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Norman Mailer

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The Fight Kindle Edition

by Norman Mailer (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.3 677 ratings

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In 1974 in Kinshasa, Zaïre, two African American boxers were paid five million dollars apiece to fight each other. One was Muhammad Ali, the aging but irrepressible “professor of boxing.” The other was George Foreman, who was as taciturn as Ali was voluble. Observing them was Norman Mailer, a commentator of unparalleled energy, acumen, and audacity. Whether he is analyzing the fighters’ moves, interpreting their characters, or weighing their competing claims on the African and American souls, Mailer’s grasp of the titanic battle’s feints and stratagems—and his sensitivity to their deeper symbolism—makes this book a masterpiece of the literature of sport.

Praise for The Fight

“Exquisitely refined and attenuated . . . [a] sensitive portrait of an extraordinary athlete and man, and a pugilistic drama fully as exciting as the reality on which it is based.”—The New York Times

“One of the defining texts of sports journalism. Not only does Mailer recall the violent combat with a scholar’s eye . . . he also makes the whole act of reporting seem as exciting as what’s occurring in the ring.”—GQ

“Stylistically, Mailer was the greatest boxing writer of all time.”—Chuck Klosterman, Esquire

“One of Mailer’s finest books.”—Louis Menand, The New Yorker

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258 pages
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Publication date

September 17, 2013
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From the Publisher

GQ says, “One of the defining texts of sports journalism.”


	HARLOT'S GHOST	ANCIENT EVENINGS	MIAMI AND THE SIEGE OF CHICAGO	THE DEER PARK	AN AMERICAN DREAM	THE SPOOKY ART
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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

There are sporting events that transcend the world of sports, and the 1974 heavyweight title fight in which Muhammad Ali regained his crown by improbably kayoing George Foreman in the middle of the African night was certainly one of them. Metaphorically, it was a writer's dream: two imposing black warriors, one all grace, the other brute force, one the iconoclast, the other the blind patriot, battling each other. Fatefully, the appropriate writer threw his pen into the ring. Norman Mailer's masterful account goes far beyond the ropes to capture the primal ethos of the sport, the larger social canvas this particular fight was drawn on, and the remarkable cast of personalities--not the least of which is Mailer himself--who converged to make this "Rumble in the Jungle" a landmark in sports history and a clear knockout in Mailer's journalistic portfolio.

From Library Journal

The "fight" is the 1975 world heavyweight championship bout in Zaire between then reigning king of the ring Muhammad Ali and up-and-coming George Foreman. Mailer relays the events of the actual fight and includes the observations of George Plimpton, Hunter S. Thompson, and others.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

"Entertaining... Mailer continues his familiar shadow-boxing with the ineffable." -- Time

In 1975 in Kinshasa, Zaire, at the virtual center of Africa, two African American boxers were paid five million dollars apiece to fight each other until one was declared winner. One was Muhammad Ali, the aging but irrepressible "professor of boxing" who vowed to reclaim the championship he had lost. The other was George Foreman, who was as taciturn as Ali was voluble and who kept his hands in his pockets "the way a hunter lays his rifle back into its velvet case." Observing them was Norman Mailer, whose grasp of the titanic battle's feints and stratagems -- and whose sensitivity to their deeper symbolism -- make this book a masterpiece of the literature of sport.

Whether he is analyzing the fighters' moves, interpreting their characters, or weighing their competing claims on the African and American souls, Mailer is a commentator of unparalleled energy, acumen, and audacity -- and surely one of the few intrepid enough to accompany Ali on a late-night run through the bush. In The Fight he restores our tarnished notions of heroism to a blinding gleam -- and establishes himself as a champion in his own right.

"An admirable entertainment.... This book recalls one to a sense of how delicate an ironist, and how serious a reporter, Mailer is." -- Saturday Review

From the Back Cover

"Entertaining... Mailer continues his familiar shadow-boxing with the ineffable." -- Time

In 1975 in Kinshasa, Zaire, at the virtual center of Africa, two African American boxers were paid five million dollars apiece to fight each other until one was declared winner. One was Muhammad Ali, the aging but irrepressible "professor of boxing" who vowed to reclaim the championship he had lost. The other was George Foreman, who was as taciturn as Ali was voluble and who kept his hands in his pockets "the way a hunter lays his rifle back into its velvet case." Observing them was Norman Mailer, whose grasp of the titanic battle's feints and stratagems -- and whose sensitivity to their deeper symbolism -- make this book a masterpiece of the literature of sport.

Whether he is analyzing the fighters' moves, interpreting their characters, or weighing their competing claims on the African and American souls, Mailer is a commentator of unparalleled energy, acumen, and audacity -- and surely one of the few intrepid enough to accompany Ali on a late-night run through the bush. In The Fight he restores our tarnished notions of heroism to a blinding gleam -- and establishes himself as a champion in his own right.

"An admirable entertainment.... This book recalls one to a sense of how delicate an ironist, and how serious a reporter, Mailer is." -- Saturday Review

About the Author

Born in Long Branch, NJ, in 1923, and raised in Brooklyn, Norman Mailer was one of the most influential writers of the second half of the 20th century and a leading public intellectual for nearly sixty years. He is the author of more than thirty books. The Castle in the Forest, his last novel, was his eleventh New York Times bestseller. His first novel, The Naked and the Dead, has never gone out of print. His 1968 nonfiction narrative, The Armies of the Night, won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He won a second Pulitzer for The Executioner’s Song and is the only person to have won Pulitzers in both fiction and nonfiction. Five of his books were nominated for National Book Awards, and he won a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Foundation in 2005. Mr. Mailer died in 2007 in New York City.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1. CARNAL INDIFFERENCE

THERE IS ALWAYS a shock in seeing him again. Not live as in television but standing before you, looking his best. Then the World’s Greatest Athlete is in danger of being our most beautiful man, and the vocabulary of Camp is doomed to appear. Women draw an audible breath. Men look down. They are reminded again of their lack of worth. If Ali never opened his mouth to quiver the jellies of public opinion, he would still inspire love and hate. For he is the Prince of Heaven — so says the silence around his body when he is luminous.

When he is depressed, however, his pale skin turns the color of coffee with milky water, no cream. There is the sickly green of a depressed morning in the muddy washes of the flesh. He looks not quite well. That may be a fair description of how he appeared at his training camp in Deer Lake, Pennsylvania, on a September afternoon seven weeks before his fight in Kinshasa with George Foreman.

His sparring was spiritless. Worse. He kept getting hit with stupid punches, shots he would normally avoid, and that was not like Ali! There was an art to watching him train and you acquired it over the years. Other champions picked sparring partners who could imitate the style of their next opponent and, when they could afford it, added a fighter who was congenial: someone they could hit at will, someone fun to box. Ali did this also, but reversed the order. For the second fight with Sonny Liston, his favorite had been Jimmy Ellis, an intricate artist who had nothing in common with Sonny. As boxers, Ellis and Liston had such different moves one could not pass a bowl of soup to the other without spilling it. Of course, Ali had other sparring partners for that fight. Shotgun Sheldon comes to mind. Ali would lie on the ropes while Sheldon hit him a hundred punches to the belly — that was Ali conditioning stomach and ribs to take Liston’s pounding. In that direction lay his duty, but his pleasure was by way of sparring with Ellis as if Ali had no need to study Sonny’s style when he could elaborate the wit and dazzle of his own.

Fighters generally use a training period to build confidence in their reflexes, even as an average skier, after a week of work on his parallel, can begin to think he will yet look like an expert. In later years, however, Ali would concentrate less on building his own speed and more on how to take punches. Now, part of his art was to reduce the force of each blow he received to the head and then fraction it further. Every fighter does that, indeed a young boxer will not last long if his neck fails to swivel at the instant he is hit, but it was as if Ali were teaching his nervous system to transmit shock faster than other men could.

Maybe all illness results from a failure of communication between mind and body. It is certainly true of such quick disease as a knockout. The mind can no longer send a word to the limbs. The extreme of this theory, laid down by Cus D’Amato when managing Floyd Patterson and José Torres, is that a pugilist with an authentic desire to win cannot be knocked out if he sees the punch coming, for then he suffers no dramatic lack of communication. The blow may hurt but cannot wipe him out. In contrast, a five-punch combination in which every shot lands is certain to stampede any opponent into unconsciousness. No matter how light the blows, a jackpot has been struck. The sudden overloading of the victim’s message center is bound to produce that inrush of confusion known as coma.

Now it was as if Ali carried the idea to some advanced place where he could assimilate punches faster than other fighters, could literally transmit the shock through more parts of his body, or direct it to the best path, as if ideally he were working toward the ability to receive that five-punch combination (or six or seven!) yet be so ready to ship the impact out to each arm, each organ and each leg, that the punishment might be digested, and the mind remain clear. It was a study to watch Ali take punches. He would lie on the ropes and paw at his sparring partner like a mother cat goading her kitten to belt away. Then Ali would flip up his glove and let the other’s punch bounce from that glove off his head, repeating the move from other angles, as if the second half of the art of getting hit was to learn the trajectories with which punches glanced off your gloves and still hit you; Ali was always studying how to deaden such shots or punish the glove that threw the punch, forever elaborating his inner comprehension of how to trap, damp, modify, mock, curve, cock, warp, distort, deflect, tip, and turn the bombs that came toward him, and do this with a minimum of movement, back against the ropes, languid hands up. He invariably trained by a scenario that cast him as a fighter in deep fatigue, too tired to raise his arms in the twelfth round of a fifteen-round fight. Such training may have saved him from being knocked out by Frazier in their first fight, such training had been explored by him in every fight since. His corner would scream “Stop playing!,” the judges would score against him for lying on the ropes, the fight writers would report that he did not look like the old Ali and all the while he was refining methods.

This afternoon, however, in Deer Lake it looked as if he were learning very little. He was getting hit by stupid punches and they seemed to take him by surprise. He was not languid but sluggish. He looked bored. He showed, as he worked, all the sullen ardor of a husband obliging himself to make love to his wife in the thick of carnal indifference.

The first sparring partner, Larry Holmes, a young light-colored Black with a pro record of nine wins and no losses, boxed aggressively for three rounds, hitting Ali more often than he got hit in return, which in itself might not have been unusual — sometimes Ali would not throw a punch through all of a round — but on this afternoon it seemed as if Ali did not know how to use Holmes. Ali had the disgusted expression Sugar Ray Robinson used to get toward the end of his career when struck on the nose, a grimace of disdain for the occupation as if you could lose your looks if you weren’t careful. The afternoon was hot, the gym was even hotter. It was filled with tourists, more than a hundred, who had paid a dollar to get in — there was a late-summer apathy to the proceedings. Once in a while, Ali would set out to chastise Holmes for his impudence, but Holmes was not there to be instructed for nothing. He fought back with all the eagerness of a young pro who sees a maximum of future for himself. Ali could of course have given a lesson, but he was boxing in the depths of a bad mood. Part of Ali’s strength in the ring was fidelity to his mood. If, when speaking to the press, a harsh and hysterical tone entered his voice as easily as other men light a cigarette, he was never frantic in the ring, at least not since the fight with Liston in Miami in 1964 when he won the Heavyweight Championship. No, just as Marlon Brando seemed to inhabit a role as though it were a natural extension of his mood, so Ali treated boxing. In a bad mood, he would stay in his lethargy, box out of his very distaste for the staleness of this occupation. Often he trained all of an afternoon in such a bad spirit. The difference today was that he was running into unexpected punches — the end of the world for Ali. In annoyance, he would punish Holmes by wrapping an arm around his head. Over the years, Ali had become one of the best wrestlers in the ring. But then if karate kicks had been introduced to boxing, Ali would also have been first at that. His credo had to be that nothing in boxing was foreign to him. Now, however, such virtuosity was reduced to wrestling with Holmes. When they separated, Holmes would go back to the attack. Toward the end of three rounds, Ali started stinging him with punches. Holmes stung him back.

Ali’s next sparring partner, Eddie “Bossman” Jones, a Light-Heavyweight, was a dark sawed-off version of George Foreman. He didn’t look five-ten in height, and Ali used him as a playmate. Absolutely comfortable with Jones (a fighter reminiscent of other fighters who stood flat-footed and belted away) Ali lay on the ropes and took Bossman’s punches when he chose to and blocked them when he wished. For all it seemed to demand, Ali could have been an inspector on an assembly line, accepting and rejecting the product. “This piece passes, this one won’t.” To the degree that boxing is carnality, meat against meat, Ali was master when it was time to receive, he got the juice out of it, the aesthetic juice of the punches he blocked or slipped, plus all the libidinal juice of Bossman Jones banging away on his gut. For all of a round Bossman belabored Ali, and Ali communed with himself. In the second of their two rounds, Ali stepped off the ropes for the last two minutes and proceeded for the first time in the afternoon to throw punches. His master’s assortment leaped forth, jabs with a closed glove, jabs with an open fist, jabs with a twist of the glove to the right, jabs with a turn to the left, then a series of right-hand leads offered like jabs, then uppercuts and easy hooks from a stand-up position, full of speed off both hands. With each punch, his glove did something different, as if the fist and wrist within the glove were also speaking.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00ERTEPNI
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Random House; Reprint edition (September 17, 2013)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ September 17, 2013
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 2721 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 258 pages
Page numbers source ISBN ‏ : ‎ 0812986121

Best Sellers Rank: #825,625 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
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Norman Mailer

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Norman Kingsley Mailer (January 31, 1923 – November 10, 2007) was an American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, film-maker, actor and political activist. His novel The Naked and the Dead was published in 1948. His best-known work was widely considered to be The Executioner's Song, which was published in 1979, and for which he won one of his two Pulitzer Prizes. In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, his book Armies of the Night was awarded the National Book Award.

Along with Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe, Mailer is considered an innovator of creative nonfiction, a genre sometimes called New Journalism, which uses the style and devices of literary fiction in fact-based journalism.

Mailer was also known for his essays, the most renowned of which was "The White Negro." He was a cultural commentator and critic, expressing his views through his novels, journalism, essays and frequent media appearances.

In 1955, Mailer and four others founded The Village Voice, an arts- and politics-oriented weekly newspaper distributed in Greenwich Village.

Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by Carl Van Vechten [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

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Jiang Xueqin

Brilliant Craftsmanship

Reviewed in the United States on November 19, 2012

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"The Fight" is not just a week-long journey into the events, places, and people surrounding "The Rumble in the Jungle," the classic championship bout between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman that will be forever remembered as one of the greatest displays of athletic prowess. It's also a free-ranging tour of a mind into a genius wordsmith; yes, there's the obnoxious narcissism of a man at the height of his literary powers and at the apex of his celebrity profiling a man about to reach the peak of his athletic glory and at the cusp of his stardom. But there's also the endless and compelling curiosity of Norman Mailer, as he zooms in and out of people's minds as he fast as he zooms in and around Zaire. Above all, there are all these psychologist insights into the athletic genius of Muhammad Ali that only a literary genius like Norman Mailer can appreciate.

The actual fight itself will go down as the most fluidly and accurately description of a championship fight in literary history, and could be compared to the final battle scene in The Aeneid. From Mailer's description, we can see that the epic battle between Foreman and Ali was violent and brutal, but ultimately who wins fights is not whoever is strongest and fittest but who is braver, smarter, and more determined. Boxing then is psychological warfare at its rawest and at its most subtle, and in the fight it becomes painfully and exhilarating clear to the audience that midway into the fight both men are on the brink of death, that their bodies and their minds have taken punishment and torture that would have killed any other human being, and that if they were to take a shot in the wrong place at the wrong time then they will come crashing down to their death. But Foreman and Ali buried their fear deep, albeit in their own individual way that defines the character of each. With Foreman he compensates with his fear of death and the much worse possibility of defeat by summoning a blind brutality and violence -- it's not only to think of winning; he needs to kill. With Ali he's looking deep into himself, summoning the mental discipline and courage he needs to do what he knows he can and must do -- land that awesome combination of strikes when Foreman is most vulnerable, that awesome combination that had not flinched his fearsome opponent in previous rounds but which most bring him down in the waning minutes of the fight when both men are on the brink of death and annihilation.

Ali proved himself the cooler and the calmer of the two fighters, and thus the infinitely superior one. And Mailer has written a book that will make eternal Ali's great athletic performance.

8 people found this helpful

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Michael A. Black

A Memoir That Reads Like a Novel

Reviewed in the United States on October 17, 2015

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Norman Mailer was one of the best writers to come out of the Twentieth Century. He was also one of those writers in the Hemingway mold, who sought to immerse himself in the subject matter about which he wrote. No stranger to the sweet science (he once did a three-round boxing match on the Dick Cavet Show with ex-light-heavyweight champ, Jose Torres), Mailer was sent to cover the Rumble in the Jungle in Africa in 1974 when Muhammad Ali became the second man to regain the heavyweight title when he took it away from George Foreman. Mailer had a way with imagery and metaphor, and his writing is engaging. His colossal ego is also in evidence in this piece. He refers to himself in the third person throughout. Interestingly enough, there is more written about the events leading up to the big fight than of the actual contest itself. Despite Mailer's friendship and obvious idolization of Ali, the author does give us a few glances of Ali's cruel nature. Foreman, who later became the oldest man ever to regain the heavyweight title, is not described in much detail, and is cast as a bit player in this piece. Ironically, Foreman's genial personality wouldn't become evident until his comeback about ten years after his original reign as heavyweight champion. The Fight focuses primarily on Ali, who was a larger-than-life icon during the 1970's. It's too bad Mailer didn't try to gain more insight into Foreman's nature, but perhaps that wasn't an option at the time, since Norman was clearly a member of Ali's camp. Originally written as a two-part article for Playboy magazine, Mailer later expanded the article into this book. It's an interesting memoir and gives the reader a sense of being caught up in the big event.

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jjlaw

Masculinity, Dictatorship and more

Reviewed in the United States on October 7, 2016

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Mailer's New Journalism here serves up a real feast, a smorgasbord of topics such as masculinity, economic dictatorship, journalism, the African climate, the African 'nature' and American stewardesses - er, flight attendants - mixed into the slow-heating but ultimately succulent and rewarding narrative of the boxing match that simmers in the background. A very New Journo sentence that!

Zaire, from 1971 and 1997 what is now the highly unstable Democratic
Republic of the Congo, is the Portugese word for the Congo River, itself taken from the Congo word nzere (river that swallows all rivers). The river, nature and weather are ever present here - will it rain before the fight (the rains came after the fight and flooded the whole concrete stadium, dressing rooms, everything).

Zaire was a military dictatorship under Joseph Desire Mobuto, who then "Africanized" his name (getting rid of Belgian colonial influence) to Mobuto Sese Suko Kuko Ngbendu Wa Za Banga, sort of "all conquering warrior who goes from triumph to triumph". This is all detailed by Mailer at the beginning of the book, although Wikipedia is also useful for those trying to remember and writing a book review on Amazon!
Essentially as a showcase for and to consolidate his rule Mobuto set up this historic boxing match. Thus a lot of the early book is Mailer's perceptions of the bizarre dictatorship and its brief history and, like all dictatorships, cult of personality. We can then compare Mobuto the warrior to the other warriors in the story, Foreman and Ali.

A major theme of the book is maculinity. There are almost no female characters in the book, apart from Ali's wife who briefly appears at the end and an American stew - er flight attendant - who is something of a heroine in the final act. Thus there is George, portrayed as the one dimensional knock out machine he probably was back then. There are the men in George's camp, who worry he might kill Ali. Then there are the men around Ali, his camp. Many doubt him. A fascinating figure is Bundini, whose role in the camp appears to be court jester, motivator and mystic provider. As another reviewer has mentioned one of the most satisfying chapters is when Mailer ("Norman" in the text) goes for a morning jog with Ali and is ultimately disappointed and worried by the seemingly lackadaisical aspect of Ali's training. The chapters chronicling the fight itself are just amazing writing that should be set as a text for any budding sports journalist.

Mailer here is good, very very good. However for me the best New Journalism tome on masculinity is actually The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe, a book of genius.

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schnellerdet

Schnell geliefert

Reviewed in Germany on November 3, 2018

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Ware einwandfrei

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Morgan

I care nothing for boxing as a sport but...

Reviewed in Australia on March 19, 2021

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The psychology behind sport fascinates me and this book gives you an interesting view of this classic fight. I don't particularly enjoy Mailer's brand of "new journalism"; stylistically I much prefer Capote, Wolfe and Didion. That said it is a good read. Anyone who is interested in this fight should also watch "When we were kings" the brilliant doco about the same in which Mailer is interviewed.

Jury

Beautiful book

Reviewed in Italy on January 9, 2017

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This book, by which is wrote Norman Mailer, is a beautiful retrospective of the best boxer never lived. I strongly reccommend this book.

simon traversy

Five Stars

Reviewed in Canada on September 14, 2014

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Mailer has an amazing command of the English language

Parvenu

Excellent

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 25, 2016

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This is a great little book from a great little writer about a great big boxing event. It is a short book, even with some pointless waffle at the end, but it gives a different insight into the crowning moment of the most important sports man, or woman, in history. The Rumble in the Jungle in 1974 when an "ageing" Muhammed Ali foolishly, some said, challenged the most fearsome fighter in boxing history to a showdown in Kinshasa, Zaire (now the DR Congo). The book describes events and emotions from the build up in the training camps through to the fight aftermath, in Mailer's distinctive voice. You will already know the story but Mailer tells it well, with some brilliant boxing insight.

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