Norman Mailer and boxing

Norman Mailer died on Saturday in New York. He was 84 years old. Despite Mailer's Pulitzer Prizes and National Book Award, his written work, whether fiction or non-fiction, never received universal praise. Too controversial and too inconsistent, he could not become the literary heir of Ernest Hemingway. But for me, his boxing writing will live on.

His topics included the death of Benny Paret, the coming of Sonny Liston as heavyweight champion and the comedown of Floyd Patterson, the first Ali-Frazier war, and the unlikely comeback of Muhammad Ali rumbling in the jungles of Zaire. Mailer was a mainstream literary voice for the boxing world in the 1960s and 1970s.

Mailer came to boxing late. His second wife's father was a professional boxer. Whenever his father in law visited their home in the 1950s, Mailer was compelled to put on the gloves and get biffed around. Mailer says he learned a lot from him. Later, Mailer had a friendship with 1960s light heavyweight champion Jose Torres. They made a deal. Mailer would help him with his writing. And Torres would help him become a boxer. It worked. Torres wrote well-received biographies of Muhammad Ali and Mike Tyson. And Norman Mailer learned how to handle his fists against heavyweight literary talents like Truman Capote and Gore Vidal who called his run in with Mailer "the night of the tiny fist."

Mailer's writing about boxing was always interesting but not always that great. In his essay "Ten Thousand Words a Minute," he writes of the first Liston-Patterson bout in September, 1962, a match having a Civil Rights storyline and enough political significance that President John F. Kennedy knew about it before anyone else. It pitted the hulking leg breaker for the mob, Sonny Liston, against the media darling and liberal Floyd Patterson. Mailer, faced with the massive and silent Liston and the sunny persona of Patterson, believed the fight had a clear villain and hero. Of the villain, Liston, he writes, he is "the hero of every man who would war with destiny for so long as he had a gimmick … the fixer, the bitch, the faggot, the switchblade, the gun." I never knew what that meant, so I contrast it to what African-American novelist James Baldwin, who also covered the fight, writes of Liston. He says Liston is "inarticulate in the way we all are when more has happened to us than we know how to express." In that one sentence, Baldwin says more about Liston and how the Patterson-Liston bout echoes the Civil Rights movement than Mailer's essay ever does.

But sometimes Mailer's boxing writing is very good. In "King of the Hill," he writes about the first Ali-Frazier match and catches the spirit of Ali in the early 1970s perfectly. He describes Ali: "like a six-foot parrot, he keeps screaming at you that he is the center of the stage. 'Come here and get me fool,' he says. 'You can't, 'cause you don't know who I am. You don't know where I am. I'm human intelligence and you don't even know if I'm good or evil.'" But Mailer misses the mark in his book "The Fight", where he said Ali was "turning the pockets of the boxing world inside out" by counterpunching off the ropes to defeat the younger champion George Foreman. It's as if great counterpunchers like heavyweight champion of the late 1920s Gene Tunney never existed and light heavyweight champion Archie Moore's brave stand on the ropes against heavyweight champion Rocky Marciano in 1955 never happened.

But the mark of a good writer may not be how much of his or her writing lasts or what percentage of it is good, but how often bits of it revisit us involuntarily as if something already in our conscious needs the reassurance of the unconcious. And one of Mailer's bits of writing revisits me when I see a once great fighter reach his end. This happened recently when I saw Arturo Gatti's career end. This fighter, whose blood from his own gaping wounds in his trilogy with Micky Ward seemed to keep him afloat, sunk to the canvas against Alfonso Gomez earlier this year and quickly retired. And it also happened when I saw Shane Mosley lose the first two-thirds of his fight on Saturday against undefeated welterweight Miguel Cotto. What pops into my head during these moments is Mailer's description of the death of Benny Paret.

In 1962, welterweight champion Benny Paret faces Emile Griffith for the third time. Griffith won the first bout; Paret won the second, taking Griffith's world title. In the buildup to their final match, Paret taunts Griffith and accuses him of being gay, thus turning the fight into a grudge match. And the fight itself lives up to that until the twelfth round when Paret gets caught in the corner, Griffith throws over a dozen punches in a couple of seconds, and referee Ruby Goldstein hesitates for just a moment before stopping Griffith's punches from landing on the head of the unconscious Paret. Mailer writes:

"And Paret? Paret died on his feet. As he took those eighteen punches something happened to everyone who was in psychic range of the event. Some part of his death reached out to us. One felt it hover in the air. He was still standing in the ropes, trapped as he had been before he gave some little half-smile of regret, as if he were saying, "I didn't know I was going to die just yet."

Here, Mailer gets to a fundamental truth about boxing. As death comes too soon to Paret, death comes too soon to all boxers. I don't mean a literal death, but a figurative one – the one that tells them they should no longer box, that they should leave the ring to the young guys.

Some take the cues before this death comes. Heavyweight champion Rocky Marciano knows his body won't hold up much longer, so after defeating Archie Moore in 1955, he exits the game as the only undefeated heavyweight champion.

Some receive the message from the messenger death and move on. Welterweight champion Barney Ross, while taking a beating from Henry Armstrong in New York in 1938, vows to the referee and his cornermen he will never fight again if they let him last out the fight. Later in life, he opts to enter the hell of Guadalcanal in WWII but not the boxing ring.

Some receive the message that death is imminent but continue fighting anyway. After nearly losing to Jersey Joe Walcott and then knocking him out in their rematch in 1948, heavyweight champion Joe Louis retires from boxing only to come back and lose to new heavyweight champion Ezzard Charles in 1950 and then gets knocked unconscious by the young Rocky Marciano in 1951.

And then there's Ali. After defeating Joe Frazier in their rubber match in 1975 – "the closest thing to death," Ali said – Muhammad Ali continues to fight in title defenses that become more and more farce-like: gift decisions against Jimmy Young, Ken Norton, and Earnie Shavers; a loss of his championship to Leon Spinks, who was fighting only his eighth professional fight; an embarrassing comeback against champion Larry Holmes that because of bad medical advice and the skill of the good young champion probably brought Ali even closer to a literal death than his bout third bout with Frazier did. As his corner used to yell "ghost in the house" to invoke controversial black heavyweight champion of the early 1900s Jack Johnson, by his last few fights Muhammad Ali as a boxer had himself become a ghost.

And even today, the messenger of boxing death isn't heeded by many: Roy Jones continues to fight on well, but not at the top-level of his division despite being clued into his death as pound-for-pound king and light heavyweight king after being knocked out by Antonio Tarver and Glen Johnson in 2004; Oscar De La Hoya wants to fight twice more in 2008 and wishes for a defining war, something in the Arturo Gatti-Micky Ward genre. And one wonders, who wishes that on themselves? And one wonders why doesn't he remember that the messenger of death came to him when he fought Felix Trinidad in 1999, and he ran from it for the last four rounds?

For Paret, Ali, Ross, Jones, and everyone else who enters the ring, death comes. And the death in the ring is a microcosm of all our physical deaths.

Then perhaps in one way, Mailer did exceed his spiritual competitor, Ernest Hemingway. It was in how he handled his own death. Toward the end of his life, Mailer had death on his mind and he would speak often of Hemingway's suicide. He asserted Hemingway dealing with a host of health issuses must've planned it for months, taking his rifle out of its case and playing with the trigger until one night he just pushed it too far. Mailer dealt with his physical decline – hearing aids, arthritis, angina – more stoically.

And it's appropriate that another fighter did the same thing on the very day Mailer died. Behind badly against young gun Miguel Cotto, the aging Shane Mosley started with right hands but couldn't hurt Cotto. He changed tactics: he began to dance and move and jab but still lost rounds. Finally, he turned into Joe Frazier and kept in Cotto's face, making the fight close even though he was physically spent and at 36 year of age his body couldn't do what he needed it to in order to defeat the body nearly a decade younger. He adjusted instead and lost, but survived honorably.

As I wrote above, Mailer's words popped into my head early in the Cotto-Mosley bout. But Mosley's adjustments in the ring had me considering the words anew. And when I learned of Mailer's death I thought of how both Mosley in the ring and Mailer in illness saw their fights through to the end. Even when their bodies weren't able, their wills were. And this makes me realize that although Mailer never wrote the great American novel and will never have the literary stature of Hemingway, he did get those 76 words about Paret exactly right.