Boxing clever

Thirty years ago, Russell Davies wrote a weekly sporting column in the New Statesman. It proved unsustainable and was soon discontinued, but not before Davies had described a boxer ‘genuflecting through the ropes’ — an image I have coveted ever since. Boxing is ‘a standing challenge to [a writer’s] powers of description’, according to Carlo Rotella and Michael Ezra in their preface to The Bittersweet Science.

They are right. All physical action is a challenge to writers: YouTube can repair deficiencies, and is invoked several times in this anthology; but it is no substitute for writing, because writing adds focus to reality. I once saw the handsome, British-Hungarian, bottle-blond heavyweight Joe Bugner working out in a gym above a pub in the Pentonville Road. His looks were legendary, celebrated in many photo-shoots. But in reality they were also faintly out of focus, blurred by boxing. Writing searches, selects and freezes the frame. It lets you take a proper look at Bugner’s looks; lets you see what you can’t quite see.

There aren’t many good boxing writers. Even proven authors can fall short. Marianne Moore, a poet capable of describing a lion’s ‘ferocious chrysanthemum’ or a jerboa’s ‘Chippendale claw’, has very little to say about the Floyd Patterson–George Chuvalo heavyweight match in Madison Square Gardens on 5 February 1965, a bout she was taken to by George Plimpton, with Bob Silvers, the editor of the New York Review of Books,

The pre-fight preliminaries produce her most vivid touches. These are punters looking for ticket touts:

Battered felt hats [Moore is wearing her best tricorne] and heavy faces, arms waving $100 bills and men shouting, pay you double, pay you double in sight of the brass buttons of policemen. I had to be led by the hand, through the squeeze of humanity; ticket-taker vigilant looking at your face and ticket, strong thumb on the ticket.