"One plays football. One doesn't play boxing."

I've always had a thing for boxing and a hard time admitting it, because, like my enthusiasm for baseball, it's essentially an exotic attachment: I don't know what makes for a good fight, only what makes for a good fight movie. In the case of boxing, though, I have an excuse: I'm white, and I'm a girl. This is not to say that there have been no good white champs—I will say that there have been no good female ones—but that African-American champs have been more important to them (and us) than ours have been to anyone.*

It's funny to me that we're willing to tell grand-scale stories with fights (America vs. Europe, black vs. white, thug vs. gentleman) when the bottom line has always been two guys beating the cabbage out of each other. There isn't even any egalitarian, rich-or-poor-a-bullet-will-kill-you-just-as-dead moral to be drawn; it may be true that all men are equal in the ring, but the men who end up there are all social and economic lowlifes of one kind or another. There are ways in which boot camp is egalitarian, but do we think of the Army as a social leveler? So the question behind all of my other boxing questions has always been: even if I discovered the secret of why boxing matters, could I get away with saying it?

Comparisons between boxers and intellectuals are the go-to solution for this dilemma, and they are almost all bad—for some idea of how bad, think of Norman Mailer. In The Culture of Bruising, Gerald Early has struck upon one that works. He means it to be about black intellectuals, but conservatives and lady intellectuals should prepare for the shock of recognition. (A little necessary background: Floyd Patterson was seen as a large-hearted, polite, and devoutly Catholic gentleman, Sonny Liston as a brutish ex-con.)

What Patterson ultimately hated about both Ali and Liston was that both thought they could, through flights of escapism, avoid a dilemma that Patterson thought was ineluctable and, unfortunately, character-building—that is, ultimately, not simply a quest for moral order but for redemptive piety. (Thus, Larry Neal was right: Patterson was "the first Hamlet of the boxing profession.") Liston, through his defeats at the hands of Ali, simply acquiesced in being what whites said he was.

. . . Liston accepted the blackness of blackness. Ali, by becoming a Black Muslim, decided he wished to change the nature of the terms, to escape the blackness of blackness by redefining the terms in his own way. Liston accepted defeat as his lot; Ali denied its possibility; Patterson felt that the black champion, like the black intellectual, could do neither. For Patterson, one could neither accept the terms nor redefine them; one must heroically struggle with them, constantly defending one's rights to participate in the discourse.

Ali hated Patterson because he thought he was an Uncle Tom ("I'll knock him on his back, so he'll start acting black"), but Patterson's reasons for hating Ali were more complex. For Ali to embrace separatism was, to Patterson's mind, un-American, but mostly it was insufficiently tragic. (Dr. Early again: "Patterson may have been James Baldwin's handsome boy and Norman Mailer's 'liberal's liberal,' but he was also an ascetic and a devout Catholic, which reminds us that Patterson's quest for freedom was simply to find a new kind of denial.") Ali and Liston made it too easy. A strange complaint for most people, but not so strange coming from a boxer.

* "One could argue that the three most important black figures in twentieth century American culture were prizefighters: Jack Johnson, Joe Louis, and Muhammad Ali. Certainly, there have been no other blacks in the history of the country (with the possible exception of Martin Luther King) who have been written about as much as whose actions were scrutinized so closely or reverberated so profoundly across the land... Indeed, these fighters were more celebrated in African-American folklore and in African-American life generally than other important black pioneers in sports such as Jackie Robinson, Jesse Owens, or Wilma Rudolph." —Gerald Early