2
" If [the heavyweights] become champions they begin to have inner lives like Hemingway or Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy or Faulkner, Joyce or Melville or Conrad or Lawrence or Proust…Dempsey was alone and Tunney could never explain himself and Sharkey could never believe himself nor Schmeling nor Braddock, and Carnera was sad and Baer an indecipherable clown; great heavyweights like Louis had the loneliness of the ages in their silence, and men like Marciano were mystified by a power which seemed to have been granted them. With the advent, however, of the great modern Black heavyweights, Patterson, Liston, then Clay and Frazier, perhaps the loneliness gave way to what it had been protecting itself against—a surrealistic situation unstable beyond belief. Being a Black heavyweight champion in the second half of the twentieth century (with Black revolutions opening all over the world) was now not unlike being Jack Johnson, Malcolm X and Frank Costello all in one… "
― Joyce Carol Oates , On Boxing
3
" [...] aunque sí puedo aceptar la proposición según la cual la vida es una metáfora del boxeo —en uno de esos combates que siguen y siguen, asalto tras asalto, jabs o golpes rápidos, golpes errados, enganches, ninguna certidumbre, de nuevo la campana y de nuevo tú y tu adversario, en pelea tan pareja que es imposible no ver que tu adversario eres tú: ¿y por qué esta lucha en una plataforma elevada y cerrada por cuerdas como un corral, bajo luces calientes, crudas e inmisericordes en presencia de una muchedumbre impaciente?—, esa especie de infernal metáfora literaria. La vida es como el boxeo en muchos e incómodos sentidos. "
― Joyce Carol Oates , On Boxing
9
" To watch boxing closely, and seriously, is to risk moments of what might be called animal panic—a sense not only that something very ugly is happening but that, by watching it, one is an accomplice. This awareness, or revelation, or weakness, or hairline split in one’s cuticle of a self can come at any instant, unanticipated and unbidden; though of course it tends to sweep over the viewer when he is watching a really violent match. I feel it as vertigo—breathlessness—a repugnance beyond language: a sheerly physical loathing. That it is also, or even primarily, self-loathing goes without saying.
...
At such times one thinks: What is happening? why are we here? what does this mean? can’t this be stopped? ... Yet we don't give up on boxing, it isn't that easy. Perhaps it's like tasting blood. Or, more discreetly put, love commingled with hate is more powerful than love. Or hate. "
― Joyce Carol Oates , On Boxing
10
" Those whose aggression is masked, or oblique, or unsuccessful, will always condemn it in others. They are likely to think of boxing as “primitive”—as if inhabiting the flesh were not a primitive proposition, radically inappropriate to a civilization supported by and always subordinate to physical strength: missiles, nuclear warheads. The terrible silence dramatized in the boxing ring is the silence of nature before man, before language, when the physical being alone was God. In any case, anger is an appropriate response to certain intransigent facts of life, not a motiveless malignancy as in classic tragedy but a fully motivated and socially coherent impulse. Impotence takes many forms—one of them being the reckless physical expenditure of physical potency. "
― Joyce Carol Oates , On Boxing
