CUT TIME

An Education at the Fights

By Carlo Rotella

Normally, I object to drawing metaphors between sports and life. That's because people who do so are usually comparing their childish delusions about sports to those about life: "The winner wants it more," "You've gotta come through in the clutch," "Hard work will take you to the top" and so on. Boxing's brutal honesty is a much truer reflection of life. The weak are used as stepping-stones for the strong. Talented, occasionally lazy fighters effortlessly pummel the less gifted who expend incredible heart and will just to stay conscious until the final bell. Skill and talent are often recieve less reward than showmanship and willingness to take a beating. Maybe it is the dark complexities and realities of the sport that attract people like Norman Mailer, Joyce Carol Oats and the author of this book, Carlo Rotella, while people like Jonny and Jaquay are drawn to football.

I don't mean to imply that Rotella draws aphoristic lessons from his discussions of boxing. Rather, he digs into the psychological and emotional elements of the sport and reveals something broader. For example, Rotella talks about a career looser who is brought in by local promoters as fodder for the home town hero. The underdog prevails, which is interesting in itself, but this is not Angels in the Outfield. The victory is sweet, but small and part of a greater pattern of failure. This story gains greater relevance towards the end of the book, when everything is cast in the shadow of aging and death. If this book has a primary theme, it is one of struggle against the inevitable. Rotella doesn't mean to uplift or depress us in that struggle, but to examine it.

The best reason to read Cut Time could be the strength of Rotella's prose. He's especially good at describing an ass kicking. My favorite examples come within two pages and, if I've made the book sound like a downer, they should correct that impression.

Butterbean's blow to the kidneys made Chamberlain look like an actor mistakenly run through for real in a stage duel.

and

Holmes went down with a finality one does not often see, not even in the movies, as sense and life went out of his body all at once. It looked like he had been shot with a tranquilizer dart just as he stepped on a landmine.

Rotella's descriptions of the people and events of boxing, as well as his own life, are always engrossing and often amusing. This is certainly a writer deserving of a much wider audience.