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A reissue of bestselling, award-winning author Joyce Carol Oates' classic collection of essays on boxing.
"Never has a woman's touch packed more wallop in the boxing ring. Carol Oates hits like a heavyweight."--Gay Talese
Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Medal of Humanities, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the Chicago Tribune Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, and has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys, Blonde, which was nominated for the National Book Award, and the New York Times bestseller The Falls, which won the 2005 Prix Femina. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.
A born storyteller, Oates has been spinning yarns since she was a little girl too young to even write. Instead, she would communicate her stories through drawings and paintings. When she received her very first typewriter at the age of 14, her creative floodgates opened with a torrent. She says she wrote "novel after novel" throughout high school and college -- a prolificacy that has continued unabated throughout a professional career that began in 1963 with her first short story collection, By the North Gate.
Oates's breakthrough occurred in 1969 with the publication of them, a National Book Award winner that established her as a force to be reckoned with. Since that auspicious beginning, she has been nominated for nearly every major literary honor -- from the PEN/Faulkner Award to the Pulitzer Prize -- and her fiction turns up with regularity on The New York Times annual list of Notable Books.
On average Oates publishes at least one novel, essay anthology, or story collection a year (during the 1970s, she produced at the astonishing rate of two or three books a year!). And although her fiction often exposes the darker side of America's brightest facades – familial unrest, sexual violence, the death of innocence – she has also made successful forays into Gothic novels, suspense, fantasy, and children's literature. As novelist John Barth once remarked, "Joyce Carol Oates writes all over the aesthetical map."
Where she finds the time for it no one knows, but Oates manages to combine her ambitious, prolific writing career with teaching: first at the University of Windsor in Canada, then (from 1978 on), at Princeton University in New Jersey. For all her success and fame, her daily routine of teaching and writing has changed very little, and her commitment to literature as a transcendent human activity remains steadfast.
Oates's Black Water, which is a thinly veiled account of Ted Kennedy's car crash in Chappaquiddick, was produced as an opera in the 1990s.
In 2001, Oprah Winfrey selected Oates's novel We Were the Mulvaneys for her Book Club.
It's a terrible sport, but it's a sport . . .
the fight for survival is the fight.
—Rocky Graziano,
former middleweight champion of the world
They are young welterweight boxers so evenly matched they might be twins, though one has a redhead's pallor and the other is a dusky-skinned Hispanic. Circling each other in the ring, beneath the glaring lights, trying jabs, tentative left hooks, right crosses that dissolve in mid-air or turn into harmless slaps. How to get inside! How to press an advantage, score a point or two, land a single punch! It seems they have forgotten all they've been trained to do and the Madison Square Garden fight crowd is getting noisy, derisive, impatient. Time is running out. "Those two—what'd they do, wake up this morning and decide they were boxers?" a man behind me says in disgust. (He's dark, nattily dressed, neat-trimmed moustache and tinted glasses. A sophisticated fight fan. Knows all the answers. Two hours later he will be screaming, "Tommy! Tommy! Tommy!" over and over in a paroxysm of grief as, on the giant closed-circuit television screen lowered over the ring, middleweight champion Marvelous Marvin Hagler batters his brash challenger Thomas Hearns into insensibility.)
The young welterweights are surely conscious of the chorus of jeers, boos, and catcalls in this great cavernous space reaching up into the cheap twenty-dollar seats in the balconies amid the constant milling of people in the aisles, the commingled smells of hotdogs, beer, cigarette and cigar smoke, hair oil. But they are locked desperately together intheir futile match-circling, "dancing," jabbing, slapping, clinching—now a flurry of light blows, clumsy footwork, yet another sweaty stumbling despairing clinch into the ropes that provokes a fresh wave of derision as the referee helps them apart. Why are they here in the Garden of all places, each fighting, it seems, his first professional fight? Neither wants to hurt the other—neither is angry at the other. When the bell sounds at the end of the fourth and final round the crowd boos a little louder. The Hispanic boy, silky yellow shorts, damp frizzy floating hair, strides about his corner of the ring with his gloved hand aloft—not in defiance of the boos which increase in response to his gesture, or even in acknowledgment of them. It's just something he's doing, something he has seen older boxers do, he's saying I'm here, I made it, I did it.
When the decision is announced as a draw the crowd's derision increases in volume. "Get out of the ring!" "Assholes!" "Go home!" Contemptuous male laughter follows the boys up the aisle in their robes, towels about their heads, sweating, breathless. Why had they thought they were boxers?
How can you enjoy so brutal a sport, people sometimes ask me.
Or pointedly don't ask.
And it's too complex to answer. In any case I don't "enjoy" boxing in the usual sense of the word, and never have; boxing isn't invariably "brutal"; and I don't think of it as a "sport."
Nor can I think of boxing in writerly terms as a metaphor for something else. No one whose interest began as mine did in childhood—as an offshoot of my father's interest—is likely to think of boxing as a symbol of something beyond itself, as if its uniqueness were merely an abbreviation, or iconographic; though I can entertain the proposition that life is a metaphor for boxing—for one of those bouts that go on and on, round following round, jabs, missed punches, clinches, nothing determined, again the bell and again and you and your opponent so evenly matched it's impossible not to see that your opponent is you: and why this struggle on an elevated platform enclosed by ropes as in a pen beneath hot crude pitiless lights in the presence of an impatient crowd?—that sort of hellish-writerly metaphor. Life is like boxing in many unsettling respects. But boxing is only like boxing.
For if you have seen five hundred boxing matches you have seen five hundred boxing matches and their common denominator, which certainly exists, is not of primary interest to you. "If the Host is only a symbol," as the Catholic writer Flannery O'Connor once remarked, "I'd say the hell with it."
I am a fighter who walks, talks, and thinks fighting, but I try not to look like it.
— Marvelous Marvin Hagler,
middleweight champion of the world
Like a dancer, a boxer "is" his body, and is totally identified with it. And the body is identified with a certain weight:
HEAVYWEIGHT—no weight limit
CRUISERWEIGHT—not over 195 pounds
LIGHT HEAVYWEIGHT—not over 175 pounds
MIDDLEWEIGHT—not over 160 pounds
JUNIOR MIDDLEWEIGHT—not over 154 pounds
WELTERWEIGHT—not over 147 pounds
JUNIOR WELTERWEIGHT—not over 140 pounds
LIGHTWEIGHT—not over 135 pounds
JUNIOR LIGHTWEIGHT—not over 130 pounds
FEATHERWEIGHT—not over 126 pounds
JUNIOR FEATHERWEIGHT—not over 122 pounds
BANTAMWEIGHT—not over 118 pounds
FLYWEIGHT—not over 112 pounds
Though the old truism "A good big man will always beat a good little man" has been disproved any number of times (most recently by Michael Spinks in his victory over Larry Holmes) it is usually the case that a boxer invites disaster by fighting out of his weight division: he can "move up" but very likely he can't "bring his punch with him." Where at one time the distinctions between weight were fairly crude (paralleling life's unfairness—the mismatches of most battles outside the ring) boxing promoters and commissions have created a truly Byzantine hierarchy of weights to regulate present-day fights. In theory, the finely calibrated divisions were created to prevent mismatches; in practice, they have the felicitous effect of creating many more "champions" and many more lucrative "title" shots.
| On boxing | 1 | |
| On Mike Tyson | 119 | |
| The cruelest sport | 185 | |
| Muhammad Ali : the greatest | 203 | |
| In the ring and out | 229 | |
| The avenger | 259 |
Joyce Carol Oates writes about the "sweet science" with the same wonderful style as her works of fiction. The main section of the book that talks about the sport in general is very interesting as she compares boxing to other diverse objects like art and pornography. Her essays on Mike Tyson (before his bizzare behavoir became his trademark) and Jack Johnson are superb in the details of how the two black men viewed themselves in "white" America. There are also essays on Ali and Joe Louis vs. Max Schnellinberger . They are alos written in the style that makes Oates a literary master. A great book for the boxing fan...and for boxing critics as well.
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Overview
A reissue of bestselling, award-winning author Joyce Carol Oates' classic collection of essays on boxing.
"Never has a woman's touch packed more wallop in the boxing ring. Carol Oates hits like a heavyweight."--Gay Talese