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Mailer made boxing a literary event

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Mark Kriegel

Mark Kriegel is the national columnist for FOXSports.com. He is the author of two New York Times best sellers, Namath: A Biography and Pistol: The Life of Pete Maravich, which Sports Illustrated called "the best sports biography of the year."

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Updated Jun 18, 2009 4:03 PM ET
     
 
Don King greeted us with the voice of an arch villain. "Heh, heh, heh," he said. "Here they come: the boss scribes." He was mocking us, of course. We were nothing but newspaper writers with East Coast deadlines. A weary crew, metabolically conditioned to rise with caffeine and fade with alcohol, we had arrived for an audience with a profoundly confused, if preposterously profitable bully named Mike Tyson. I don't remember a word Tyson said that day in Vegas. But we all got a kick out of the boss scribe bit, repeating the line all day and into the night. What a voice is King's: the Penguin meets the Joker in a blaxploitation flick. Heh, heh, heh. King was a hustler and a killer, qualities Tyson greatly admired. But his real genius lay in his capacity for comedy. After all, that's why we were there. At least I was. The days leading up to a big fight were a mating ritual for comedy and tragedy, a festival for reporters like me to mine high drama from low life. Boxing may be the worst of sports, but it's the best to write. That much I learned from the bossest scribe of all, Norman Mailer, who was for a time in the realm of letters what Tyson was supposed to be in the ring: Baddest Man on the Planet. I was 21, a recent college graduate living at home, the most unsuccessful bartender in Manhattan, when I began to investigate the volumes above my father's desk. There was a full shelf of Mailer's audaciously titled books, including The Naked and the Dead, The Prisoner of Sex, Deaths for the Ladies (and Other Disasters) and Of A Fire on the Moon. I began with An American Dream, as my father's description of it as "a great bad novel" proved irresistible. But I found what I was looking for (or perhaps, what was looking for me) in a collection called The Presidential Papers. It contains Mailer's famous piece on JFK, "Superman Comes to the Supermarket," and the less famous "10,000 Words a Minute," about the Floyd Patterson-Sonny Liston title fight in Chicago. Mailer's method was the same for political conventions as for heavyweight bouts, rendering events at novella length, casting himself as the protagonist. He had the champion's ego, or Ego!, as he'd later write of Muhammad Ali. Yes, Mailer had it. Ali had it. Evander Holyfield, much to his own peril, still has it. Tyson never did, though. Tyson was too worried about looking like a fool, and so was doomed to become one. I'd like to think Mailer was fearless in the best way of athletes and actors and authors, which is to say that he was willing to risk embarrassment. On Saturday, after the news of his death had hit the wires, I got a call from a friend who worked the Patterson-Liston promotion. He could still recall the press conference the morning after the fight, as Mailer invited himself into the aisle and began to shadowbox. Suddenly, a short, barrel-chested Jew was bobbing and weaving his way toward Liston, arguably the most feared man in America. "I don't know if he was drunk or just pretending to be," said my friend. "But he scared the shit out of Sonny." From "10,000 Words...", Mailer's description of the reporters drinking and smoking and trading anecdotes in the press room: "So they char the inside of their bodies in order to scrape up news which can go out to the machine, that enormous machine, that intellectual leviathan which is obliged to eat, each day, tidbits, gristle, gravel, garbage cans, charlotte russe, old rubber tires, T-bone steaks, wet cardboard, dry leaves, apple pie, broken bottles, dog food, shells, roach powder, dry ball-point pens, grapefruit juice. All the trash, all the garbage, all the slop and a little of the wealth go out each day and night into the belly of that old American goat, our newspapers... "So great guilt clings to reporters. They know they help to keep America slightly insane." Then there was this, also from The Presidential Papers, about the death of Benny "Kid" Paret at the hands of Emile Griffith in Madison Square Garden: "He hit him eighteen right hands in a row, an act that took perhaps three or four seconds, Griffith making a pent-up whimpering sound all the while he attacked, the right hand whipping like a piston rod which has broken out of the crankcase, or like a baseball bat demolishing a pumpkin. I was sitting in the second row of that corner — they were not ten feet away from me — and like everyone else, I was hypnotized... "And Paret? Paret died on his feet... 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" and then, his head leaning back but still erect, his death came to breathe about him. He began to pass away. As he passed, so his limbs descended beneath him and he sank slowly to the floor. He went down more slowly than any fighter had ever gone down, he went down like a large ship that turns on end and slides second by second into its grave. As he went down, the sound of Griffith's punches echoed in the mind like a heavy ax in the distance chopping into a wet log." Mailer wrote those words in 1962, the year I was born. I read them in a year when Jay McInerney was all the rage. Still, none of that had any deterrent effect. For me, Mailer's sentences had no expiration date. Even if I had no ambition to be a sportswriter, I would remain forever curious about the fights. Looking back on the previous millennium, it may be difficult to understand that — even in the age of television — the fights were considered literary events. Indeed, after reading Mailer's dispatches from Manila and Zaire, one can argue that he had more to do with the mythologizing of Ali than Howard Cosell. And no one understood the power of the boss scribes more than Don King. The Fight, Mailer's book-length treatise on Ali's improbable knockout of George Foreman, includes a portrait of King as a gifted suck-up, eager to please, in search of his own cachet and fully aware of the celebrity the boss scribes could confer upon him. They are in Zaire, with Hunter Thompson drinking at the next table, as King tells Mailer of prison and his avoidance of its perils. He read. He read Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. He read Alfred Kinsey and Masters and Johnson and Hitler and Marx, whom he describes as "a cold mother------." Then there was another German philosopher, whose great work, Beyond Good and Evil, dealt with man's will to power. "Knee's itch," said King. "I read a lot of him." Nietzsche, he meant. Not all of Mailer's boxing stuff has aged so well. The emphasis on Pimpology can cause one to wince. Then there's the confusion — as the late Jack Newfield liked to point out — between violence and eroticism. (In that respect, Mailer and Tyson did have something in common.) Finally, his excessiveness could lead to silliness. As Mark Kram wrote in his eloquent debunking of Ali, Ghosts of Manila: "With a high fever, Norman Mailer judged him to be America's greatest wit, an observation that — after the first time around — could only have been produced by a deranged funny bone or an avidity for comic cant." All true. Still, I can't imagine a young writer embarrassing himself more than I did trying to imitate Mailer. In other words, he inspired me. We met twice. Once, as we were introduced at a restaurant, I mumbled something about having written a novel. Recognizing my chagrin — how many times had he heard that before? — he was exceedingly polite. The other time was in 1993, in front of the old New York Post building on South Street. The editorial staff was in revolt against a parking lot magnate seeking to buy the paper, then in bankruptcy. Mailer, wearing a bomber jacket and knit cap, came to speak at our rally, which was dedicated to insulting our would-be owner. I tried to help him onto the flatbed of a truck, but he resisted the offer, choosing to move in as a fighter, out of a crouch, leading with his left, as if to prove that he needed no help. Then Mailer spoke: "The key thing about the paper," he said, "is every reporter should be allowed to tell his own lies, rather than the lies his owner imposes." Put another way: it was our right to feed that old goat as we saw fit. I did about ten years as a sportswriter in New York. In all that time I never saw anything as magnificent as the tenth round of the first fight between Riddick Bowe and Evander Holyfield. I never heard a coach or a manager speak with the sense of Teddy Atlas, the trainer whose construct was a veritable theology of courage and cowardice. I may have missed the epics in Manila and Zaire. But across that decade I spent feeding the goat, the only thing I didn't bitch about was covering the fights. Of course, the big bouts haven't been literary happenings in quite some time. I read some months ago that David Mamet — who had long since grown tired of wondering whether Tyson would bite off another man's ear — had written and directed a film set in the world of mixed martial arts. "I grew up with boxing," he told the Los Angeles Times. "But everyone seems sick to death of it." To me, nothing could anticipate boxing's doom more than the scorn of a heavyweight writer. So maybe the obituaries are correct, that boxing is as dead as Norman Mailer. Or maybe, as I can't help but hope, the fight game is just waiting on a new generation of boss scribes.

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