Writing for those who love to read

By Bart Barry-

SAN ANTONIO – Friday afternoon, 10 miles southeast
of here, restrictions got eased by local government and free COVID-19 testing
became much more accessible at Freeman Coliseum – which shares a lot with its larger,
more celebrated successor, AT&T Center, home of the Spurs.

If you’re thinking, Freeman Coliseum, why, where
have I read about that recently, here’s to hoping the answer is “Sporting Blood”
(Hamilcar Publications, $27.95), Carlos Acevedo’s new book of “Tales from the
Dark Side of Boxing” – in which Freeman Coliseum gets recalled more times than
I can recall seeing it in any book I’ve read.

That last clause works well about a lot of items
in Acevedo’s book, which is a clumsy way of imparting how damn original it
is.  Not gimmicky original, not look-at-me-I’m-writing
original; proper original.

I’m going to let things go where they might from
here, adopting a first-person style nearer what Thomas Hauser employs in
“Sporting Blood’s” foreword, eschewing what straight, third-person boundaries
Carlos sets for his art.  Hauser and I
came on Acevedo’s magnificent prose right about the same time in 2011.  I’m sure I found TheCruelestSport.com via a
Steve Kim tweet and knew within a paragraph how large Carlos’ talent was by the
only indicator I trust: Envy.

Once you’ve decided you’re a writer you’ve
unwittingly entered a competition with everyone you read henceforth, and
reading, the deep pleasures of which first made you think about writing,
changes and changes.  You imitate your favorite
writers, reading them more to write them better – like Ellison transcribing
Hemingway – and they become your influences, and then you read their influences,
and if all goes well you luck into Harold Bloom’s misprision.  Along the way you start reading the seams of
others’ writing, both in the way a couturier examines a dress and the way a
major leaguer knows to lay-off a breaking ball. 
You see the dozens of decisions every author makes on every page, and
how he executes them, and frankly it makes reading average writers a lot less
fun. 

But reading takes care of its own, and if you
enjoy it enough to do it enough, reading leads you to the best writers, and their
stitches are so tight, and they hide the ball so well in their windups, you
transcend your pettiness and enjoy them much more than you could if you weren’t
a writer.  I thought about this a goodish
bit by the midpoint of “Sporting Blood” – about just how much I was enjoying
the experience of being immersed in Carlos’ world, however unpleasant he tries
to make it.  (There is no flimflamming in
the book’s subtitle.  More about that in
a bit.)

Carlos writes in a masculine prose that is not
macho.  It knows what it is, has no
compulsion to explain itself, feels effortless, knows where it’s going, and doesn’t
compromise its style for others’ whims. 
Carlos himself is nearly unknowable in his writing and uncompromising.

Most of the authors to which Carlos Acevedo now will
be compared had either great editing or incredible access and usually
both.  They worked at newspapers or magazines
with full editorial staffs, sat a row or two from the canvas at every fight,
and got to follow their subjects from training camps into dressing rooms and
back to hotels.  Carlos has matched or
bettered them with a library card.  That
takes ambition, discipline and magic.

“In the years since his humiliating surrender to
Sugar Ray Leonard in the infamous ‘No Mas’ debacle, Roberto Durán, formerly the
most revered fighter in the world, had become little more than a pot-bellied
barfly whose roadwork consisted of chasing women.”

That’s from “Yesterday Will Make You Cry” – a
chapter about Davey Moore, not Roberto Duran, and it’s a good look at the craft
one finds throughout the book. 
“Pot-bellied barfly” is both rhythmic and evocative, and wonderful for
being unnecessary.  It’s writing for
those who love to read.  Here’s some
more:

“Although [Mike] Quarry never won a world title,
he was surely the undisputed parking lot champion of the San Joaquin
Valley.  More than one poor schlub found
himself, bridgework loosened, nose newly askew, laid out on some patch of
concrete in Bakersfield, courtesy of a left hook that had failed to stop some
of the best light heavyweights in the world but was more than enough for
paunchy nightcrawlers who trained exclusively on Combos, Alabama Slammers, and
Marlboros.”

That’s from “Lived Forward, Learned Backward” – a
chapter about the Quarry Curse.  The
second sentence just goes on and on, reveling in its stamina.  I was chuckling and shaking my head and
thinking what the hell is Carlos doing? even before the “punchy
nightcrawlers” showed up with their “Combos, Alabama Slammers, and Marlboros.”

This book is ever judgmental but never
unsympathetic.  It embraces the absurdity
of its subjects’ lives the way many of them lived to do.  And it’s joyful in its own immersion.  “Total Everything Now” is an exquisite
chapter, beginning with its title, about Mike Tyson’s 1988, peppered throughout
with mentions of Tyson’s notorious mother-in-law, Ruth Roper.  But not until the sixth allusion to Ruth (a
feeling of pity, distress, or grief), a gratuitous parenthetical about her
ubiquitousness on the chapter’s final page, do you realize Carlos has aptly and
humorously used her name for seasoning throughout.

He does something similarly free-indirect with
drugs in a chapter about Sonny Liston’s death, “Red Arrow”, named after “a
bebop trumpeter nicknamed ‘The Red Arrow.’” 
Suddenly a hitherto-sober book fills with amphetamines, morphine,
mushrooms, pot, LSD, horse, barbiturates, tranquilizers, reefer, coke, sniffing,
shooting, skag, joypopping, and chasing the dragon.

Which at last brings us zigging and zagging to a
theory about Acevedo’s choice of subject, “The Dark Side of Boxing”.  The best writers want to be read creatively,
and so here comes some creative reading:

In “Sporting Blood’s” final 10 pages one of
Acevedo’s numerous and rich similes includes William S. Burroughs and his cut-up
method (wherein Burroughs took linear stories, cut them to pieces, then
reassembled them in nonlinear ways).  Subsequently
I spent Saturday reading “Naked Lunch” – Burroughs’ 1959 tale of debauchery –
thinking about how Carlos tells his stories of Muhammad Ali (“A Ghost Orbiting
Forever”), Aaron Pryor (“Right on for the Darkness”), Johnny Tapia (“Under
Saturn”) and Tony Ayala Jr. (“The Lightning Within”).  If one set out to use a cut-up style to
describe actual prizefights, it mightn’t work; there are but eight punches in
the boxing cannon, after all, and championship matches generally progress in an
orderly if not predictable way.  But if
one wished to tell to-the-edge-of-panic tales of these men’s lives both before
and after prizefighting . . .

*

CARSON, Calif. – Before Chocolatito got stretched
by The Rat King, I flattened my left hand and set it at eye level then said to Sean
Nam, a talented young boxing writer from New York, “Here’s Carlos.”

Then I set my right hand at chest level and said,
“And here’s everyone else.”

*

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry