The best place to watch and evaluate a sport like boxing is not the same as the sweet spot a boxer wants to find when he is in the ring about to attack. It’s close but not too close. It is removed but not so far away that the distance can be mistaken for indifference, disinterest, or fear.
In other words, it is a medium range type. In this range, you are close enough to strike whenever you see an opportunity but still allow yourself enough distance that you don’t blow your job, get caught by something you didn’t see coming, or end up swallowed up by the climb. From this perspective, you have the opportunity to see and think, as well as to see weaknesses and maintain clarity in the midst of chaos.
And yet, because of both the senses and the emotions of it all, there is still a temptation to approach, again close, at that time nothing comes that will be clean, large, or penetrating. This is as true for boxers as it is for writers. In fact, these days, since few are able to do anything productive or beneficial with their access, we find ourselves stuck in one excruciating and frustrating clinic; you have been told by a referee to “use your way out” to do the same job and expect different results.
That’s why you read a book like Head shot by Rita Bullwinkel – a self-confessed outsider – offers a refreshing experience for anyone tired of hearing the same old words used to describe the same old situations. For in Head shot, his first novel, Bullwinkel successfully creates a new kind of game language with a very familiar vocabulary that, like many of its participants, has been used and abused to the point of exhaustion. When you read it, you are immediately reminded of the importance of outsiders. You are reminded, moreover, of how the nature of boxing continues to provide a framework for the examination of larger, human problems, and that its language, although a tad trite, is still universal, accessible even to an outsider.
That’s not to say Bullwinkel is a stranger to the competition, mind you. The eight-time junior Olympian in water polo, though he’s never boxed, has apparently spent enough time around people trying to get him better in ramshackle gyms and arenas to know all the sounds and smells. He also contacted Ginny Fuchs, a female technician, to check some details and make sure everything was in place. Head shot it was true of Fuchs’s experience as a novice boxer. In doing so Bullwinkel was able to create a compelling account of a novice tournament involving eight teenage girls, told over two days. He organizes the book as a series of face offs, starting in the quarter-final stage, and most of the time he keeps the action in the ring, giving insight either through flashbacks, or flashforwards, or by explaining, in vivid detail, the thought processes of the two girls who, in fighting and developing, exchange more than just punches.
Undeterred by distance, and the fact that this is fiction, Bullwinkel uses his eight boxers to produce the kind of insight that enlightens even the most jaded boxing writers and fans. He writes: “Artemis Victor doesn’t know what it takes to own a house, but he knows what it takes to beat other people, which seems like owning property, beating other people by having a piece of land and doing it.” that piece of land is yours, it should not be shared with other people, because owning property is a product of your victory over other people, since, you earned more dollars than them so now this piece of land is your last.
Rita Bullwinkel reads her novel “Headshot”
As the competition continues, Head shot inevitably says goodbye to some of its characters. However, rather than being completely defeated by them, Bullwinkel wisely decides that the winner of each round will carry a piece of his defeated opponent into the next. This is not done in any practical way, I must point out, but, as Bullwinkel explained during a reading at Daunt Books (Marylebone) on June 20, “I see them eating their opponents after beating them.”
Again, it’s an interesting thought; maybe only an outsider, someone who refers to hits as “hits”, and who knows nothing too everything about boxing, he can. Of course it cannot be denied that the boxer is replaced by every man or woman trained to hurt in the ring. It often feels like the relationships they build with their opponents are forever changed, often for the better, because they “connect” inside the ring on fight night. In the past, they may have hated and insulted each other, but the constant battle – for some, the only cure they know – is the perfect place to spend it, reach a greater understanding, and not come together in the end a better fighter or person – or, ideally, both.
In many ways, to call a novel like Head shot The “boxing book” is not only selling less but, to some extent, making you lose. After all, it’s much more – and better – than that. Indeed, when Bullwinkel, during the fight, stops to reveal what his young boxers will end up doing with their lives until they are old, he understands both the passing of the hobby/obsession and that boxing will become a part of any person. life, regardless of his level of interest, dedication, and energy.
That, to me, was the best feature Head shot; a fist drawing, so consuming and dangerous, as something that comes and goes and, once it’s gone, never checks to see if it’s right. It’s here Head shot finds an association with WC Heinz’s The expert, another classic novel based on boxing that reveals its ability to hit parts of the body and soul that others cannot reach. These two, published about 66 years apart, both perfectly capture the basic truth about boxing and its participants that other so-called true stories, or false accounts, do not even recognize, so they are limited by perceived truth, ideal or truth. the egos of the real-life characters involved. But in fiction, of course, there is always distance. And in this distance lies the truth.
Classic: The Professional by WC Heinz
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