No Kind Of Badass, But…
The manly art, Norman Mailer once wrote, “arouses two of the deepest anxieties we contain. There is not only the fear of getting hurt, which is profound in more men than will admit to it, but there is the opposite panic, equally unadmitted, of hurting others.”
Mailer was right about the two deep anxieties. I think of these primal urges and how no amount of observing or studying as a spectator can remotely prepare one for either the savage reality of being swung at or of the state of complete exhaustion three minutes of close combat affords. Until I first boxed, as an adult, I had no knowledge of either.
All the soft tissue injuries of my youth were, if sport-related, come by in the normal course of swift human or inanimate contact. Football, basketball, track, falling off bicycles, even wrestling, but never as the result of a fist swinging at my face with intention.
The boys who were in real fist fights always seemed to be the ones who might end up behind bars, doing time in the state pen or the county. I thought the kids who swung away were the “angry” or “troubled” youth who didn’t have a better way to solve problems. Social misfits letting testosterone-fueled urges getting the better of them. Uncontrollable young punks, street fighters who articulated their rage with their fists. I wrestled and rough housed my way through youth and learned about letting anger out in acceptable ways, or controllable ways, or talking about it… but never swinging away.
Then one day I laced up a pair of gloves, one weekend in Baltimore, and learned to box, in my thirties. The savage, primal pleasure of just cutting loose was liberating.
Over the next few years I worked out at a couple of gyms, far removed from the health and racquet club atmosphere, learning the rudiments of how to stick and move and keep my chin down, touching a primordial pulse of some kind. I was nobody’s Muhammad Ali, no kind of badass, and was too old when I started to take part in any sanctioned amateur bouts.
This all came to mind recently because I asked a young colleague if he had been involved in any sports in school. Yeah, he replied, football and boxing. You just don’t hear that very often. It’s like opening a package, when you learn something new about someone, something you hadn’t expected. I told him about my late-in-life flirtation with the gloves and heavy bags and sparring and we both appreciated having that in common.
Teddy Roosevelt sparred for ten rounds with Mike Donovan in the White House basement on March 3, 1905. Also called “Professor,” Donovan was a middleweight in the bare-knuckle era and went on to become a well-known teacher. Although the boxer was in his sixties at the time, it was no small thing for the president to go toe-to-toe with him. Ryan Swanson writes in The Strenuous Life, his new book about Roosevelt’s impact on modern sports, that “the two men struggled desperately, joyously…Roosevelt had probably suffered a minor muscle tear. He complained of stiffness. But there was still pride involved in a good injury for Roosevelt.”
I remember a good injury like that, once sparring against a guy much heavier than I was. A gift of my first cracked ribs. Yeah, bring it on! There is just no end to the surprises in this life. “In the end,” Rumi said, “we will all be surprised.”
