By Bart Barry-
Recently the New York Times published a column on beauty by David Brooks and a long-form piece on boxing by Dan Barry. Brooks’ column marked a sincere effort to celebrate a thing its author freely concedes he does not understand. Barry’s investigation marked a sincere effort to demonize a thing its author thinks he understands. One challenges its readers, and the other “challenges” its readers.
As Barry set out to write his literary synthesis of Thomas Hauser’s 2013 investigative report, one senses, he did it with an editor’s silent incantation – “What is the angle here?” – drumming through his head. A tragedy happened, and that means a villain, or villains, and the more villains, the less any one villain deserves empathy, who has time for that when villains lurk round every paragraph, and that means going hard-down on whichever villain, full-literary, award-winning, drilling to the “truth” – however superficial that particular truth might be, however much of a caricature you must make of a nobody or two to get that truth through your editor’s filters.
In Barry’s case, the villain is a villainous inspector endangering a prizefighter, his home state’s reputation, and the sanctity of sport itself, all in the petty pursuit of handwraps (he uses as a fundraising tool for former prizefighters). One hopes the first angle for this story was an irony like: An inspector trying to raise money for impoverished prizefighters inadvertently minted another impoverished prizefighter. That first angle might not have suffered an editor’s skepticism, though: These barbarians believe in saving them after they destroy them?! Subsequent reporting, too – interviewing men Hauser’s story already gave a mirror with which to study themselves for two years – revealed, much as Hauser already had, that the language barrier, Russian-to-English, likely precluded Abdusalamov’s words from tripping an inspector’s alarms, no matter his attentiveness.
As Barry re-reported, Abdusalamov’s stating his face hurt carried fractionally the conditional impact of his stating his head hurt. A light headache is expected by any athlete who exerts like that for 30 minutes, much less an athlete struck repeatedly to the skull, and as boxers are of the sturdiest stock if a fighter tells an inspector his head hurts, he’s describing a perilous abnormality, and a chain of actions gets triggered. When those actions do not get triggered, later interviews with medical professionals tend to reveal nothing so much as the extraordinary self-aggrandizement of someone who attends medical school. The hypotheticals are invariably rich and the mistakes of others who are not them invariably inexcusable: Every second counts!, everything might have been different!, were it my hospital . . ., it reminds me of someone I saved!, they did what?
A few years ago, the least-pleasant writing assignment I’ve endured sent me to fetch the likeliest cause of Frankie Leal’s 2013 death, asking if it could have been avoided. The question itself is an angle-beggar: Every event in a human life is not equal parts impossible and inevitable, and you need to decide which this event was and prove it. I interviewed a host of experts, lost most of my admiration for the field of neurology – the delta between its certainty and expertise being absurd – and concluded Leal’s death was equal parts impossible and inevitable, and if anyone were to blame it was Leal himself (a verdict and sentence, both, Leal would have accepted).
Last week Carlos Acevedo provided a review of Barry’s piece that included this insight: “That an underclass pursuit as barbaric as boxing can still exist in 2016 in a country known for its exceptionalism and for meritocracy is a shock to progressives who, like Marxists, view prizefighting as the exploitation of the destitute for the frivolous benefit of the bourgeoisie. But in the streets where gunshots echo in perpetuity, where drug gangs rule corners in daylight and moonlight alike, where unemployment is a scourge and in which prison terms are more common than college degrees, risk is a relative concept.”
Notice the empathy, notice the dexterity, notice the tolerance for ambiguity. Among Acevedo’s advantages over Barry are these: Talent, and softer editing – Acevedo didn’t have to compose his story before he wrote it and then watch anxiously as his boss changed his prose and then changed those changes.
Whatever David Brooks’ stature as a writer, he is remarkably adept at navigating editors and getting his occasionally angle-less columns published with charming ambiguity. His Jan. 15 column has something like an angle – he favors beauty over economists – but it allows a wide enough band for agreement as to have no angle at all. He also addresses something like physical intelligence, a form of beauty often misclassified as athleticism – that linear measurement of times and spaces, adored equally by scouts, geeks and other men enchanted by being right.
Because of the way it punishes errors, more viciously than another sport, boxing uncovers its practitioners’ physical intelligence in a way no IQ test or SAT ever measured a brain. It engenders intimacy, too: A man will forget his sexual partners before he forgets his sparring partners. Much to the chagrin of those who would ban it, boxing reveals what man senses even when he cannot prove it: This world is an unpredictable and often violent place for all who occupy it. Boxing is ugly and vital, and often its vitality grows in proportion to its ugliness.
And boxing buries its undertakers.
Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry
