On Boxing Exp (Paper Only)

"No other subject is, for the writer, so intensely personal as boxing. To write about boxing is to write about oneself--however elliptically, and unintentionally. And to write about boxing is to be forced to contemplate not only boxing, but the perimeters of civilization--what it is, or should be, to be 'human' . . .

The sport seems in crisis, its best practitioners no less than its most dubious contaminate by association with fixed fights, manipulated judges, questionable referees. Demands for its abolition are made, indignation is aroused, well-argued editorials are printed, deals continue to be made, boxers continue to be , managed.' occasionally there is a boxing match that, in its demonstration of skill, courage, intelligence, hope, seems to redeem the sport--or almost. Perhaps boxing has always been in crisis a sport of crisis.

Without doubt, it is our most dramatically 'masculine' sport, and our most dramatically 'self-destructive' sport. In this, for some for us, its abiding interest lies."

--Joyce Carol Oates,
from the Foreword

Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Medal of Humanities, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, and has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including We Were the Mulvaneys; Blonde, which was nominated for the National Book Award; and the New York Times bestseller The Accursed. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.