Paper boxing: the masterstroke of capital

01

There is a marked destiny.

You have to knock it down anyway.

And there, in the transgression of determinism, the literary drama of boxing emerges.

Everything else—the ring, the 12 ropes, the lights, the bell, the canvas, the audience, the opponent, the blows, the blood;

the specter of death hovering over the

ring

— It is nothing more than the backdrop for the human tragedy of a man fighting against it and his destiny.

That's where Urtain was born.

In the fight against himself.

In the fate of him not accepted.

02

First

round

: a Basque farmhouse surrounded by cows, trees and stones.

A strong, very strong child.

That at nine years old—let's see if you lift that stone—he wins his first bet.

That later he beats up a kid to defend the honor of his family.

That at the age of 18 he receives the first black herald: the death of his father.

That he becomes a stone lifter and lifts 187.5 kilos over and over again, over and over again, 12 times in 15 minutes.

That he allows himself to be convinced to be a boxer and thus escape from the factory, the field, the scaffolding;

to get up early and clock in;

of a boss

That in the

ring

he knocks down all of his opponents in half a minute.

That he proclaims himself European heavyweight champion, txapela and gloves in the air in the Madrid night.

That he is received by Franco in El Pardo like the chess player Arturito Pomar was 30 years earlier.

That he becomes the most popular person in Spain.

That he advertises brandi, anise, lingerie.

That he stars in a movie.

That originates books.

That he unleashes urtainmania in a Spain with a gray soul and green awning that never won anything.

Except for long dictatorships.

Second

round

: Felipe de Luis Manero is a journalist.

This year he turns 40. In his literary debut,

Sito Presidente,

he put together a non-fiction based on regional soccer, Galician drug trafficking, and Sito Miñanco's delusions of grandeur in his town, Cambados.

Now he has put together another non-fiction where the ink stains.

Splashes.

A book made from boxing, violence and a dizzying cocktail of hopes, triumphs, waste, fatality, sweat, warm blood and JB.

It is titled

Urtain

(Pepitas).

The subtitle is

Portrait of an Era.

And that same thing makes up this altarpiece of a country with bullfighters who took the staff to ecstasy by jumping like a frog.

Stone lifters who could have been Urtain and didn't want to.

A fearless and treacherous young journalist named José María García.

The dictator's personal doctor who at the same time presided over the boxing federation.

Obscure boxing promoters with no qualms about scamming.

And a society thirsty for a leader who would make them dream in color.

An anonymous and popular hero.

One like them.

Of flesh and blood.

That he is unfaithful to his wife.

Let him smoke and drink.

That he is willing to fix fights.

May he not fear the shadows to find the light.

That's what pugilistic literature is really about: failure.

The literary boxer is a tragic hero

That is what Felipe de Luis Manero tells with short sentences, precise language, many hours of research and grafted reflections.

Reflections like this: “The unbearable feeling of begging for alms, the resignation that always accompanies poverty, the rage of those who refuse to be poor, the euphoria of those who believe that one day they will stop being poor.”

Third

round

: what does Urtain explain about us?

“Urtain,” responds the author, “incessantly pursued a success that never came and that perhaps was impossible to come because it did not exist.

Urtain spent his entire life searching for something, but perhaps he never identified what.

And I think we are all on that path: the path of the hero who, after a few meager victories, loses, loses and loses again.

The beauty of defeat.

The cruelty of boxing.

The certainty of staying alive in every blow you receive.”

Until the final collapse.

03

I am writing to the playwright Juan Cavestany.

He brought the Morrosko of Cestona from oblivion, 20 years after his death.

He won nine Max Awards with the play

Urtain

(edited by Nórdica).

I ask you for just one hit:

What does Urtain say about Spain?

What explains his figure of late Franco society?

Then Cavestany pounces with a combination.

Ten chained blows.

—Urtain's story comes with the dramaturgy almost done, with references in universal tragedy that refer to Greece and others typical of the Spanish idiosyncrasy of its time.

We have a story of

rags to riches

, the villager who goes to the capital where he becomes rich and famous.

Dazzled by the city lights, he is unable to see his own limitations (the blissful

hýbris

), nor does he seem aware of the precariousness of his prefabricated ascent.

This does not take away from the character's qualities of great nobility and tenderness at times.

He also tries to free himself from the long shadow of his father.

Paco Martínez Soria crosses paths with

Surcos

and with

The fall will be harder

.

The result is more Ozores's

I Made Roque III

than Stallone's

Rocky

, the other seventies working-class hero.

We were a bit beret-wearing and Sovereign, but we made up for the shortcomings and delays with “passion” and “cojones.”

It was also the time of exposure.

In the theatrical production that we did about Urtain, the symbolism of having taken his life a week before the opening of the Barcelona Olympic Games was important.

Deciding whether in that year 92 Francoism was completely overcome is not a minor thing, or in other words, it is a major thing, like the Talavera ceramics.

When José Manuel Ibar threw himself from the tenth floor—alone, in debt, exhausted—he was 49 years old.

04

No one would say that this peaceful 85-year-old lady, with intelligence illuminating her enormous pupils, her calm and monotonous voice, so thin that it seems as if her veins were going to pop out of her hands and translucent neck at any moment, is a boxing addict. since childhood.

And at the same time she is Joyce Carol Oates.

The great living lady of American letters.

Eternal candidate for the Nobel Prize.

She is the author of almost 60 novels in 60 years.

She is the author of

The Gravedigger's Daughter, A Book of American Martyrs,

and

Blonde

.

She is also the author of an intense and brief essay:

On boxing.

Reading it requires a highlighter.

When he says that boxing is more about being hit than hitting, more about feeling pain than winning.

When he says boxing is for men, and it's about men, and it's about men: a celebration of the lost religion of masculinity.

When he says that boxing is leaving the consciousness of sanity to penetrate another that is difficult to name.

When he denies that boxing is a sport: there is nothing playful about harassing each other.

The highlighter doesn't rest.

But there are two ideas that catch you.

One: Oates writes, against the hackneyed cliché, that boxing is not a metaphor for life.

“Yes, I can accept the proposition that life is a metaphor for boxing—in one of those fights that go on and on, round after round, jabs or quick punches, missed punches, hooks, no certainty, again the bell and new you and your adversary, in a fight so even that it is impossible not to see that your adversary is you: and why this fight on a platform elevated and closed by ropes like a corral, under hot, raw and merciless lights in the presence of a impatient crowd?—that kind of infernal literary metaphor.

Life is like boxing in many uncomfortable ways.

But boxing only looks like boxing.”

Photography from the boxing series 'Neutral Corner'.

Madrid, 1962. Ramón Masats (VEGAP Madrid. 2024)

Two: Oates writes one of the reasons why boxing has attracted so many writers such as Jack London (The Fight of the Century), Ernest Hemingway (

Fifty Grands

) or Dario Fo (

The Forbidden Champion

).

“The systematic cultivation of the pain of that sport for the sake of a project, a vital goal: the voluntary transposition of the sensation that we know as pain (physical, psychological, emotional) to its opposite pole.

(…) Not only accepting, but also promoting what most healthy beings avoid – pain, humiliation, loss, chaos – is experiencing the present moment as something, in a certain sense, already past.

Here and now are but part of the construction of there and then: pain now, but control, and consequently triumph, later.”

05

The

EL PAÍS

Style Book includes a section titled 'Information singularities'.

It has four points.

One talks about suicides.

Another speaks of bomb threats.

A third speaks of rape.

The fourth – which is actually the first – talks about boxing.

And it specifies that this newspaper "does not publish information about boxing competitions, except those that report accidents suffered by boxers or reflect the sordid world of this activity."

Suicide, bombs, rape and boxing.

06

The Academy has also turned its back on literary boxing.

Until last year.

The philologist Alba Pérez-Alonso has defended, at the University of Valladolid, the first doctoral thesis on the subject.

It is titled

Boxing and Literature.

Corpus and critical study of the narratives of the boxer as a failed hero in Spanish literature.

Carol Oates writes that life is like boxing in many ways, but boxing only looks like boxing.

It is a 500-page journey through the works of Ignacio Aldecoa and his Young Sánchez;

of Juan Marsé and his maqui boxer Jan Juliver;

of Julio Cortázar and his boxer Torito in the days before his death;

of the stories with boxers by Onetti, Galeano, Fontanarrosa, Piglia, Villoro, Sepúlveda, Halfon, many others.

From Kid Pambelé by Alberto Salcedo Ramos and Kid Bururú by Mirta Yáñez and the delicious Kid Tunero, the knight of the

ring

by Xavier Montanyà, a literary gem.

From the literary evocations of the filmmaker José Luis Garci to the

Boxer's Prayer

written by his colleague Fernando León de Aranoa.

From the surreal memoirs of the heavyweight Pedro Roca written in 1932 —

From a boxer to a writer

— to the illustrated history of this unique boxer and of that working-class Barcelona that boxed in the twenties and thirties that Julià Guillamon resurrected in

No one will ever see me in a

ring

.

Without time to make room for Dum Dum Pacheco and the portrait that Servando Rocha has made of him and of the brutalist Spain of mud and wasteland, in

All the hatred that was inside.

Alba Pérez-Alonso's research reviews more than a hundred novels and almost a hundred boxing stories written in Spanish.

And she comes to an interesting conclusion: It wasn't boxing, it was capitalism.

The boxer has been represented in Spanish literature in the form of the hero, with the narrative structure of the myth and blending into the scale of values ​​of capitalist discourse.

And the result is a cataract of failures.

That's what pugilistic literature is really about: failure.

The literary boxer, framed by an economic and cultural system that condemns nonconformity and encourages the pursuit of success, ends up becoming a tragic hero.

He trusts that he can fight against his unassailable destiny.

That he can defeat destiny.

But the opponent who knocks him down does not dance on the canvas.

He is defeated by the very economic and social system that incites him to rebellion: the 12 strings of his

ring

.

The boxing narrative is thus aligned with Ulrich Beck's risk society.

It also links with Erich Fromm's idea that capitalism needs men who feel free and independent, even if they are not at all.

And, finally, it connects with the theory about the failure of historian Scott Sandage, author of

Born Losers.

A History of Failure in America

(Born Losers. A History of Failure in America, not translated).

That is to say: it is capitalism, as a system, that creates losers from birth.

Losers who will be losers throughout their lives.

No matter how much they fight.

No matter how hard they try.

No matter how much blood and sweat they drip in the corner of the

ring

.

And yet, there is a discursive framework that pushes individuals to try to avoid this failure.

It is there, concludes Alba Pérez-Alonso, where the boxer of literature settles.

His condemnation.

Sisyphus with Everlast pants.

07

The bullfighting chronicle is a journalistic genre.

Reading Joaquín Vidal even though he hated bullfights was a type of newspaper reader.

The same thing happened in

The New Yorker

with AJ Liebling's boxing chronicles.

When he was 13 years old, Uncle Mike, single and recently moved to the East Coast from California, transmitted his boxing passion to his nephew by telling him stories about the great legends and a thousand experiences of the

ring

.

The importance of the story, as in cycling, as in chess.

The boxer rebels against the fate of defeat, fights against failure like a Sisyphus in Everlast pants

Liebling later became a journalist.

And he began to tell the exquisite readers of

The New Yorker

—as Uncle Mike had done with him—about that golden era of American boxing that was the 1950s.

With Joe Louis knocking down targets.

With Rocky Marciano, the only retired heavyweight undefeated, without ever biting the canvas.

With Sugar Ray Robinson, who dreamed that he killed his rival on the canvas and the next day he killed young Jimmy Doyle with a left hook.

The sweet science

(Capitán Swing, 2018), is the title of the volume that compiles those chronicles of great expressive richness and human perspective.

That was his contribution to a genre—letters and boxing, culture and boxing—that has blossomed into great talents.

The complete route is traced by

Boxing.

A Cultural History

, an essay by Kasia Boddy, professor of American Literature at Cambridge.

Suffice it to say that the book has about 2,000 footnotes and that it covers the presence of any trace of boxing in culture: from the

Iliad

to the violent futurism of Marinetti or that posthumous dream of Dadaism that was Arthur Cravan, half boxer and half poet.

From the Berlin evenings between boxers and intellectuals such as Heinrich Mann, Döblin, Grosz and Rudolf Grossman to the Parisian fights that attracted Picasso, Man Ray, Miró, Cocteau, Bonnard and Colette.

From a teenager Philip Roth reciting the names and weights of all the

ring

champions to Bob Dylan's

Hurricane

or Clint Eastwood's

Million Dollar Baby

and all the political boundaries that boxing has experienced: race, ethnicity, sex, mafia.

From the pioneering role of Arthur Conan Doyle in 1896 with his novel

Rodney Stone

- and his ode to boxing as a sport for loners, intellectuals and gentlemen - to the esthete Norman Mailer, who created

a classic piece of sports literature in

The Fight .

A milestone of new journalism at the level of Ali.

Imperishable.

Like David Remnick's

King of the World

: the trail of

The New Yorker

still attached to paper boxing.

08

Wild bull.

Scorsese gets into the

ring

.

Hate, violence, guilt, cheating, jealousy, machismo, revenge, addiction, broken bodies, broken dreams;

the gloomy reverse of the society of the spectacle.

But the film begins with poetry.

An evocative, beautiful long sequence shot.

Unreal.

Robert De Niro, on one side of the

ring

, jumps and punches the air amidst enveloping smoke.

Camera flashes flicker in the background.

He moves in slow motion, very slow.

Everything happens in black and white.

The intermezzo

of Cavalleria rusticana

plays

.

His violins prelude verismo: the sordidness that entangles the lower classes.

In rural Sicily of lemon trees and in Madison Square Garden in New York City.

Social determinism.

The fruitless fight against destiny.

Jake LaMotta.

Urtain.

'Urtain.

Portrait of an era'.

Felipe Luis Manero.

Pepitas, 2024. 232 pages, 21.50 euros.

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