Today’s post, “The Fighter,” marks the twelfth iteration of Lord of Indiscipline. From now until the first day of February, it will be the last. I like to think that Lord of Indiscipline has a good thing going for it, and seeing as too much of a good thing is not a good thing, it seems appropriate for us all to step back momentarily and let out that sigh of satisfaction (or relief, as you like it).
To all of you who have been reading Lord of Indiscipline since the pitter-patter of “Baby Steps” sounded in your inbox in the first week of October, I say thank you. To all of you who started reading somewhere between that post and this present one, I also say thank you. To all of you who are finding Lord of Indiscipline for the first time with this very post, I say welcome.
I hope you have enjoyed (or are enjoying) the writing here, finding it interesting or humorous or provocative, depending on the subject and presentation (of which, after taking stock of the archives, I think “eclectic” is an apt descriptor), but always enjoyable. You can find all the posts at said archive or at the links in the list below. If you know of someone who might enjoy any of these posts in particular or Lord of Indiscipline in general, please do share it with them.
“Baby Steps” | on something new
“Prometheus Shrugged” | on triumph and tragedy
“They Can’t Take That Away from Us” | on the magic of sport
“My Aim Is True” | on the world we live in
“Bring Out Your Dread” | on fear and this time of year
“No Pain, No Gain” | on the burden of belief
“The Stars” | on an adventure (short story)
“A Veritable Smorgasbord” | on thanksgiving
“The Tree” | on another adventure (short story)
“A Mind of Winter” | on being born again
“Take Sight” | on light and life
I hope each and every one of you will be happy to see Lord of Indiscipline after this brief hibernation. In the meantime, have a very merry Christmas. Adeste fideles!
The Fighter
A man had only so many fights in him, to begin with. It was the iron law of the game. (Jack London, “A Piece of Steak”)
Men fight not because they hate, but principally because they love. (Fulton J. Sheen)
Reading while eating was a staple experience of growing up in my family. I don’t know that any one of us has ever brought a book to the dinner table, but we pretty much always brought a book to breakfast and to lunch. If you were clever about it, you could pair your sandwich with schoolwork and be free of studies that much sooner in the day. But the typical move was for literary fare that was familiar and filling—the print equivalent of comfort food. P. G. Wodehouse springs immediately to mind, as he featured at basically every stage of development; other, more seasonal, figures include Arthur Conan Doyle and Howard Pyle; Clair Bee and John R. Tunis; G. K. Chesterton (invariably the Father Brown omnibus) and Agatha Christie (or Dorothy L. Sayers, in the case of my sisters); Lemony Snicket and James Thurber and Bill Watterson (again, eclectic); and two of my particular favorites: C. S. Forester and James Herriot.
I was especially devoted to the last. As a twelve-year-old, I was determined to be a veterinarian, thanks entirely to the All Creatures Great and Small books. One Christmas, I received the full series. The books were beautiful—the crisp, compact St. Martin’s Press paperback editions—but they had one defect: they were not good for lunchtime reading. You couldn’t lay them them flat or lean them against something and have a free hand for your food. You needed both hands to read the book. A remedy to this misfortune appeared in the form of audiobooks from the public library, audiobooks in cassette format. So I read the books when not eating and, while eating, listened to my tapes. I can see in my mind’s eye my brothers and I sitting at the big dining room table: they are eating lunch and reading their books; I am sitting in the corner seat, in front of the window, with my Walkman headphones on, listening to All Things Bright and Beautiful—and loving it.
My veterinarian phase was relatively short-lived, but I used the time well. (My brothers’ stuffed animals lived much longer and happier lives thanks to my suture-work and discrete use of sulfa powders (corn starch).) The year 2005 brought the release of Cinderella Man, the story of the 1935–1937 world heavyweight boxing champion James J. Braddock, and I changed my veterinarian bag for boxing gloves. Built less like Braddock and more like Rudy Ruettiger—“Five foot nothin’, a hundred and nothin’, and barely a speck of athletic ability”—I never pursued this pugilistic interest any further than asking for a punching bag for Christmas one year and persistently suggesting Cinderella Man as the candidate for family movie night.
As it happens, however, I did have precursors for this fighting tendency and interest therein. For one, my maternal grandfather was a fighter. Nicknamed “Red,” Papa was a short, stocky Irish-American with a reach as short as his heart was wide. He regaled us with stories of him taking on any and all comers: one at a time or all at once, twice, thrice, ten times his size, and always emerging the victor. “The bigger they come, the harder they fall,” he would assure us. Given his Irish descent, it was never entirely clear whether these triumphs took place in the professional setting of an actual boxing ring or were purely personal affairs. Given our share in that Irish descent, we honestly didn’t care. A fight is a fight.
The other precursor—and this brings us back to the literary luncheons—was from an old book called Best Book of Sports Stories, edited by one M. A. Donnelly and published in 1966 by Doubleday. It sat on a shelf outside our dining room and I would routinely default to it when I discovered I had left my original choice of book in my room or upstairs or somewhere farther than that shelf a few strides from the table. I only remember the first three stories: “A Diving Fool” by Franklin M. Reck; “A Busher’s Letters Home” by Ring Lardner; and “A Piece of Steak” by Jack London. It may well be that those are the only three I ever actually read. None of the other entries in the table of contents sound familiar—which is a shame, as my father assures me that I certainly missed out by not reading Paul Gallico’s “Thicker Than Water,” and his assurances are never misplaced.
Of those remembered three, it is Jack London’s that I recall hitting me the hardest. In retrospect, this strikes me as somewhat odd. I would have been reading that story between the ages of ten and fourteen, a prime age for relishing a good boxing story—which is what “A Piece of Steak” ostensibly is—but also a prime age for reveling in the happy ending: the victory of the good guy, the triumph of the underdog, the glory of the implausible made real. It was at this age that I loved Cinderella Man. But “A Piece of Steak” is not Cinderella Man. It does not tell the victory of the good guy or the triumph of the underdog. It is the story of old Tom King and his battle in the ring with the young Sandel. For a piece of steak, Tom King could have tasted victory again, could have returned home to his wife and kids in glory, bearing the spoils of the victory and remediation of poverty: thirty pounds. But for the lack of the steak the fight was lost:
He remembered back into the fight to the moment when he had Sandel swaying and tottering on the hair-line balance of defeat. Ah, that piece of steak would have done it! He had lacked just that for the decisive blow, and he had lost. It was all because of the piece of steak.
Yet “A Piece of Steak” is not just the story of Tom King. It is the story of Age versus Youth.
As Tom King thus ruminated, there came to his stolid vision the form of Youth, glorious Youth, rising exultant and invincible, supple of muscle and silken of skin, with heart and lungs that had never been tired and torn and that laughed at limitation of effort. Yes, Youth was the Nemesis. It destroyed the old uns and recked not that, in so doing, it destroyed itself. It enlarged its arteries and smashed its knuckles, and was in turn destroyed by Youth. For Youth was ever youthful. It was only Age that grew old.
Age versus youth. Time versus all of us. The story of Tom King is the story of every single one of us. “Time, like an ever-rolling stream, bears all its sons away.” The subtext of the story, it seems to me now, is this simple fact of life: we are born into a battle. That must be the subtext of the story, or at least part of it—I can’t think why else, at the lordly age of eleven, I would have had the slightest interest in a story of an old boxer losing his last fight and weeping at the wretchedness of it all. I had little enough taste for tragedy back then. If it was my story to tell, I would have had Tom King, despite sickening pangs of hunger in his belly, nerve himself for the knockout punch and then deliver it heavy and swift and final to Sandel’s jaw. That would have been then, however; now is now and I know well enough that such is not life. We are born to battle, and battles have losers as well as winners.
We are born, not to run, but to battle. “Born to bruise,” in fact. We have no choice there. The choice, as Fulton J. Sheen describes in War and Guilt (forthcoming from Cluny in the new year), lies in what we are fighting for. And “what we are fighting for depends on what we are living for.” And depending on what we are fighting and living for is how we will fight and live for it. Tom King is fighting for “his missus and two kiddies.” For him, the fight is literal: his profession is boxing. For us, in all likelihood, the divide between literal and figurative might appear more stark. Our professions may not have the appearance of a bloody exchange of blows between opponents; our lives may not have the semblance of high stakes of glorious victory or ignominious defeat. But appearances can be deceiving. Because that is what life is—a fight—and it carries all the trappings of the same, visible and invisible.
“Let me take my punches in the ring,” the Bulldog of Bergen tells his wife. “At least then I know who's hitting me.” The implication is clear: life throws its punches and they are all the more dangerous for their hiddenness and their anonymity. In our age, those features of our adversary are readily apparent: hiddenness and anonymity. Like an old boxer, we can face up to these features and basically play for the tie: cover up, protect our soft spots, live to fight another round, and demand the judges’ decision go our way. The game is clearly on unequal grounds—rigged, if you will—but I have to play anyway. And since I have to play anyway, why not play with guts? Why not punch with a proper fighting spirit? Why not play to win? Of course, to play that way, to fight that way, has a pre-requisite: something actually worth fighting for. And that means something worthy of our love.
In memoriam: John James Lewis (1932–2016)
Credits: George Bellows, A Stag at Sharkey’s (1917), via Wikimedia Commons.