Boxer

Name for me, if you can, all the boxing movies that have black heroes.

Hmm.

The Fighter, a Mark Wahlberg baby, received seven Oscar nominations, and is considered a shoo-in for not one but two acting awards. In the continuing Oscar series, we ask, what is it about boxing? Sportsinmovies.com reminds us that “Boxing films are the only sports related films to win an Academy Award for Best Picture, and they did it twice (Rocky, Million Dollar Baby)! These gritty films bring us death, depression, imprisonment and ultimately…victory!”

But it doesn’t even need to be dramatized. Joyce Carol Oates believes boxing is “America’s tragic theater.” Early heavyweight champions used to perform on the vaudeville circuit, showing off their shadowboxing, their physique, and the odd hobby. An interview with Norman Mailer, who boxed and who wrote about boxing, gave us this:

Interviewer: At one point you compared the boxer thinking about being in the ring with his opponent and the terror of contemplating that blank page as a novelist. There’s a similar battle that’s going to ensue.

Norman Mailer: No doubt. I’ve written at times about the spooky element in writing. You go in each morning, and there’s a blank page. Maybe it takes five minutes, maybe it takes an hour. Sooner or later you start writing, and then the words begin to flow. Where does that come from? You can’t pinpoint it. You always wonder, “Will it all stop tomorrow?” In that sense it’s spooky.

M-W says the first known use of “boxing,” defined as ” the art of attack and defense with the fists practiced as a sport,” happened in 1605. Boxing glove, by the by, did not come into use until 1841. That’s over two centuries of bareknuckle brawls. Curiously, pugilism, which one would think is the older of the two (because it sounds fancier) is not listed as known until 1791. Pugnus is Latin for fist, in case you’re wondering. Pugnare is to fight. Pungere is to prick.

But the standard definitions leave much unsaid about how we like our boxing, or how we like our boxing stories (and really, boxing stories eclipse the real thing anyway – have you ever watched actual boxing? It sucks). I’d like to propose that dictionaries add “poor or black, perhaps both” to their definition of boxer. Oh, and there can be an addendum that reads “now with some Latinos, too.” Although it should also read “when used as a metaphor, almost always white.”

Search your feelings, Luke; you know this to be true. Boxing may be old but remained illegal in many parts of the United States into the 20th century. It’s two guys trying to kill each other, after all. We already understand why it’s what boxing historian Bert Sugar calls the sport “of the dispossessed,” of the lowest rung on the ladder.

The Wards, featured in The Fighter, certainly fit that category. They’re poor, loud, large, smokey, boozey, and druggy, at least in one case. And they’re IRISH. Then, to add insult to injury, Micky Ward’s first opponent in The Fighter is black. He’s twenty pounds heavier than Micky and we’re told he’s just gotten out of prison. So, to start things off, Micky gets the snot beat out of him by a giant criminal black man. But Micky gets some other Others to whip. A later opponent, Sanchez, dances to the ring to some mariachi kind of tune, but later goes down from what looks a lot like a sucker punch. I grant you that Micky’s final opponent is white – and we’re talking British Isles white. But he is foreign, so he’s got an accent and stuff and all his fans boo at our homegrown hero, who walks to the ring to the sweet strains of “Here I Go Again” by Whitesnake. It’s not as obvious a choice as Bonjovi would have been, but you get the idea anyway.

White America wins, just as we did in Rocky, the quintessential boxer flick, where the short but muscled white guy goes the distance with the tall tailored black champ.

Of course, Rocky wasn’t really about race. It was about the little guy, the underdog, the working man. America was in troubled economic times then, just as we are now when we see Dicky and Micky redeem themselves. “Hollywood’s Class Warfare” is the title of a recent New York Times article by film critic A. O. Scott, and a picture of the Ward boys from The Fighter introduces it. The article pulls together an impressive number of 2010 threads to weave a thesis of a “countervailing mystique” (talk about a non-working-class phrase) that “clings to the streets of Lowell” (Fighter’s locale) and other Americana zones. “The common trait of these places…is tribalism.” And since movies “exist partly to smooth over the rough patches in our collective life,” (and that’s an idea worth ruminating on for a few moments), it makes sense that films set in these places rally the American tribal feelings within us, and indeed might be completely calculated to do so. Think of Bruce Springsteen with his butt in front of the American flag and the dirty rag in the pocket: tribe, baby. Reagan tries to appropriate those feelings by using “Born in the USA” as a campaign song, and Springsteen told him to stop.

But when we rally around tribe, we never rally around college-educated diction or Susan Sontag essays or NPR. The New York Times is specifically snubbed in The Fighter, actually. No, we rally around places and people that don’t pronounce all their consonants, every time. We rally around “clans,” which is the word, with its connotations of tight-knitness, and, yes, ferocity, that most writers use to describe the Ward family. Even NYTimes readers get off on that stuff. Clans, tribes, slang, meth. We slummin’, man.

Another Oscar darling this year, Winter’s Bone, is all about meth and the clans of Missourah. It’s not all that good, but NYTimes folks are liking it, because, as my clever sister put it, “‘poor people are poor!’ movies always go over well at Oscar time.” The picture is of the main character teaching her little sister how to shoot squirrels so they can eat. Yeah.

Look at two examples from the last decade to see how they fit these patterns of boxing, race, and class.

When Million-Dollar Baby comes out in 2004, we’re maybe at the height of the culture wars of the Bush era, it being an election year and all. The Abu Ghraib story breaks, Terri Schiavo’s starving to death, nobody’s happy (alright, exaggeration), and we get an Oscar-sweeping movie about losers and death. I’d like to just remind us that the chick who beat sweet little Hilary Swank up badly enough to, well, you know if you’ve seen the movie, looked like this:

Hilary Swank played self-admitted white trash in the film, so we rooted for her. Bush was able to cast himself as more blue collar than John “married to Heinz fortune” Kerry, even though the Bushes are more blue blood Connecticut than anything else – so he won.

The next year we got Cinderella Man, a Depression era feelgood. By this point we know we’re stuck with Bush, so it’s time for a tactic change: shit sucks, but watching a (white) guy beat people up makes us feel better. Bring em on.

There are many other examples. You might even throw in a mention for On the Waterfront, not a boxing movie per se but a bona fide classic where one of the most famous lines in cinema – “I coulda been a contender” – is said by a poor young man bemoaning his now fixed state as a citizen of “Palookaville.” Like that film, Cinderella Man is also noteworthy because it reminds us of a simpler time when boxing belonged to white folks. Have you seen the Conan sketch where he plays the old-timey boxer who gets repeatedly pummeled by black guys? It’s true that these days our boxing stories are much more about triumph of the poor than they are triumph of the white. But it wasn’t always that way. Conan’s sketch was echoing the very true story of Jack Johnson. Not the guy who writes sleepy songs about pancakes.

In part two we’ll see how the ghosts of boxing’s past continue to haunt the sport, and haunt our culture.