On Boxing and Writing

On Boxing and Writing — by Juan Pablo Gargiulo

I'll never forget the time I punched a professional boxer in the face. It was October 2013, I had recently graduated from the University of Texas, and I was preparing for my debut as an amateur boxer. I showed up to Richard Lord's Gym every day to hit the heavy bags and get in a few rounds of sparring.

Some days had more sparring partners than others. One Saturday morning, a couple weeks before my fight, the gym was unusually empty. The only other guy willing to work with me was a professional boxer named Daniel. I laughed and told him no thanks, but he insisted. "Get in the ring," he said grimly.

We put on groin protectors, gum shields, hand wraps, and sixteen-ounce gloves. I put on my headgear; he did not. The rules of the three rounds were simple: three minutes; I was to try and hit Daniel, and he was not to hit me. Simple enough.

When the buzzer sounded, I stepped out and threw out a few cautious, half-assed jabs. He dodged them easily, bobbing his head left and right, rolling his eyes at me.

"Come on, man," he said, "snap it out!"

I threw out a few more, this time with a little more pace. Still no contact. He was always a move ahead. Ten more punches, this time a flurry of left hooks, right hooks, uppercuts, and overhand rights — nothing but air. After three minutes, the bell sounded, and I walked back to my corner, shoulders burning with exhaustion. Over a hundred punches thrown and not one had connected. Or come remotely close.

I refused to believe sixty seconds had passed when the buzzer sounded to signal the second round. I stepped out and continued throwing wild, looping punches with faint hope of making contact.

I threw luckless punches for about forty-five seconds, trying my best to look at which directions Daniel was moving. Then an ingenious idea hit me: why not aim where his head isn't? I stepped back and stared down my opponent, almost a decade older and twenty pounds heavier. I stepped forward with my left foot and threw jab, jab, then a wild right hook aimed a full foot to the right of his head.

I made solid contact, hitting him square in the nose, just as he had moved his head in that direction to avoid the predictable right cross.

"Oh my God, I'm so sor—" I began, before a fist sent my head snapping backward. It felt like a baseball bat.

"Don't apologize! One more minute."

I had hit him. I couldn't believe it. And I had put some power on it.

The second round ended. The third round was much like the first: I fanned Daniel with my gloves for three minutes.

My careers as a writer and boxer began at the same time and, as a consequence, the two have become inseparable in my mind. The first article I published was for an online magazine. It was titled: "Seven Lessons I Learned from Getting Punched in the Face." A month later, I published another article titled: "Ten Things You'll Learn from Writing Every Day." As I wrote the latter, I was reminded of the former, and I noticed similarities between writing and boxing. Both require tremendous amounts of self-discipline. Both require living in obscurity, working — and hoping — for success long before any measurable amount can be seen or felt. Both are public exhibitions where one is laid bare in front of an audience, exposed, vulnerable for mockery. Both rely on momentum; boxing literally, writing figuratively through perseverance and output. Both require becoming a student of the craft: just as an amateur boxer must throw thousands of punches and run thousands of miles before he or she becomes a professional, so must an amateur writer put in the hours at the desk. A professional writer must necessarily become a professional reader, and professional boxers must become professional spectators. Finally, both careers are filled with failures and disappointments. And learning how to find the will to keep going.

"Why are so many writers obsessed with boxing?"

I asked myself this as I came across yet another instance of the sweet science in literature. It was inescapable. Homer wrote boxing into The Iliad and Hemingway wrote it into The Sun Also Rises. Authors ranging from Norman Mailer, to James Baldwin, to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, to Nellie Bly wrote at length on boxing. Oscar Wilde, Lord Byron, and Teddy Roosevelt not only wrote about boxing, but they stepped into the ring and threw leather themselves. There has always been a link between boxing and writing. But why?

Joyce Carol Oates described a brilliant boxing match as "quicksilver in its motions, transpiring far more rapidly than the mind can absorb." A great boxing match, she observed, has the power that Emily Dickinson attributed to great poetry: you know it's great when it takes the top of your head off.

Anyone who reads Oates's On Boxing will likely find themselves asking the same question I did: why would she care about boxing? What could possibly be her connection to the sport?

She answered the question in the book. When she was a little girl, her father, Frederic Oates, an amateur boxing enthusiast, took her to Golden Gloves tournaments in Buffalo, New York. She remembered those outings with her father, those smoke-filled arenas where, at eleven years old, she was the only girl in the audience. She never forgot sitting with her father and his male friends and their sons, watching the male boxers and having a distinct feeling of "otherness." That feeling always stayed with her.

Oates identified in her writing the idea that, like a dancer, the boxer is his body and is entirely identified with and by it. "And that body is identified with a certain weight," she writes. A boxer is both in and out of control; out of control, to some extent, with regards to his size, and in control with regards to his physical fitness. A boxer works to control what he can, and strives to overcome what he cannot.

"Life is like boxing in many unsettling respects," Oates writes, "but boxing is only like boxing." Life can be compared to boxing, but not the other way around. If you watch five hundred fights you have seen exactly that — five hundred fights. Their common denominator, which does exist, isn't what's important.

One of the most memorable moments of On Boxing is a scene where Oates describes two young boxers standing in the ring. "So evenly matched they might be twins," Oates writes, and the fight is absolutely atrocious. The crowd screams at the boys, asking if they learned to box earlier that morning. The fight ends, the final bell sounds, and one of the boys moves to his corner and holds his glove aloft. Oates describes how the crowd boos and jeers at him, but he doesn't seem to raise his fist in response or in defiance — he simply does it because he has seen others before him do it. As if to say: I'm here, I made it, I did it. "Get out of the ring, assholes!" someone in the crowd shouts. "Go home!" The crowd laughs as they walk back to the dressing rooms in their robes, one after the other. Why had they thought they were boxers? Oates posits.

In several short stories about boxing, such as some famous ones by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle featuring the protagonist Montgomery, it is the motivation of the boxer that is emphasized; it's not that the pugilist necessarily wants to step into the ring, he often needs to step into the ring. For money, fame, recognition, whatever — although money is the overwhelming motivator for most boxers in real life and in literature. In some stories, the details are rich, the imagery is verbose, and the reader can relive the blow-by-blow of the fight. In other stories, the fights are cast aside and the atmosphere surrounding the boxers takes center stage. Suddenly, it's not the fight itself that makes the night so much as the idea of "Fight Night" and what it means to the spectators, some of whom may grow up to become the next Oates or Hemingway.

Jack London, known for his novels White Fang and The Call of the Wild, was transfixed by boxing's grace and brutality. He covered fights as a journalist throughout his life, and he wove his obsession into his fiction. His 1915 report on the fight between Jack Johnson and Jim Jeffries is one of the finest pieces of boxing — or sports — journalism ever written. "Dark and somber and ominous was that face, solid and stolid and expressionless, with eyes that smoldered and looked savage. The man of iron, grim with determination, sat down in his corner." Those haunting descriptions are still relevant today when describing the warriors in the ring.

Ralph Ellison wasn't afraid to add the salty language of boxing to his prose to set the scene. Modern boxing is no longer the gentleman's sport that it was in the era of the twenty-round Queensberry rules brawls. Whether you are in the front row at Madison Square Garden or mid-bleacher at your local Golden Gloves tournament, you are guaranteed to hear boxing's famously salty language — in English and Spanish. Anthony Bourdain once described the unique language among line cooks at a restaurant as "like haiku or kabuki, defined by established rules with a rigid traditional framework in which one may operate." Same with ringside talk.

Leonard Gardner's novel Fat City was hailed by Denis Johnson as "a book so precisely written and giving such value to its words that I could almost read it with my fingers, like Braille." Gardner's 1969 novel was a story of love, ambition, disappointment, and hope — everything that the sweet science, at its core, is about. When Ernie Munger, a young, new boxer, steps into the ring to spar for the first time at The Lido Gym, the ensuing conversation between the rookie and his corner man are among the finest scenes in American literature. "You got a good left. Understand what I mean? Step in with that jab. Understand what I mean? Get your body behind it. Bing! Understand what I mean?" Boxing trainers are rarely known for their eloquence, but they're full of boxing wisdom, and in that corner when you're too exhausted or dazed to think straight, when you have seconds to regroup before the fists start flying again, those guys are your brain.

As I wrote about Lord's Gym, I felt like the third man walking on the moon. This literary ground bore the names of two writers before me: Adam Pitluk and Frederick Wiseman. Pitluk's biography of Jesús Chavez, Standing Eight, was published in 2007 and briefly wrote about Richard Lord and the gym in Austin. Despite his sometimes less-than-accurate artistic embellishments, he set the bar. This project was partially born out of the desire to go more in depth into the gym, partly using Pitluk's book as a launching point.

Frederick Wiseman's 2010 documentary, Boxing Gym, doesn't contain an engaging narrative, but the interviews with Richard Lord and the details captured in the gym are invaluable. To hear Richard tell a story is to hear a man with a superhuman memory for detail. "No way, that's some bullshit," he said when I asked him about whether it was true that he ran around Town Lake with water in his mouth, breathing through his nose. "It was Listerine." The details throughout this film — the way Richard speaks, the way the gym sounds, the way the boxers, men and women of all walks of life, move their limbs — captured the music of the gym and served as an invaluable resource.

I don't know why I box. Or why I write about it. Perhaps it is an unconscious appreciation of something I know to be bigger than myself, something I can't fully understand, something in the realm of the spiritual. Boxing is special. Boxers present audiences with a unique opportunity — a unique intimacy that writers, musicians, or artists cannot emulate. It's a voyeuristic performance; a dialogue of reflexes. To watch two fighters push each other to their absolute limits is more than sport. Those of us who box, and those of us who are obsessed with boxing, never wonder to ourselves: "Why boxing?" The stranger question to me, to us boxers, is: "Why not boxing? Have you ever tried it?"

As a writer, whenever I find myself steeped in failure or rejection, I come back to that Saturday morning in the ring with Daniel. I swung hundreds of times and hit him once — a terrible percentage, granted, but I can still say I punched a professional boxer in the face. Writing and boxing are all about failure: for every visible success, there are a thousand invisible failures.

In writing and in boxing one should enter the ring with a certain expectation of failure. It's the price of learning. Neither writing nor boxing are for the faint of heart; both require thick skin, brass balls, and no small amount of craziness, but I can think of no finer pursuits in life. Give boxing, or writing, or both, a shot. Who knows? Maybe, just maybe, you'll get lucky and land something.

JPG, 20 May 2016