down 17 times in a six round match to lose a “newspaper decision.” In Grimmish, spars with Johnson in Australia as he prepared to fight Tommy Burns for the heavyweight championship. Grim, in the novel and in life, eventually ends up in a mental hospital, but it’s never clear whether this is the result of his life in the ring or the cause of it. His ability to endure tremendous suffering never feels much like an accomplishment. In Winkler’s novel, even the talking goat seems to realize that Grim’s incredible chin is more of a curse. 

Eclipse of the Sun is more consistently tragic fair. Shuttleworth sets six poems around the 1975 Muhammad Ali-Ron Lyle fight with its controversial ending in the 10th round. While Lyle was likely ahead on the cards, Ali stunned him with a flurry of shots and the referee who felt Lyle was done. After that fight, Lyle never had another shot at a championship. Shuttleworth, who places himself in Lyle’s camp writes:

Melancholia in Lyle’s after fight room
Every dream has a breaking point

I’ve long wonder what has made boxing into the object for so much nostalgia. While the sport today is nowhere near as popular as it was in its glory days (which remain nebulous: maybe the 1920s and 1930s, maybe the 1950s and 1960s, in the 1970s when Ali, Foreman, and Frazier made their names, or even in the 1980s when the Four Kings became stars), the quality of boxing is remarkably high. Tyson Fury, Canelo Alvarez, Bud Crawford, Shakur Stevenson, and Naoya Inoue could match up against any fighter in any era. One could even argue that the sport is safer and less corrupt than in the past. Despite all this, boxing remains a place for nostalgia.

There are those who will want to imagine that this is nostalgia for a lost idea of masculinity, but it is important to note that in the work of Shuttleworth and Winkler, the wages of this expression of the masculine are tragic: mental illness, depression, hopelessness, and death. The seemingly inescapable results (hence tragic) of these expressions of masculinity seem to underscore its futility. Can we be nostalgic for a dead end? I have doubts.    

I wonder whether the agonistic aspects of boxing, the romance of two fighters locked in competition, evokes a world where hard work, determination, skill, luck, and maybe even talent mattered? When many of us look around the world today, we don’t see the triumph of individuals, but the shattering weight of structural inequality. Maybe the tragic elements of boxing is that as much as the moment in the ring conjured the image of two competitors, on their own, proving their mettle, most sage observers know that the playing field was never truly level. The machinations behind the scenes that set the stage for individual competition also shape the character of the outcome. 

Maybe this is the lesson that makes boxing a compelling teacher. It’s not so much a nostalgia for a better past, but the realization that the system hasn’t changed and the heroes of the future walk among us now, training, hoping, and suffering just like the rest of us.

Grim

On my flight over to Greece, I read Michael Winkler’s Grimmish (2021) on Richard Rothaus’s recommendation. It was good and weird.

Essentially, it was a 200+ page reflection on pain through the story of Joe Grim an obscure, but not unremarkable early 20th century boxer. Grim’s claim to fame was not his victories in the ring, but his relentless resistance to being knocked out. Apparently, he was capable of surviving extraordinary levels of punishment over the course of 15 and even 20 round fights. In fact, he fought some of the leading boxers of his era including Jack Johnson at heavyweight, Joe Walcott (I) at welterweight, and Joe Gans at lightweight. Grim appears to have mostly been a welterweight or middleweight. Over his career he accrued a record of 24(10)-104-22.

The boxing, however, is a minor part of the novel which is set (albeit somewhat loosely) during Grim’s time touring Australia. Instead, the novel reflects on Grim’s ability and willingness to endure pain to make a living. In some, perhaps simplistic, ways, the novel might be a reflection on capitalism where we’re often called upon not so much to win or even to advance, but to endure in the name of making a living. 

Joe Grim was also an Italian immigrant and he honed his tremendous tolerance for pain in the streets of South Italy. His travels to Australia to advance his career as a boxer further contribute to a sense of displacement. In one of the more obscure (but also humorous) sections of the novel, Grim finds himself stranded in the Australian outback with a talking goat and a guy who has agreed to man Grim’s corner. Running short of water and with little help of being saved, they discuss various matters as they resolve to pass gently. Somehow they are saved only to find themselves in a small town where a head butting contest is taking place at the local pub. Displacement is pain and leads, it seems, to more pain. For Grim, this pain is both physical and mental as he soon finds himself in a mental hospital in Perth.

The kind of physical and mental pain created by displacement, capitalism, and, in the most limited way, boxing, offers the author a bit of a metaphor for the kind of pain associated with writing. As someone who struggles constantly with words, it is easy to recognize in Grim’s struggles the struggle of the author. Winkler goes a step further though and comments not just on task of writing but also on the pain that an author endures in efforts to get their work to an audience.

Despite its unusual topic and even more unusual execution, Winkler’s book offers a meditation on topics of significant relevance in the “contemporary discourse”: capitalism, displacement, resilience, and work. We live in a world suffused with pain and suffering. Winkler makes clear that Grim felt the pain. His massive determination and resilience (to invoke another favorite term in our Neoliberal age) did not represent an immunity to hurt or reveal that capitalism, displacement, and work did not take their toll. In fact, Winkler tells us that Grim spends his later years in a hospital for the mentally infirm in Philadelphia. Instead, the heroism Grim displayed in the ring and allowed him to make a living left him a devastated man. Boxing as a sport, but more importantly, as a metaphor for our current situation where pain is the cost of capitalism, displacement, resilience, and work, has its consequences. Whether we, or Grim, could have done better is hard to know.

Three Things Thursday: Making Life Harder, Publishing, and Lineal Champions

It’s almost mid-semester and that always puts me in a bit of a reflective mood. The lovely fall weather and some thoughtful colleagues doesn’t hurt either. So this week, I’m offering a little trio of three things Thursday meditation.

Thing the First

One of the things that I tell my students consistently is not to make their lives any harder than they need to be. Many of my students are carrying heavy course loads, working jobs, and have other family and personal responsibilities on top of the every day pressures of taking classes during a pandemic. In response to this, I’ve really focused on managing student workloads, particularly in lower division classes, and encouraging students to consider how best to use their time to get out of a class what they want to get out of it. In other words, do not do things the hard way because they seems like the best way.

Of course, in my professional life, I consistently do things the hard way. In fact, I seem to consistently and knowingly make my life harder than it needs to be by filling up my time with projects that reflect my interests rather than my priorities. More than that, I seem to get some kind of weird pleasure or at least excitement about navigating the hardest path and pushing myself to endure the frustrations and challenges that come not from the work itself but the arrangement of the work. This has me wondering whether my advice to students to stay on the easy path is good. Maybe more of my students are like me than I know?

Thing the Second

I’ve been working on a little Op-Ed piece for Near Eastern Archaeology with my fellow ASOR book series editor Jennie Ebeling. It’s still a work in progress, but we basically advocate for an increased emphasis on digital publishing in ASOR while acknowledging that there are certain challenges to this. 

This got me thinking about how the publishing ecosystem is a bit perverse. On the one hand, there seems to be consistent pressure on faculty to publish. Over the past few years this pressure might even be increasing at least among my colleagues in Europe. As a result, there seems to be a constant stream of publications in a growing number of journals and book series. These, in turn, require universities to constantly increase their library budgets to capture a productive share of the academic output. At the same time, there appears to be persistent barriers to supporting open access publishing at scale. These aren’t just economic barriers (although I’m sure that’s part of it), but also professional ones which discourage scholars from publishing in open access journals and book series. Anther colleague pointed out that in many fields in the humanities, there are even biases against finding subventions for publication to make them open access or more widely available. The result is that universities have created a system where they are scrambling to provide support for the publications that they push their faculty to produce. A significant slice of the revenue that this cycle creates is siphoned off to private investors further depleting public resources that could go for research, teaching, and in-house publishing.

Thing the Third

Unless you live under a rock, you probably know that this weekend is the Wilder-Fury III. This is the third heavyweight fight between Tyson Fury and Deontay Wilder. The ramp up to the fight has been pretty heated and, like any major heavy-weight fight, the world feels like it stops when these two massive men step into the ring. 

In the fragmented world of heavyweight boxing, only one belt is on the line: the WBC belt. The fight will also be for The Ring heavyweight championship. More importantly (for me at least) is that the belt will be for the Lineal Heavyweight championship. I think the lineal championship, in particular, is what makes boxing – particularly in the so-called standard divisions – so appealing to me. The idea of the lineal championship is that only ONE guy is champion and the only way to be champion is the beat the guy who was the previous champion. If a champion retires, then the championship goes to the highest ranked contender ideally after the 2 and 3 ranked contenders fight. At times, then, the lineal championship can lay open or be contested. Obviously, in this era with multiple ranking systems, sanctioning bodies, and championships, it is often hard to confirm the real lineal champion but with heavyweights there’s a sense that Tyson Fury, after his victory over Wladimir Klitschko (who, in turn, won the lineal championship with his victory over Ruslan Chagaev, who was the third ranked heavyweight in the world at a time when Klitschko was ranked second; there was no lineal champion at that moment because Lennox Lewis had retired).

In any event, I like the concept of a lineal champion. It reminds me of Papal Succession and other formal lineages. I also like that in boxing – at least in theory – requires a fighter to defeat the champion in order to be the champion. In other sports, every season starts with a level playing field and while I get that this generates some excitement, in the world of free agency, there’s a lack of continuity that boxing at least seeks to rectify with its somewhat arcane system of succession.