The Dead Boxer: A Boxing Story Unlike Any Other
I dare you to find me a boxing tale as unique as this one
Boxers have it hard. In the movies, they’re always out of money, tasking the patience of their loved ones, getting beaten up, and in need of a comeback. The many variations on this theme never fail to satisfy, but imagine my surprise when I ran across a boxing story unlike any other: 19th-century Irish writer William Carleton’s novella “The Dead Boxer.”
“The Dead Boxer” begins with a young man named Lamn Laudher on his way to a tryst with his love Ellen Neil. The year is 1720, a time when the common folk still believe in fairies and other mysterious powers. Lamn Laudher is a lusty lad known for his physical strength and bravery, and Ellen is a great beauty. Theirs would be a perfect match if only their families weren’t as feuding as Montagues and Capulets. To make matters worse, Lamn Laudher’s first encounter of the evening is with Nell M’Collum, a woman whose bad reputation extends to the supernatural. She sends him on his way with a curse, but as the plot unfolds, a lot of the action is less supernatural than soapy.
“Where’s the boxing?” I thought. Then the Dead Boxer arrives in town. According to custom, if no one responds to a traveling pugilist’s challenge, the locals must pay him 50 guineas. The Dead Boxer isn’t literally dead: He isn’t a zombie boxer, although that would be cool. Instead, he’s dead in the sense of exact. Like a good marksman, like Floyd Lawton, he’s “a dead shot.” He has a certain punch that kills every opponent he faces. Thus, the connotation is that he causes death, so no sooner has he issued his challenge than he digs a grave for his next victim in the church boneyard. That victim may turn out to be Lamh Laudher, because that’s who accepts the challenge.
The modern era of boxing begins around the dawn of the 20th Century. Back then, a boxer might or might not wear gloves and, depending on where you were, boxing might or might not be legal. According to Encyclopedia Brittanica, boxing in the 1600s was bare-knuckled and involved wrestling. Weight divisions didn’t exist, much less governing bodies like the WBO, and what a UFC fighter today would call “ground and pound” — jumping on a fallen opponent to hammer away at his or her head — was totally acceptable. These rules, or lack of them, would be the ones governing the fight between Lamn Laudher and the much larger Dead Boxer.
In my experience, boxing stories tend to fall into two broad categories: action and inspirational. In the former category, early to mid-20th century writers of pulp fiction like Robert E. Howard and Louis L’Amour played to and played up dominant tropes of masculinity through stories revolving around the thrill of the sport, gambling and organized crime. In the latter category, the fighter must also grow as a person. Mark Wahlberg must overcome the complications of having a crackhead brother . . . Jake Gyllenhaal must get his daughter back from child protective services . . . Halle Berry needs to learn to be a mother . . . The prime example is the film Rocky (1976), which established a pattern many boxing films since have followed.
The boundaries between these categories are anything but absolute. Michael Shaara’s novel The Broken Place (1968) uses the story of a Korean War veteran returned to life in the ring as an attempt to be the prosaic and epic successor to For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) by Ernest Hemingway — himself no stranger to the literary boxing tale — in its exploration of life, love and death. Szczepan Twardoch’s The King of Warsaw (2016) is a coming-of-age tale against the backdrop of the Polish underworld, looming fascism and Zionism. And Willy Vlautin’s novel Don’t Skip Out on Me (2018), about a Paiute cowhand in America who wants to be a badass Mexican boxer, inverts the inspirational tale’s customary ending in triumph. A lot of value is to be had in morphological abundance.
“The Dead Boxer” is no exception when it comes to mixing and matching. The external action is there in an altercation between Lamn Laudher and Ellen’s brother and in the bout with the traveling boxer. By the end, however, internal developments have also occurred in that Lamn Laudher is now no longer the boy he was setting out to meet his love. He has made choices, suffered the weight of their consequences, and come out the other side. For better or worse, so have many of the other characters. Yet the 18th-century rural Irish setting, the author’s 19th-century idiom, and touches of the supernatural and macabre distinguish “The Dead Boxer” as a boxing tale like none other I’ve encountered.
Since taking up the sport myself, I’ve been exploring as many boxing tales as I can through the written word and visual media, and there’s a surprisingly large number of works out there. Tonight I plan to watch Mary Kom (2014) starring Bollywood star Priyanka Chopra. In the meantime, I hope you’ll recommend your favorite boxing tales via a comment so I know what to explore next.
