Not always the biggest wins but who knows how to avoid getting hit. In boxing as in life. In a violent melee as in a confrontation of words and reasons. Boxing as told by Katherine Dunn is simply life. Sport becomes all-encompassing, there are winners and losers but, above all, the battle against ghosts, against our worst nightmares to seek resurrection from terrible dances. The circus of the ring are twenty-two short stories signed by Katherine Dunn (1945-2016), American writer and poet, struck by the way of boxing. By chance, in 1980 she saw a boxing match on television, asked her husband to attend a live confrontation, and from that day, with her lines, full of blood and anger, she knocked out all the clichés of the “noble art”. Including what is not a sport or a story for young ladies. Joyce Carol Oates had already proved it: On boxing it is a dazzling book, it is the rhythm and clash of boxing gloves.
The mirror boxing of America
Dunn, who edited a weekly column in “Willamette Week”, an alternative Portland newspaper, and who wrote for “The Ring”, “Sport Illustrated”, “New York Times”, “Vogue”, “Playboy”, tells the fabulous 80’s of boxing: he follows the champions, he lets himself be fascinated by amateurs, he gives his best in reports for gyms and training days. Boxing, the oldest of the martial arts, in the United States becomes popular both as a sport and to scrape a few dollars and follows the migratory waves: first there are the Jewish boxers, then the Scandinavians, the Irish, the Italians, the Eastern Europeans. , the Soviets and South Americans: «the adrenaline rush that this sport gives you is like a drug, it leads to addiction even if taken in small doses from the corner of the ring». And Katherine Dunn’s lines are like rounds bubbling with incandescent lava: they don’t leave you indifferent, they are a whirlpool that magnetizes even the less accustomed to this sport. Because she is the first to be part of the show, she loves its protagonists and moments: «no matter how brutal it may seem, there is a strange delicacy in it».
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Hagler, Tyson and the other stars
The stories of historical stars such as Sugar Ray Leonard, Marvin Hagler and Mike Tyson, defended by the infamy of Evander Holyfield’s ear bite, flow. A true America flows because “there is no Hollywood preview or Broadway debut or parade of honor to take place: only an evening of great boxing reveals the sparkling heart of America in all its beauty”. And Dunn’s talent, discipline and intelligence know how to shape boxers like warrior artists, like Nureyev of the ring, dazzling even when they are dripping blood and fatigue. Very human, they could be under the walls of besieged Troy: they are heroes. Everyone. Even the most unknown athletes and the most anonymous who make up the picture: the attendants who control the ropes, the bettors, the coaches, the trainers, the young people who enter the gym for the first time, dreaming of Rocky and the social rise.
The strength of the boxers
Dunn’s eye thrives on details, angles and gives its best in what cannot be seen. As in the story about cutmen, who stand at the corner to stop any bleeding in the 60 seconds of rest between one take and the next: «a cutman it is not successful when the boxer wins, but only when he does not lose because of the blood ». Or in the pages about the golden girls, only allowed to box after 1993. In the Grand Avenue Gym in Portland, Dunn observes two boxers swinging under the leather helmet, theirs is a fight for the future. As is that of the kids who, sack on their shoulders, almost frightened by the sacred thresholds, look for their first gym. They can find a bad coach or a good one. They will do their first hour of training, the first punches, then will come the movement and the shape and the discovery of “a complex world, made of pain and fatigue, of pride and beauty”. Exactly, life is sublimated because sport is much more than the flow of fatigue, adrenaline and fatal hooks: «boxing is so tiring that anyone who ventures there already demonstrates a certain tenacity. By crossing the threshold of a gym, you earn the right to be nice. ‘ Far beyond the gong bell.
The circus of the ring. Dispatches from the world of boxing, Katherine Dunn, Translation by Leonardo Taiuti, 66th and 2nd, Roma, pagg. 272, € 17