There’s a passage in Carlos Acevedo’s column from 2013, The Ugly American: A Darkness Made to Order, which centers on the violent Timothy Bradley Jr.-Ruslan Provodnikov bout, that offers a glimpse into his approach to writing about boxing.
“When you think about the way these men pushed themselves to limits most of us can only imagine,” he writes, “you think about courage, will, determination, endurance, character. Maybe, just, maybe, you think about what these men do and what, exactly, it means to you. Sometimes, however, you stop to think about the cost … and what the cost may mean to these men years from now.”
Acevedo has been thinking about these men, their courage and the costs of that courage for quite some time now. For more than decade, he has articulated these thoughts into powerful, crystalline writing as seen in outlets like Boxing Digest, Remezcla, MaxBoxing, Undisputed Champion Network, Boxing News, HBO, Hannibal Boxing and in his own blog (now defunct) The Cruelest Sport. And he has done so with uncommon seriousness, acuity and flair largely out of step with his contemporaries.
His debut book, “Sporting Blood: Tales from the Dark Side of Boxing” (Hamilcar Publications), out later this month, is a rich mosaic of 21 essays on some of the most astonishing – and disturbing – lives in the sport’s history. The pieces range from now-obscure figures like the 1930 Jewish lightweight champion Al Singer to icons like Muhammad Ali, from the pyrotechnic brilliance of Roberto Duran to the seemingly accursed existence of Johnny Tapia. Also included are previously unpublished pieces on the Wilfred Gomez-Lupe Pintor rivalry, Mike Quarry, Mike Tyson, Tony Ayala Jr. and Jake LaMotta.
“Sporting Blood,” above all, is concerned with the dramatic rise and fall of prizefighters, and few have conveyed that movement, with all its attendant contradictions, more compellingly than Acevedo. But as grim and somber as these stories may be, they are also occasions for appreciation, as suggested by the title.
“I got the title from a Teddy Roosevelt quote,” said Acevedo, who was born in the Bronx and now lives in Brooklyn. “But it was also the name of a collection of Jack London articles, and a couple of films as well, both about race horses.
“‘Sporting blood’ is a phrase that was once fairly common, but has long since become obsolete. It means to be up for a challenge, in an athletic sense, but also as a measure of intrinsic boldness. Which, I think, is a working definition of prizefighters.”
Boxing Junkie spoke to Acevedo on the occasion of his new book over a period of a few weeks.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
Boxing Junkie: You started out by writing for boxing websites in 2007.
Acevedo: I actually wrote for print when I first started out. The first story I ever wrote, on 1950s, 1960s heavyweight contender Eddie Machen, was published in Boxing Digest magazine, which was formerly Boxing Illustrated and stretches back to the 1950s. Then I wrote a piece on Ben Foord, the South African heavyweight who was something of a phenom in the 1930s, and Boxing Digest also published that. One of the problems I had with print was the tight word-count, which forced me to cut 3,000-word pieces down to 1,200, which was neither ideal nor particularly fun. So I turned to the internet because, in addition to having almost no editorial standards or discrimination, space requirements were irrelevant. So you would have a couple of articles on a site about the “Pound-for-Pound Best Haircuts in Boxing” or “Why Victor Ortiz is the Fighter of the Future” and then you would have me with 3,500 words on the career of Johnny Saxton.
So the internet was liberating for you, but at the same time, from a cultural standpoint, you’re clearly a print guy.
I was always a nut about paper, even when I was a kid. I would buy as many magazines as I could on a $3-a-week allowance. In the early 1980s, 12 bucks a month was like six magazines and a bunch of comic books. Whenever I could get to a newsstand I would pick up KO, World Boxing, Fight Game, Boxing Scene, The Ring, Boxing Today and the occasional Sports Illustrated and Inside Sports. I also bought a lot magazines that, looking back, give off a distinct Gen-X wasted-youth feel: The Twilight Zone, Fangoria, Hit Parade, Headquarters Detective, Starlog, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine – which was digest size! – Creem, Pro Wrestling Illustrated, Bizarre Adventures, and Omni, which never made any sense to me. But reading this stuff kept me occupied and sort of insulated from the daily terrors of the Bronx neighborhood I grew up in.
Over the years, I also amassed thousands of books and so having “Sporting Blood” come out in a snazzy hardback, with acid-free paper and plenty of flattering blurbs, is really satisfying.
OK, so you began writing in 2007. What motivated you to start then?
I started writing about boxing in 2007 mostly to read about the fighters I was interested in, boxers from the past who had been neglected or given spotty attention. A lot of what I had read had been in the vein of what I call “Boxrec History,” which is often just a series of names, dates and places. There’s very little research done, not much interpretation, no context and they’re more or less artless, that is, devoid of style. It’s amazing how someone can make Jack Dempsey or Aaron Pryor or Floyd Patterson boring, but, I guess where there’s a will, there’s a way.
I was also struck by how much internet boxing writing was mostly fan enthusiasm and lacked the kind of critical analysis that I grew up reading. It seemed to me that too many of these writers were just looking to get press credentials and brag about having interviewed a few monosyllabic pros or a manager or a promoter, who are invariably pathological liars. Boxing, partly because it’s unregulated, is basically a hustle, a con job, and the industry itself will try to sell the public anything, and writers should be in opposition to this, not in cahoots with it. That’s how I thought about it back in 2007, and it’s actually worse now.
I always had writerly pretensions. I owned a portable Olivetti, for the love of God, as well as an IBM Selectric, a 30-pound Smith-Corona from the 1930s, and a word processor that probably should be on display in the Smithsonian, but I could never filter out distractions, and discipline has never been a strong point for me. Also, whatever I did manage to write sounded like it was produced by a Kenyon College undergrad just after World War II. I was pretty much out of the loop; more so today, when so much writing is basically identity politics and a self-absorbed obsession with topicality, or hot-button issues. Writing about boxing allowed me to keep crafting sentences and produce narratives, which most boxing stories are, because of the often larger-than-life qualities of the participants. It’s not literature or art, or anything like that, but I do the best I can to offer some depth and context and narrative verve.
Indeed, what always stands out about your pieces is your refusal to treat boxing in a vacuum. In your chapter on Jake LaMotta, for example, you start out with an obscure detail – that LaMotta read Freud! – from which you then branch out to talk about the popularity of psychoanalysis and Surrealism in the 1940s. Within the space of a paragraph, you’ve seemingly enhanced LaMotta’s life. What is it about boxers that compels you to write about them (as opposed to other subjects)?
Before I was ever interested in anything else, I was interested in boxing. When I was a kid, boxers were my heroes. I used to pull the posters out of KO magazine and hang them on my bedroom walls the way other kids hung up pictures of KISS or Farah Fawcett or Scott Baio. So there is, of course, after more than 40 years, a familiarity there and, hopefully by now, a certain amount of, not expertise, maybe, but knowledge.
Because boxing is essentially a marginal pursuit, it attracts chaotic personalities, daredevil types, adrenaline junkies, rebels. This is especially true up until about the 1920s. For years, boxing was an outlaw pursuit in America, banned or restrained at some point or another in nearly every state of the union. And even in the 1920s, you could still find states where prizefights were illegal. Naturally, those circumstances are bound to attract singular personalities. These hell-bent-for-leather types are intrinsically story material, they are characters whose adventures can be fleshed out like the protagonists in a novel or an epic poem.
Like?
Take someone such as Ad Wolgast, lightweight champion during the primitive — read: brutal — days, who was already suffering from the effects of dementia pugilistica when he was in his 20s. To reverse his physical decline, which must have been terrifying to a young, outwardly-fit ex-champion, Wolgast decides to undergo an operation in which he has goat glands inserted into his scrotum, which, believe it or not, was something of a fad in America, when medicine had not been professionalized yet. I mean, that sounds like something out of a Harry Crews or Stanley Elkin novel. Or the frenetic lives of Jack Johnson, Aaron Pryor and Muhammad Ali – there’s enough fascinating detail in them to keep anyone interested.
Writing about boxing also allows me to pursue my interest in narrative, since every fight is a series of narratives, like a Matryoshka doll. First, there is the story of the fighter: his style, his background, his motivation; then there is the story of the fight: the elements that bring two professionals together into the ring, such as public demand, economics, bragging rights; and finally there is the story of the fighting, which ultimately reveals the characters of the participants.
My other interests – mainly poetry and fiction – came about years after I fell for boxing, and are broader and far more difficult to assimilate than 100 years or so of boxing history. Basically, I’m a pretty limited guy: I know a lot about hardcore music, 1980s metal, film noir, jazz between 1945 and 1965, and 20th century fiction and poetry. As an omnivorous reader, I have some awareness of art, film, architecture and history, but certainly not enough to write anything of interest on any of those subjects.
Can you describe how Sporting Blood came together?
Sporting Blood is a collection of 21 essays on various fighters and fights from the past. There are four new stories in the book, plus a forward by Thomas Hauser, to go with essays I wrote over the years. More than a few of the older stories have been revised or expanded, which makes them “newish,” I guess. And given the transitory nature of the internet, most of the older stories have been off-line for many years and can only be found here. The overriding theme of the book here is catastrophe, I guess. There are a lot of tragic stories here, involving drugs, gangsters, mysterious deaths, disintegration, madness, suicide, but there are also the brief glories of fighters who earned notoriety and riches before their star power flickered and died. Some of the fights and fighters covered in the book are well-known: Mike Tyson, Muhammad Ali, Jack Johnson, Jake LaMotta, Sonny Liston and Joe Frazier. Others are more obscure but no less interesting: Johnny Saxton, Eddie Machen, Ad Wolgast and Mike Quarry.
One thing that comes across collectively in these pieces is just how strange and unique an “occupation” like boxing is. Also sad. At one point, you quote the boxing writer Trevor Wignall as saying, “It is impossible to conceive of anything more hideous than the fate of the unsuccessful boxer.” Time after time you articulate the existential and often terribly unfortunate predicament that befall most prizefighters. … Obviously you have a great deal of empathy for their lives. This is an age-old question, but do you find it ever difficult to square your enthusiasm for the sport with the dramatic and tragic fallouts of most of its participants?
Being a prizefighter in the U.S. circa 2020 is not only an anachronism but also a sort of rebuke of capitalist progress. That men must fight for a living, or even for a sense of distinction, is hard to reconcile with the material success of 21st century America. Such a bleak contrast still shocks some people, obviously not boxing fans, but if you ever read the comments section of the rare New York Times boxing story, for example, you’ll find a visceral reaction against boxing as a pursuit. Which makes sense: Most New York Times readers have no clue of how poverty and urban squalor can create circumstances so desperate that the only constructive way out is through fist-fighting.
Right, it’s beyond the pale of their imagination.
It’s troubling to think about the all-but-guaranteed fate of so many boxers: They will wind up broke or depressed or alcoholic or homeless or suffering from CTE. In exchange for a certain amount of fame — and much more of it years ago, up until the late 80s, I’d say — and the promise, but rarely the attainment, of riches, fighters risk their health and, in some cases, their lives. This gamble is not as disturbing as it might seem at first glance, and if you’ve ever spent any time in a slum, which is a nightmare of dehumanization, you can almost understand the trade-off. Aspirations are often hard to come by in some of these places, and the boost that boxing can give to a potential wayward soul is a real gift. To me, that sometimes mitigates some of the tragic stories in “Sporting Blood,” but the truth is, boxing is all but indefensible. Only libertarian notions of free will and individuality can really justify it. The deaths and injuries we’ve seen over the past few years remind us that heartache is inevitable in this sport.
Patrick Day and Maxim Dadashav both died from ring injuries. Adonis Stevenson sustained life-changing brain damage …
That said, boxers are far, far better off today, in the corporate boxing age, than they have ever been. More boxers are millionaires than ever. Fighters with a dozen bouts have received astronomical paydays and the need for content — as opposed to quality sporting events — assures an artificial demand that far outstrips supply. We’ve seen several mediocre and virtually unknown fighters in main events across every platform in the last year or two, which guarantees them fat paychecks, but also creates mismatches and dangerous situations, even if the establishment media won’t admit it. In this corporate age, which has its roots in the early 80s, but is really trending today, promoters and networks sign fighters to extravagant contracts and that has the effect of making dozens if not hundreds of boxers commodities who cannot be devalued by the threat of actual competition. I’d say that, if not for mismatches and the tendency for fighters to go on and on past their primes, boxing is not nearly as dangerous as it used to be. For the “opponent,” of course, boxing is neither remunerative nor safe. And that’s probably where I’m most squeamish.
What is the piece that you are most proud of? That fulfills your idea of a great narrative. What was the most difficult piece to write?
If I had to choose, I would probably pick The Windfall Factor, which is the outlandish tale of the Evander Holyfield-Bert Cooper title fight that took place in 1991. The elements that surrounded this fight epitomize everything bizarre about boxing as a subculture during that era. Things are far more polished these days. Cooper was a drug-addicted washout promoted by a sociopathic con man named Elvis Parker, who wore oversized sunglasses and a red wig. Parker was a criminal, plain and simple, who also had a coke habit. Eventually, Parker would wind up promoting Mark Gastineau, the steroid-addled ex-linebacker who was a star on the gossip pages in New York during the ’80s. A series of fixed fights ensued, until Gastineau was knocked out by Tim “Doc” Anderson, a circuit-fighter who had once been guided – and mistreated – by Parker. The result is a noirish tale of poisoning and finally murder.
It was hard to compress so much dramatic information into a short narrative and that was the main challenge: how to keep this preposterous tale, with its grotesque cast of characters, from going off the rails? Hopefully, I succeeded in keeping the story both brief and dramatic. For anyone interested in the entire tale, they should buy a copy of “The Years of the Locust” by Jon Hotten, a hilarious and disturbing look at the boxing underbelly of the early 1990s.
Who are some of the key influences on your writing?
When I was a kid I had to read way above myself to learn about the sport. There was no Donkey Punch Boxing or boxingbozo.com to give me that echo-chamber effect that’s so prevalent in the cyber age, a time when people want everything to reflect their preconceived notions or fit into their narrow comfort zone. Anyway, at 10,11, 12 years old, I was reading Michael Katz, Steve Farhood, Vic Ziegel, Dave Anderson, Richard Hoffer and Ira Berkow. A couple years later, you could add Phil Berger, Ralph Wiley and William Nack to the list. From there it was Hugh McIlvanney, John Schulian, Thomas Hauser and George Kimball.
Overall, the most important writers to me were Farhood, Katz, McIlvanney, Hoffer and Schulian, with Larry Merchant thrown in for his HBO commentary. Farhood clearly modeled KO on Sports Illustrated and Inside Sports and treated boxing as a serious pursuit. There were no Best Ring Entrances of All-Time pieces in KO magazine.
Can you elaborate a bit on what you find so appealing about those writers?
They brought gravitas to a sport that touched on everything from sociology to economics to death. And they highlighted the often fraudulent nature of a sport that was essentially a holdover from the hoaxish travelling shows of the 19th century.
Katz understood boxing as a kind of free-booty pursuit suddenly dovetailing with corporate interests in the late ’70s and early ’80s and creating this vortex of cutthroat promoters suddenly in league with TV networks, who saw boxing as a mega-attraction. In fact, at the time, networks often counter-programmed other sporting events with boxing matches.
And Merchant made it clear that boxing was full of false narratives – like a John Le Carré novel or a used car salesman convention – and his job was to counterbalance the propaganda that surrounded nearly every fight.
Howard Cosell was like that, too. ABC was paying him insane amounts of money and he would be on the air saying: “ladies and gentleman, this fight is a nightmare,” or, “I apologize for this mismatch.” Of course, Merchant was more poetic, but either way, that kind of oppositional coverage is basically obsolete.
I should also mention “The Black Lights” by Thomas Hauser, which was revelatory in the late 1980s, when I read it, and “On Boxing” by Joyce Carol Oates.
Most of these stories deal with boxing as it was known in the 20th century. Was it a conscious decision on your part to exclude the contemporary scene?
I guess the most recent subject in “Sporting Blood” is the Evander Holyfield-Bert Cooper story, although I’ve also written about fighters who were active during the Aughts: Johnny Tapia, Mike Tyson, Tony Ayala and Holyfield. But the Tyson and Holyfield stories are about specific dates and the Tapia and Ayala pieces are basically overviews of their topsy-turvy lives.
It’s probably not a conscious decision, but I would say that boxing has lost some of its organizing principles over the last 20 years or so, let’s put it that way, and the drama needed for a story is often lacking these days. There was a certain organic element to boxing that’s been missing for a while.
Why do you think that is?
I attribute that to networks ceding control of programming to promoters, traditionally people with reputations comparable to rainmakers and used car salesmen. There’s not a single quality-control guy involved in boxing television at any level, with the possible exception of Gordon Hall at Showtime. Full stop. There are some network executives who would protest that, but they’re pretty transparent in their phoniness. Every platform now airs whatever crap card a promoter puts together. Imagine trusting a promoter that way? It’s like putting your faith in a Nigerian Prince email or listening to advice from a three-card monte dealer who already has your money in his pocket.
But your point is that this wasn’t always the case?
Years ago, every network had someone who purchased matches from promoters on a fight-by-fight basis. NBC had Ferdie Pacheco and Kevin Monaghan, CBS had Mort Sharnik, ABC had Alex Wallau, USA had Brad Jacobs, ESPN had Russell Peltz and Dough Loughery, and so forth. They didn’t always buy the best fights and they made more than their share of mismatches, but they were tasked with the job of trying to maintain standards for their viewers. There is no way they would repeatedly air the same dull fighter over and over again or fighters with zero constituency or popularity or these fighters with almost no career trajectory, like Gary Russell Jr. with his yearly 12-round workout. There are simply far fewer compelling matchups made and, with that, far fewer compelling careers, which is reflected by how people tend to overrate fighters with one or two noteworthy wins on their records.
Another reason boxing seems a little less interesting is simple: Most fights are underwritten by networks without regard to the matchup or the fighters. As a result, you get a slew of undifferentiated fights that only stand out, if they stand out at all, to hardcore boxing fans, who play the mark more often than their self-professed expertise would lead you to believe. Years ago, before ancillary revenue and corporations entered boxing, the only way to make top purses was to draw a crowd, and that compelled most fighters to acknowledge the audience with their performances. No matter how many fighters stink out the joint today, perform in near-empty arenas, or produce ratings similar to those of the World Axe Throwing League, they’ll be right back on Showtime or DAZN.
Without trying to romanticize too much, the fighters of the past had professional dictates that drove them that have since vanished. They sometimes fought twice a month, they were looking for the biggest fights, which often meant the biggest purses, not avoiding them, and had to appeal to a broad constituency. With only eight divisions and, usually, one champion per division, the stakes were much higher when it came to title shots. Nobody had to fake-market these guys or advise them to wear a f—ing suit of armor into the ring or sit on a flying carpet with fireworks exploding all over the place. They were there to fight, until it came time to fight again.
In one sense then “Sporting Blood” is a tribute to a bygone era.
In a way it is, although fighters will always be compelling personalities, just based on the novelty of their profession, and there will always be fighters who try to transcend the limitations of their era, to stand out. At the risk of sounding nostalgic, fighters from previous eras were forced by circumstances to overreach, since ancillary revenue was limited. They fought 20-25 times a year, relied on attracting a crowd, and targeted headline fights because, unlike today, there was a correlation between big fights and big paydays. All sports have evolved: the NBA introduced the shot clock, football players used to play both offense and defense, baseball lowered the mound, and hockey tweaks its rules every year. Boxing superficially resembles its past incarnations – two men in a ring, battling it out – but the political and corporate forces, combined with its ad hoc nature, have created a parody of the rough-and-tumble pros of the past. What you can find in “Sporting Blood,” for the most part, is how fighters struggled against both their opponents and their careers during a time when they all scrambled for footing in a pitiless vocation. Sometimes, the outcomes of these struggles were disturbing, to say the least.
“Sporting Blood” is available in bookstores and Amazon on March 31.
