FUNDAMENTALS By Christina Newland
MUST READ: The Harder they Fall (1947) Published by Ivan R. Dee
LOST FIGHT Jack Johnson vs. Arthur Cravan Barcelona, 23 April 1916 I of legends about himself before being called out. If boxers and promoters
has wonderful strength holding,” Cravan said at the time. “Once, aiming at my stomach, he missed me by a fraction of a second – I caught his tremendous punch on my elbow; he laughed and I’m sure I laughed back. … I knew I was to be beaten.” There’s also a solid chance that Cravan always knew he’d be beaten, that he took the match to peacock and that he was assured in advance he wouldn’t be hurt.
When asked for a favorite boxing book, I’m tempted to go straight to Budd Schulberg’s classic 1947 novel The Harder They Fall, a fictionalized imagining of the real Primo Carnera heavyweight corruption scandal. It’s narrated from the point of view of a cynical press agent who contributes to the most crooked rise to the title in boxing history and eventually feels great shame about his
n the days of yore, long before Google, an enterprising fight hustler might make up any number
Johnson, “The Galveston Giant,” had proven his power and skills stateside against the future Hall-of-Fame likes of Sam McVey, Joe Jeannette, Sam Langford, Bob Fitzsimmons, Stanley Ketchel and Jim Jeffries. His European bout with Cravan was viewed as a bizarre mismatch from the start, with the pale, nervous Cravan clearly terrified and the overpowering Johnson practically holding his opponent up through much of the fight. Finally, after five dull rounds, Johnson knocked Cravan to the canvas in the sixth. But the pair were cosmically matched, if not athletically: a pair of rebellious, splashy figures with conscious personas. Cravan, a multi- hyphenate eccentric artiste who died mysteriously at sea, aged 31, would go down (no pun intended) as a footnote in boxing and literary lore. Johnson, who himself had built up a towering reputation as a hedonist and a provocateur, was proud of his status as the first Black heavyweight champion of the world and flouted his success in the face of the racist white establishment – making him far more than a footnote in history. But in either case, both men’s attitudes toward celebrity – and knowing provocation – prophesied the future of the sport.
have always had a tendency to showboat, change their names or puff up their backstories for audience benefit, in the 1910s, you could get away with all manner of shenanigans. Enter Arthur Cravan, a 6-foot-1 vagabond poet who claimed to be the nephew of writer Oscar Wilde, palled around with the likes of Guillaume Apollinaire and saw himself as something of a prodigy in the boxing ring. A literary enigma par excellence, he only fought three professional matches, and lost all of them. He was known for taking on false identities and procuring dozens of passports, lying about his nationality and provoking arguments everywhere he went; the kind of man who believed his art was mainly in his life, rather than on the page. The Paris Review called him a “Dadaist poet-boxer who was neither a good poet nor a good boxer.” And he would learn at least the latter part – along with the rest of the world – on April 23, 1916. During that fateful spring in Barcelona, Spain, he would go nearly six rounds with the walloping former heavyweight champion of the world: Jack Johnson. “In my fight with him I found it almost impossible to get through his left, and he
MUST WATCH: Body and Soul (1947)
Given that my gateway to the sport was very much the boxing movie, this is a tough one to narrow down. It could easily be Raging Bull , but in the interest of choosing a slightly lesser-seen option, I’m going to say Body and Soul, from 1947. Made in striking black and white, it was one of the key visual inspirations for Scorsese’s later film. It’s loosely based on the story of Jewish-American fighter Barney Ross, who was a champion in three weight classes during the 1930s. In the film, he’s a middleweight fighter called Charley Davis, played with
complicity in this exploitation. It’s a nakedly dark exploration of corruption and gangsterdom in the sport, later adapted for the big screen with Humphrey Bogart as the protagonist. I also have to mention the book that has had the biggest impact on me as a boxing fan and writer: George Kimball and John Schulian’s remarkable anthology from 2013, entitled
The Hurt Business: A Century of the Greatest Writing on Boxing . For over a decade, I’ve underlined, dog-eared and otherwise worn it out with re-reading. The collection of boxing reportage is set out in chronological order, beginning with novelist Jack London’s 1910 account of the Jack Johnson vs. Jim Jeffries title fight and going right up to the early ’00s. Through the vivid styles of various writers over the past century, the book captures boxing’s major personalities, dilemmas, glories and tragedies. It includes literary stalwarts like James Baldwin and Joyce Carol Oates alongside legendary reporters like Mark Kram and Gay Talese,
lumpenproletariat charm by John Garfield. Directed by strident lefty Robert Rossen, the movie works as an anti-capitalist parable – showing how an honest salt-of-the-earth boy is wooed by greedy materialism – and also as an earnest boxing drama, with a love for the sweat and ritual of the sport. The spirit of realism infuses the entire film, and it’s one of astonishingly few boxing movies of its era to address, even obliquely, race – with the inclusion of a major Black character (real-life former prizefighter and stage actor Canada Lee). Cinematographer James Wong Howe used up to eight cameras to set up the variety of shots used during the
making for an eclectic, beautifully written and insightful read. Recommended selections? W.C. Heinz’ 1951 true-crime story “The Brownsville Bum,” which reads like a hard-boiled noir novel. And the unvarnished, painful post-fight report of Ali vs. Frazier at The Thrilla in Manila, penned by Kram for Sports Illustrated in 1975. If anyone ever made the mistake of assuming boxing fans and commentators were lowbrow, reading this anthology will remind you it has always been a sport of scholars and poets as much as it is bruisers.
matches – and sometimes even filmed on roller skates for additional effect. The result is an unrivaled, thrilling, smoky trip through the boxing underworld and the redemption that can be found there. Honorable mentions have to include another ’40s flick – the short, poetic, brutal 1949 noir The Set-Up – and 1962’s Requiem for a Heavyweight, starring Anthony Quinn as a punch-drunk, jobless former fighter with little left to show from his glory days as a pugilist. Be sure to bring a hanky.
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