Norman Mailer's View On Boxing

A sport of endurance, a combination of saliva and sweat, and a stank aroma of staunch determination and pure will. Each champion poised like animals contained in a cage. These images are similar to the ways that Norman Mailer portrayed the ruthlessness of the sport known as boxing. Mailer’s hard-hitting imagery immerses the reader into the brutality of boxing through Benny Paret’s last fight, showing the champion’s descent from the greatness he was well known for with examples such as “he went down like a large ship which turns on end and slides second by second into its grave” and “Griffith was in like a cat ready to rip the life out of a huge boxed rat.” These scenes evoke a sense of immeasurable understanding of the true nature of boxing as it

Mailer cites many powerful images to show his slow descent from greatness. In the last paragraph, it really shows how the death of Paret symbolizes both the brutality of boxing and the end of a champion. “He was still standing in the ropes, trapped as he had been before, he gave some little half-smile of regret, as if he were saying, ‘I didn’t know I was going to die just yet.’” Mailer places Paret in this state of weakness, and this state of weakness sends the audience (both in the story and in real life) into a state of disbelief, as if to show that we were also experiencing the same thing as Paret, and that we “weren’t sure he was going to die just yet.” Mailer uses the death of the hero to portray the sport in a tragic way. Then in his final moments, as if comparing him to the famous sinking of the Titanic, “he went down more slowly than any fighter had ever gone down, he went down like a large ship which turns on end and slides second by second into its grave.” Similar to the Titanic, both were viewed as almost impregnable beings. However, as both tales show, everything must fall and both did so slowly, in an agonizing