Lecture[2]: Pete Hamill on Boxing
Pete Hamill speaks at NYU. Photo by Nitasha Tiku.
Pete Hamill's love affair with boxing began in 1957, when the Brooklyn Dodgers left for California—for good. "It was a traumatic thing if you came from Brooklyn," said Hamill. "The flag came down, they pounded Ebbets Field to rubble, and so we shifted our affections to something else."
On September 22, 2005, Hamill, a legendary New Yorker and celebrated journalist, spoke at New York University's Department of Journalism. He talked to students and faculty about what attracted him and other American writers of his generation to the sport of boxing.
The focus of his lecture was the 1962 prizefight in Chicago between reigning champ Floyd Patterson and Sonny Liston. The fight, which was over in two minutes and six seconds, was the subject of articles by Hamill and other literary heavyweights, such as James Baldwin, Norman Mailer, and Gay Talese.
According to Hamill, it was the promoter Harold Conrad who "dreamt up the notion of getting people like Jimmy Baldwin to come to the [Liston-Patterson] fight." The fight headquarters at the Sheraton-Chicago hotel "became one of these places where every hour seemed to have possibilities," said Hamill. "If you were a young reporter and you wanted to learn something about the trade, you could talk to these guys."
Hamill found the scene surrounding the Liston-Patterson fight as instructive as the world of Manhattan boxing gyms in the '50s and '60s. Back then, he said, a writer learned about the sport by going to such gyms and asking questions. As a young reporter, Hamill frequented gyms such as Stillman's and the Gramercy, soaking up the tactics, history, and culture of boxing, and rubbing elbows with fighters, trainers, and fellow newshounds—and mobsters, who ran the numbers racket and controlled boxing contracts with a heavy hand, into the '60s.
Hamill spoke to his audience in the cadences of a Brooklyn accent that betrays a boyhood spent in the borough's Park Slope neighborhood. But he easily slipped into his best Jimmy Cagney impersonation when recalling the "old hoodlum" Lou Stillman, owner of Stillman's gym. "The phone would ring and he [Stillman] would say,'Kelly? Kelly? Do you want the Jewish Kelly or the Italian Kelly?,'" he said, switching to a nasal whine.
Hamill distinguished the trainers and cornermen, whose job is to come to a fighter's aid between rounds, from the owners and promoters he met at the gyms. The former, he said, were "craftsmen" who had learned the intricacies of the sport and were eager to pass their knowledge on to the next generation. "At the Gramercy," Hamill said, "you had to walk up two long flights of stairs to get to the gym, and at any step, you could turn around and leave." If a young boxer made it up those two flights, it was understood that he wanted a chance to see what he could do in the ring. And the trainers and cornermen, who loved and understood the sport, were often willing to give a young kid that first shot. "It was part of that sense that must have existed in the workshops of Florence in the 15th century," said Hamill. "If this kid Da Vinci comes in, let him paint eyelashes so we can see what he's got."
"Whether it's boxing or the stock market," he said, "if you ask the questions of somebody who knows, they're always delighted to answer."
Hamill advised the journalism students in his audience to make the most of peoples' desire to share the wisdom they've learned. "Whether it's boxing or the stock market," he said, "if you ask the questions of somebody who knows, they're always delighted to answer." Moreover, he cautioned, a reporter should never feign knowledge about a subject she doesn't understand. If you ask the right person a question, no matter how elementary, he said, that person "will give you an answer that will illuminate the question. But you've got to ask."
One of the essential lessons Hamill learned about reporting from other boxing writers was the importance of close observation. "You had to look," he said. "It seems obvious, but the one thing you're trying to do is to help your reader see [an event] that he or she was not at." Hamill advised young reporters to observe an event as if it were a movie, and to write about it using "the vocabulary of cinema: wide-shot, two-shot, close-up." Readers have learned the visual grammar of film from watching television and movies, he reasoned, and if you structure your story so that it starts with a broad perspective and then focuses in on specific details, it will be easier for them to picture the scene you are trying to portray.
In fact, said Hamill, it is boxing's inherently filmic qualities that attracted so many young writers from his generation to the sport. "The ringside, the corner, the blood: it becomes very cinematic in that sense," he said. The challenge in reporting is to find out where the drama in your story is, said Hamill, and "the drama in boxing is obvious." When the bell rings, the two fighters are left alone, squaring off in a pool of light. "Because of the movement and speed" of the sport, he said, "you had the chance to make something extraordinary."