Reading the Fights

Edited by Joyce Carol Oates and Daniel Halpern

New York : Holt, 1988

305 pages

Dust Jacket Blurb

Your grandfather wished he'd seen Dempsey. Your father wished he'd seen Joe Louis or Rocky Marciano. Now don't miss Joyce Carol Oates, Daniel Halpern, and other heavyweights in this classic work on the fight game.

Gerald Early, A.J. Liebling, Norman Mailer, Pete Hamill, and Gay Talese are among the world-class writers who describe and dissect the most controversial of all sports in terms of boxing history, traditions, ideals, and practitioners. Among the matches analyzed: Marciano-Moore, Frazier-Ali, Leonard-Duran, Bramble-Mancini, and many more. Included also are personal recollections of a boxer's training, examination of the poetics of machismo, and a classic interview with Cus D'Amato.

Though Joyce Carol Oates says she could entertain the proposition that life is a metaphor for boxing in many unsettling respects, these writers do not see boxing as a symbol for something else. Boxing is boxing. As Ms. Oates makes plain, each match is a story—"a unique and highly condensed drama without words. Boxers are there to establish an absolute experience, a public accounting of the outermost limits of their being: they will know, as few of us can know of ourselves, what physical and psychic power they possess—of how much, or how little, they are capable."

"It is for those of us," the editors write, "who, like Hugh McIlvanney, believe that boxing, with even its myriad ambiguities, offers a thrill 'as pure and basic as a heartbeat.'"

"Why are you a boxer?" Irish featherweight champion Barry McGuigan was asked. "I can't be a poet," he replied. "I can't tell stories."

"Boxing is a sport to which all other sports aspire." —George Foreman

"I ain't never liked violence." —Sugar Ray Robinson

"The fight for survival is the fight." —Rocky Graziano

Page address:
http://jco.usfca.edu/works/anthologies/fights.html