Aristotle, a student of a wrestler named Plato, taught that eudaimonia, usually translated as “happiness” or “the good life,” requires both intellectual and moral virtues. With regard to the latter, courage, the moral muscle to confront and overcome our fears, is essential. Failures of courage assume a variety of forms. Many who are rich in talents are stymied by the terror of trying and failing. In boxing, there are gifted fighters who land their dream bout only to sabotage their training, thereby keeping their ego-guard up by telling others and themselves, “I lost because I couldn’t prepare properly.” Boxers, of course, don’t own self-sabotage. I have friends with exceptional wordsmithing ability who long to be published, but the horror of rejection banishes their work to the desk drawer.
In book two of his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle contends that cultivating courage—the ability to confront pain, threats and uncertainty—requires regular practice with manageable increments of fear. It is not easy to find opportunities for this practice since we live in a society in which young people are cosseted from fear and anxiety. Nietzsche, the philosopher with a hammer who could write with a feather touch, insisted we have been tamed into herdlike creatures by the conquest of slave morality. On Nietzsche’s reckoning, we need to return to the good old days of natural human strength and cruelty: something like the Comanche, who danced around the pyre as their captives were burned alive. Or as he teaches in the Genealogy of Morals: “To see suffering does you good, to make suffer, better still.”
But I digress from the quiet point, that cultivating courage requires sparring with fears. Where is the workshop for this training to be found? At a local boxing gym.
●
To my teenage philosophical mind, boxing seemed the essence of all sports. Stripped to the waist and mano a mano, boxers appeared to be engaged in an unmediated testing of their wills. At nineteen and having transferred to college in New York City, I was determined to become a regular student at a nearby college of the sweet science: the Gramercy Park Gym, the famous “home of champions” (now sadly defunct) on the second floor of a rickety old building at 116 East 14th Street. This dilapidated palace of punches was home base to the likes of Floyd Patterson and Jose Torres. After a few walks by, I finally worked up the nerve to trudge up the long flight of stairs to the gym. Slowly ascending, I could hear the rat-a-tat-tat of the speed bag and the clang of the bell timing rounds.
My lip twitching, I introduced myself to two of the best teachers in the hurting business, Bob Sullivan and Al Gavin. Naturally, I just wanted to get in the ring and fight, but these two fistic wise men only allow you to spar after coming to the gym every day for six weeks and demonstrating that you were learning your craft. I did my time, and one afternoon Bob informed me that the next day would be my baptism: I’d climb through the ropes to spar. Twenty-four hours later, as I slipped on headgear and the sixteen-ounce gloves, my pulse thrummed as though I were about to charge out of the trenches in World War I. At the bell, I was so deep in fight-or-flight mode that in my frenzied attack I spit my mouthpiece out twice. Still, the two rounds went well enough to convince my coaches I was ready to spar on a regular basis. Week by week, I became accustomed to the ritual and no longer approached sparring sessions as though they were title tilts. Hitting and avoiding being hit gradually became less and less nerve-wracking, and I became more capable of coping with my fears.
One of the premier lessons Cus D’Amato, former owner of the Gramercy Park Gym, passed onto his star students—Patterson and Torres, along with “Iron Mike” Tyson—is that so long as it does not turn into a psychic conflagration, anxiety is natural and even productive in spiking awareness. Though I have not always been able to honor the spirit of my own homilies, I preach to my boxers, “Don’t panic about feeling panicked.” By the same token, I get nervous and uncomfortable whenever one of my fighters is in denial, joking around in the dressing room, seemingly oblivious to the confrontation under the klieg lights they are about to endure.
Boxing can help build courage, can help someone stand toe to toe with their fears. However, we ought not conflate physical and moral mettle. There are decorated combat veterans in Congress who will not stand up against unjust policies for fear of offending higher-ups capable of stripping them of their cherished power. There are mafiosi who, though physically courageous, have no respect for justice. Still, physical bravery can serve as groundwork for higher iterations of courage. It was only after Frederick Douglass risked his life by thrashing his overseer in a fistfight that he experienced the sense of agency to begin his lifelong struggle to end slavery and secure equal rights. Nelson Mandela was an amateur boxer who put on the mitts as both a physique- and character-building exercise. Who knows if it was a cause-and-effect relation, but Muhammad Ali demonstrated boundless courage both inside and outside the ring in his refusal to serve in what he judged to be an unjust war.
What is boxing good for? Besides providing practice in facing your fears, it is a sluice for repressed rage. I grew up in a house of shouts and backhands. There was love, but also a steady threat of mayhem. The whippings and all-night bouts between my parents created a reservoir of fury and fear in me that came with varying degrees of consciousness and sometimes functioned as the puppet strings of my frequently outlandish behavior. Boxing provided a barely sublimated outlet for my rage.
Though this might seem a stereotype, women—unlike men, who are frequently applauded for unbridled aggression—are often socialized to keep a lid on their ire. Many of them are so at odds with their aggressive feelings that, as a coach, I often have to stop them from pulling their punches and encourage them to extend their arms so their blows might actually reach their fleshy target. Once the taboos have been broken, women usually experience letting their fists fly as intensely liberating. But man, woman or otherwise, there is no denying that the quality of our life and character will be significantly shaped by the way we handle our anger.
●
Boxing can provide some slack for emotions on too tight of a leash. Nevertheless, it is not all about release. I once jabbed George Foreman, an ordained minister, about the apparent contradiction between his devotion to the god of peace and his commandment to turn the other cheek, and the fact that he was running a boxing gym where he taught teens how to throw a jab to the face. Foreman countered that you can’t be successful in the gloved game unless you learn to control your emotions.
Foreman pointed to his own boxing tenure as a negative object lesson, confessing that in the first chapters of his Hall of Fame career, he sprang up the stairs to the ring bent on literally killing his rival. Reflecting back on his former self, supremely happy he never accomplished his gruesome goal, the big guy with one of the most sleep-inducing punches in heavyweight history explained that back in the day he aspired to be the king of intimidation, à la his role model Sonny Liston. As the Houston native learned in his losses to Muhammad Ali and Jimmy Young, the uncontrolled rage and adrenaline he mobilized for those frays gobbled up his energy like a Formula One car burning through gas. As Ali detected before their Rumble in the Jungle in Kinshasa in 1974, Foreman would be so revved up that he would be gassed by the fourth round. Boxing necessitates getting hold of ourselves and using our emotions without being devoured by them.
For the ancients, temperance or self-control was the master key to the good life. The American ethos is heavily weighted in a different direction, toward passion and gusto. We lovers of the American dream, with all our pieties about freedom, deceive ourselves into thinking there is nothing more to acting freely than doing what you desire. As Bob Dylan sings, “Are birds free from the chains of the skyway?” Are those of us chained to our desires free just because we are able to do what we want to do, even if we can’t control what that is?
Though I am no George Foreman, I have absorbed many jabs and left hooks in pursuit of what my philosophical colleagues regarded as paradoxical goals of building neural connections while offering advanced instruction in brain rattling. All these academics in their jeans and wire-rimmed glasses should calm down and take note of the overlap between sparring with ideas and with your fists. There is plenty of aggression at work in philosophy seminars, and I would prefer a punch to the snoot to someone knocking the pins out of an argument I had been laboring over for months. Or take a historical perspective again, and consider the public philosophical duels captured in Plato’s dialogues between Socrates and a rogues’ gallery of Greek sages and heroes: Protagoras, Gorgias and Nicias, among others.
The first commandment of the Socrates guild is “know thyself.” People in the fight game are fond of saying that boxing doesn’t build character; it reveals it. It can do both. Boxing can certainly be an aid in the quest for self-knowledge: you learn a lot about yourself in the ring, namely how far you are willing to go to win. In losing his title to George Foreman, my boxing lodestar Joe Frazier absorbed six vicious knockdowns in less than six minutes before the referee wisely stopped the fight. Unfortunately, though I mimicked Frazier’s take-no-prisoners style as a boxer, I soon learned that this boy from the burbs was no Godzilla of the will like Smokin’ Joe.
●
Even though it was half a century ago, I still haunt myself with one particular failure of will. When I was fifteen, five-foot-ten and weighing only 170 pounds, I was overmatched in a bout with the nineteen-year-old New Jersey Golden Gloves champion, a hard puncher but slow of both hand and foot. In the opening stanzas, I succeeded in stepping out of the way of his incoming shots. Frustrated and egged on by his corner, he played one of boxing’s dirty tricks, pouncing on my front foot and nailing it to the canvas so that I couldn’t slide back, couldn’t avoid the fusillade of punches that put me down. I came to just as the ref was screaming out the count of six. I’m ashamed to admit it, but for a nanosecond I considered the question of trying to get up or staying down. My answer: instead of grabbing the ropes and struggling to beat the count, I ran up the white flag, stayed down, and took the knockout loss. To be fair to myself, I’m not sure I could have gotten to my feet in time—but in memory it feels like I had a choice, and I didn’t even try. “A coward dies a thousand deaths, the hero only one,” or so the old adage goes, and it rings true to the pain I have long felt for playing possum. Still, I had a lesson pounded into my skull that night. I learned something about myself. And I resolved never to let myself down like that again.
Kierkegaard contended that anxiety, not reason, separates us from beasts and angels. It is in anxiety that we fully grasp our freedom vis-à-vis the universe of possibilities abiding within us. Anxiety is, as it were, the stigmata, the sign that we are selves or spirits. In The Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard observes that if someone were to boast that they had never experienced angst, “I will gladly provide him with my explanation: that it is because he is very spiritless.” Elsewhere, he spins the heads of mental health providers: “Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate.” He frames a new kind of courage, one that “does not shrink back, and still less does he attempt to hold it off with noise and confusion; but he bids it welcome, greets it festively, and like Socrates who raised the poisoned cup, he shuts himself up with it and says as a patient would say to the surgeon when the painful operation is about to begin: Now I am ready.”
There is something about having the confidence to defend yourself mano a mano that neutralizes insecurity and nurtures another quality that was important to Kierkegaard: authenticity. Forgive my war stories, but years ago I had a fortunate firsthand experience of this. One night when I was a sixteen-year-old sub-novice boxer, I was soused and stumbling along the boardwalk in Seaside, New Jersey, ramming into people and making a nuisance of myself, when a policeman caught my act and pulled me aside. In front of a crowd of onlookers, I immediately started hurling insults at him and daring this thirty-something NFL-linebacker-looking officer to put down his nightstick and put up his fists. He could have squashed me like a bug. Instead, attempting to calm me down, he put his big mitt on my shoulder and guided me to the squad car. “You’re drunk,” he said. “We’re going to the station. You need to sober up before I can let you back in public.” Coach-like, he added, “If you really want to be a fighter, you have to stay away from the booze and train.” The big shot in me shot back, “I sparred today and will be at the gym tomorrow, so get off it!”
I don’t know how this powerful man in blue put up with my insolence. Back at the station, he plied me with coffee and gave me a gentle talking-to that I was too bombed to remember. At about two in the morning, he drove me five miles to my parents’ home and let me off in the driveway with some encouraging words. At this point I had enough of a ledger that he could have charged me with disorderly conduct and threatening a police officer, tickets that could have easily sent me to the juvie detention center. But because he felt secure in himself and didn’t feel ego-threatened by the inebriated, loud-mouthed boxer wannabe, he was able to act with authenticity and care.
This is an online supplement to issue 35 (“What is violence for?”). To read the rest of the issue, click here.
Aristotle, a student of a wrestler named Plato, taught that eudaimonia, usually translated as “happiness” or “the good life,” requires both intellectual and moral virtues. With regard to the latter, courage, the moral muscle to confront and overcome our fears, is essential. Failures of courage assume a variety of forms. Many who are rich in talents are stymied by the terror of trying and failing. In boxing, there are gifted fighters who land their dream bout only to sabotage their training, thereby keeping their ego-guard up by telling others and themselves, “I lost because I couldn’t prepare properly.” Boxers, of course, don’t own self-sabotage. I have friends with exceptional wordsmithing ability who long to be published, but the horror of rejection banishes their work to the desk drawer.
In book two of his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle contends that cultivating courage—the ability to confront pain, threats and uncertainty—requires regular practice with manageable increments of fear. It is not easy to find opportunities for this practice since we live in a society in which young people are cosseted from fear and anxiety. Nietzsche, the philosopher with a hammer who could write with a feather touch, insisted we have been tamed into herdlike creatures by the conquest of slave morality. On Nietzsche’s reckoning, we need to return to the good old days of natural human strength and cruelty: something like the Comanche, who danced around the pyre as their captives were burned alive. Or as he teaches in the Genealogy of Morals: “To see suffering does you good, to make suffer, better still.”
But I digress from the quiet point, that cultivating courage requires sparring with fears. Where is the workshop for this training to be found? At a local boxing gym.
●
To my teenage philosophical mind, boxing seemed the essence of all sports. Stripped to the waist and mano a mano, boxers appeared to be engaged in an unmediated testing of their wills. At nineteen and having transferred to college in New York City, I was determined to become a regular student at a nearby college of the sweet science: the Gramercy Park Gym, the famous “home of champions” (now sadly defunct) on the second floor of a rickety old building at 116 East 14th Street. This dilapidated palace of punches was home base to the likes of Floyd Patterson and Jose Torres. After a few walks by, I finally worked up the nerve to trudge up the long flight of stairs to the gym. Slowly ascending, I could hear the rat-a-tat-tat of the speed bag and the clang of the bell timing rounds.
My lip twitching, I introduced myself to two of the best teachers in the hurting business, Bob Sullivan and Al Gavin. Naturally, I just wanted to get in the ring and fight, but these two fistic wise men only allow you to spar after coming to the gym every day for six weeks and demonstrating that you were learning your craft. I did my time, and one afternoon Bob informed me that the next day would be my baptism: I’d climb through the ropes to spar. Twenty-four hours later, as I slipped on headgear and the sixteen-ounce gloves, my pulse thrummed as though I were about to charge out of the trenches in World War I. At the bell, I was so deep in fight-or-flight mode that in my frenzied attack I spit my mouthpiece out twice. Still, the two rounds went well enough to convince my coaches I was ready to spar on a regular basis. Week by week, I became accustomed to the ritual and no longer approached sparring sessions as though they were title tilts. Hitting and avoiding being hit gradually became less and less nerve-wracking, and I became more capable of coping with my fears.
One of the premier lessons Cus D’Amato, former owner of the Gramercy Park Gym, passed onto his star students—Patterson and Torres, along with “Iron Mike” Tyson—is that so long as it does not turn into a psychic conflagration, anxiety is natural and even productive in spiking awareness. Though I have not always been able to honor the spirit of my own homilies, I preach to my boxers, “Don’t panic about feeling panicked.” By the same token, I get nervous and uncomfortable whenever one of my fighters is in denial, joking around in the dressing room, seemingly oblivious to the confrontation under the klieg lights they are about to endure.
Boxing can help build courage, can help someone stand toe to toe with their fears. However, we ought not conflate physical and moral mettle. There are decorated combat veterans in Congress who will not stand up against unjust policies for fear of offending higher-ups capable of stripping them of their cherished power. There are mafiosi who, though physically courageous, have no respect for justice. Still, physical bravery can serve as groundwork for higher iterations of courage. It was only after Frederick Douglass risked his life by thrashing his overseer in a fistfight that he experienced the sense of agency to begin his lifelong struggle to end slavery and secure equal rights. Nelson Mandela was an amateur boxer who put on the mitts as both a physique- and character-building exercise. Who knows if it was a cause-and-effect relation, but Muhammad Ali demonstrated boundless courage both inside and outside the ring in his refusal to serve in what he judged to be an unjust war.
What is boxing good for? Besides providing practice in facing your fears, it is a sluice for repressed rage. I grew up in a house of shouts and backhands. There was love, but also a steady threat of mayhem. The whippings and all-night bouts between my parents created a reservoir of fury and fear in me that came with varying degrees of consciousness and sometimes functioned as the puppet strings of my frequently outlandish behavior. Boxing provided a barely sublimated outlet for my rage.
Though this might seem a stereotype, women—unlike men, who are frequently applauded for unbridled aggression—are often socialized to keep a lid on their ire. Many of them are so at odds with their aggressive feelings that, as a coach, I often have to stop them from pulling their punches and encourage them to extend their arms so their blows might actually reach their fleshy target. Once the taboos have been broken, women usually experience letting their fists fly as intensely liberating. But man, woman or otherwise, there is no denying that the quality of our life and character will be significantly shaped by the way we handle our anger.
●
Boxing can provide some slack for emotions on too tight of a leash. Nevertheless, it is not all about release. I once jabbed George Foreman, an ordained minister, about the apparent contradiction between his devotion to the god of peace and his commandment to turn the other cheek, and the fact that he was running a boxing gym where he taught teens how to throw a jab to the face. Foreman countered that you can’t be successful in the gloved game unless you learn to control your emotions.
Foreman pointed to his own boxing tenure as a negative object lesson, confessing that in the first chapters of his Hall of Fame career, he sprang up the stairs to the ring bent on literally killing his rival. Reflecting back on his former self, supremely happy he never accomplished his gruesome goal, the big guy with one of the most sleep-inducing punches in heavyweight history explained that back in the day he aspired to be the king of intimidation, à la his role model Sonny Liston. As the Houston native learned in his losses to Muhammad Ali and Jimmy Young, the uncontrolled rage and adrenaline he mobilized for those frays gobbled up his energy like a Formula One car burning through gas. As Ali detected before their Rumble in the Jungle in Kinshasa in 1974, Foreman would be so revved up that he would be gassed by the fourth round. Boxing necessitates getting hold of ourselves and using our emotions without being devoured by them.
For the ancients, temperance or self-control was the master key to the good life. The American ethos is heavily weighted in a different direction, toward passion and gusto. We lovers of the American dream, with all our pieties about freedom, deceive ourselves into thinking there is nothing more to acting freely than doing what you desire. As Bob Dylan sings, “Are birds free from the chains of the skyway?” Are those of us chained to our desires free just because we are able to do what we want to do, even if we can’t control what that is?
Though I am no George Foreman, I have absorbed many jabs and left hooks in pursuit of what my philosophical colleagues regarded as paradoxical goals of building neural connections while offering advanced instruction in brain rattling. All these academics in their jeans and wire-rimmed glasses should calm down and take note of the overlap between sparring with ideas and with your fists. There is plenty of aggression at work in philosophy seminars, and I would prefer a punch to the snoot to someone knocking the pins out of an argument I had been laboring over for months. Or take a historical perspective again, and consider the public philosophical duels captured in Plato’s dialogues between Socrates and a rogues’ gallery of Greek sages and heroes: Protagoras, Gorgias and Nicias, among others.
The first commandment of the Socrates guild is “know thyself.” People in the fight game are fond of saying that boxing doesn’t build character; it reveals it. It can do both. Boxing can certainly be an aid in the quest for self-knowledge: you learn a lot about yourself in the ring, namely how far you are willing to go to win. In losing his title to George Foreman, my boxing lodestar Joe Frazier absorbed six vicious knockdowns in less than six minutes before the referee wisely stopped the fight. Unfortunately, though I mimicked Frazier’s take-no-prisoners style as a boxer, I soon learned that this boy from the burbs was no Godzilla of the will like Smokin’ Joe.
●
Even though it was half a century ago, I still haunt myself with one particular failure of will. When I was fifteen, five-foot-ten and weighing only 170 pounds, I was overmatched in a bout with the nineteen-year-old New Jersey Golden Gloves champion, a hard puncher but slow of both hand and foot. In the opening stanzas, I succeeded in stepping out of the way of his incoming shots. Frustrated and egged on by his corner, he played one of boxing’s dirty tricks, pouncing on my front foot and nailing it to the canvas so that I couldn’t slide back, couldn’t avoid the fusillade of punches that put me down. I came to just as the ref was screaming out the count of six. I’m ashamed to admit it, but for a nanosecond I considered the question of trying to get up or staying down. My answer: instead of grabbing the ropes and struggling to beat the count, I ran up the white flag, stayed down, and took the knockout loss. To be fair to myself, I’m not sure I could have gotten to my feet in time—but in memory it feels like I had a choice, and I didn’t even try. “A coward dies a thousand deaths, the hero only one,” or so the old adage goes, and it rings true to the pain I have long felt for playing possum. Still, I had a lesson pounded into my skull that night. I learned something about myself. And I resolved never to let myself down like that again.
Kierkegaard contended that anxiety, not reason, separates us from beasts and angels. It is in anxiety that we fully grasp our freedom vis-à-vis the universe of possibilities abiding within us. Anxiety is, as it were, the stigmata, the sign that we are selves or spirits. In The Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard observes that if someone were to boast that they had never experienced angst, “I will gladly provide him with my explanation: that it is because he is very spiritless.” Elsewhere, he spins the heads of mental health providers: “Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate.” He frames a new kind of courage, one that “does not shrink back, and still less does he attempt to hold it off with noise and confusion; but he bids it welcome, greets it festively, and like Socrates who raised the poisoned cup, he shuts himself up with it and says as a patient would say to the surgeon when the painful operation is about to begin: Now I am ready.”
There is something about having the confidence to defend yourself mano a mano that neutralizes insecurity and nurtures another quality that was important to Kierkegaard: authenticity. Forgive my war stories, but years ago I had a fortunate firsthand experience of this. One night when I was a sixteen-year-old sub-novice boxer, I was soused and stumbling along the boardwalk in Seaside, New Jersey, ramming into people and making a nuisance of myself, when a policeman caught my act and pulled me aside. In front of a crowd of onlookers, I immediately started hurling insults at him and daring this thirty-something NFL-linebacker-looking officer to put down his nightstick and put up his fists. He could have squashed me like a bug. Instead, attempting to calm me down, he put his big mitt on my shoulder and guided me to the squad car. “You’re drunk,” he said. “We’re going to the station. You need to sober up before I can let you back in public.” Coach-like, he added, “If you really want to be a fighter, you have to stay away from the booze and train.” The big shot in me shot back, “I sparred today and will be at the gym tomorrow, so get off it!”
I don’t know how this powerful man in blue put up with my insolence. Back at the station, he plied me with coffee and gave me a gentle talking-to that I was too bombed to remember. At about two in the morning, he drove me five miles to my parents’ home and let me off in the driveway with some encouraging words. At this point I had enough of a ledger that he could have charged me with disorderly conduct and threatening a police officer, tickets that could have easily sent me to the juvie detention center. But because he felt secure in himself and didn’t feel ego-threatened by the inebriated, loud-mouthed boxer wannabe, he was able to act with authenticity and care.
This is an online supplement to issue 35 (“What is violence for?”). To read the rest of the issue, click here.
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.