Crime and punishment

I HAD always wondered why people who fancied themselves as number-one crashhot sportswriters chose to write about boxing. Where I saw only brutality and sordidness, the top sportswriters found a Hemingwayesque vision of masculine beauty. Where I saw a face covered in blood and snot, they saw the perfectibility of the human spirit.

I have covered a couple of heavyweight title fights, have drunk in the Flame in Las Vegas and the Irish Bar in Atlantic City, and have listened to much hard, tough, brutally observant banter in which jabs and hooks are discussed with fluency, along with numbers rackets, killings, dope, crooked deals and so on. Boxing's criminal traditions are an ineluctable part of the attraction. Listening in, I began to understand boxing's attractions for a writer.

Crime is such bliss. No one in journalism is in a position to doubt it. You can't beat a good murder. It sells papers, and - much more important - it gets the writer on to the front page. But I never had a good murder to write about.

When I worked on the newsdesk in local papers, I was always the Useless Reporter. I was assigned only stories in which nothing happened. I sat for hours in magistrates' courts, taking notes in dodgy shorthand about unspeakable doings in public lavatories. I knocked on people's doors and asked about the traffic: `Would you say it was hell living here?' I longed for a good murder.

When we had the good luck of a halfdecent murder, the Good Reporters chased about all week writing stories while I went to the planning committee meeting. Trying to make a planning application for a small building sound interesting is hard, but murder is easy. Violence commands the attention: violence is a perfect subject for any kind of writing. With violence, any decent writer has a decent story. With a planning application, James Joyce would be struggling for a line and Hemingway would give up.

Boxing guarantees you stories that seize the imagination. Of late, there was Oliver McCall bursting into tears and refusing to fight. There was Mike Tyson biting chunks off the ears of his opponent. And then there was the fight last weekend, when Lennox Lewis from Britain beat Evander Holyfield for the world heavyweight boxing championship, but was denied the victory by a crooked decision from the judges.

Naturally, there is a lot of hand-wringing going on: it is a black day for boxing, boxing reaches a new low, all that kind of thing. The fact is, it is a sensational story: even I, the Useless Reporter, could hardly have failed to fascinate every reader of the Surrey Mirror.

Boxing, of course, only ever has black days, and boxing can't possibly have a new low since it hit bottom years ago. But the background of corruption only adds to the power of the story. If you write about boxing you have everything in your favour: large characters, criminality and the spectacle of a pair of giants trying to club each other to death. You can't lose. Boxing empowers a sportswriter, sportswriting empowers boxing. Thus the business rumbles on from one spectacle to the next, attended by its court of graceful, grateful phrase-makers. Writing compellingly about a day when nothing happens needs the genius of James Joyce, but writing compellingly about boxing - it's murder.

Copyright Spectator Mar 20, 1999
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