creative forces

 

Blog # 120…August 2021

Moore and Parker

Boxing came into my life unexpectedly in 1956 when I was a waitress at a summer hotel in Muskoka. The brother of the owner was a fight referee in New York and suggested the site as a training camp for James J Parker, a Canadian heavyweight who was challenging Archie Moore for the World title in Toronto in July. So I was serving meals to the fighter, his manager, trainer, sparring partners and an assortment of other Runyonesque characters associated with the game...I gave Rocky Marciano lunch one day, quite an experience for a 19 year old physiotherapy student!

I’ve maintained a marginal interest in the sport until recently when I started to notice a considerable following in an unexpected  group -  young women - and not just observing but getting serious and stepping into the ring. I felt intuitively that women seem ill-equipped to box, not just physically but emotionally, and decided to delve a bit deeper.

 I started with Joyce Carol Oates’  1993 book On Boxing to try and get a sense of why the sport, with its inherent violence would appeal to anyone, not only women. If you know her work at all, which I didn’t, she‘s an extremely thorough, prolific  and thoughtful writer of both fiction and non – and I thought if anyone could discover and tell me why boxing fascinates, it would be JCO.  She explored the sport from many angles and pondered its ambiguities, paradoxes and curiousities: boxers are often kind, gentle, well mannered people who become murderous brutes when they enter the ring; men usually identify with the winner, women with the loser; it’s the most primitive, yet most sophisticated of sports; its savagery is contained by a myriad of rules and regulations; it provides an outlet for poor, disenfranchised youth, holding out the promise of another life.  And on and on she goes, sometimes rhapsodizing and making comparisons to Greek and Shakespearean tragedies, still no clear idea of why so many of us find it fascinating.

Eastwood and Swank

Million Dollar Baby swept the Oscars in 2004, Hilary Swank playing a young girl determined to be a boxer , her coach played by Clint Eastwood. She had a promising career…until, well she didn’t.  Totally worth worth watching again so I won't spoil it.

US Olympian and Deming

And that brings us back to women in the sport and Sarah Deming’s 2019 YA book Gravity. Sarah brings her Jewishness and her experience as a NYC Golden gloves champion and as a boxing journalist covering the 2016 Rio Olympics into the novel. We get a chance to be backstage with Gravity Delgado in her life at home, in the gym, the ring and in her love life. Many of the contradictions that JCO mentions are here…before every fight, Gravity says the Shema, a Jewish prayer to keep her opponent, the audience and those she loves safe - she includes all of the people of Brazil before competing in her Olympic fight.

So we're left without the answers to many of our questions about why boxing holds such appeal mixed with revulsion for so many of us, some things are obvious, others more perplexing...a bit like life.

August already, half of summer gone. half left, enjoy the rest, see you in September.