The Amateur Boxer

(This is the first of a series of posts about boxing and filming it and everything in between.)

A question that I get asked more than any other question is how I ended up spending three years working on a documentary on amateur boxing. The answer is easy.

There are only two things in a documentary film. What you are filming and how you film it. I was literally walking down the street one afternoon looking, whether I knew it or not, for a particular kind of inspiration…a subject matter or a story or a person that had never really been shown on film…someone or something that was not so much larger than life as much as a gateway into the deeper, complex, messy humanness of being human where I could have free reign to do my thing. It didn’t happen when I walked by a random boxing gym and spoke to a trainer outside sweeping the sidewalk. And it didn’t happen when he invited me to see a local boxing match. It happened the first time I saw children fighting in a ring and the madness of the crowd and a mother in tears embracing her kid for beating the other boy.

In the sport of boxing, I was not interested in making a film about Mike Tyson or Muhammad Ali or Oscar De La Hoya. If someone offered me cold hard cash to make my name on a film about one of them I would have turned them down and shrugged my shoulders to anyone who asked if I was insane. Any film takes an incredible amount of time and energy to complete and rarely will any future film projects get off the ground without a similar project from the past on your record. It makes little sense to do anything but grind out the kind of thing you want to do as, like everything, you become what you do.

Not only am I not interested in chasing after famous or infamous individuals and being some parasite feeding off someone else’s fame, I have no interest in exploring minor topics like this. What I was seeking out when and before I dove head first into the center of the ring was a large canvas with lots of blood left by people who were in the middle of living life. I was not interested in the world of HBO PPV fights to explore as it is the end of the road instead of the beginning. Men fighting other men for money and fame, invigorating as it is at the moment of watching it, is a minor topic compared to the magnum opus of amateur boxing.

Amateur boxing is a kind of Genesis of sports and the most unfiltered view of the human struggle apart from a real wartime situation or the daily ritual of living in poverty or maybe some combination of the two. The phenomena of the fight is the physical violence and the story behind and beneath the fight is the mental violence that is condensed from the long diluted arc of waking life. The two violences combined is like watching some original struggle of a person fighting to become himself at the risk of getting the belief in himself destroyed. There is almost a purity to the way it holds the mirror up to nature.

I have yet to meet a fighter who is not deeply religious in some way. And there is something about the rituals of the boxing gym that is straight out of a monastery with all its ascetic practices and its devotion to pure discipline and overcoming all physical temptations. The boxer is a devout practitioner of life stripped of all delusions and comforts and made-up distractions that occupy most people in the course of a day.

What drew me to the sport of amateur boxing as a great subject for a documentary film was the naked fact of what happens inside the ring. The fight is the fight like all fights are fights. But in the course of the fight is the story of the larger fight of the fighters. Everyone has to fight at some point in his or her life whether one is from the streets of East LA or Bed Stuy or from the suburbs or the hills. And the fight is always a hell of a mess of someone trying to be somebody in a place where just about everybody seems like some kind of nobody. And this place for amateur boxing, and boxing as a whole, is a sport driven by men who are looking for a second chance and kids who are trying to be men and at the same time trying to figure out what it means to be a man.

But the manliness of sport is hardly discernable from the humanness of sports. What Cus D’amato called the “psychology of masculinity” really cannot be separated from the psychology of humanity. What happens in the course of a boxing fight is hardly discernable from what happens in the course of a life. It is the psychology of family. Family meaning the raw head trauma that we all suffer as kids and spend a life living out. Family meaning understanding that you can only play with the cards that you have been dealt. Family meaning the circumference of trust that you learn to measure after being burnt by everyone and anyone. Family meaning the few people who you can depend on with your most private of thoughts. Family meaning your mother and father and what they teach and expect of you. Family meaning belief that what someone else is telling you is true and not just told to use you. Family meaning what happens in the center and the corner of a boxing ring, between two people stripped of all material objects except their own desire to survive and triumph.

This is the magnum opus of amateur boxing and is what makes it a bigger subject for a film than the biggest televised fight in the past, in the present or in the future. Life happens not in the spectacle but in the immediate details in front of you. Not in the fame but in the hidden. Not in what you can see but in the subconscious made conscious by a fight. Not in what you say but what you do.

And after three years I am not quite sure what the film is anymore than I am sure what boxing is. What I know is that each round is 3 minutes in the same way that the film is 120 minutes in the same way a life span is some determined number of years. Each one is some attempt at controlling the forces in front of you in a mortal length of time and doing everything you can to extract a meaningful victory from what you know in front of a crowd of spectators.