By Cliff Rold

Author: Katherine Dunn
248 Pages
$16.65 Trade Paperback
Schaffner Press (www.schaffnerpress.com)
Available through: IPG Distributors (www.ipgbook.com or 312-337-0747
Slated for Publication: May 2009

Boxing fans have become used to the sight of women throwing leather in the ring.  The sports chronicles though have still been largely kept by men.  The exceptional Joyce Carol Oates offered On Boxing in the 1980s and for years it has remained what it was at publication: a must-read for anyone interested in boxing and rare for its feminine pen.

Oates, though, has never been alone. 

For the better part of three decades, Katherine Dunn has chronicled the sport in a way Oates can’t claim, actively covering the fights and working the gyms while seeing her work appear in Sports Illustrated, Playboy, and Vogue.  Here, for the first time, the best of Dunn’s reflections and reportage are collected for the first time in One Ring Circus: Dispatches from the World of Boxing and should be guaranteed a spot on any bookshelf, boxing centered or otherwise. 

Divided into three sections, One Ring Circus covers the gamut of the sport from local fighters and stars who almost were to the biggest fights in recent decades like Marvin Hagler-Tommy Hearns and Larry Holmes-Gerry Cooney.

And, of course, she covers the girls.

Dunn gives readers a look at Women’s Boxing from cradle to center stage.  The rise Lucia Rijker and the surprising quality of the bout between the daughters of Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier cover the latter but don’t come close to one of the two best pieces in the collection. 

Titled “Just as Fierce,” originally published in Mother Jones magazine, Dunn begins with the triumph of Dallas Malloy in integrating U.S. Amateur Boxing and then goes into areas unfamiliar to fight fans and interested observers.  Firing away with libertarian feminism akin to the work of Wendy McElroy, Dunn dismisses notions about physical strength deficits and preconceived fragility in women.  For instance:

…so many of us are convinced that women are incapable of aggression on the same scale as men - that women are physically too weak, or are inherently, biologically different in aggressive capacity, or are spiritually superior to the whole concept of violence.  These beliefs are the legacy of ancient, traditional definitions of the female role, inadvertently augmented by some recent efforts to combat the oppressive social factors that still assail women.

The boys get their fair share as well and, for those who missed it when originally run in Playboy, Dunn’s “Fight or Die” is harrowing.  Covering the past and late stages of the career of Johnny Tapia, Dunn takes readers into the eyes of his wife and others for a look at the mercurial and storied former Bantamweight great. 

He’s an engaging and genuinely nice man, a loving husband and father.  But when the drug lust rises in Johnny Tapia, things go bad.  Outside the ring his life is riddled by overdoses and tangles with the law.  In recent years he has been diagnosed as bi-polar and hospitalized more than once for suicidal depressions.  Half laughing, he counts on his fingers the drugs his doctors have tried to beat back his depression…

The book does have one feeling of incompleteness.  In parts I, II, and III, Dunn provides a frame to her work by examining the end of the amateur career, and shift to the pros, for once-promising prospect Andy Minsker.  Her look closes with his second pro bout and the reader finds the fate of Minsker in the post scripts; it doesn’t feel like enough.  Over the course of the reading, Minsker’s story captures the attention and when the cover is closed at the end there is a feeling of wanting more detail about how Minsker’s tale reached its conclusion. 

It’s hard though to fault the author for not thinking many years ago about how her future anthology would be composed.

It is difficult to separate Dunn, as a woman, from the work compiled but that’s a good thing.  Throughout the book, she shows she can be ‘just as fierce’ on the page as any male while providing insights most males could not. 

One Ring Circus comes highly recommended.

Cliff Rold is a member of the Ring Magazine Ratings Advisory Panel and the Boxing Writers Association of America.  He can be reached at roldboxing@hotmail.com