If {the heavyweights} become champions they begin to have inner lives like Hemingway or Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy or Faulkner, Joyce or Melville or Conrad or Lawrence or Proust…Dempsey was alone and Tunney could never explain himself and Sharkey could never believe himself nor Schmeling nor Braddock, and Carnera was sad and Baer an indecipherable clown; great heavyweights like Louis had the loneliness of the ages in their silence, and men like Marciano were mystified by a power which seemed to have been granted them. With the advent, however, of the great modern Black heavyweights, Patterson, Liston, then Clay and Frazier, perhaps the loneliness gave way to what it had been protecting itself against-a surrealistic situation unstable beyond belief. Being a Black heavyweight champion in the second half of the twentieth century {with Black revolutions opening all over the world} was now not unlike being Jack Johnson, Malcolm X and Frank Costello all in one…
( Joyce Carol Oates )
[ On Boxing ]
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