On Boxing

Rating:
Summary: The Lady Knows Boxing
Review: And she's had long meaningful conversations with a pre-incarceration Mike Tyson. Before the ear biting and the crotch grabbing etc. The two chapters (actually essays) I highly recommend here are the one about Tyson and "Boxing: The Cruelest Sport." This is essentially a collection of essays Oates has written about boxing so they're a mixed bag. But it's worth getting for the two I mentioned.

Rating:
Summary: Of Champion Quality
Review: Despite some pretentiousness, many redundancies, and an often poorly stitched together narrative, Joyce Carol Oates brings a scalpel-like insight to the incomparable phenomenon that is boxing. She will deepen your understanding -- and take your breath away.

I wonder what Miss Oates thinks of the apparent growing popularity of female boxers (surely, the oxymoron non pareil). My guess is that she sees it for precisely what it is -- political correctness carried to its ultimate and inevitable fatuity. A woman who boxes may be to drool over by lipstick lesbians, but she will always be that absurd and grotesque anomaly -- a woman who boxes. The one thing she'll never be is a "Boxer."

Perhaps another book will be forthcoming from Miss Oates, one that will explore this perversion of the "Sweet Science." My guess is not -- why waste time on the ridiculous when, in "On Boxing," she has spoken so well on what is sublime.

Rating:
Summary: The Manassa Mauler vs. Plato
Review: I agree with the Swedish reviewer. This book is too cosmic for my tastes. In a funny way I think Oates is aware of the trap she has set for herself. At the outset she says, "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,' the Catholic writer Flannery O'Connor once remarked, `I'd say the hell with it.'" (Pp. 4-5.)

Having said that a fight is a fight, that generalizations are secondary, that symbolism is worthless, she proceeds to play philosopher for half the book. There is no relief from the earnestness. However, when she gets around to Mike Tyson, the pre-road-rage Tyson, I found a lot more to grab onto. Her rather sweet portrayal of the young champ is satisfyingly concrete, and certainly a kind of bizarre period piece in light of subsequent events in Tyson's life.

Coincidentally I read the following passage in American Heritage Magazine while I was reading this book. It's from an interview with sportswriter W.C. Heinz, now 86. Without coming within ten feet of a word like "homoerotic," it illustrates one of Oates's points and finishes with a memorable, upbeat image:

"When two fighters fight a hell of a battle, there's later a liking between them. This was true of Joe Walcott and Rocky Marciano. Marciano took him out in the thirteenth round of their great first championship fight, but Joe also knocked down Rocky in the first round. Rocky had never been down before, and the next day I was interviewing him and I asked him, "What were you thinking when you went down?" He had a wonderful fighter's remark. He said: "I was thinking, `This guy can really punch. This will be one hell of a fight.'"

I enjoy this kind of writing better. To my way of thinking, the deep thoughts come off better when left unstated, or sprinkled in carefully within more definite imagery like this.



Rating:
Summary: Take It From a Fighter
Review: I am still stunned that a person who has never been in the ring could have gained insights into boxing as powerful as the ones Oates pulled together in this book. And I'm grateful (and stunned) that a woman could be as sympathetic, not just to fighters, but to men and manhood, as Oates has managed to be in this book.

I am a serious amateur fighter and a sparring partner to the professional fighters I train with. I do gym work or road work five days a week with a former-professional trainer who was also a two-time NY Golden Gloves champion and junior Olympian. I spar Glovers and pros and I love it. I understand boxing and the love for boxing. The gist of my review here is this: After I read this book I realized I didn't understand my love for boxing -- where it comes from and what it all means and what it is I'm doing exactly -- as well as Joyce Carol Oates does. This woman is amazing to me. I've never read her fiction, but I will.

The first section of this book, the one in which Oates seemingly tries to take on boxing and what it means from every imaginable angle, is best. This is one of those very, very few books that made me fold down corners so that I can easily return to specific passages. I don't know if non-fighters will really understand this book, or if many fighters will ever bother to read it. But I'm damned glad I did and damned glad Ms. Oates is out there writing.

Rating:
Summary: Not what you might expect
Review: I don't know what it is about Oates that makes so many, be they critics, fellow writers, or just average Joes and Janes, instinctively start spewing superlatives. Granted, some of what she's written is very good, but there are also those rather mediocre titles that seem to be praised to the skies for no other reason than that they're supposed to be, and that indeed appears to be the case with this little piece. It's amusing and it's informative, sure, but some kind of masterwork? Please.

'On boxing' is best when Oates focuses on the hard facts, like who did what where and when. That was not was I was looking for when I first got my hands on it, but it's still better - by far - than the parts where she tries to decipher the meaning of it all, which read like undergraduate assignments in pretentiousness. As is common with knowledgeable writers, Oates cannot help involving complex notions to say simple things. A boxer is not knocked out, he is knocked out of Time (yes, big 'T'). The opponent is not the opponent, he is the Other (yes, big 'O'). This is a practice I absolutely loathe. What we've got here is supposed to be a book about boxing, and if I wanted 'Being and Nothingness' I'd have bought it. Don't get me wrong - certainly boxing could make for some profound commentary on the nature of humanity, which, I presume, is what she was aiming at (although I don't think she'd admit it). I'm just saying that with what she finally came up with you just keep wondering why she can't stick to the point, namely, that two people are trying to beat each other up.

Some people say this is the best that has ever been written on boxing. Obviously, they haven't looked very hard - even the Mailer quote on page 103 is enough to see why this is so.

Give it three stars for the moderately enjoyable journalism and, I almost forgot to say it, some beautiful photographs.

Rating:
Summary: liberal lies or bad research
Review: i must address several untruths in ms. oates book.while she is certainly a good writer,apparently she didn't do much research for this book.she states that the majority of soldiers killed and who served in the vietnam war were black;wrong.blacks made up 12 percent of the u.s. population at the time,and 14 percent of the casualties.the average soldier who died in vietnam was a middle-classed white boy.next she states that champ jack dempsey was afraid to fight black fighters;wrong.he fought at least 3 black fighters that is easily verified,and his chief sparring partner was black.his promoter tex rickard wouldn't allow it,for fear of race riots.harry wills the top black fighter of the time was afraid to fight middleweight harry greb.he also sustained a horrific beating at the hands of white heavyweight jack sharky.jack johnson admitted that the only acknowledged fight he lost was to joe choynski.while the "saintly" joe louis was dringing,doing drugs,and cheating on his wife,max scmeling was freeing jews in germany.incidentally max scmeling and jack sharky are both still alive at nearly one hundred.do some research please!

Rating:
Summary: Oates Writes Like Ali Danced
Review: Oates Writes Like Ali Danced

4.25 Stars

I really enjoyed this book.

There's another reviewer (Ensio N. Mikkols) who said it best - "The Lady Knows Boxing" and she really does.

I was on the fence about reading this. I went back and forth trying to decide and finally just went for it and I'm glad I did.

Oates has a great and unique perspective on boxing as an art and science. She sounds like she's been around boxing her whole life and has a respect for it.

Her writing style is fancy, elegant and adds respectability to the sweet science.

I love her take on Mike Tyson - I hate that most writers make him sound like a monster. Oates knows he's human and shows him in a fair, understanding and empathetic light.

One sign of a great book is what it leaves you with or what it inspires you to do. I'm left with a greater respect and understanding of the sweet science of bruising and am inspired to read and learn more about Mike Tyson.

Rating:
Summary: Blood ballet
Review: Six years of bouts with local bruisers and grainy films of Marciano and Louis, and I retired with my fascination intact. Before I chanced upon Oates no book on boxing quite took me beyond the physical. An extraordinary insightful book that subtly find its way to the soul of this controversial sport.

Rating:
Summary: Sugar Ray Oates
Review: The sport of Boxing, on the surface at least, does not automatically come to mind as obvious subject matter for the premier writing talents of Joyce Carol Oates; even though Ms. Oates certainly can get down and dirty with the best of them as in her "Man Crazy" or "Zombie."
But as Oates explains in her 1987 collection of essays (revised in 1994), "On Boxing":"No one whose interest began as mine did in childhood--as an offshot of my father's interest is likely to think of boxing as something else, a metaphor...Life is like boxing, in many respects. But boxing is only like boxing."
Oates is a boxing fan and a great writer and it was inevitable that these two facets of her life would converge.
"On Boxing" is really 3 separate essays: "On Boxing," "On Mike Tyson" and "The Cruelest Sport."
The first essay is so crammed full of fascinating, revelatory statements about the nature and function and the social and psychological nature of boxing that it is hard to pick out only a few to quote here. But I will try: "To enter the ring near-naked and to risk one's life is to make of one's audience voyeurs of a kind: boxing is so intimate. It is to ease out of sanity's consciousness and into another, difficult to name. It is to risk, and sometimes to realize, the agony of which "agon" (Greek, "contest") is the root."
In Oates view, the boxer brings more than his body to bear in the ring...he also brings his soul: "There are some boxers possessed of such remarkable intuition, such uncanny prescience, one would think they were somehow recalling their fights, not fighting them as we watch."
"On Boxing" the essay is also a boxing history lesson highlighting the careers of Jack Dempsey,Joe Louis, Muhammed Ali,Sugar Ray Leonard, Roberto Duran, etc.: their careers, their boxing styles, their defeats and in some cases their lives after the boxing ring: "the drama of life in the flesh. Boxing has become America's tragic theater."
The second essay, "On Mike Tyson," written in 1988 predates all of Tyson's legal troubles, court cases and incarceration. And so Oates, who had extensive access to Tyson, writes of his home,his dog and his friends in glowing terms.With Oates, Tyson is soft-spoken, courteous, sensitive, thoughtful and intospective. Things that in 2002 we do not normally associate with Mike Tyson. Never a pushover, Oates also quotes Tyson after his 1986 fight with the hapless Jesse Ferguson, whose nose was broken in the match, "I want to punch the bone into the brain...Tyson's language is as direct and brutal as his ring style, yet as more than one observer has noted, strangely disarming--there is no air of menace, or sadism, or boastfulness in what he says: only the truth."
Oates also speaks of a boxing match as a "catharsis" as Aristotle wrote: "the purging of pity and terror by the exercise of these emotions; the subliminal aftermath of classical tragedy."
The third essay, "The Cruelest Sport" details in part the physical toll of boxing. For example the 1980 Ali/Holmes fight in which Ali takes a tremendous beating from Holmes: in Sylvester Stallone's words, the fight was "like watching an autopsy on a man who's still alive." This as well as the Ali/Foreman fight in Zaire in 1974 began irreversible loss for Ali: progressive deterioration of Ali's kidneys, hands, reflexes and stamina.
"On Boxing" is Joyce Carol Oates's Ode to Boxing and by extension her father's interest in boxing, the smokiness of the arena, the smell of the hair oil and the hot dogs.And, even if you are not a boxing fan you cannot help but revel at the insights and amazing depth of feeling she brings to this subject and it's denizens.