Boxing

Boxing Tournament, 1945

Boxing is the toughest and loneliest sport in the world. —Frank Bruno

Boxing is a combat sport in which two people engage in a contest of strength, speed, reflexes, endurance and will, by throwing punches at each other with gloved hands in a roped square ring. Traditionally, the goal has been to knock the opponent out from blows to the head. One can also win by technical knockout or on points.

Quotes

Sorted alphabetically by author or source

• Boxing is a lot of white men watching two black men beat each other up.
  • Muhammad Ali, attributed in Chambers Sporting Quotations‎ (1990), by Simon James, p. 27

• Champions aren't made in gyms, champions are made from something they have deep inside them — a desire, a dream, a vision. They have to have last-minute stamina, they have to be a little faster, they have to have the skill and the will. But the will must be stronger than the skill.
  • Muhammad Ali, in Talent Is Never Enough : Discover the Choices That Will Take You Beyond Your Talent (2007) by John C. Maxwell, p. 141

• Boxing is the toughest and loneliest sport in the world.
  • Frank Bruno, as cited by Emma Brockes in "Q: Did you feel suicidal before you were sectioned? A: Nah, I'm not that brave or clever. I wouldn't know how to tie a rope, know what I mean?", The Guardian (24 October 2005).

• You know, I cut easily, so I don’t think I would’ve won the title, but I would’ve been a contender.
  • Roger Donahue, American boxer, as quoted by Budd Shulberg in his interview for The Times (UK) newspaper (19th January 2009)

• To me, boxing is like a ballet, except there's no music, no choreography and the dancers hit each other.
  • Jack Handey view on boxing, he is an American humorist[1]

• Compared with football, boxing is gentle as the ancient pastoral pastime of tending sheep. A ten-second knockout, to the football man, is a joke; he'll get knocked out thus fifteen times every game. The rules of his sport give him three minutes to wake up—or the time which spells the boxer's finish multiplied eighteenfold. He is trained and exalted to a point of Spartan fortitude which is at once the wonder and disgust of the pugilist. He will continue to play with a sprained ankle, with a twisted knee, with a shoulder out of joint. He never leaves the arena of his own volition; he has to be dragged out—usually held by main force flat upon a door. In his world exist no towel or sponges.
  • James Hopper, as quoted in "Sports and Athletics: The Most Beautiful Sport", Literary Digest (August 5, 1922)

• I am close to believing the Carpentier-Dempsey match the most beautiful thing I ever saw. And here we have the imitation close to the original, close to its meaning, near enough to be a symbol. No clutter of useless details; the thing itself, clean and sharp. A boxing match, to some of the other games, is like a Greek statue to a Doré print, a Greek play to some turgid Victorian three-decker.
  • James Hopper, as quoted in "Sports and Athletics: The Most Beautiful Sport"
    • Comment: Regarding his reference to "the imitation [being] close to the original," Hopper's premise, as regards both boxing and football, is that "any game, or sport, is an imitation, and the refinement, on some original human activity," the respective prototypes being, in this instance, a duel to the death and war itself.

• Why waltz with a guy for 10 rounds if you can knock him out in one?
  • Rocky Marciano, as quoted in, "Remembering the Brockton Blockbuster", by Thomas Hauser, in The New York Sun (14 September 2005)

• Boxing is for men, and is about men, and is men. A celebration of the lost religion of masculinity all the more trenchant for its being lost.
  • Joyce Carol Oates, On Boxing (1987), p. 72

• Boxing Day. I hope it will be made clear on this foggy anniversary of it to every foreigner who is passing his first Christmas in London, and who may have read that la boxe has been put down in this country, that the shops are not closed and a holiday given to those employed therein to enable them to spend Boxing Day in fist-fighting, an old English sport and pastime not now kept up, except under the influence of an excess of liquor, Pugilism being mainly restricted to conflicts on the question of who was the architect of the Houses of Parliament.
  • "Great Days and Events", Punch, Vol. 54 (4 January 1868), p. 3

• I think you are gonna find, when it's over... I think you're gonna find yourself one smilin' motherfucker. The thing is Butch, right now, you've got ability. But painful as it may be, ability don't last. And your days are just about over. Now that's a hard motherfuckin' fact of life. But it's a fact of life your ass is gonna hafta get realistic about. See this business is filled to the brim with unrealistic motherfuckers. Motherfuckers who thought their ass would age like wine. If you mean it turns to vinegar, it does. If you mean it gets better with age, it don't. Besides Butch, how many fights you think you got left in you anyway? Two? Boxers don't have an 'old timer's day.' You came close, but you never made it, and if you were gonna make it, you woulda made it before now.
  • Quentin Tarantino, Pulp Fiction, character Marsellus Wallace.