When boxing was a writer’s sport, Norman Mailer, who passed away last year at the age of 84, gave writing about boxing a good name. He was never a boxing guy, per se, but his contributions to the canon, although infrequent, challenge that of his illustrious peers. Mailer didn’t only write about boxing. His interests were too wide, his writing too eclectic, for easy categorization. Still, he understood the fights, and his writing bolstered the premise that boxing is, among other things, a thinking man’s art.
As a public figure for a half-century, Mailer made more missteps than most men in his position would have dared. There was, for example, his alarmingly hit or miss oeuvre; his quixotic campaign for mayor of New York City; his six marriages, the second of which ended when he stabbed his wife; his literary spats with the good, bad and ugly writers of his generation; and his Jack Abbott episode, where Mailer finagled the release of a felon with literary gifts from prison, who after six weeks as a free man killed a waiter in a dispute over a restroom.
In addition to those faux pas, Mailer tended, with all the consciousness he could muster, toward the abrasive. He was egotistical, arrogant, pigheaded, pugnacious, a born provocateur, but he fought the power, tried to rouse the sleepy from their slumber, and he wrote like a dream.
Although Mailer’s greatest works—“Armies of the Night” (1968), “Of a Fire on the Moon” (1970), “The Executioner’s Song” (1979)—are not about boxing, it’s his writing about the fight game that concerns us here. An early boxing essay is included in a collection called “The Presidential Papers of Norman Mailer” (1963). It first appeared in Esquire titled “Ten Thousand Words a Minute,” and while it’s a wild and wooly ride through the dense underbrush of Mailer’s erudition, the essay focuses in large part on boxing; the 1962 heavyweight title fight between Sonny Liston and Floyd Patterson; and the ring death of Benny (Kid) Paret at the hands of Emile Griffith at Madison Square Garden in 1964.
Mailer wrote of Floyd Patterson, “I had an affection for Patterson which started early. When he was bad he unbelievably bad, he was Chaplinesque, simple, sheepish, eloquent in his clumsiness, sad like a clown, his knees looked literally to droop. He would seem precisely the sort of shy, stunned, somewhat dreamy Negro kid who never knew the answer in class. But when he was good, he seemed as fast as a jungle cat.”
About Sonny Liston Mailer wrote, “Liston now emerged from the depths of the clubhouse and walked slowly toward us. He was wearing a dark-blue sweat suit, and he moved with the languid pleasure of somebody who is getting the taste out of every step. First his heel went down, then his toe. He could not have enjoyed it more if he had been walking barefoot through a field. One could watch him picking the mood out of his fingertips and toes. His handlers separated before him. He was a Presence.”
The fatal rubber match between Griffith and Paret was broadcast live on national TV. It was terrible on the tube. Norman Mailer was ringside:
“Some part of his death reached out to us. One felt it hover in the air. He was still standing in the ropes, trapped as he had been before, he gave some little half smile of regret, as if he were saying, ‘I didn’t know I was going to die just yet,’ and then, his head leaning back but still erect, his death came to breathe about him, and he sank slowly to the floor. He went down more slowly than any fighter had ever gone down, he went down like a large ship which turns on end and slides second by second into its grave. As he went down, the sound of Griffith’s punches echoed in the mind like a heavy ax in the distance chopping into a wet log.”
Mailer’s “King of the Hill,” his treatise on the Fight of the Century between Ali and Joe Frazier in 1971, is exemplary writing about two great fighters and the first of their three classic bouts.
“The closer a heavyweight comes to the championship,” Mailer wrote, “the more natural it is for him to be a little insane, secretly insane, for the heavyweight champion of the world is either the toughest man in the world or he is not, but there is a real possibility he is. It is like being the big toe of God. You have nothing to measure yourself by.”
Mailer’s greatest accomplishment in the boxing genre, and by consensus one of his finest books, is “The Fight” (1975), his first-person account of the Ali-Foreman Rumble in the Jungle. “The Fight” is a romp of a read from the first page to the last, but if you like your boxing straight no chaser, you might want to drown your sorrows in another tome.
Mailer on Don King: “How he could talk… Once when one of his lesser-known fighters hinted that a contract was unsatisfactory and King could get hurt, Don leaned forward—fond was he of telling this story—and said, ‘Let us not bullshit each other. You can leave here, make a call, and have me killed in half an hour. I can pick up the phone as you leave and have you offed in five minutes.’”
Mailer on Ali: “His master’s assortment leaped forth, jabs with a closed glove, jabs with an open fist, jabs with a twist of the glove to the right, jabs with a turn to the left, then a series of right-hand leads offered like jabs, then uppercuts and easy hooks from a stand-up position, full of speed off both hands. With each punch, the glove did something different, as if the fist and wrist within the glove were also speaking.”
Unlike King and Ali, George Foreman “lived in silence. Flanked by bodyguards to keep…handshakers away, he could stand among a hundred people in the lobby and be in touch with no one. His head was alone. Other champions had a presence larger than themselves. They offered charisma. Foreman had silence.”
Mailer once said about himself, “I seemed to have turned into a slightly punch-drunk and ugly club fighter who can fight clean and fight dirty, but likes to fight.”
Norman Mailer died as he lived, writing and fighting the good fight until the final bell.
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