"Some of the intellectual lessons Joe Brown taught were brutally simple. In boxing, for example, he was fond of reminding his guys that to win in boxing you had to hit the other guy. To hit the other guy you had to move in close enough for him to hit you. No other way. One of the immutable lessons of boxing was that there was no free ride. No free lunch. To succeed you had to be at risk. You had to choose to be at risk. That choice was the chief act of will and courage. After that you might win or lose, on the basis of luck or skill, but the choice itself was all that mattered".

This comes from George Garrett's "My One-Eyed Coach," detailing the lessons of master-teacher and great man Joe Brown: fighter, coach, sculptor, and maybe artist in its fullest and best sense. Same Halpern/Oates book that I've been discussing the last few days here (page 257).

There's one more quote from the book that I 'd like to finsh up with. Michael Stephens this time, in his tough little piece "The Poetics of Boxing"(266):

"In the morning, I am forever kidded by my wife and daughter for the way I noisily breathe at night, all the results of those constant breaks to my nose. But then as a writer I see boxing today as a durable metaphor for a craft, and when it is done well, I recognize it as an art, and that these brutal men are artists. As Aristotle said, we humans are fascinated by imitation, and boxing's mimesis is a structured, patterned imitation of certain lives, those that were poor and tough, full of pity and terror, and capable of catharsis. This, too, is what Antonin Artaud might have meant by a theater of cruelty, the actor totally sacrificing himself to a deadly craft -- the boxer boxing".