Boxing in art, literature, and film

For such a brutal trade, boxing has attracted more than its share of artists and writers. Of course, it may be more accurate to say that it is boxing’s seminaked display of aggression that accounts for its appeal. If all life is ultimately a Darwinian struggle for survival, then boxing at least has the virtue of being open about it. Boxing is also said to foster the “manly” virtues of discipline and fortitude. According to the duke of Wellington, boxing “tends to produce and keep up that natural undaunted bravery and intrepidity which has enabled our armies to conquer in many a hard-fought battle.” Whatever its psychological hold, the sport has always inspired wonder and admiration, as well as repugnance, moving the artist to pick up pen, brush, chisel, or camera.

One of the earliest depictions of boxers appears on a Minoan vase from Crete c. 1500 bce. Almost 800 years later Homer recounted a boxing match in the 23rd book of the Iliad (see above), and, in a neat bit of parallelism, the sport became part of the 23rd Olympiad in 688 bce. Later Plato referred to boxing in the Republic and the dialogue Gorgias; Virgil, echoing Homer, included a boxing match in the Aeneid (see above). Pindar composed poems for Olympic champions, as in the Olympian ode written for Diagoras of Rhodes excerpted here:

But, Father Zeus, you who rule over the ridges of Atabyrium, grant honor to the hymn ordained in praise of an Olympian victor, and to the man who has found excellence as a boxer, and grant to him honoured grace in the eyes of both citizens and strangers. For he walks a straight course on a road that hates arrogance, knowing clearly the sound prophetic wisdom of his good ancestors.

Greek and Roman art frequently depict boxing. Greek vases portray many different types of blows and postures and often show blood pouring from a boxer’s nose and cuts on his face. The life-size seated boxer (dating to the 1st century bce) now in the Roman National Museum in Rome wears superbly detailed sharp thongs on his hands, and his battered face, broken nose, and cauliflower ears show the effects of such fighting. The brutal and sinister forms of the Roman caestus (glove) frequently appear in small bronzes and in Roman mosaics.

After boxing died out with the gladiatorial games in the 5th century ad, it naturally disappeared from the literary and artistic canvas. When the sport resurfaced in 17th-century England, artists and writers soon gravitated to it. William Hogarth painted the first British champion, James Figg, and Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift attended Figg’s exhibitions in London. Early in the next century, Lord Byron and John Keats professed themselves admirers of the sport, while William Hazlitt’s essay “The Fight” (1821) made it legitimate material for men of letters. In 1812 a London journalist, Pierce Egan, wrote a history of British boxing, Boxiana, whose highly stylized prose very likely influenced a young reader by the name of Charles Dickens. Both Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray attended the famous fight between the American John C. Heenan and the British champion Tom Sayers in 1860, and Thackeray wrote a rather silly but endearing poem about it, A Lay of Ancient London. George Bernard Shaw devoted a novel to boxing, Cashel Byron’s Profession (1883), which became the play The Admirable Bashville (1903). Arthur Conan Doyle not only made sure that Sherlock Holmes was a good amateur pugilist, he also wrote a half dozen stories about boxers under the title The Croxley Master and Other Tales of the Ring and Camp (1910). Even the poet laureate John Masefield devoted some stanzas to boxing in The Everlasting Mercy (1911). Here a boxer’s seconds (a second assists or supports a boxer or duelist) try to ensure that their fighter will be ready for his next round:

They drove (a dodge that never fails)
A pin beneath my finger nails.
They poured what seemed a running beck
Of cold spring water down my neck;
Jim with a lancet quick as flies
Lowered the swelling round my eyes.
They sluiced my legs and fanned my face
Through all that blessed minute’s grace;
They gave my calves a thorough kneading,
They salved my cuts and stopped the bleeding.
A gulp of liquor dulled the pain,
And then the flasks clinked again.

Americans resisted boxing until the end of the 19th century, but, once the sport had gained a foothold, men who wrote about boxing often seemed as plentiful as fighters themselves. Among them were Jack London, Dashiell Hammet, H.C. Witwer, Nelson Algren, Ernest Hemingway, Ring Lardner, James T. Farrell, Clifford Odets, Irwin Shaw, Budd Schulberg, and Norman Mailer.

In fact, it is likely that more literary writing, as opposed to pure journalism, has been spent on boxing than on any other sport, and, indeed, on rare occasions, gifted journalists have blurred the line between literary writing and sportswriting. A.J. Liebling’s reportage in The Sweet Science (1956), for example, appeals both to writers and sports fans, and Heywood Broun’s newspaper column “The Orthodox Champion” (1922) managed to both celebrate and poke fun at the way boxing and literature are often conjoined. To understand why writers, especially male writers (though not exclusively, Joyce Carol Oates being an exception), are drawn to the sport, it is enough to know that boxers, more than any other athlete, throw into relief the writer’s own sedentary and introspective profession. Bluntly put: one writes, the other fights. The boxer engages in a visible struggle, with a designated opponent, whose outcome is usually (though not always) resoundingly clear, while the writer’s struggle is always with himself, and success is hardly the product of a unanimous decision. Moreover, if the writer frets that his own experience is somehow less vital or real than that of the man of action, boxing can symbolize this insecurity.

Given boxers’ well-developed physiques and the visceral reality of physical combat, such men and the profession they engage in are a natural subject for painters and photographers. The French painter Théodore Géricault and the English painter John Constable portrayed boxers, while such well-known Regency caricaturists as Thomas Rowlandson and Robert and George Cruikshank trained their jaundiced eyes on the London Prize Ring. American George Bellows vividly portrayed boxing matches in Stag at Sharkey’s (1909) and Both Members of This Club (1909). Bellows’s 1924 lithograph of Luis Firpo knocking Jack Dempsey out of the ring is perhaps the most famous of all boxing scenes. Other American painters of boxing include Thomas Eakins and James Chapin, both of whom ably rendered the movement, power, and grace of men boxing, as well as the fatigue and pathos that often attends the aftermath.

These same dramatic qualities appealed to filmmakers. In fact, the very first motion picture using “actors” was a boxing exhibition filmed by Thomas Edison on June 16, 1894, using the Edison kinetoscope. And in 1897, the championship fight between Gentleman Jim Corbett and Bob Fitzsimmons became the first sporting event to be captured on film. The power of such films was attested to when interstate commerce in footage of Jack Johnson beating Jim Jeffries (July 4, 1910) was prohibited by federal law. (The fact that Johnson was an African American and Jim Jeffries a white boxer had more than a little to do with it.) Johnson’s life would eventually be the subject of another boxing film, The Great White Hope (1970, adapted from the Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Howard Sackler). As for fictional movies about boxers, they outnumber all other sports films. Although most early fight films followed a set pattern of a poor boy who battles his way out of the slums only to fall prey to women and gangsters, their popularity really depended on the built-in tension in every boxing match. Not only is there danger with every punch thrown, there is anxiety in who shall prevail; and when two boxers represent different constituencies of class, ethnicity, or nationality, a championship fight becomes all the more significant.

A short list of notable fight films includes Rouben Mamoulian’s Golden Boy (1939); Robert Rossen’s Body and Soul (1947), about an ambitious Jewish fighter’s rise from poverty; Robert Wise’s The Set-Up (1949) and Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956); Mark Robson’s Champion (1949), loosely based on Ring Lardner’s short story of the same name, and The Harder They Fall (1956), inspired by the rise and fall of Primo Carnera; Kurt Newman’s The Ring (1952), about a young Mexican American’s fight for respect in and out of the ring; Requiem for a Heavyweight (1962, adapted from Rod Serling’s Playhouse 90 production of 1956); John Huston’s Fat City (1972), which captured the unglamorous world of small-time boxers; Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull (1980), based upon the life of the fighter Jake La Motta; Sakamoto Junji’s Dotsuitaru nen (1989, Knockout), based upon the autobiography of young welterweight Akai Hidekazu, who suffers brain damage from boxing but eventually returns to the ring (Akai plays himself in this film); the six popular but highly artificial Rocky movies (1976–2006), which tell the story of a decent man who fights for a living; Kitano Takeshi’s Kidzu ritān (1996, Kids Return), about two Japanese teen bullies who take up boxing and learn about life in the process; Katya Bankowsky’s Shadow Boxers (1999), a documentary featuring Lucia Rijker; Karyn Kusama’s Girlfight (2000), an award-winning film about female pugilists; Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby (2004), a drama that focuses on the relationship between a female boxer and her aging trainer; and David O. Russell’s The Fighter (2010), which follows two boxing half brothers as one tries to land his big break with training from the other, who is dealing with his own crack cocaine addiction. In books or in film, the climactic match often means salvation or redemption—a time-tested formula hard to resist.