The Manly Art Quotes

“Boxers responded to a violent world by embracing violence, by accepting brutality and returning it with interest, by being as tough and savage as life itself.”
― Elliott J. Gorn, The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckle Prize Fighting in America

“Boxers, then, embodied a distinctly working-class version of the American dream, providing models of upward mobility within bounds acceptable to the street culture.”
― Elliott J. Gorn, The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckle Prize Fighting in America

“Ideally, the ring was also a true democracy, in which men succeeded or failed under conditions of perfect quality of opportunity. But as a market place of violence, boxing symbolically mocked the liberal belief that atomistic competition led to social good. After all, bloodied bodies were what the ring “produced.” Spectators identified with those boxers who best represented their ethnic group, neighborhood, or trade. Personal toughness, local honor, drunken conviviality, violent display - every bout upheld these powerfully antibourgeois values. Bare-knuckle fighting was thus a transitional phenomenon, incorporating old values and new. The prize ring’s form was “modern” - achievement-oriented, meritocratic, egalitarian - but its content “premodern” - ascriptive, nonrational, hierarchical.”
― Elliott J. Gorn, The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckle Prize Fighting in America

“Prize fighting glorifies violence, exploits the poor, exalts force over reason, glamorizes atavism. It is these very horrors, however, so reprehensible by themselves, which highlight all that is noble in the ring. Courage, the quest for excellence, the overcoming of fear, dreams of transcending one’s social and physical handicaps, boxers’ poetic harmony of mind and body, their competitive strivings past all reasonable human limits - the ring’s dark barbarism makes such qualities glow like fireflies on a Southern night.”
― Elliott J. Gorn, The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckle Prize Fighting in America