Culture

At the Fights: American Writers on Boxing Edited by George Kimball and John Schulian

At The Fights: American Writers on Boxing edited by George Kimball, John Schulian, Colum McCann. Library of America. Hardcover, 560 pages. $35.
The cover of At The Fights: American Writers on Boxing

"The people who go to fights don't just go to see some guy win," W.C. Heinz wrote in 1951, "but they go to see some guy get licked, too." Which is, in a line, the problem with fighting. In most sports, you're judged by what you do; in true spectator sports, like mixed martial arts and boxing, you're judged by how impressively you do it.