Two fighters and two authors

Several weeks ago, we got our copies of six books on professional boxing that chronicle some of the sport’s finest moments and practitioners. The big bonus is that the books are written elegantly by some of the world’s great literary icons, among them, Norman Mailer (author of bestsellers like, “The Naked and the Dead”,  “An American Dream”,  and “On God”) and Gay Talese (sports journalist  who wrote for the New York Times and Esquire Magazine and recipient in  2011 of the Normal Mailer Prize for Distinguished Journalism).

Two of these books are “Reading the Fights”, featuring the works of Mailer, Talese  and Joyce Carol Oates and “The Fight” by Mailer.

Mailer, who passed away on November 10, 2007, wore various hats in his lifetime. He was a novelist, journalist, film maker, a political activist and even a candidate for Mayor of New York City. He opposed the Vietnam war although he served in his youth in the Philippines in World War II as a cook.

Talese, started his career in sports journalism rather accidentally. Various accounts state that he was playing high school baseball as a sophomore and a team official who was assigned by the local paper to render an account of the high school team’s games, passed on the responsibility to Talese. The young man who wanted to ingratiate himself to the coach in the hope of getting more playing time, promptly did as he was told… and more. Talese gave full accounts of the games which the paper obviously liked and before he knew it, he was given a column on the Ocean City (New Jersey) Sentinel-Ledger. That set off Talese to a very successful career as a sports essayist who was fascinated with boxing, specifically Floyd Patterson a frequent subject in his columns.

In describing Ali’s fight with George Foreman, Ali’s “rope-a-dope” tactics and the eighth round knockout by Ali of Big George Mailer, uses poetry, not prose.

After several rounds of Ali’s “rope-a-doping” and the spectacle of Foreman flailing away with abandon and with no science at Ali, at the end of the (sixth) round, “Foreman was now so arm-weary he could begin a punch only by lurching forward until his momentum encouraged a movement of the arm. He looked like a drunk, rather a somnambulist, in a dance marathon.

“Nonetheless, Foreman’s punches were hardly more than pats. They were sufficiently weak for any man in reasonable shape to absorb them. Still, Foreman came on. Sobbing for breath, leaning, almost limping, in a pat-a-pat of feeble cuffs, he was all but lying over Ali on the ropes… The bell rang the end of the sixth…Foreman looked ready to float as he came to his corner. Sandy Saddler (the same fighter who elbowed and head butted our own Gabriel “Flash” Elorde in the ring) could not bring himself to look at him. The sorrow in Foreman’s corner was now heavier than in Ali’s dressing room before the fight.”

Mailer continues, “….The bell rang for the eighth round….With twenty seconds left to the round, Ali attacked. By his own measure, by that measure of twenty years of boxing, with the knowledge of all he had learned of what could and could not be done at any instant in the ring, he chose this as the occasion and lying on the ropes, he hit Foreman with a right and left, then came off the ropes to hit him with a left and a right. Into this last right hand he put his glove and his forearm again, a head-stupefying punch that sent Foreman reeling forward.

“As he went by, Ali hit him on the side of the jaw with a right, and darted away from the ropes in such a way as to put Foreman next to them. For the first time in the entire fight he had cut off the ring on Foreman. Now Ali struck him a combination of punches fast as the punches of the first round, but harder and more consecutive, three capital rights in a row struck Foreman, then a left, and for an instant on Foreman’s face appeared the knowledge that he was in danger and must start to look to his last protection.

“His opponent was attacking…..Then a big projectile exactly the size of a fist in a glove drove into the middle of Foreman’s mind, the best punch of the startled night, the blow Ali saved for a career. Foreman’s arms flew out to the side like a man with a parachute jumping out of a plane, and in this double ring. All the while his eyes were on Ali and he looked up with no anger as if Ali, indeed, was the man he knew best in the world and would see him on his dying day.”

Next week, an account of what transpired seconds after fight’s end and how it “feels” to be knocked out, according to Floyd Patterson.