Like a lot of you who were either too cheap to spring for the pay-per-view or, more reasonably, had seen Floyd Mayweather fight before and guessed exactly what disappointment was about to unfold, I consumed the action for free, 140 characters at a time, the 21st-century version of peeping through a stadium knothole.
“Best round for Manny, lands solid right hands,” so tweeted one of my trusted correspondents. “Floyd on cruise control, winning handily.”
Sadly, it was all I needed to know or, yet more sadly, the best I could have expected to read.
The coverage of Mayweather’s fight with Pacquiao, like every other sporting event these days, was nearly atomised by today’s need for immediacy. Even the next day’s journalism, which ought to have offered a fuller explanation of such momentous events (it was the Fight of the Century, right?), was little more developed than an internet listicle. Here’s the money Floyd made, here are the ligaments Manny tore, here’s the boredom we all suffered. Sport in general, but boxing in particular, is now apparently bereft of metaphor.
And what a shame that is. Boxing, by tradition, going back to Homer anyway, has always been a reliable wellspring of literature, a place where prose danced on the page as surely as the boxers on canvas. No other sport has ever come close. Whether it's novels, whether it's drama, whether it's the next day's newspaper column – boxing has been the source of so much good writing it rightfully deserves its own genre. And so we have novels like Fat City, or a screenplay like On the Waterfront (and Rocky, too, I guess), the writers drawn to their themes of Darwinism, so much naked (almost literally) urgency on display. The limits of courage and desperation, whatever it is that it takes to be a man, are easily plumbed in the ring, which writer Gerald Early summed up as, "the cauldron of violence and inertia, depravity and bravado, distorted masculinity and strange fellowship". No wonder Ernest Hemingway's very earliest stories, like Fifty Grand (not to mention The Killers, much later), used boxing to first tinker ideas of manhood. For a writer, the sport offers ease of access to almost everything that matters.
That neither Jonathan Franzen nor Martin Amis dips his quill when the bell rings has more to do with the marginalisation of the sport than it does its ability to reveal character in its fabulously colourful tableau. There are still stories there, but they wouldn’t make sense to today’s reader, who is only sporadically exposed to a niche sport. Boxing has been driven to the fringes by short-sighted promoters (imagine holding the Super Bowl in abeyance for five years, as owners circled for a bigger payout—about what happened here), the changing tastes of the sporting public (who prefer mixed martial arts above boxing, and football above all else) and the complete absence of heavyweight boxing (what husky young man heads for a boxing dungeon when a football scholarship is dangling?). It is about as relevant these days as harness racing, and not likely, given the lack of interest and funding at amateur levels, to make much of a comeback.
For all the hysteria over the pay per view audience (and it did break all records – 4.4 million purchases generating more than $400 million (Dh1.46bn) in revenue), let’s keep in mind that it represented about one tenth of the viewership of the average NFL game. Regular season. No writer could gain traction in this on-again, off-again racket.
And the day-to-day stuff, the journalism that was all too often accidental literature, has really vanished. Boxing’s drama used to lure all the top writers, in huge numbers. At a 1910 fight between Jack Johnson and Jim Jeffries, more than 600 scribes were in attendance. Perhaps there were that many at Mayweather-Pacquiao, but none of them had the credentials of Jack London, who somewhat reluctantly conceded from ringside that “the greatest battle of the century was a monologue delivered to 20,000 spectators by a smiling negro who was never in doubt and who was never serious for more than a moment at a time”.
Boxing has always, up to the 1970s anyway, enjoyed the attention of celebrity journalism. What we miss now are the musings of somebody like Richard Wright, who saw racial significance in a heavyweight bout, recording in the New Masses magazine the howls of Harlem when Joe Louis flattened Max Schmeling. “With their faces to the night sky,” he wrote, “they filled their lungs and let out a scream of joy that it seemed would never end, and a scream that seemed to come from untold reserves of strength.”
OK, maybe Mayweather-Pacquaio doesn’t deserve full geo-political treatment. But I wouldn’t have denied Baldwin a press credential, on the chance he could make sense of an anti-Louis like Mayweather.
There were often more heavyweights at ringside as between the ropes. A big fight, for a writer of exaggerated temperament and ambition, was, as Jack London would have explained, a true Call of the Wild. In 1971, for yet another fight of the century, this between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, there were two Pulitzer prize winners (Norman Mailer and William Saroyan) and one Oscar winner (Budd Schulberg) hacking away at press row.
Of course, a lot of this was literary slumming, producing as much highfalutin nonsense as prize-winning poetry. I have no idea what Mailer, who was irresistibly drawn to boxing, meant when he called boxing the “buried South Vietnam of America”. However, I do give him props for some wild and unforgettable flourishes. Here’s our man describing George Foreman’s rendezvous with the canvas in Zaire in 1974, the Rumble in the Jungle with Muhammad Ali: “He went over like a six-foot 60-year-old butler who has just heard tragic news.” Get that out of your head.
Nor am I certain what Joyce Carol Oates, likewise a fan of the Sweet Science, meant when she wrote in On Boxing: “When a boxer is ‘knocked out’ it does not mean that he has been knocked unconscious, or incapacitated; it means more poetically that he has been knocked out of Time.” I would disagree here, on the basis of my own ringside experience, and assert that the man lying lifeless on the canvas is actually and medically, if also poetically, knocked unconscious.
Some of these writers would have been better off taking a page from Hunter S Thompson, the gonzo journalist who travelled to Africa to cover the Rumble and, while he had many wonderful adventures there, failed to file anything for Rolling Stone but an expense report. He spent fight night, perhaps filled with fear and not just a little loathing, in the hotel pool with a pack of Dunhills, a bucket of ice and a bottle of Wild Turkey.
What we’re really missing, though, are the daily (and weekly) slobs who followed the game with gusto and wrote accordingly, their largely unadvertised talents producing deadline gold. I wouldn’t call A J Liebling a slob exactly, but his journalism was in a bigger hurry than Hemingway’s. Here he is, so economically capturing the resolute fury of Rocky Marciano in his fight with Archie Moore in 1955: “He resembled a Great Dane who has just heard the word ‘bone’.” For that same story he managed to invoke Don Giovanni, Faust and Captain Ahab, finally settling on Moore’s suffering as such: “The pangs of a supreme exponent of bel canto who sees himself crowded out of the opera house by a guy who can only shout.” That’s called punching in bunches.
The late George Plimpton once theorised, "the smaller the ball, the more formidable the literature". Unless this was simply a metric to exclude football, or a sly reference to the fighters' anatomy, there was never bigger hogwash. And he himself proved it so in Shadow Box, his wry series of boxing impressions. He also was in old Zaire for the Rumble and wrote, less wryly this time, of the beaten Foreman, the monsoon rains unleashing hell immediately after the fight. We no longer enjoy metaphor in our boxing coverage but that morning, Plimpton imagined poor befuddled Foreman, poetically knocked out of time, in his tin-shed dressing room. "The sound of the rain," Plimpton wrote, "must have been deafening."
We no longer have Mark Kram, who covered Muhammad Ali for Sports Illustrated and once wrote of Ali's assault upon Joe Frazier in 1975's Thrilla in Manila, encapsulating his futility: "You can go so far into that desolate and dark place where the heart of Frazier pounds, you can waste his perimeters, you see his head hanging in the public square, may even believe that you have him, but then suddenly you learn that you have not." That, my friend, was boxing writing, 140 characters-plus.
But there was so much of it. W C Heinz, Red Smith, Hugh McIlvanney (on reluctant Joe Bugner: “When the bell rings, it is not a bugle call for him”), Vic Ziegel, Jerry Izenberg – these were guys who published reams of boxing coverage, belles-lettres on the cheap. Maybe the wonder is why they shouldn’t still. The sport is so seductive, so tantalising, the fighters trying to go the distance with as much grace as possible. How could any account of their struggle fail to achieve literature? Even journeymen writers, slobs such as myself, found an automatic elevation of prose at ringside, as if this was the one place, the one way, to explore the human condition. As they say, if you can’t write boxing ...
But now there is no boxing, except for the periodic smash-and-grab promotions so craftily staged that you can barely identify the sport that sustains them. The sport feels over. And I’m at the point, grown gradually queasy over the years, where I can do without it. But, boy, do I miss boxing writing.
Richard Hoffer is an award-winning sportswriter whose work has appeared in Sports Illustrated and the LA Times. He is also the author of four books, most recently, Bouts of Mania: Ali, Frazier, Foreman and an America on the Ropes.