Friday Links: Boxing Edition
"Mental aptitude tests cannot measure genius except in certain narrow ranges, and the genius of the body...eludes comprehension." - Joyce Carol Oates, 'On Boxing'
Trigger warning: this week’s column discusses a biography of Jack Johnson, the boxer who became the first Black Heavyweight Champion of the World during Jim Crow. Jim Crow. Boxing. There’s going to be some talk of racism, domestic abuse, violence, and suicide. Take care of yourselves.
And of course, your final weekly Vine: Thursday was Chapter 65: “The Plague of Payouts.” Today is Chapter 66: “The Plague of Vine.” The Lazy & Entitled podcast will continue in some form eventually, but this week is the last Vine Radio Hour. Sincere thanks to everyone who read, listened, or otherwise supported this project. Lazy & Entitled will return with music (and more!) in 2024.
There’s something about writing about something that elevates it. Monarchs understood this, and we’re still reading Shakespeare’s histories all these years later. Something I have less than zero interest in—bullfighting—takes on a mythic quality simply because one of my favorite writers was into it. My favorite sport, obviously, is basketball. Second favorite is soccer. The best ways to experience those sports, for me anyway, is playing or watching. Don’t get me wrong, I love basketball and soccer writing. It’s just I enjoy playing or watching those sports more than I enjoy reading about them.
What I’ve Been Reading Lately:
Boxing, though. Can’t help myself, but I do love boxing. Actually doing it and watching it are very fun—I am a father and therefore retired from fighting, but I still train my friends Kevin and Rafi sometimes. For the last two years, we’ve gone to watch the Golden Gloves down in Cicero Stadium, and no plans to not go in 2024. Reading about boxing, though, is way more fun than watching the bloated, criminals-in-fancy-suits, we-know-about-concussions-now-and-try-not-to-hit-each-other PPV fights of the Floyd Mayweather Era. And these two books were such a treat. One of them, I’m not even sure if it’s a good book, or if it’s just well-written enough and I really like reading about boxing. Of course, I am talking about On Boxing by Joyce Carol Oates and The Big Smoke by Adrian Matejka. Also the October 2023 issue of Thrasher magazine.
On Boxing by Joyce Carol Oates: my hangups on JCO were discussed Wednesday and are discussed more below, so let’s focus on the book: I really enjoyed it! It’s a slim, well-wrought meditation on the sweet science, which apparently JCO has been a fan of since she was a kid. It’s by no means comprehensive, but it’s a great thinker writing about a sport, that, again, benefits strongly from being written about. There are surprisingly few racial faux pas for a book written by a white woman of the Ivy League in the 1980s-90s—it’s not perfect, but JCO does treat the Black fighters with care and dignity, which is more than you can say for most of the sports press during the Jack Johnson, Muhammad Ali, and Mike Tyson eras. There’s some weird gender stuff that I, a cis straight white man, don’t feel totally right commenting on (boxing is hypermasculinity, but I don’t think that means there’s no place for the feminine in boxing, as JCO asserts). And yeah, it is a white woman in the 80s and 90s writing about a predominantly Black and Latine sport, with special focus on Black heavyweight champs Johnson, Ali, and Tyson.
Mostly, you come away realizing boxing is the story of racism in the colonial world. Boxing is the story of capitalism’s most marginalized seeking the biggest paydays (until the 90s, champion boxers were the US’s highest-paid athletes, JCO asserts. Not sure if that’s on a per-competition basis, or if Big Four salaries simply hadn’t climbed that high yet). Boxing, “the red light district of sports,” also demands the biggest personal cost. There’s a reason boxing comes up in noir so often. It’s not just that criminals and drunks like to see folks pummel each other. It’s that people turn to professional boxing because their options are pretty shit otherwise. Which leads us right into…
The Big Smoke by Adrian Matejka: Oh, now this made a nice pairing with the JCO. A poetic biography of Jack Johnson (not unlike Tyehimba Jess’s leadbelly, here’s Bob and me discussing leadbelly in two parts on The Line Break, and here’s the episode where Bob reads Adrian Matejka’s “Mixology”) and man what a well-put together book. We see The Champ’s desperation to get out of poverty, we see the extravagances of wealth, we see the racism he faces. We also get some wrenching poems from Hattie to Belle, “wives” of the Galveston Giant (whom he never married). One he did marry, Etta Duryea, is heard only through excerpts of her interviews with the Feds when they were manufacturing a Mann Act case against the Galveston Giant. At the end of the book, Etta commits suicide, implicating Jack and his infidelities. From there, Jack Johnson’s biography isn’t all that unlike the end of Raging Bull—depressingly chasing spotlight after dwindling spotlight. Man, poem biographies are my favorite kind of biographies. The only kind I’ll read? Maybe. Recommend some poem biographies to me, please.
The October 2023 Issue of Thrasher Magazine: my homie Breno loaned this to me and I’m just now getting around to reading it. What fun! I haven’t read a magazine in forever. This one has pictures of skateboarders! As much as I love skateboarding, I’m very, very bad at it, so reading about it is much more fun than attempting. Elated am I to learn that skateboarders are still fixing infrastructure, and that people are still sending handwritten letters to Thrasher. From prison, too—even though skateboarding is not, well, y’know.
LINKS!
Something to listen to? Come on, you know what we’re going with. It’s obvious, right? Here’s Miles Davis’s “Right Off,” from A Tribute to Jack Johnson. Seek this whole album out, dudes.
Let’s follow up a look at one of JCO’s book with this bonkers deep dive into her interior life, thanks to Rachel Aviv at The New Yorker. Astounding details: JCO told her first husband never to read her work. After his death, she learned that he’d started and abandoned a novel in which the two leads were thinly-veiled versions of the two of them. He also describes a breakdown he actually had and a lobotomy administered to his sister, which he and JCO never really discussed! She knew his family so little she had to ask a New York Times reporter to get in touch with his sister and notify her of his death. Couple that with the fact that JCO has a sister, 18 years her junior, who has such severe autism she has never been able to speak, and Joyce hasn’t visited her in 52 years. Look, I’m not here to judge anyone’s personal lives. May JCO find inner peace, whatever that looks like.
To refute JCO’s weird assertion in On Boxing that there is no space for the feminine in boxing, here’s Dave McKenna at Defector on Katie Taylor being awesome. A pull quote: “Fans weren’t the only ones left craving more of what this fight delivered. In a post-fight interview while still in the ring, Taylor was asked about giving Cameron another shot, which would be the first trilogy fight of note in women’s boxing history. Instead of being coy or pulling an Apollo Creed and saying there “ain’t gonna be no rematch,” the winner immediately said bring it on. And showed she's dreaming bigger than ever. ‘Let’s get the trilogy in Croke Park,’ she said.” Hell yeah. That’s boxing trash talk, or “mouth-fighting” as they called it in Jack Johnson’s day.
WE ARE GETTING LONG ON TEXT THIS NEWSLETTER. Goodness. Enjoy this beaver in Northwestern’s lagoon, courtesey of Bob Seidenberg in Evanston Round Table!
Joel Christensen in Neos Kosmos on the preservation of historic art. I think about this stuff passively a lot—the amount of people it takes today to bring one book into production, with the author getting the lion’s share of the credit. Now think about the amount of people throughout history needed to prop, like Homer up. Think about those people, and think about how little we have to Sappho. Are the Homeric texts imperial achievements? To quote Christensen (emphasis mine), “…how much has Western humanism taught us to value precious objects over human life?”
More celebration of Indigenous artists, since we didn’t get enough last week—Juan Velasquez and Quispe Lopez with a playlist of LGBTQ Indigenous artists in them. I don’t have Spotify, but I know the end of the year’s coming when people start posting their Wrapped. Add some Indigenous artists to next year’s Wrapped, maybe, homies.
BONUS BALTIMORE SIXTH LINK: The story of Old Bay is one of antifascism, we learn thanks to Francesa Cohen in Baltimore Heritage. Everyone who cleans their crabs before eating is a Nazi, now.
What’re you still doing here? Go read Vine! It’s the last week!
If you’re in the service industry, I know you’re fighting for your life. Maybe not as much as Jack Johnson and Mike Tyson, but I see you. May you clean up in tips this weekend.
Sorry you got an email,
Chris
Came here for Miles and was not disappointed.