Raging Bull Redux

There’s not much harder than being a man, unless one happens to be a woman. If you don’t believe me, take it from Jake La Motta, the subject of Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull (1980).

“Let me tell ya a little story,” says La Motta in the Special Features section of the 2-DVD boxed set of Raging Bull. “When it came out it was down the block here, a movie, two blocks here in my neighborhood right here where I live now. And I went with my ex-wife Vickie. And we get there, we watched the movie. And when I saw the movie I was a little depressed. I said to her, ‘Was I really like that?’ You know what she said to me? ‘You were worse.’”

Boxing is a sport, but boxing is no game, and the life and death struggles of its participants, in and out of the ring, are an ideal subject for cinema when inspiration is the purpose, or a walk on the wild side is the intent.

Filmdom’s fascination with boxing began with Thomas Edison, who filmed a sparring session between heavyweight champion Gentleman Jim Corbett and Peter Courtney in 1894, and over the years there have been several fine flicks about the fights: Alfred Hitchcock’s The Ring (1927); Body and Soul (1939) starring John Garfield; Robert Wise’s The Set-Up (1949); Champion (1949) starring Kirk Douglas; the Jack Palance TV version of Requiem for a Heavyweight (l956); The Harder They Fall (1956); and John Huston’s Fat City (1972).

At one end of the spectrum is the quintessential boxing fairytale, Rocky (1976), with its many offspring and endless revenue streams. At the other is Raging Bull.

Raging Bull, which the AFI lists as the fourth greatest American film of all time, was nominated for eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Robert De Niro as La Motta), Best Supporting Actor (Joe Pesci, in his second film, as Jake’s brother Joey), Best Supporting Actress (Cathy Moriarty as La Motta’s long-suffering spouse Vickie), Best Cinematography (Michael Chapman), Best Editing (Thelma Shoonmaker), and Best Sound (Frank Warner).

De Niro’s portrayal of La Motta is a tour de force that is still on tour, and among his many accomplishments in Raging Bull, not least of which was learning how to box, was gaining sixty pounds to portray Jake as he ballooned out of contention.

De Niro told the authors of Inside Oscar: The Unofficial History of the Academy Awards, “I can’t fake acting. I know movies are an illusion, and maybe the first rule is to fake it, but not for me. I’m too curious. I want to deal with all the facts of the character, thin or fat.” Putting on all that weight wasn’t easy. “You have to [eat] three times a day. You have to get up in the morning and just eat. Eat that breakfast, eat those pancakes, eat dinner, even of you’re not hungry. It’s murder.”

It may have been murder, but homicide isn’t to everyone’s taste. Pauline Kael, for example, wrote in The New Yorker on December 8, 1980, “What De Niro does in this picture isn’t acting, exactly. I’m not sure what it is. Though it may at some level be awesome, it definitely isn’t pleasurable . . . what I found myself thinking about wasn’t La Motta or the movie but the metamorphosis of De Niro.”

To which the esteemed British critic, Peter Ackroyd, countered: “The man without a soul has nowhere to go but outward.”

Raging Bull was De Niro’s baby from the start. The film’s producer, Irwin Winkler, recalled, “I constantly saw Bob De Niro walking around with this shopworn-looking book, and he never told me what it was, but he always carried it around. And one day he came over to me and he said, ‘I want you to take a look at this book.’ And I looked at it and it was the book on which Raging Bull ultimately was based.”

“There was something about it,” De Niro told Fred Ferretti in “The Delicate Art of Creating a Brutal Film Hero” (New York Times, November 23, 1980), “a strong thrust, a portrait of a direct man without complications. Something at the center of it was very good for me. I felt I could evolve into the character.”

At first, Scorsese didn’t want to make a film about boxing. When De Niro pressed Scorsese about adapting La Motta’s story into a film, he said, “A boxer? I don’t like boxing.” Scorsese told his biographer Mary Pat Kelly, “The only logical fight I ever saw was a Buster Keaton film. He’s in the ring with this big guy. The guy comes out swinging. Keaton goes to the corner and gets a chair and hits the guy with it. That was the only logical boxing scene I ever witnessed. The idea of ‘Let’s get two guys into the ring and let them hit each other’ was something I didn’t – couldn’t – grasp.”

But Raging Bull is about boxing only in part. It’s also about the crises of masculinity, family, and faith, the limitations of will, and the ambiguity of redemption.

Raging Bull begins in 1941 when Jake is a young up-and-comer and follows his rise and fall with clinical precision. La Motta is a body genius, but he’s an idiot savant, his mind a jumbled mass of confused impulses. It’s hard not to root for Jake at the same time as one despises him, and watching him self-destruct is like watching a train wreck in real time. Jake first spots 15-year-old Vickie, the love of his life and future wife, at a public swimming pool. After a whirlwind courtship, where Jake is at his most touching and vulnerable, they marry. Jake gets what he wants, Vickie gets more than she bargained for, and the middleweight contender and his glamorous bride are the toast of the town . . . as long as he keeps winning.

But at home Jake’s like a caged animal. Always on edge, he’s suspicious, paranoid, distrustful of everyone and everything, especially as it concerns Vickie.

With Jake’s rise in the rankings, the mob wants a piece of the action. Without the mob’s help there’s no way he gets his coveted shot at the crown. There are, however, conditions. At Joey’s urging, Jake agrees to take a dive, to go in the soup against a bum named Billy Fox.

Two years later, La Motta fights for the middleweight title held by Marcel Cerdan. Jake forces Cerdan to quit on his stool and is crowned middleweight champion of the world.

Jake celebrates his success by eating himself out of his weight class. He’s also more convinced than ever that his wife is sleeping around. Jake asks Joey, “Did you fuck Vickie?” Joey can’t believe his ears. “You really let this girl ruin your life,” he says. “Look at you. You’re killing yourself the way you eat, you fat fuck. She really did a job on you. You know how fuckin’ nuts you are?” Again Jake asks, “You fuck my wife?” “How could you ask me a question like that? How could you ask me? I’m your brother. You ask me that? Where do you get the balls big enough to ask me that?” Jake says, “Just tell me.” “I’m not gonna answer that. It’s stupid. You’re a sick bastard. You know what you should do? Try a little more fuckin’ and a little less eatin’. You won’t have troubles upstairs in your bedroom and you won’t take it out on everybody else.”

There’s no reasoning with Jake. His manhood has been established, and is constantly reinforced, by the violence of his surroundings, his profession, his very being, so he goes upstairs to confront Vickie and hurls accusations and punches. But Vickie, despite her black eye, swollen jaw, cut lip and wounded pride, despite her better judgment, decides to stick around.

Jake continues to fight, and has a series of bouts with Sugar Ray Robinson. Their final bout, in Scorsese’s deft hands, is a grotesque pas de deux where Jake, no longer at the top of his game, can only show the world how tough he is by enduring the beating of his life; albeit without going down.

A dozen fights later and Jake calls it quits. He fulfills a lifelong dream and opens a nightclub in Miami where he can play out his skewed ambitions as an overweight master of ceremonies spewing lame jokes (“I haven’t seen so many losers since my last fight at Madison Square Garden”) before a thankless crowd of celebrity gawkers.

La Motta’s fall is as precipitous as his rise. Vickie leaves him. Then he gets busted for introducing a 14-year-old girl to some men at his club. He’s convicted of pandering and thrown in the Dade County Stockade for a year.

“I lived a crazy lifestyle for a couple of years before this movie,” said Scorsese in Untouchable: A Biography of Robert De Niro, “which culminated in Raging Bull. The understanding of why I was doing it found its way into Jake’s character and I was able to deal with it on film . . . and got to the point where Jake was able to sit in front of the mirror and be kind to himself in the end. That was what the lesson of the film was for me.”

In the final scene of Raging Bull, bloated Jake La Motta is sucking on a cigar in his dressing room. He looks at himself admiringly in the mirror, and proceeds to recite Budd Schulberg’s immortal words from On the Waterfront (1954), where Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando/Jake La Motta/Robert De Niro) confronts his older brother Charley (Rod Steiger/Joey La Motta/Joe Pesci) in the backseat of a sedan.

“It wasn’t him, Charley. It was you. You remember that night at the Garden you came down in my dressing room and you said, ‘Kid, this ain’t your night; we're going for the price on Wilson?’ Remember that? ‘This ain’t your night?’ My night. I could’ve taken Wilson apart that night. So what happens? He gets a title shot outdoors in the ballpark, and what do I get? A one-way ticket to Palookaville. I was never no good after that night, Charley. It was like a peak you reach, and then it’s downhill. It was you, Charley. You was my brother. You should’ve looked out for me a little bit. You should’ve taken care of me just a little bit, instead of making me take them dives for the short-end money. You don’t understand. I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am. Let’s face it. It was you, Charley.”

Raging Bull is a cultural touchstone. It may be the anti-Rocky, the dark side of a crimson parable, but it’s Scorsese’s finest work, a dream ménage of subject, object, and auteur.

Save Us Joe Louis

I’m a tough nut to crack. I don’t like Rocky, love Raging Bull, must be a dark side of the moon kind of guy. I remember drifting through Michael Mann’s Ali almost half asleep, seemingly narcotized by the reverence. And when Mario Van Peebles appeared as Malcolm X like some bronze angel from on high, I flashed on Denzel Washington’s pulsating portrayal of Malcolm in Spike Lee’s X – and that’s when it hit me: Ali had all the right ingredients but one. It had the wrong director. What Ali needed was Spike Lee. So when I heard that the always controversial but all the more fascinating for it Spike Lee was developing a film on former heavyweight champion of the world Joe Louis, called Save Us Joe Louis, I was pleased as punch.

In the May 5, 2005 Variety, Army Archerd reported that “Lee and Budd Schulberg have been working (writing) the Joe Louis project for five years. It’s the story of the two Louis-Max Schmeling championship bouts (1936 and 1938) and the global ramifications. Lee says characters involved in the pic will include FDR, Hitler, Mussolini and Sugar Ray Robinson for starters, adding Schulberg was on hand for the 1938 fight. Lee tells me, ‘Bud (93) is going strong. This is a David Lean caliber film.’”

The film called Save Us Joe Louis (the working title was The War to Come) will focus on the rivalry and eventual friendship between heavyweight champions Joe Louis and Max Schmeling. Their lives and fights intersected while Europe was at war and the rest of the world was about to join in (World War II, 1939-1945), and Joe the American and Max the German became proxies for their rival nations. When Louis visited the White House at the President's request, FDR told him, “Joe, we need muscles like yours to beat the Nazis.” Joseph Goebbels, one of Hitler’s henchmen, wrote to Schmeling after he won the first fight with Louis on June 19, 1936, “I know you fought for Germany, that it was a German victory. We are proud of you. Heil Hitler!”

Such was the heated atmosphere of the Louis and Schmeling fights. After the climactic Louis-Schmeling rematch on June 22, 1938 in Yankee Stadium, the film Save Us Joe Louis will follow the fighters into their postwar and post-boxing lives. Max becomes a Coca-Cola magnate in Germany and lives to a ripe old age, but never shakes the Nazi stigma. Joe loses everything but his shirt and dignity and becomes a greeter at a Vegas casino.

Although the film is not yet in production, funding is where things stand, many big names, in addition to Spike Lee and Budd Schulberg, have been mentioned as possible players in Save Us Joe Louis. Terrence Howard is rumored to be interested in playing the champ, even though Vin Diesel was in the early running. Danny Glover has shown an interest in portraying Joe in his later years, while Samuel L. Jackson sees himself in several roles. Hugh Jackman has been penciled in as a maybe Max Schmeling, with Maximilian Schell possibly playing the German champ in his dotage. There has even been talk of Jodie Foster playing Max’s movie star wife Anny Ondra.

With so many of Hollywood’s heavy hitters warming up in the batter’s box for what to these ears sounds like the best boxing movie since Scorsese’s Raging Bull, I wanted to get the latest scoop and asked Budd Schulberg, Spike Lee’s co-screenwriter on Save Us Joe Louis, for an update.

Budd Schulberg has been around. He was born in New York City on March 27, 1914. His father, B.P. Schulberg, was a film pioneer, a Hollywood insider. Budd went to L.A. High, Deerfield Academy and Dartmouth College. He worked briefly as a screenwriter in Hollywood, before serving in the U.S. Navy during WW II. At war’s end, he was in charge the photographic evidence at the Nuremberg Trials. Schulberg got mired in the HUAC mess, but paid penance with some of the greatest screenplays ever written (and greatest films ever made): The Harder They Fall (1956), a thinly disguised account of the career of one-time heavyweight champion Primo Carnera (1933-1934), starring Humphrey Bogart as sleazy Eddie Willis, a down on his luck ex-sportswriter hired to shill for a promoter and his latest harebrained scheme, a clumsy giant named Toro Moreno; A Face in the Crowd (1957), a redemptive political object lesson starring Andy Griffith as “Lonesome” Rhodes, an Arkansas hillbilly with the gift of gab who plays the guitar and carries a mean tune, a good old boy who slimes his way to the top of the tower of power to become one of the worst bad old boys of all time; and the seminal On the Waterfront (1954), that twilight tale of love and regret, complacency and the mob, the dockside parable of broken promises, broken dreams and broken noses, a timeless noir flush with indelible lines like those spoken by ex-pug Terry Molloy, played to Academy Award winning perfection by Marlon Brando, lines written by screenwriting’s poet laureate, Budd Schulberg:

“It wasn't him, Charley, it was you. Remember that night in the Garden you came down to my dressing room and you said, ‘Kid, this ain't your night. We're going for the price on Wilson.’ You remember that? ‘This ain't your night!’ My night! I coulda taken Wilson apart! So what happens? He gets the title shot outdoors on the ballpark and what do I get? A one-way ticket to Palooka-ville! You was my brother, Charley, you shoulda looked out for me a little bit. You shoulda taken care of me just a little bit so I wouldn't have to take them dives for the short-end money… You don't understand. I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am, let's face it. It was you, Charley.”

I spoke with Schulberg at the Hammerstein Ballroom at the Manhattan Center in New York City where he was attending a recent Broadway Boxing show and asked about the genesis of the Spike Lee/Budd Schulberg Joe Louis film project. “It began actually at one of those pre-fight dinners at the Garden where we were both were and got to talking about Joe Louis and the Joe Louis film that had never been made,” said Schulberg. “We met again after that dinner and decided to do it. We did extensive research for three or four months. We did nothing but read about Joe Louis, Max Schmeling and so forth. Then for a year we worked on several different drafts.”

For Spike Lee, the director and race man, the life and career of Joe Louis, the anti-Jack Johnson by temperament and design, but no less heroic for it, must have been like manna from heaven.

“When Joe Louis started to make a name for himself in New York after beating Carnera and Baer,” Schulberg told me, “Time magazine had him on the cover with the words: ‘THE BLACK MOSES’ – and that’s the line we take.” The title of the film “Save Us Joe Louis” has an interesting origin. “That is based on the story of a young black kid that’s being executed,” explained Schulberg. “When they strapped him down, attaching all the things to him, he actually cried out, ‘Save me Joe Louis!’ In fact we have that scene in the film. Joe Louis was like a god really.

“One of our problems is that this is a much more costly film than Spike had been in the habit of making. His films have been about $35 to $40 million, and this would be almost twice as much. It’s a huge canvas,” Schulberg said. “Disney likes it and has offered about $35 million, roughly half of what we would need. So we’re looking for someone to match Disney.”

I asked Schulberg if he and Spike Lee had decided on a leading man, someone to play the singular “Brown Bomber.”

“Spike has talked to Terrence Howard about playing Joe Louis. We both agree he would be ideal. We’re aware of the fact that the new generation isn’t aware of Joe Louis in the way they are of Ali,” said Schulberg, “and we’re hoping the chemistry of an upcoming star like Terrence Howard will help us overcome that problem.”

Remembering Da Rock

Former middleweight champion Rocky Graziano personified Nu Yawk. He was born Thomas Rocca Barbella in a Rivington Street tenement in 1922 and came of age on the Lower East Side. Rocky was a rambunctious kid with a rap sheet by the age of ten. Seemingly born to raise hell, he was a truant, punk, thief and hoodlum before he hit adolescence.

In his autobiography Somebody Up There Likes Me, first published in 1954 and turned into a film noir movie about his film noir life two years later, Rocky describes Rocky as only Rocky can: “I was so crooked ya coulda used my arm for a corkscrew. I wasn’t a juvenile delinquent. I was just a kid with an impediment of the reach.”

Rocky wrote about growing up in New York’s slums: “We go from one roach palace to another on Tenth Street and First Avenue. This pad, even though they was supposed to have steam heat, go find it. Here, in the middle of winter, even the janitor banged on the pipes. And if you paid your rent on time, you could be arrested for suspicion of robbery.”

In response to being poor, Barbella hustled reality. “I never stole anything unless it started with ‘A.’ ‘A’ truck. ‘A’ car. ‘A’ payroll.”

Always in and out of trouble, it was Manhattan Island one day/Riker’s Island the next for the recidivist Rocca Barbella. In lieu of a long stretch in the joint, a judge took pity on the repeat offender and forced him into the military. If ever a match was made in hell it was the U.S. Army vs. Da Rock. In no time Rocky was AWOL. In no time Rocky was in the brig.

History was repeating itself and Barbella, as usual, never could do nothing right.

“There was always something I want to say but I never knew how, so I let my fists do the talking for me.”

Rocca Barbella finally saw the light. He loathed following orders and hated khaki and knew the soldier’s life was not for him, so he borrowed another GI’s name — Rocky Graziano — and went absent without leave forever.

“There was still one thing I had to find out for myself. I had to learn that I was only happy when I was fighting.”

Rocky Graziano turned pro on March 31, 1942 in Brooklyn with a second round kayo over Curtis Hightower. Rocky had seven more fights that year, eighteen fights in 1943, and twenty fights in 1944.

“The only time I’m straight about what I’m doing is when I’m in the ring taking punches and giving them.”

Rocky wasn’t a sweet scientist. Nope, not even close. He went for the jugular.

“You can look at my face and you’ll know it’s a tough business.”

Graziano could take a mean punch. He also loved to dish it out. He thought nothing of taking four, five, six shots to land a haymaker of his own.

“I give in to nothing or nobody. Cut me, break my bones, it was all the same.”
Rocky never let his lack of finesse deter him.

“Anybody hurts me gets busted in two and dumped in his own blood.”

Rocky was also, in keeping with a New York tradition, a dirty fighter.

“In a fight it’s the thumb in the eye, the knee in the balls. In pool you cheat on the score. In baseball you rap the base runner sliding in or use your spikes. In poker it’s the marked deck, loaded dice in craps. The important thing is not how you do it,” Graziano wrote. “The important thing is to win.”

His three explosive bouts with Tony Zale — Rocky lost the first in 1946, won the rematch and middleweight title in 1947, and lost the 1948 rubber match — are touchstones in the sweet science of bruising.

“There’s only one way to lick Zale. You gotta kill him.”

Rocky Graziano retired from boxing in 1952 with a 67-10-6 (52 KOs) record and commenced his career in showbiz. He morphed from a granite-chinned pugilist into a solid gold celebrity. He became a TV host and pitchman. He became a bestselling author. He was pals with Presidents and Hollywood stars.

In an amazing turnaround of fortune, Rocky was famous, he was adored, and he was rich.

“You know why I like to hang around millionaires?” he asked. “They never ask you for money.”

Boxing rescued a nowhere man and turned him into something fabulous, and his life, according to Da Rock, was some kinda miracle.

“I once heard a poem with religion in it and there was this line I never forgot: My cup runs over.”

Don King Backs Bush on Katrina

Don King has found a home on Fox News. He was on “Hannity & Colmes.” King also appeared on "Your World with Neil Cavuto," where he defended George Bush’s handling of Hurricane Katrina; the crawl at the bottom of the screen read: "Don King: Stop Blaming Pres. Bush For Katrina!"

In recognition of the one year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, Alessandra Stanley wrote in the New York Times that "not many ... officials were eager to go on television to defend the administration's handling of the relief effort," and that Cavuto was forced to turn "to boxing promoter Don King" to "praise the president."

Cavuto said to King, “I know you're friends with the president, like the president. He's getting a lot of bashing on Katrina. Deserved?”

"Well, the president is, I think, is a revolutionary president. He stands for inclusiveness. And not only that. He has given more women freedom than any other president in history. With the … Afghanistan … and Iraq ... and the Middle East, he has freed a lot of women. So, when the women's groups know," replied King in answer to Caputo’s question about Hurricane Katrina, "they must take note of that. A lot of women now, they've got the liberties and the freedoms, and they'll be able to vote and to be able to be active. It's because of George Walker Bush."

Cavuto tried to steer the questioning back to the subject of Bush and his handling of Katrina, and asked about the recent criticism of the president by Sen. John Kerry, and the very recent criticism of the president by giddy fitness guru Richard Simmons, which King had been listening to and watching while waiting in the Green Room before going on the air.

"Well," said King about the senator from Massachusetts, "I think that, you know, you have to take it for what it's really worth. You know, John Kerry, you know, I love the man. He's a great American, but he's a flip-flopper. So, when you're flip-flopping all the time, you don't know what stand he's really taking. So, we can disregard that."

About health nut Richard Simmons King said, "Richard Simmons is one of the greatest exercisers in the world. I adore him, his energy, his vitality to be able to exercise. But in running a country, and knowing all the different idiosyncrasies and appealing to all the people, such as George Bush is doing, Richard should stick with the exercising. Know what I mean?"

King described Katrina as "God's work" which revealed "that we had a Third World nation within the most, the most plush, luxurious, and wealthiest nation in the world. When you find that Katrina, the devastating part about Katrina, that we had people living in squalor and blight and want in Mississippi, in New Orleans and in the Mississippi Delta belt just as though they were in slavery in 1865. This is the exposure. Now, getting to take care of them, yes, little short there. You were tardy. But to recognize what it is now, and to have a mayor down there, that's Nagin, and they've got the money that they have put up to be able to do — "

Cavuto interrupted. "What do you think of Mayor Nagin?"

"I like Nagin," said King about New Orleans' controversial mayor. "I think sometimes, he, you know, he steps over the bar, but so's do everybody else. You know what I mean? I think he's down there. He got reelected. He stood the test of time."

King has given a lot of money for hurricane relief, something approaching a half mil, according to Cavuto, who then pointed out that King’s money, and the missing billions funneled from the government, seems not to have made it to New Orleans.

"That's a problem that we have to really try to get at," King said. "You know what I mean? To find out where the organizational dis-structure is, and put it into a proper fitting."

A good answer, but maybe not the answer Cavuto was looking for, because he asked King if he thought that money had been stolen.

"No, I don't think. It may, it may," King repeated, "being misplaced or not going through the pipelines as readily as it should. And I think that's where our attention should be. Just as we have all of these great organizations, the FBI, the CIA, Interpol, and the IRS, we ought to have enough brains to find out how to funnel and channel money back to where the necessary — "

Caputo interrupted again to press his point. "I've been down there, Don," he said with feeling. "They (the people) all say, 'God, we hate 'em (politicians) all.' Do you think that's justified?"

"No, that's not justified," replied King. Then he elaborated: "What we need to do is to find out what the problem is and attack that problem, which, you know, you have just demonstrated. And we must be able to resolve that — you know what I mean? Because this is a country of the people, for the people, and by the people. And, and this, this country here is one of the greatest nations in the world, called America. And so, now we should be able — with all of the MIT graduates, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Cambridge, Oxford — we should be able to identify what the problem is, and resolve the problem by handling it appropriately, not through making speeches and attacking the President because he's to, he's to blame for everything from the Johnstown Flood, to World War II, to the Lindbergh kidnapping. Anything that they can find, when they can't deal with it, they jump on George Walker Bush. But let me tell you this. Even the Democrats that are castigating, vilifying, and character-assassinating him are so happy when they go to bed to know that they have a man in the White House that says what he means and means what he says, and resolves the protection of this nation."

Cavuto told King that 90% of all African-American voters voted for Kerry, or against Bush, in the last presidential election, and so King’s embrace of Bush seems an anomaly at best, cynicism at worst.

King said that African-Americans had been "indoctrinated" and "totally bamboozled," but that "it will jibe once they understand. Bush has made inclusiveness. You know, he had Colin Powell. And there's the secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, as to security. You know, now, either Bush is totally insane, or he put two blacks — who are shiftless, worthless, no account, that we all lie, cheat and steal — you know what I mean? — into positions of security, for both those who are proponents of America and those who are opponents of America. And so, he is either a man of God. Now, you know that Moses, you know, God told Moses to go to the, to the pharaohs, say, 'Let my people go.' Well, he touched George Walker Bush, and said, 'Let my people in.'"

Joyce Carol Oates On Boxing

The archetype of a boxing writer is some hardboiled guy brimming with cynicism and chomping on a cigar. But that description only goes so far. Guys named Homer, Virgil, Egan, Byron, Hemingway and Mailer wrote about boxing, and some of them never touched tobacco.

Into this guild of two-fisted guardians protecting the last bastion of male exclusivity from the poisonous onslaught of women's lib comes a willowy creature full of talent who digs the fights. Joyce Carol Oates has three names and deserves every one of them. Not only is she one of America’s great novelists. She is also a savvy critic of the fight game.

Like many of us, Joyce Carol Oates came upon boxing by accident. Her father loved the game and left dog-eared copies of The Ring magazine lying around their home in upstate New York. Those old mags with their baroque graphics and black and white photos were as compelling then as they are today and they caught the attention of an inquisitive dark-eyed little girl.

"Years ago in the early 1950s when my father first took me to a Golden Gloves boxing tournament in Buffalo, New York," writes Oates, "I asked him why the boys wanted to fight one another, why they were willing to get hurt. As if it were an explanation my father said, 'Boxers don't feel pain quite the way we do.'"

"Pain," she adds, "in the proper context, is something other than pain."

Exposure to the fights at an impressionable age shades one's perspective forever: "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."

Even as an introspective child, Oates was an astute and wary observer of the rites of man, and she was repelled and attracted to the strange beauty and beautiful violence that made everyone's heart beat faster.

Much has happened since then. Ms. Oates has been much published and much praised for the quality of her oeuvre, but she never lost her fascination for and abhorrence of the manly art.

On Boxing by Joyce Carol Oates is as fine a book on the subject as any ever written. If she had written under a pseudonym, something butch rather than fem, her treatise on the world's cruelest sport would be praised to the high heavens, instead of being attacked as the work of some dame.

Oates writes: "Boxing is for men, and is about men, and is men. A celebration of the lost art of masculinity all the more trenchant for being lost."

Although women boxers now grace our ranks with alacrity and grace, the fight game is still, for better or worse, a boys club.

"'The Sweet Science of Bruising' celebrates the physicality of men," Oates writes wistfully, "even as it dramatizes the limitations, sometimes tragic, more often poignant, of the physical."

Oates recognizes, as many of us do, the connections between life and boxing: "Life is like boxing in many unsettling respects. But boxing is only like boxing."

Boxing might indeed be only like itself, but it found a home — albeit rancorous and uncongenial — in the broader category of sport.

"I have no difficulty justifying boxing as a sport," writes Oates, "because I have never thought of it as a sport. There is nothing fundamentally playful about it; nothing that seems to belong to daylight, to pleasure. At its moments of greatest intensity it seems to contain so complete and powerful an image of life — life's beauty, vulnerability, despair, incalculable and often self-destructive courage — that boxing is life, and hardly a mere game."

Joyce Carol Oates' On Boxing rubs many men the wrong way. It's not only the way Oates writes that troubles them. It's what she writes: "If boxing is a sport it is the most tragic of all sports because more than any other human activity it consumes the very excellence it displays."

Boxing is a hurting business, no one emerges unscathed, but Oates sees beauty in the ugliness. She also understands boxing better than boxing understands itself.

"Each boxing match is a story," she writes, "a unique and highly condensed drama without words. Because a boxing match is a story without words, this doesn't mean that it has no text or language, that it has no text or language, that it is somehow 'brute,' 'primitive,' 'inarticulate,' only that the text is improvised in action . . . Ringside announcers give to the wordless spectacle a narrative unity, yet boxing as performance is more clearly akin to dance or music than narrative."

Boxing may be akin to dance and music, but it wins the brutality sweepstakes — even allowing for classical ballet and the mosh pit — without much of a fight.

"The punishment — to the body, the brain, the spirit — a man must endure to become even a moderately good boxer is inconceivable to most of us whose idea of personal risk is largely ego-related or emotional."

Oates concedes that boxing, at least conceptually, is appalling, but less appalling than round after round of oppression, famine and war.

"The boxing match is the very image, the more terrifying for being so stylized, of mankind's collective aggression; its ongoing historical madness."

Joyce Carol Oates has written eloquently about former heavyweight champion Mike Tyson. Her Mike Tyson (1986) revisits Iron Mike on the cusp of his crowning glory: "Mike Tyson, a boy warrior, has become legendary, in a sense, before there is a legend to define him." Oates writes "the Roman boast 'munera sine missione' in the gladiatorial games — no mercy shown — would be perfectly logical to him."

Blood, Neon, and Failure in the Desert (1987) recalls Tyson's unification of the heavyweight title in 1986: Describing Mike's victory Oates writes, "Winning too can be a kind of failure." Then she adds prophetically, "Machismo punctures easily."

Tyson/Biggs: Postscript (1987) describes the beating Mike put on Tyrell Biggs: "Boxing's spectacle is degrading, no doubt — in the most primary sense of the word: a de-grading of the self; a breaking down, as if one's sensitive nerve-endings were being worn away . . . The single-mindedness of (Tyson's) ring style works to suggest that his grievance has the force of a natural catastrophe."

Rape and the Boxing Ring (1992) connects the dots between boxing, celebrity, race, sex and the criminal justice system: "Who is to blame for this most recent of sports disgraces in America? The culture that flings young athletes like Tyson up out of obscurity, makes millionaires of them and watches them self-destruct?"

Oates' Fury and Fine Lines (1997) examines Tyson’s assault on Holyfield in Vegas: "In his desperate apology for his desperate act, Tyson said he didn't know why he bit Holyfield's ear, he just 'snapped.' We can take him at his word. If there's an explanation, he doesn't know it." Describing the champ’s downward spiral, Oates writes that "Boxing is the appropriate sport for Nietzsche's terrifying aphorism: 'What someone is begins to be revealed when his talent abates, when he stops showing us what he can do.'"

Tyson's talent has abated, he has shown us what he can do, but he is no more boxing than a redwood is a forest. Boxing is layered, dense, complex, comprehensive and serious.

"The boxing match as 'serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude' — to refer to Aristotle’s definition of tragedy — is an event that necessarily subsumes both boxers, as any ceremony subsumes its participants."

Joyce Carol Oates, despite her gender, perhaps because of it, rips the veil of misconceptions disguising the sport of sports.

"Which returns us to the paradox of boxing, its obsessive appeal for many who find in it not only a spectacle involving spectacular feats of physical skill but an emotional experience impossible to convey in words; an art form," Oates writes, "with no natural analogue in the arts. Of course it is primitive, too, as birth, death, and erotic love might be said to be primitive, and forces our reluctant acknowledgement that the most profound experiences of our lives are physical events — though we believe ourselves to be, and surely are, essentially spiritual beings."

Is Tex Cobb the Real Contender?

I recently saw Tex Cobb sitting ringside at the Blue Horizon in Philadelphia and asked him for an interview. “I don’t do interviews,” Tex said. Then he laughed.

There was a time when Cobb was more talkative. He lived his life on the razor’s edge and left a trail of wisecracks in his wake. There’s a ton of evidence suggesting the former heavyweight contender once had something to say.

“If you screw up in tennis, it’s 15-love. If you screw up in boxing,” Cobb said several years ago, “it’s your ass, darlin’.”

Although he fought for the WBC heavyweight title in the Houston Astrodome against Larry Holmes in 1982, Tex never wore the crown. No one questioned his heart or ability to take a punch — Cobb had one of the best chins in history — but all agreed that Tex lacked something essential.

Randall “Tex” Cobb was born May 7, 1950 in Bridge City, Texas. He graduated from Abilene High School in 1968. He studied philosophy and played fullback at Abilene Christian College, where he was a backfield mate of Wilbert Montgomery, who went on to star for the Philadelphia Eagles.

Tex was good with his hands, but he was not a conventional Golden Glover. He dropped out of college at the age of 19 and commenced fighting in smoke-filled Texas saloons: “Beer mugs, knees, fists, elbows, and top of your head take the place of the Marquis of Queensberry Rules,” recalled Cobb.

Cobb made a name for himself as a kickboxer rated by the PKA (Pro Karate Association). He was tough, he was a draw, and he went to Joe Frazier’s gym on Broad Street in North Philly for some formal training. Tex picked up a few fundamentals and gave the amateurs his best shot, but his best shot was not good enough: “I only had two fights as an amateur and lost both of them. Heck, I figure I didn’t have much of a future there, so I turned pro.”

His professional debut was on January 21, 1977. Tex scored a first round knockout over Pedro Vega in El Paso.

By the end of 1979, he reeled off thirteen straight wins, all of them by kayo.

“All I want to do is hit somebody in the mouth,” Cobb confessed. “It’s a whole lot easier than working for a living.”

His next fight was against a Cleveland heavyweight named Terry Mims. In 1980 Tex went the distance with Cookie Wallace. Two fights later he punched his way into the heavyweight rankings with an eighth round TKO over Earnie Shavers at the Joe Louis Arena in Detroit.

“The toughest thing to do in the ring is restrain myself. I want to knock the other guy in the groin,” said Cobb, “but I know I can’t do that.”

Three months later Tex dropped a controversial split decision to ex-champion Ken Norton, but Cobb was in the mix: “If I were any more serious, they’d make me a national disease.”

In 1981 he gave a good account of himself in a losing effort against Michael Dokes at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. Two fights later, Tex muscled rugged Bernardo Mercado over ten rounds. That victory set the stage for the big fight with the heavyweight champion of the world Larry Holmes.

When asked before the fight if he was afraid of Larry, Tex replied, “What the hell is this guy going to do to me? Hit me? You think I got all this scar tissue running into parked cars?”

The two men met on November 26, 1982 in Houston, Texas, and Holmes beat Cobb to within an inch of his life. For fifteen lopsided rounds, the champ pounded the challenger. Larry didn’t drop his opponent — Tex was too damn stubborn for that — but at one point Cobb turned to the ref and said “You’re white. Help me.” The ref may have been white, but the ref didn't help, so Tex stood there and took shots.

Ringside announcer Howard Cosell was calling the fight. “I have been called obnoxious, bombastic, sarcastic, confrontational and a know-it-all,” Cosell said about himself. “Of course, I am all these things.” Cosell threw up his hands in disgust at Holmes vs. Cobb and quit boxing because of the fight. Cosell said during the bout: “This is brutalization.”

Tex explained away the loss (“When I got up I stuck to my plan — stumbling forward and getting hit in the face”) but took pride in the fact that he was the man who drove Howard Cosell from the fight game for good. Cobb said it was “My gift to boxing.”

Tex won his next four fights. James “Buster” Douglas, soon to become undisputed heavyweight champ, beat Tex on points. Cobb met Michael Dokes in a rematch and dropped a four-round technical decision. Tex lost his next two fights, a verdict to Eddie Gregg and a one round kayo to a club fighter named Dee Collier.

Tex Cobb was on the slide and took 1986 off to regroup. It was about time: “I figure I’ve been hit in the head with everything ‘cept a ‘54 Pontiac.”

Tex made the inevitable comeback in 1987. He racked up nine wins in a row without a loss, setting up the March 1, 1988, bout in Memphis, Tennessee against ex-titleholder Leon Spinks. Although near exhaustion at the end, Tex hung on to squeak out a ten-round point decision over the aged former champion.

Even though Tex said “It never bothers me to hit people I like,” getting hit by people he liked was another story, so he took a second hiatus, this time for three years, after his fight with Neon Leon.

Cobb made another comeback in 1992, scoring a first round TKO against Paul Barch, in a bout that was shrouded in controversy. Barch sold his side of a sordid story to Sports Illustrated, claiming he went into the soup for Tex while both men were high on cocaine. Cobb denied everything and sued the magazine for libel. Tex won the lawsuit, which was overturned on appeal, but it was definitely case closed when he uttered these immortal words: “It’s one thing to call me white and slow. But to call me a fat, cowardly, cocaine-snorting, fight fixing cheat? Who are they calling fat?”

Tex continued to soldier on. He won his last eight fights, the final one on May 7, 1993. Cobb retired with a record of 43-7-1 (36 KOs).

“I’m not standing up for the great state of Texas or the state of the white race or any of that,” Cobb said. “I’m a guy making a living.”

Tex had a second career in Hollywood, part of which ran concurrently when he was fighting, but he and LA were like snake oil and water.

“I find it a drag being sensitive twelve hours a day,” he said. “I’ve got thirty minutes of sensitivity in me in the morning, thirty minutes in the evening and that’s it. I’m more at home kicking butt.”

Despite his attitude, perhaps because of it, Tex Cobb was a character actor in demand for several years. He has over two-dozen TV and film appearances to his credit, including appearances in The X Files, Miami Vice, In the Heat of the Night, Married...with Children, Uncommon Valor, Raising Arizona, The Champ, Golden Child, Police Academy 4, Diggstown, Naked Gun 33 1/3 and Ace Ventura: Pet Detective.

“People always ask if success is going to change me,” said Cobb, “and I tell them I sure hope so.”

Being on the west coast, instead of the east coast where he now lives, had some advantages.

“Hollywood’s a great place to vacation, but I wouldn’t want to live there. The people don’t have a concept of reality,” the former contender said. “Their reality is how good they pretend.”

But since Cobb was acting for a living, pretending in LA became a way of life.

“I love acting,” Cobb said. “It’s easy for me. All you do is look in the camera, smile, and lie with charm. I learned how to do that watching Don King promote fights.”

Many people have it out for Don King, and vice-versa, and it sounds like Cobb might be one of them: “Don King is one of the great humanitarians of our time. He has risen above that great term prejudice. He has screwed everybody he has ever been around. Hog, dog or frog, it don’t matter to Don. If you got a quarter, he wants the first twenty-six cents.”

Tex was never champion, but he got to deal with the top rank of the game.

“Don King is like everybody else in boxing. He’s a liar, a thief, a murderer and a racketeer. And a con man. But there ain’t anybody as bad as Bob Arum. That New York City Jew lawyer will make you hate city folks, Jews, and lawyers in the same day.”

Randall “Tex” Cobb is alive and well and exercising his right to remain silent in Philadelphia.

Bullish on the Bronx Bull

In a sport full of madmen, former middleweight champ Jake La Motta holds pride of place. Fights fans love him because he was tougher than tough. Wiseguys hate him because he was a rat. Culture vultures love Jake because Martin Scorsese made a movie of his life.

“My life story is now on film,” La Motta said in an interview several years ago. “The movie is called Raging Bull and I am played by superstar Robert De Niro. I told the producer I’d like to play myself, but he said, ‘Jake, you’re not the type.’”

Not every prizefighter gets to watch the movie of his life. He has to be very special, or very wild and crazy, and Jake La Motta was all that, and a good deal more.

Jake La Motta was born on July 10, 1921, to hardscrabble beginnings in the Bronx. “We were so poor that my old man would go outside every Christmas and shoot his gun,” Jake wrote in his autobiography, “then come back and tell us that Santa Claus has committed suicide.”

La Motta remembered how it was: “I read the Romans had bread and circuses. We had home relief and boxing.”

Difficult, aggressive, combative, always itching for a fight, Jake was a nut job from the start, but this violent man was redeemed, insofar as any man is redeemed, by boxing. But it took a lotta bungled crimes and a lotta busted heads before he saw the light: “I was a bum and I lived like a bum in a bum neighborhood.”

Jake may have been a bum, but at least he was a bum who could punch. He went legit on March 31, 1941 at the age of eighteen and had twenty bouts in his first year as a pro: “I had more fights in one year than many of these guys have in their entire careers.”

In 1942 Jake fought and lost to the legendary Sugar Ray Robinson. In 1943 he fought Robinson two times in the same month, losing the first fight but winning the rematch — becoming the first man to defeat Sugar Ray. La Motta, who memory may not be the best, remembered those fights as though they were yesterday: “I fought Ray Robinson so many times, it’s a wonder I don’t have diabetes.”

That same year, Jake had the first of four fights in seven months with low blow artist Fritzie Zivic. Those pugs pounded each other silly in Pittsburgh. “A fighter goes into the ring with one thing on his mind,” wrote La Motta, “to beat the shit out of the other guy before he beats the shit out of him.”

In 1947 La Motta took a dive during a bout with Billy Fox to set up a shot at the middleweight crown, but Jake was so fake that a scandal ensued and he lost his license to fight.

He was subpoenaed to Washington, DC, to testify about going in the soup before Congress. “I never did like Washington,” wrote Jake. “All those over-sized buildings and monuments made me feel like some dumb bug crawling around a pyramid or something.”

A Senate Anti-Trust and Monopoly Subcommittee investigating corruption in boxing turned La Motta into a dark star.

“Senators — who the hell knew from Senators? All I knew was back rooms and stinking catacombs with creeps and mobster wiseguys.”

During his swearing in before the Senate, La Motta swore to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help him God, and Jake was as good as his word: “You win some, you throw some.”

La Motta got his shot at the middleweight crown in Detroit on June 16, 1949 against the French-Algerian champion Marcel Cerdan. Jake took Cerdan apart that night, forcing the champ to quit on his stool after ten.

The Bronx Bull defended his crown twice — including one of the greatest come-from-behind victories of all time against Laurent Dauthille in 1950 — before losing the middleweight title back to Robinson the next year.

“Robinson never got me down,” Jake remembered. “If the referee hadn’t stopped the fight, Robinson would’ve collapsed from hitting me.”

Jake La Motta retired from boxing on June 2, 1954 at the age of 34 with an 83-19 record (30 KOs). Then the fun began.

Jake opened a nightclub in Miami Beach and for a time was the toast of the town. “My wife, Vickie, never knew I was an alcoholic till one night I came home sober,” wrote the champ. “But as I always say, you’re never drunk if you can lay on the floor without holding on.”

Jake’s marriage to Vickie was rocky. So was their divorce. “She always complained she didn’t have anything to wear,” Jake observed. “I never believed her until I saw her pictures in Playboy.”

The vice squad set up La Motta at his club. They fixed up a real live doll, made her all pretty and nice, and dangled her like jailbait in front of the champ. His bloodshot eyes and addled brain must have deceived him that night, because he thought she looked twenty-one; funny, she felt twenty-one. Jake introduced her to some men at the bar, and those cats had the time of their lives.

La Motta was busted, jailed and railroaded through the system for pimping a fourteen-year-old girl.

After his release from prison, La Motta attempted reforming. He tried, at least at first, keeping his hands to himself. “I’m jaded,” admitted Jake. “If I never see another boob it ain’t gonna bother me. Impervious? I flattened a bum named Impervious in Buffalo.”

La Motta also began a sputtering career as an actor, emcee and comedian. Wobbling on stage one night, a mike in one hand, a drink in the other, a cigar between his lips, Jake’s lame retort to handful of hecklers pretty much sums up the spirit of those days: “Ya know, it’s guys like you that are gonna force me to make a comeback.”

Jake’s comeback came in unusual ways. His autobiography, Raging Bull, was published in 1970. The movie of the same name came out ten years later and made film history.

When all is said and done, it’s hard to know what to make of Jake La Motta, so maybe the Bronx Bull deserves the last word.

“You know what a geek is? You throw a geek a raw chicken and he’ll eat it, feathers and all, and everyone outside the cage will laugh and applaud. Was I a champ or a geek? Only God knows what I was.”