Boxing has a long tradition of attracting the attention of serious writers but, once in the vicinity of the ring, not all of them have deserved to be taken seriously. At that early stage of the Rumble in the Jungle, when Muhammad Ali had decided to adopt the perilous strategy of planting himself against the ropes in the hope of letting George Foreman ‘blast his ass off’, a figure prominent in the literary world turned to the famous novelist beside him in the press seats and shouted: ‘The fix is in’.
To some of us for whom the tension of those minutes is an imperishable memory – who can recall as if it happened an hour ago how the raw immensity of the risk Ali was embracing put a knot in our stomachs and nearly made us want to shield our eyes from the drama – the thought that somebody could have associated the violence taking place two or three yards in front of us with a fix has a hilarious, almost a sweet absurdity. Where had that man of letters acquired his outlandish perspective on events inside the ropes? If, as must be suspected, he absorbed it from movies, they certainly weren’t the kind of films identified with Budd Schulberg, who was another of the writers on hand in Kinshasa when the hours before an African dawn were filled with perhaps the most extraordinary experience sport has produced in the past 50 years.
Schulberg’s lifelong love affair with boxing has never been tainted with the romantic naivety rampant in the mind of that conspiracy theorist in Zaire. Budd’s has always been a clear-eyed passion. Thanks to a father who took an admirably broad view of what constituted the essentials of a boy’s education, he was around fights and fighters from an early age. Both his knowledge (historical and technical) of sport’s roughest trade and his warm regard for the men who ply it are deeply rooted. Being in his company anywhere is a rich pleasure, but having him as a companion at ringside is a privilege to be cherished.
Obviously, his longevity alone makes him a living archive of the fight business, and the recollections he can summon up from as far back as the 1920s are informed by such perceptive observation that distant decades come alive as he evokes them. The same is true, naturally enough, when he talks of writers with whom he had close encounters long ago, of Ernest Hemingway or Scott Fitzgerald, William Saroyan or Nathanael West. Of course, Hemingway has always been linked with boxing, unimpressively as a participant (‘not particularly evasive’ was A.J. Liebling’s assessment of the Nobel Prize–winner’s technique) but brilliantly in print (his short story ‘Fifty Grand’ is as good as fiction about the ring can be). He once rashly sought to engage Budd in a rapid-fire interrogation about fighters and their deeds that was meant to be a crushing humiliation for the younger man. But it was Papa who retired on his stool after being pummelled by more vivid specifics than he could handle.
But it is not Schulberg on the past but Schulberg on the present that I appreciate most when we are together at the fights. I have come across few men with as profound an understanding of the imperatives that govern the quality of a performance in the ring. I confess to a lack of enthusiasm for sporting chroniclers who are fine with description but feeble in judgement, who give us plenty of colour but don’t know a hawk from a handsaw. It is a species exemplified by some horse-racing correspondents of my acquaintance, fellows whose words can present a picture of a thoroughbred that Stubbs might envy but whose tips would put you on welfare.
Plainly, that last point is not meant to be anything more than the facetious complaint of a frequently impoverished bettor. Anybody who claimed to be consistently accurate in forecasting the outcome of races or fights would be a bigger fraud than Nostradamus. But I do think we can ask of reporters of both kinds of contest that they should be able to comprehend and interpret the action as it is unfolding and that, once it is over, they should have a clear idea of what they have seen.
At ringside, Budd Schulberg invariably does all of that, and more. The voice that will come through the ensuing pages is not just engaging and eloquent. It is wise.