"It's a real bloodsport," my dad likes to say whenever we talk boxing. When we watch fights together, he has the habit of saying "ooh! ooh! ooh!" when a fighter runs a particularly vicious combination. I remember watching Rumble in the Jungle footage in the basement when I was a kid, and I remember my father's awe. Big George leaning into Ali in the corner, Ali pulling his opponent's head into his arm pit. Foreman dragging toward Ali with his arms outstretched like a zombie. That first sharp right delivered by Ali. "Ooh!" says my father. Two more right hands and Ali is out of the corner ("Ooh! Ooh!" my father says), George wheeling after him, off-balanced, into Ali's one-two. "Ooh!" says my father. Foreman looks like a marionette, strings drawn tight, then snapped. His arm flaps above his shoulder. He folds at the waist and tumbles forward, rolls onto his back. As he tries to lift himself up, he wears a look of dumb wonder. "Ooh!" my father says.
I cannot tell whether my father is vocalizing the impact of each blow or the pain of the man on the receiving end. Maybe both.
It is no surprise to witness displays of tenderness between fighters and their teams, or even their opponents. Boxing is, after all, a craft frequently commenced under hard times, nurtured in near-monastic conditions, entailing a mental and physical reconfiguration. It forms close bonds. It's execution, at high levels, draws two men together into a bodily and psychological extremity that draws on the deepest reservoirs of personal substance. It is a categorically oppositional encounter, one of intense intimacy.
It's harder to account for tenderness on the part of the boxing viewer, perhaps because that tenderness is coupled with the opposite of tenderness. Just to observe a boxing match requires the suspension of a basic aversion to real intimate human violence. This is not the same as desensitization. Watching a fight, we aestheticize the exercise of punishing force, at the same time experiencing a hyper-acute awareness of its effect.
No place is this paradox more apparent than in the double-edged accolade of having "heart." The term generally refers to the ability to persevere through powerful adversity (meaning, in this medium, blunt force trauma). Occasionally it's attributed to a fighter who manages to hash out a rugged, hard-fought victory, but more often applied with a lining of condescension to a fighter who won't surrender even when he is getting the snot beaten out of him. And yet, the fighters that embody the trait in its full expression are often not merely respected but loved- sometimes more than their technically superior peers. (Consider, for example, the boxing audience's response to Arturo Gatti compared to Pernell Whitaker.)
I got to thinking about this while watching Primo Carnera's 1934 bout with Max Baer- or, to be precise, Primo Carnera's 1934 massacre at the hands of Max Baer. Carnera crops up often in the annals of boxing history, despite having never been much of a boxer. His blunt features and snaggletoothed grin graced the cover of Time magazine in 1931. He starred with Baer in the light-hearted 1933 Myrna Loy romance The Lady and the Prizefighter, playing himself. His story was adapted by Budd Schulberg in his 1947 novel The Harder They Fall, and again by Rod Serling in the 1956 teleplay Requiem for a Heavyweight. At one time, he held the heavyweight championship of the world. He was 6' 5 1/2'', 275 lbs, considered a giant in his native Italy. He could be staggered by even a light tap to his chin.
Paul Gallico and Jack Sher both wrote at length about Carnera, and like much of the literature on the fighter, their treatment tends to drift into the maudlin. I was a little annoyed by it, frankly speaking, found it a bit sentimental, but as I reviewed Carnera's history, I came to feel some of the same, and also to understand why his figure has persevered in the sport's mythology. Unusual as it is, his is, in it's way, such a boxing story- dramatic, tragic, fraught with fantasy and delusion, spun around the central dramatic object of Carnera's oddity of a body.
Carnera was born weighing 22 pounds in 1906 to a stone-cutter family in Sequals, Italy. By eight years old, he was the size of a grown man. In the wake of World War I, Sequals was place of destitution, and Carnera set out at the age of twelve, making his way to France where he did laborer's work, carrying bags of cement, laying bricks, cutting stones. At seventeen, he joined a traveling circus, commencing his career as a body-spectacle. He was exhibited as a freakshow giant, then a strongman, then a wrestler. "It is no life to live," Carnera said of this period of his life. "I feel foolish and I am very lonely most of the time. I am paid very little, which I do not realize at the time, and the work is hard and the conditions bad. I get very homesick many times, when I am with the circus, more than when I was a laborer."
By 1928, the circus had disbanded, and a depressed Carnera was spotted sprawled on a park bench in Paris by an obscure heavyweight named Paul Journee, who convinced the big man to meet with a short and vaguely crooked fight manager named Leon See. See quickly realized two things about Carnera: the profit potential as a curiosity attraction, and his low ceiling as a technician, due to the giant's clumsiness, over-developed muscles, and his glass chin. Nonetheless, Carnera was in the ring two weeks after signing with See, and within fifteen months had accumulated a 16-2 record (mostly knockouts, with both losses due to disqualification from illegal blows). This feat was accomplished less by Carnera's ineffectual slap-punches than by See's underworld connections, who either fixed the bouts or pitted the big man against the most tomato-canned of tomato cans.
Carnera landed in America in 1930, backed by a team with names like Broadway Bill Duffy, Mad Dog Vincent Coll, Big Frenchy DeMange, and Boo Hoo Huff, if that's any clue to their allegiance to letter of law. The Italian was presented to the American public with carnival fanfare. In his debut against one Big Boy Peterson at Madison Square Garden, Carnera entered the ring in a visor-ed hat and green vest, wearing trunks emblazoned with the image of wild boar, flanked by See and other diminutive attendants to enhance his size.
Peterson fell in dubious fashion just over a minute into that fight. This proved to be the temple for the next four years. Carnera's underworld managers guided him through a run of mostly knockout victories, ensured by the dispensation of bribe-money and the occasional threat of lethal force. The mobsters, having ousted See (who, though remembered fondly by Carnera, seemed to have few scruples about dipping into his fighter's pockets), also managed to swindle just about every penny that Carnera earned.
His reception in American was both affectionate and derisive, often in the same turn. On his arrival, he was labeled "a mighty killer," and "a new giant menace on the American boxing scene," as well as "a neanderthal type with a tremendous punch." Indeed, his massive frame, guileless demeanor, and shaky English garnered Carnera a reputation as an over-sized simpleton (which was not the case). Neither did the public and press completely swallow the integrity of Carnera's success; some of his nicknames referred directly to his shabby technique- "Satchel Feet," "The Ambling Alp," etc. Nonetheless, they kept buying tickets. (Several of Carnera's suspicious fights were examined by various boxing commissions, though nothing ever came of these investigations.) Carnera's story is shaded with grand tragedy by the common belief that he himself had the wool pulled over his eyes, that his team concealed their dirty dealings and endlessly talked up his invulnerability, that he actually entered the ring with the belief that his fists landed with elemental force. (Some accounts dispute this claim.)
At the time he fought former co-star Max Baer, Carnera was heavyweight champion of the world. He'd won the title from Jack Sharkey in June 1933, but it was not a triumphant time in the Italian's life. The previous year, Sharkey had beat him senseless, puncturing any notion of invulnerability the giant had possessed. He was demoralized and wanted out of the sport. "It was too late then," the fighter said. "They had me by the throat. They would not let me quit. Every fight was to be my last one, but it never was. I had no friends in the game, nobody I could talk to even, or ask advice. Everyone cared for money, that's all. I knew it, and this is a very lonely thing." The champ had declared bankruptcy a month after winning the title, and took the Baer fight in desperate need of the payday.
Baer had killed a man in the ring in August 1930, and a few months later laid a severe beating on Ernie Schaaf, who died after his next fight (against Carnera, as it happens) due to the injuries sustained in the Baer match. In 1933, the half-Jewish Baer had bested Hitler-favorite Max Schmeling in a fight that made him a hero to Jews and was seen as a symbol of the struggle against German fascism. He was most assuredly not a tomato can.
In On Boxing, Joyce Carol Oates writes, "a boxer ‘is' his body, and is totally identified with it." By today's standards, Carnera's size is not unusual, but during that period, it was extraordinary. (The only bigger man to have achieved such success in the ring was Jess Willard, who held the heavyweight title from 1915 to 1919. Willard was taller than Carnera but 35 lbs lighter, and had a bulky frame, without the Italian's articulated musculature.) If the wonder of Carnera was the weird grandeur of his body, then the horror of his match with Baer is that of a body gone awry.
Carnera went to the canvas with Baer's first hard right hand, his trunk-like legs trembling as he rose. Then he was getting hit again, pitching about, kept aloft by the ropes, no longer even trying to strike back or defend himself, just trying to flee the smaller man with force in his fists, looping three-quarters of the ring before Baer's fists crumpled him again, his torso draped over the ropes. Each Baer blow seemed to send a ripple through his body, snapping back his huge head, twitching his extremities. That was the first round.
"I never liked Carnera before," a fight manager remarked to Jack Sher. "To me he was nothing but a big, stupid bum. But, by God, I loved and pitied the big, blind ox that night, because I never seen so much guts."
Before the fight was stopped in the 10th round, he'd hit the canvas thirteen times. His face was swollen, smeared with blood, but he had not relinquished consciousness. It seemed like the last vestige of a self asserted in a body whose control had been wrested from him. It was a tragic reckoning for this boxer who seemed like an innocent trapped in a burlesque of might, a body that did not suit his soul, a body that defined him and which he couldn't wield.
He had still worse to come after that fight- another beating at the hands of Joe Louis, and another beating, and another, and another, and so on into injury, poverty, obscurity. Boxing had not been kind to Primo Carnera, not for a minute. (After his retirement, he finally found a successful third act as a professional wrestler, something of a return to his roots.)
Writing about Primo Carnera, it's hard after all to avoid that old sentimental melancholy. But I suppose that's part of boxing too. It is a blood sport, as my father says. It is a brutal sport, and a cruel one. There's no denying it. Boxing would be a much simpler affair if cruelty and brutality were all there were to it. But it is hardly so simple. For it is also an affair of empathy, of dignity, and of love.