In 1923 Paul Gallico, a young New York Daily News
reporter, approached heavyweight boxing champion Jack Dempsey with an
idea for a story. New to the sports beat, Gallico worried that he
couldn’t write about boxing “graphically or understandingly” without
having experienced it firsthand, so he asked Dempsey if they could spar.
His only request was that the champion not aim for the body. “I
explained that I expected to survive and said my only serious doubt was
my ability to take it in the region of the stomach,” Gallico wrote. “I
asked the great man if he might confine his attentions to a less unhappy
target.” Dempsey obliged the journalist and knocked him out with “a
good punch to the nose” in just over a minute. Gallico wrote that the
knockout was like an “awful explosion within the confines of my skull,
followed by a bright light, a tearing sensation and then darkness.”
Ten years ago I was a young-ish reporter
myself and in the midst of an early midlife crisis. I had spent the
first part of my adulthood as a devoted pacifist and decadent, my head
either in a book or a bottle of whiskey, but by 33 the old
answers—drinking, smoking, lazing about, responding to all hostility
with irony—weren’t satisfying me anymore. I was bored to tears.
Convinced that the cure to my paralysis would only be found in throwing
myself into a new life, I decided to run in the exact opposite direction
from where I’d been moving for a decade. I had never been in a fight,
had always been repulsed by the idea, and had always seen combat sports
as proof of humankind’s refusal to grow up and be civilized. But I also
saw, however faintly, that there were extraordinary sensations to be
found in fighting, that to fight would be to feel life deeply. So I decided to start my experiment in transformation there. After 33 passive years, I suddenly needed to know what I would do if someone hit me in the face.
Paul Gallico is part of a great lineage of
writers who tried their hand at fighting. Albert Camus was an amateur
boxer. Norman Mailer sparred with light heavyweight champion José
Torres. Ernest Hemingway tormented Ezra Pound by forcing the poet to put
on gloves and try to hit the much larger novelist in his Paris
apartment. And George Plimpton, who turned Gallico’s hand’s-on approach
to sports journalism into a career, also boxed a former champion for a
story, in his case light-heavyweight Archie Moore, who bloodied the
writer’s nose.
At the root of the sympathetic connection between writing and fighting lies solitude. ... [mehr] https://lithub.com/why-are-writers-drawn-to-boxing/
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