Assignment America: Boxing defined

NEW YORK, April 29 (UPI) -- There's a moment in almost every boxing match when blood starts to flow, and from that point on the contest becomes focused -- at least from the outside -- on wounds and injuries and hurt.

Will the slower fighter's eye swell so tightly shut that he essentially becomes a one-eyed man unable to see developing hooks from that side? Will the blood dripping onto a boxer's chest give the less mature fighter a false sense of security, causing him to expend too much energy trying to finish off the wounded opponent? Will the man with the mangled and cut-up face gain the sympathy of the crowd, as he works close and takes more punishment in seeming defiance of his body's deterioration?

I haven't ever sat at ringside, so I haven't had the experience of seeing the nasty gashes open up and the blood spew into the crowd, peppering reporter's notebooks with droplets that will still be there tomorrow. But Carlo Rotella has. He's seen it not just at the big glitzy televised fights between celebrity boxers, but at small-town cards all over New England where professional pummelers are brought in with records like 2-32-2 to be the designated loser to the hometown favorite.

He's studied the game, talked to the fighters, dissected the matches, been a student at gym workouts, and after two decades he's distilled it all into a remarkable book called "Cut Time" (Houghton Mifflin, 224 pages, $24).

"When blood from a serious cut finds its way into the lights," writes Rotella of a fight he watched at the ballroom of a Days Inn in Allentown, Pa., "everything seems to change: it's cut time. You can almost hear it, a droning almost-music that hangs in the smoke-filled air of fight night, strumming the optic nerves and vibrating in the teeth, encouraging fighters to do urgent, sometimes desperate things.

Spectators, too, shamed and fascinated, plunge headlong into cut time. What was inside and hidden, implicit in the fight, has come outside and taken form."

I've felt this myself, dozens of times, but never could have put it into such exquisitely supple prose. Rotella is not a fighter himself, but an English professor by trade, currently teaching and doing scholarly research at Boston College. He started his fight education at the Larry Holmes Training Center in Easton, Pa., which was down the hill from the college where he taught, and as he became a student of the game, he found himself applying its lessons to his own life and that of his students.

What makes this such a great boxing book is that Rotella doesn't follow either of the prevailing traditions among pugilistic chroniclers. He's not a sentimentalist or a mythmaker, expanding fighter's stories into ill-fitting symbolic cultural legends. (Norman Mailer would be the worst offender in this category.) Nor is he an encyclopedic statistician -- the sport seems to attract them even more than baseball -- who's obsessed with unanswerable "pound for pound" comparisons, like the boxing experts on cable TV.

Rotella -- who started writing about boxing for magazines, mostly so he could get media credentials and sit up close – does things the old-fashioned way, with crisp and lucid description of what actually happens, as opposed to what we would like to happen or what the crowd thinks is happening, in a boxing match. At times this can be disconcerting -- I could have done without the lurid description of what Larry Holmes' puke looks like when he eats too close to a workout -- but at other times it can be poetic in the way that a clean hard jab is. Not flashy, but exactly on target. Listen to the way he describes the climax of a fight between Kevin "The Flushing Flash" Kelley, who had a closed eye, and Derrick "Smoke" Gainer:

"Three rounds later, in the eighth, Gainer was deep into his rhythm, leaning into his punches with the abandon of a formerly skittish young boxer well on the way to making his fortune by knocking out a champion. He stepped in and threw a left; as he did so, he dropped his right hand, a bad habit. Kelley had anticipated the left and was already into his move. To switch on the fly from lefty to righty, throwing his own punch while avoiding Gainer's, Kelley had to do four things at the same time: he brought his trailing foot, the left, forward in advance of the right so that it became his lead foot; he turned his trunk so that his left shoulder became his lead shoulder; he craned his head and torso far to the right to allow Gainer's punch to pass harmlessly overhead; and he threw a chopping overhand left that started as sort of a cross thrown from a left-handed stance but, as he moved his feet and turned his trunk and shoulders, became more of a hook thrown from a right-handed stance. With his entire self in concentrated motion behind the punch, Kelley hit Gainer right on the button.

"Gainer folded up and went down as if he had been pre-set, like a light on a timer, to lose consciousness a moment before Kelley's punch landed. He rolled over onto his back after he hit the canvas and lay there, quivering. The referee counted to seven before waving his hands to indicate that Gainer was finished.

"Meanwhile, Kelley climbed onto the ropes in his corner, shouting and making exultant gestures with his gloved hands at the crowd in the arena and all the people in front of their televisions, wherever they were. (Kelley's trainer Phil) Borgia, smiling behind his fierce little beard and mustache, helped Kelley keep his balance. The victor's nose was bleeding, and there was blood on his face. His eye looked worse than ever, alien and archaic, as if afflicted by a condition for which there had not been a name since the Middle Ages."

Every page of the book is just this tight.

Perhaps the reason boxing attracts so many great writers is that it's the sport that most closely approximates life -- both its brutality, its joy, its sense of promise, and of course that ultimate moment when the body can't do it anymore and a fighter gets a sense of his mortality.

Rotella has put all this into his writing, using boxers and their lives as a way to get at the nature of education (one of his literature students has a brief boxing career, and they find ways to relate boxing to, among other things, "Bartleby the Scrivener"), the nature of suffering (cut time is not about pain), the limitations of revenge (Rotella has seen bar room fights as well), the curious way that the rich and pampered seem to have a need to touch fighters and sense their capacity for punishment, what "going the distance" really means (in one affecting chapter, he relates boxing to his Sicilian grandmother's life), and the boxer's own inner life, told through his detailed study of Larry Holmes, who may have been the most scientifically skilled of heavyweights, and therefore never the most popular.

He also goes on at length about how every match is actually a mismatch, and it's our perception of the battle between the gifted overachiever against the battered underdog that really creates the drama we all love. We're given a script -- a way the bout is supposed to go -- and then every departure from it is thrilling.

For example, in the Oscar de la Hoya fight against Yory Boy Campas this weekend, the dullness of the contest resulted from the script being followed precisely. (It even ended in the sixth round, exactly the moment the Vegas oddsmakers had predicted.) De la Hoya was the golden boy on the road back to glory. Campas was the workhorse veteran who had taken way too many punches and had a tendency to get spooked by his own blood. And even though De La Hoya never cut Campas, he cuffed up his face so much that it was only a matter of time.

Humiliatingly, Campas was retired by his own corner when it became obvious that he'd lost the desire to work. He didn't want to go through cut time.

I'm a boxing fan, and this book will appeal to boxing fans in the same way that Al Alvarez' "The Biggest Game in Town" appeals to fans of high-stakes poker, and for many of the same reasons. Like Alvarez, Rotella is a stylist whose style is invisible. He's a journalist whose reporting seems effortless. And he's a philosopher who doesn't make a philosophical point so much as lay it out so precisely that it seeps into the subconscious so that -- my highest praise -- you'll never be able to watch a boxing match the same way again. I think you call that plain ole good writing.

(E-mail Joe Bob Briggs, "The Vegas Guy," at [email protected] or visit Joe Bob's Web site at joebobbriggs.com. Snail-mail: P.O. Box 2002, Dallas, Texas, 75221.)