ONE RING CIRCUS: Dispatches from the World
of Boxing
By Katherine Dunn
Reviewed by:
David Gionfriddo,
CyberBoxingZone Staff Writer
(MAY 13) A few years back, I had
the opportunity to attend an amateur boxing event in a Portland, Oregon
school gymnasium with author/journalist/fight fan/friend Katherine Dunn.
As an admirer of her imaginative and nuanced fiction, I seized a quiet
moment between fights to pose the ultimate sophisto-smartass query: How
did some one who excelled in the delicate art of storytelling reconcile
her love of boxing with the violence inflicted on its participants?
She sized me up with the calm, generous gaze of a teacher enlightening
an eager, but remedial, student. She had obviously spent years
considering and shaping her answer.
“Because people’s lives are never cleaner or purer than when they are
chasing the dream.”
One Ring Circus, a collection culled from 20+ years of Dunn’s
boxing-themed pieces, chronicles the sweat-soaked legs of that chase,
and dissects the components of that elusive dream.
What sets Dunn’s book apart from the other tomes on the “Boxing” shelf
is its unique and welcome voice. Fans are familiar with the full cast of
usual suspects: the grizzled veteran reporter adept at cataloguing the
sport’s crime s and misdemeanors; the academic who views every jab as
signifier of social upheaval; and the cheerleader who rhapsodizes about
every KO as a triumph of the human spirit. Dunn’s vision reaches into
the crannies of rundown neighborhood gyms to examine the sport’s most
elemental and profound human interactions, and to extract truths far too
basic for the more vainglorious fight-mob scribes.
Readers who have never thrown a punch in anger, and whose preconceptions
of gym life come straight from 1930s movie scripts, will be surprised at
what really transpires between teacher and student, fighter and
opponent. “The flat fact,” Dunn writes in “School of Hard Knocks,” her
essay on the dynamics of training, “is that a boxing gym is a place
where men are allowed to be kind to one another.” In a milieu dominated
by macho clichés and trash talk, it probably takes a woman and a damn
fine observer to utter such a bare and jarring home truth.
One Ring Circus abounds with truths like these, and such truths comprise
a lens that renders clear much of the confusing, hazy and contrary world
of the Hurting Business. The most basic preparations, the crudest
triage, are acts of love and expressions of craft and pride. But the
reality of combat and its perils are always waiting to intrude. Few who
read the story of the undercard fighter and his earnest but inept
handlers, watching a fight slip away in a stream of un-coagulated blood,
will ever look at cut men the same way again.
Dunn’s vision ranges all the way from the trainer gently wrapping the
hands of a novice to notorious front-page bouts fought in extravagant
settings before crowds of stars and high-rollers. And her
often-contrarian views can make for bracing reading. The Tyson who bit
Evander Holyfield is transformed from back-alley thug to desperate
victim of rough tactics. Drug addict and serial felon Johnny Tapia
reveals a secret life spent battling youthful traumas and
re-establishing loving family ties. Dunn reads the papers, but rarely
hews to the conventional wisdom. In her own way, this prospector for
human warmth, who nervily offered to spar with knockout artist Lucia
Rijker, is every bit as scrappy and game as the smalltown longshots she
writes about,
Every Dunn essay is a polished blend of empathy, artistry and informed
opinion. But One Ring Circus really kicks into gear when she adds to the
mix her formidable research skills and her gift for persuasive rhetoric.
“The Vice and Virtue of Boxing” plumbs the empirical data to support a
powerful defense of the sport and a stern rebuttal to boxing
abolitionists. “Just As Fierce,” originally published in Mother Jones
more than a dozen years ago, tears down age-old prejudices against
female participation in combat sports. When Dunn spars with the
Consensus, the results are never less than compelling. She has so much
more than a mere puncher’s chance…
One Ring Circus is no weighty doorstop of an anthology, and the one real
criticism of the book is that it could have been more inclusive. But
while it may leave you wanting more, like a phone booth war stopped on
an accidental head butt, Dunn’s collection is a great addition to your
boxing library that illuminates and glorifies this misunderstood and
maddening sport, one of those rigorous disciplines that “offer us
greatness and hurl us deeper into life by their drama and beauty.”
A game fringed with bagmen and bloviators, shysters and showoffs, has
finally got the wise, lucid spokesman it needs and deserves.
(One Ring Circus can be ordered on Amazon.com or at TowerBooks.com)
