Boxing brings out the best in sportswriting. Think Jack London, Ernest Hemingway, Norman Mailer. Joyce Carol Oates, in her essay “On Boxing,” explored the idea that the sport is an eloquent metaphor for masculinity and male aggression.
But the idea that aggression may not be exclusively a male trait is one that we explore in this week’s cover story. Michael Hirsley, accompanied by photographer Stacey Wescott, takes us into the ring and the training gyms of a new species: the woman boxer. The woman at the center of this story, Laila Ali, comes from the royal boxing bloodline of her father, Muhammad “Float Like a Butterfly, Sting Like a Bee” Ali.
Mike Hirsley has been following boxing since 1995, when he first covered Mike Tyson’s release from prison, and has gone on to cover all the major matches for the Tribune. He’s as comfortable with Olympic athletes as he is with the local bruisers on the West Side of Chicago. “On the undercards of major fights,” Mike recalls, “I have seen women’s bouts that were more competitive than some of the men’s matchups. But women’s boxing certainly suffers from not having enough challengers, let alone rivalries, for its top-level fighters. Until that happens, we won’t know if the sport can grow from a novelty status.”
Mike has been a Tribune reporter since 1974, and before he became a sportswriter he was the newspaper’s religion writer. “Jokes I had heard about moving from religion to sports–I always say it’s ‘a higher calling’–were even more frequent when I became the boxing writer.”
This week, we benefit from the breadth of Mike’s experience and his ability to sort out the sleaze from the honorable folks as he observes the dramas of women acting out their aggression. As Joyce Carol Oates wrote, “Boxing has become America’s tragic theater.”