AJ Liebling will always be boxing’s literary standard-bearer, his masterpiece The Sweet Science and other books sure to find grateful fans across generations. If there is a top table of boxing scribes, Liebling is certainly at the top. However, my Scottish colleague, Hugh McIlvanney, certainly deserves at least a seat at the same table, a sentiment expressed by many when the esteemed journalist died in 2019 at the age of 82.
As a sports journalist, Hugh displayed his tough lyricism, wonderful originality and penetrating observation over several decades covering the fight game for The Observer, The Sunday Times, Sports Illustrated and other esteemed publications. A selection of his best reporting is brought together in his seminal work, McIlvanney on Boxing, which originally appeared in 1982 but has since been reissued. My own copy came out in 1997, which means that a substantial portion of the book deals with eminently writeable figures like Mike Tyson, Evander Holyfield, Riddick Bowe, Lennox Lewis, and Julio César Chávez. In the hands of a master craftsman like McIlvanney, the exploits of these pugilistic luminaries take on great importance and their personalities swell to divine proportions.
Until I purchased the 1997 edition of McIlvanney on Boxing, I was less familiar with Hugh’s output than his brother’s. For those who don’t know him, his younger brother, William, is considered one of Scotland’s greatest novelists, and his 1975 work, Docherty, is considered a classic. Having devoured several of William’s books, I could be forgiven for thinking that Hugh might not live up to those impossible standards, but just a few pages and such reckless assumptions were completely blown away.
There are many similarities between the two, including a gift for similes and metaphors; the ability to imbue the simplest, most direct gestures and conversations with a powerful sense of seriousness and a very real empathy for other human beings. The writing in this compendium – like William’s (and Hemingway’s, by the way) – is tough but elegant; unadorned, but effusive in its navigation of deep and subtle emotions. In other words, the kind of writing that is perfectly suited to the unforgiving but paradoxically rewarding world of pugilism.
The book begins with “The Case Against Boxing,” a short but powerful article about the intermittent clamor for the abolition of the sport that McIlvanney loves dearly. The writer does not hide his moral ambivalence, although he does criticize abolitionists for oversimplifying his arguments. “Aggression is central to all competitive sports,” he reasons, “and it would be surprising if there were not many young people dissatisfied with the sublimation of it in ball games, in athletics, and in adventure activities such as mountaineering. or in horse or machine racing. Those natures hunger for the rawest form of competition and that means boxing.”
The pieces that follow are divided into five parts: “The Alpha…”, which covers Ali’s career from 1966 to 1975; “Some of Our Own Who Could Have a Row,” which features moving accounts of battles involving Terry Downes, Walter McGowan, Ken Buchanan and others; “Prodigies and Prisoners,” “…and the Omega,” a section chronicling Ali’s inexorable decline in the late ’70s, and “Further Dispatches,” a brilliant array of pieces spanning 1985 to 1997.
Packed with humor and admirable attention to detail, these are undoubtedly some of the best boxing articles ever printed. Tellingly, McIlvanney remains the only sports journalist named Journalist of the Year, in addition to seven Sports Journalist of the Year wins. These professional victories were as much a sign of his obsessive detail and precision as they were of his engaging and eloquent style.
Naturally, Ali is a figure to whom McIlvanney – like many of his fellow scribes – was strongly drawn. The early pieces are worthy of The Greatest, placing their towering achievements in their proper context and recounting them with frequent reference to the deep reserves of courage, will and talent they required. “At his best,” McIlvanney writes, “his unrivaled mobility made him as safe as a dive bomber attacking a caravan.”
It’s not just about Ali’s prowess in the ring, however, as McIlvanney draws meaning and substance from more than just his glove exploits. He understood what Ali represented, his importance in the canon of boxing lore, and his broader appeal as an outspoken black American. Although millions of words have been written about boxing’s most celebrated star, McIlvanney was one of the relatively few whom Ali courted. “On a street called Topaz in New Orleans, in a village along the Zaire River outside Kinshasa, and on the boardwalk in Nassau, Bahamas, an hour before dawn, I was fortunate enough to record some of his most private daydreams.” .
As a consequence, there is undeniable credibility behind observations like this: “Ali seems to view his life as a strange, ritualistic work. It may be that the explanation for his rantings is that he always felt they were required by the script that accompanies his destiny. Others still glow on the page, reflections of Ali’s own blinding luminescence: “Compared to him, the most vivid of his predecessors are blurry figures dancing behind frosted glass.”
When the “Louisville Lip” suffered a loss to Smokin’ Joe Frazier in 1971, his first professional loss, it loomed large in McIlvanney’s eyes, and in the brilliantly titled piece “Superman at Bay,” the author writes: “Perhaps the most notable One aspect of that absolutely remarkable heavyweight championship fight at Madison Square Garden is that the defeat, far from diminishing Ali in the eyes of his admirers, has deepened his feelings far beyond the normal limits of respect and affection. of the public.”
Of course, Ali would rise, like a phoenix, to exact revenge on his arch-nemesis three years later, before shocking the world in the era-defining “Rumble in the Jungle.” On that immortal night, McIlvanney values Ali’s daring over his arsenal of physical weapons: “When all the extravagant trappings of an extraordinary event have begun to fade and gather dust in memory, when we have become vague about the handling involved, about how ethnic pride and financial greed became hot bedfellows… what will remain absolutely intact is the excitement over Muhammad Ali’s performance. And for this witness, at least the most vivid memory will not be the inspiration of his tactics or the brilliance of his technique, however fascinating. It will be the brilliant and flawless diamond of your value.”
You could say that Ali is an easy character to write well about, given his larger-than-life personality. And it is true that many good books have taken Ali as their subject. However, McIlvanney proves equally adept at translating the sheer physicality and killer nature of some of boxing’s less talkative fighters. Chew on this sublime nugget, which describes the confrontation between Foreman and Norton: “The impression was that Norton’s spirit had been anesthetized by the relentless presence of Foreman, who was a victim awaiting his downfall. There was never any chance that he would have to wait long. The 25-year-old world champion has now become fully aware of his fearsome capacity for destruction.”
George Foreman’s technique, let’s be honest, was quite agricultural, even as he opened a ruthless gap in the heavyweight division. But while lesser writers would focus solely on his atomic power, the passages here sketch a wonderfully vivid and terrifying picture of relentlessness. “Pulverizing blows tend to come from both hands in long arcs, moving diagonally towards his opponent’s head, and the huge arms often brush disdainfully against efforts to parry the defense… He sets the ring in quarters with a lethal sense of geometry, using perfectly synchronized lateral movement. -step that cuts off escape routes as emphatically as a roadblock.”
“Part Two: Some of Our Own Who Might Have a Fight” contains a number of fantastic pieces, perhaps of most interest to British fight fans. I enjoyed reading more about Terry Downes, Howard Winstone, and Walter McGowan, three wrestlers whose careers I had never researched.
At the risk of going off on a tangent, my former amateur coach, John McDermott, who won the Commonwealth gold medal at the 1962 Perth Games, was very fond of McGowan. Walter came from Hamilton, just a few miles from the boxing club McDermott founded in Blantyre, and they were both about the same age. McIlvanney writes of McGowan that “he had the best hands I have ever seen in a boxer from these islands, and his extraordinarily fast, varied and damagingly selective punches made him the most precociously brilliant amateur.” And by all accounts, John McDermott wasn’t bad either!
In any case, McIlvanney turns his discerning eye to McGowan’s second duel with Chartchai Chionoi, Downes’ confrontation with Willie Pastrano, and Winstone’s close loss to Vicente Saldívar. These wonderful 1960s skirmishes are a delight to read about, with fascinating characters and subplots combined with the sheer dynamism of the writing itself.
In addition to capturing the individual traits of his subjects, McIlvanney describes the qualities that define truly magnificent fighters with enviable incisiveness. As evidence, here he explains the destructive modus operandi of the Grand Champion of Mexico Julio César Chávez:
“To his opponents, Chavez brings a nightmarish quality to the ring, pressing so relentlessly that he seems to encircle them, allowing no escape from the percussive intensity of the assaults mounted with a patient and seemingly dispassionate fury… Once he has begun to tear the ring apart “He draws substance from his man with rhythmic strikes to the torso, the mastery of the range that governs his blows allows him to smoothly shift to the vulnerable head, and each time one blow lands, several others are almost certain to land with the same precision” .
Your subjects don’t have to be perfect to receive such scathing analysis. Consider this description of Lennox Lewis, then ascending the heavyweight ladder in the mid-1990s: “His self-confidence, fueled as it is by all the evidence that he really does possess the invaluable gift of overcoming the difficulties that He creates himself with an erratic, often sloppy technique, and somehow finding a way to win is undoubtedly his greatest asset…”
Suffice to say, I could happily quote this collection all day. But the best advice I can give you is to buy McIlvanney on Boxing and discover for yourself how enriching it is to read. Of course, there’s always time for one last extract, and this one deserves to be savored.
“Only deep reserves of intuition or prejudice could allow someone to be dogmatic about what will happen when Leonard, whose speed, spontaneous wit and technical range make the word virtuosity inevitable, clashes with the extravagant physical attributes of Hearns, who has a reach “which is a threat to the chins in the neighboring county and develops enough influence when it hits to knock down a small building.”
As we know, the fight in question was a classic and is still talked about to this day. The same can be said for McIlvanney in boxing. -Ronnie McCluskey
