The Great American Photo Blog

BOXING and the
CRUCIBLE OF LOVE

Otherwise sane people—myself included—find something admirable in the dance between two men hell bent on beating the shit out of each other. What we find appalling in the street somehow finds a timeless majesty in the ring; even at the lowest level of Boxing; even when two hapless souls slug it out for a $50 purse; even when nothing is at stake but, perhaps, honor (which can be best described as the honor of not losing to a loser).

When I was in Poland I saw more street fights in a year than I’d seen in three decades of city living in America. I saw two guys go at it with bike chains, two leather jacketed hoods thrashing each other and spitting out blood in an alleyway, one enormous drunk beating his victim’s head against a curbstone. Then there was the cowardly clocking of girlfriends and wives. It was all very cinematic without subtitles or need of subtitles. A man beats a woman and someone intervenes and the woman cries out, “Get away! Leave him alone!” And the would-be hero walks off disgusted screaming, “You deserve what you get, then, you stupid bitch!”

And, yet, Poland wasn’t a violent place. Just filled with too many men with violent tempers and a taste for vodka, revenge, or merely justification for being a human vehicle with nowhere to go but down. Whatever lie at the root of these bouts of violence, it’s safe to say that, although the Polish men may have been fighters, they certainly were not Boxers.

When I was a kid it was expected that you would get into your share of fights. It was a world that had yet to protect children from experiencing their own childhood. Summers you were left to roam at will and as long as you survived through the day and showed up in one piece at the supper table, no questions were asked.

It was expected that boys would be graced with cuts and bruises and come home filthy and fight taking baths. We were content to stink, to watch the dirt built up around our ankles, to wear underwear for a month or socks for three days straight. As with baseball and football and bicycles, only sissies would even think of wearing helmets or complain about getting the wind knocked out of them. And you never backed down from a challenge, never back down from a fight.

My father grew up in the Bronx, was a chapter member of the Golden Guineas, and knew how to take a punch. And, presumably, how to give one. Violence was never far from his life and he took beatings at home so I’m sure he was more than happy to give them when he was out in the street. And years later, when he wasn’t a kid and his flair for violence had yet to ebb, he could floor you with a look. And any defiance—especially coming from my oldest brother—was met with the same force divvied out to him by his father.

Violence is a part of life and my father intuited this early on. He was a startling mass of contradictions with a temperament that could swing from terrifying to tender in an instant. The most constant aspect of my father’s makeup was that he was not delusional; not about his children and certainly not about the world that preyed on more tender hearts than his own.

It was he who taught me not to shy away from a fight and gave me a singular piece of advice that I’ve used—successfully, I might add—on three occasions. “Joey, if you ever get into a fight get in as close as you can and just keep hitting him. Go wild! And, whatever you do, don’t stop!”

He didn’t encourage me to fight, but rather not to back down from one. The lesson was important because fighting was inevitable; because this was life and one had to learn how to battle. And my father knew that one learned many things about life by engaging in its battles.

I’ve had 3 fights in my life and I won all 3 hands down. My career started in 2^nd grade and ended 5 years later when I defended myself against Allan Harris and sent him flying into the hedges with a single blow to the face. I vaguely remember him holding his nose and watching his hands fill with blood. I don’t remember much else, not talking about the fight, not being proud that I won. I do remember my legs trembling and that I felt as though I could easily puke my guts out.

My father prepared me to fight because he knew that my nature was to avoid such things. We now live in a country that is so soft that my limited experience with brutality is no longer a simple fact of life. Two kids can't go at it anymore without someone calling in the authorities, teams of psychologists, parents, the marines... Decorum is not something to cherish; it's become a fetish. A kid gets into too many scrapes and he'll find himself on Ritalin, anti-psychotics, or worse. We want peaceable lives not because we are peaceable people but because we are soft, cynical and cannot fathom that there is anything worth fighting for.

The suburban ethos has infected whatever is left of our culture where niceness is mistaken for kindness and violence is reserved for entertainment; something that only happens on TV screens, movie screens, computer screens. And when we’re confronted with the violence of real life in real time it shatters that safety glass inside us. It sounds an alarm and we are as apt to retreat from a series of blows as swiftly as our unpracticed souls will reflexively turn away from the crucible of love.

KNOCKED AROUND, HUMBLED AND DISARMED

Growing up in the 70s every kid on the block knew the Heavyweight Champions and their contenders; Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier, George Foreman, Jerry Quarry. The build up to the fights were such that even those who didn’t care about boxing—or condemned it for being a primitive pastime—knew their names and reputations. They even listened in and checked out the sports page on the following day and witnessed the graphic horrors of head wounds, busted lips, bloody faces and pummeled bodies with grudging and breathless admiration before relapsing into disgust. And there is much to be disgusted with.

For several weeks I’ve been watching the old fights on YouTube and the grandeur of the sport that is part of our literature, part of boxing’s mythology, is not evident in the footage. When you get down to it two guys beating the shit out of each other really is nothing more than two guys beating the shit out of each other. It’s brutal, primitive, and agonizing to watch. When Sugar Ray Robinson beats Jake Lamotta to a pulp or Joe Louis mercilessly annihilates Max Shmelling there is no glory and it makes me wonder exactly what are we celebrating here?

But maybe it’s not celebration we’re looking for, but, rather, the base acknowledgment that violence, when confined to an arena and civilized by rules, becomes a ritual in which it is not only safe but necessary to partake.

When I was a kid my father rattled off the names Joe Louis, Rocky Marciano, Sugar Ray Robinson as though their very names could bring back a life long gone; a life lived out in candy stores, pool halls, and barrooms. A cinematic world lived in black and white where I imagined everything came to a halt as the first bell sounded and the fighters emerged from their corners... Ali, Frazier, Foreman and later Larry Holmes and Leon Spinks were part of this succession of Boxers that could be traced back to John L. Sullivan with more certitude than Pope Benedict can be traced back to Saint Peter. And this ongoing procession of Heavyweight Champions, among a thousand sensations of light and grace, was enough to bind father to son and son to father. Humanity is such that the shared drama of watching two men beating each other to death can result in furthering such mutual love and understanding.

The connection between generations is enough to make relevant most fictions. This passing of the baton from one generation to the next is what makes sports useful in a most fundamental way. The baseball diamond, the gridiron, the boxing ring… They are all timeless spaces and those who go to battle on field or canvas are contemporaries of all the giants and all the dwarfs that ever wielded a bat or tied on a pair of gloves.

I would never have started taking boxing pictures if it hadn’t been for Paul Y., a sports writer and gentleman who is obsessed with boxing and the history of military maneuvers. I’d never been to a boxing match until I found myself ringside at something the promoters called “The Celtic Invasion”. This “Invasion” featured Irish boxers and was put on at Boston’s historic Orpheum Theater just before Saint Patrick’s Day, 2008. For a street photographer there are few things more enticing than watching two guys slug it out. There are no pretensions in the ring, no self-consciousness, no pretending. You can’t will yourself to stop bleeding when you’re cut open, and you can’t help but cringe in anticipation when you’ve been already been knocked around, humbled, and disarmed. But even in defeat these kids have stepped outside of time and into something mythic. Although this “timelessness” may have lasted for no more than 35 seconds, it’s theirs for life. And that’s something worth fighting for.

BOXING GALLERY

Boxing #1