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The secret of Ali’s mature success, and the secret of his tragedy: he could take a punch [...] Where in his feckless youth Ali was a dazzling figure combining, say, the brashness of Hotspur and the insouciance of Lear’s Fool, he became in these dark, brooding, increasingly willed fights the closest analogue boxing contains to Lear himself: or, rather, since there is no great fight without two great boxers, the title matches Ali-Frazier I (which Frazier won by a decision) and Ali-Frazier III (which Ali won, just barely, when Frazier virtually collapsed after the fourteenth round) are boxing’s analogues to King Lear—ordeals of unfathomable human courage and resilience raised to the level of classic tragedy. These somber and terrifying boxing matches make us weep for their very futility; we seem to be in the presence of human experience too profound to be named—beyond the syntactical strategies and diminishments of language. The mystic’s dark night of the soul, transmogrified as a brutal meditation of the body.

Matches of such spectacular action as Tyson/Berbick and Tyson/Biggs (arguably Tyson’s most intelligently fought fight thus far) suggest boxing’s kinship with ancient, or not-so-ancient, rites of sacrifice. The trappings of sport, let alone entertainment, simply dissolve away. One is witnessing the oldest story of our species, the battering of one man into submission by another, the triumph of one which is the loss (the mock death) of the other; but the significant issue, in boxing at least, is not this battering so much as the victim’s accommodation of it, second after second, round after terrible round.

It might be argued that America’s fascination with sports—if “fascination” is not too weak a word for such frenzied devotion, weekend after weekend, season after season, in the lives of a majority of men—has to do not only with the power of taboo to violate, or transcend, or render obsolete conventional categories of morality, but with the dark, denied, muted, eclipsed, and wholly unarticulated underside of America’s religion of success.

The fictive text against which boxing is enacted has to do with the protection of human life; the sacramental vision of life. Thou shalt not kill (or main, wound, cause to suffer injury) and Do unto othesr as you would have them do unto you are the implicit injunctions against which the spectacle unfolds and out of which its energies arise.

Boxing is not to be seized as a metaphor for life, but its swift and sometimes irremediable reversals of fortune starkly parallel those of life, and the blow we never saw coming—invariably, in the ring, the knockout blow—is the one that decides our fate. Boxing’s dark fascination is as much with failure, and the courage to forbear failure, as it is with triumph. Two men climb into a ring from which, in symbolic terms, only one climbs out.

“He can run but he can’t hide”—so said Joe Louis before his great fight with Conn in 1941. In the brightly lit ring, man is in extremis, performing an atavistic rite or agon for the mysterious solace of those who can participate only vicariously in such drama: the drama of life in the flesh. Boxing has become America’s tragic theater.

Though boxing has long been popular in many countries and under many forms of government, dictatorships no less than democracies, surely its popularity in the States since the days of John L. Sullivan has a good deal to do with what Americans honor as the spirit of the individual—his “physical” spirit— in defiance of the State. The remarkable rise of boxing in the 1920s in particular can be seen as a consequence of the diminution of the individual vis-à-vis society; the gradual attrition of personal freedom, will, and strength—”masculine,” to be sure, but not solely masculine.

Clearly, boxing’s very image is repulsive to many people because it cannot be assimilated into what we wish to know about civilized man. In a technological society possessed of incalculably refined methods of mass destruction (consider how many times over both the United States and the Soviet Union have vaporized each other in fantasy) boxing’s display of direct and unmitigated and seemingly natural aggression is too explicit to be tolerated.

Those whose aggression is masked, or oblique, or unsuccessful, will always condemn it in others. They are likely to think of boxing as “primitive”—as if inhabiting the flesh were not a primitive proposition, radically inappropriate to a civilization supported by and always subordinate to physical strength: missiles, nuclear warheads. The terrible silence dramatized in the boxing ring is the silence of nature before man, before language, when the physical being alone was God.

Yet this world is conceived in anger—and in hatred, and in hunger—no less than it is conceived in love: that is one of the things that boxing is about. It is so simple a thing that it might be overlooked.

Each boxing match is a story—a unique and highly condensed drama without words. Even when nothing sensational happens: then the drama is “merely” psychological. Boxers are there to establish an absolute experience, a public accounting of the outermost limits of their beings; they will know, as few of us can know of ourselves, what physical and psychic power they possess—of how much, or how little, they are capable. To enter the ring near-naked and to risk one’s life is to make of one’s audience voyeurs of a kind: boxing is so intimate.

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