By Richard Ford

September 9, 1996

The New Yorker Magazine

View this story as it originally appeared »

(Ed: There has been more than one article covering this subject over time, and while this is representative, it’s not the one I’m looking for. But it gets the point across. – CD)

A metaphysics of fisticuffs.

What a punch in the face really means.

I‘ve hit a lot of people in the face in my life. Too many, I’m certain. Where I grew up, in Mississippi and Arkansas, in the fifties, to be willing to hit another person in the face with your fist meant something. It meant you were—well, brave. It meant you were experienced, too. It also meant you were brash, winningly impulsive, considerate of but not intimidated by consequence, admittedly but not too admittedly theatrical, and probably dangerous. As a frank, willed act, hitting in the face was a move toward adulthood, the place we were all headed—a step in the right direction.

I have likewise been hit in the face by others, also quite a few times. Usually just before or just after the former experience. Being hit in the face goes with doing the hitting yourself, and, while much less to be wished for, it was also important. It sig-nalled some of those same approved character values (along with rugged resilience), and one had to be willing to endure it.

I can’t with accuracy say where this hitting impulse came from, although it wasn’t, I’m sure, mere peer pressure. My grandfather was a boxer, and to be “quick with your fists” was always a good trait in his view. He referred to hitting someone as “billing.” “I biffed him,” he would say, then nod and sometimes even smile, which meant it was good, or at least admirably mischievous. Once, in Memphis, in 1956, at a college football game in Crump Stadium, he “biffed” a man right in front of mc some drunk he got tired of and who, as we were heading up the steep concrete steps toward an exit, had kicked his heel not once but twice. The biff he delivered that day was a short, heavy boxer’s punch from the shoulder. Technically a hook. There was only one blow, but the other guy, a man in a felt hat (it was autumn), took it on the chin and went over backward, and right down the concrete steps into the midst of some other people. He was biffed. We just kept going.

There were other times my grandfather did that, too: once, right in the lobby of the hotel he ran—putting a man down on the carpet with two rather clubbing blows that seemed to me to originate in his legs. I don’t remember what the man had done. Another time was at a hunting camp. A man we were riding with in a pickup truck somehow allowed a deer rifle to discharge inside the cab with us and blow a hole through the door—a very, very loud noise. The man was our host and was, naturally enough, drunk. But it scared us all nearly to death, and my grandfather, whose boxing name was Kid Richard, managed to biff this man by reaching over me and connecting right across the truck seat. It was ten o’clock at night. We were parked in a soybean field, hoping to see some deer. I never thought about it much afterward except to think that what he—my grandfather—did was unarguably the best response.

Later, when I was sixteen, and my father had suddenly died, my grandfather escorted me to the Y.M.C.A.—this was in Little Rock—and there, along with the boys training for the Golden Gloves, he worked out the solid mechanics of hitting for me: the need for bodily compactness, the proper tight fist, the confident step forward, the focus of the eyes, the virtue of the three-punch combination. And he taught me to “cut” a punch—the snapping, inward quarter-rotation of the fist, enacted at the precise moment of impact, and believed by him to magnify an otherwise hard jolt into a form of detonation. Following this, I tried out all I’d learned on the Golden Gloves boys, although with not very positive effects to myself; They were, after all, stringy, small-eyed, stingy-mouthed boys from rural Arkansas, with more to lose than I had—which is to say, they were tougher than I was. Still, in years to come, I tried to practice all I’d learned, always made the inward cut, took the step forward, always looked where I was hitting. These, I considered, were the crucial aspects of the science. Insider’s knowledge. A part of who I was.

Of course remember the first occasion when I was hit in my own face—hit, that is, by someone who meant to hurt me, break my cheek or my nose (which happened), knock my teeth out, ruin my vision, cut me, deliver me to unconsciousness: kill me, at least figuratively. Ronnie Post was my opponent’s name. It was 1959. We were fifteen and had experienced a disagreement over some trivial school business. (We later seemed to like each other.) But he and his friend, a smirky boy named Johnny Petit, found me after class one day and set on me with a torrent of blows. Others were present, too, and I did some wild, inexpert swinging myself—nothing like what I would later learn. None of it lasted very long or did terrible damage. There was no spectacle. No one “boxed.” But I got hit a lot, and I remember the feeling of the very first punch, which I saw coming yet could not avoid. The sensation was like a sound more than a shock you’d feel—two big cymbals being clanged right behind my head, followed almost immediately by cold travelling from my neck down into my toes. It didn’t particularly hurt or knock me down. (It’s not so easy to knock a person down.) And it didn’t scare me. I may even have bragged about it later. But when I think about it now, after thirty-seven years, I can hear that cymbals’ sound and I go light-headed and cold again, as if the air all around me had suddenly gotten rarer.

Over the years since then, there have been other occasions for this sort of blunt but pointed response to the world’s contingent signals—all occasions I think now to be regrettable. I once hit my best friend at the time flush in the cheek in between downs in a football game where we were playing shirts and skins. We were never friends after that. I once hit a fraternity brother a cheap shot in the nose, because he’d humiliated me in public, plus I sim-ply didn’t like him. At a dinner after a gfriend’s funeral (of all places) I punched one of the other mourners, who, due to his excessive style of mourning, was mak-ing life and grief worse for everybody, and “needed” it, or so I felt. And many, many years ago, on a Saturday afternoon in the omiddle of May, on a public street in Jack-son, Mississippi, I bent over and kissed another boy’s bare butt for the express purpose of keeping him from hitting me. (There is very little to learn from all this, I’m afraid, other than where glory does not reside.)

ICAN hardly speak for the larger culture, 1 but it’s been true all my life that when I’ve been faced with what seemed to me to be an absolutely unfair, undeserved, and insoluble dilemma, I have thought about hitting it or its human emissary in the face. I’ve felt this about authors of unfair book reviews. I’ve felt it about other story writers whom I considered perfidious and due for some suffering. I’ve felt it about my wife on a couple of occasions. I once took a reckless swing at my own father, a punch that missed but brought on very bad consequences for me. I even felt it about my neighbor across the street, who, in the heat of an argument over nothing less than a barking dog, hit me in the face very hard, provoking me (or so I judged it) to hit him until he was down on the sidewalk and helpless. I was forty-eight years old when that happened—an adult in every way.

Today, by vow, I don’t do that kind of thing anymore, and pray no one does it to me. But hitting in the face is still an act the possibility of which I retain as an idea—one of those unerasable personal facts we carry around in deep memory and inventory almost every day, and that represent the seemingly realest, least unequivocal realities we can claim access to. These facts are entries in our bottom line, which for each of us is always composed of plenty we’re not happy about. Oddly enough, I don’t think about hitting much when I attend an actual boxing match, where plenty of hitting happens. Boxing seems to be about so much more than hitting about not getting hit, about certain attempts at grace, even about compassion or pathos or dignity. Though hitting in the face may be all boxing’s about— that and money and its devo-tees have simply fashioned suave mechanisms of language to defend against its painful redundancy. This is conceivably why A. J. Liebling wrote less about boxing than about boxers, and why he called it a science, not an art: because hitting in the face is finally not particularly interesting, inasmuch as it lacks even the smallest grain of optimism.

Part of my bottom line is that to myself I’m a man— fairly, unfairly, uninterestingly, stupidly—who could be willing to hit you in the face. And there are still moments when I think this or that—some enmity, some affront, some inequity or malfeasance—will conclude in blows. Possibly I am all unwholesome violence inside, and what I need is therapy or to start life over again on a better tack. Or possibly there’s just a meanness in the world and, as Auden wrote, “we are not any of us very nice.” But that thought—hitting—thrilling and awful at the same time, is still one crude but important calibration for what’s serious to me, and a guide, albeit extreme, to how I could confront the serious if I had to. In this way, I suppose it is a part of my inner dramaturgy, and re-latable, as interior dramas and many perversions are, to a sense of justice. And in the end it seems simply better and more generally informative that I know at least this much about myself—and learn caution from it, forbearance, empathy— rather than know nothing about it at all. ♦Published in the print edition of the September 16, 1996, issue. As part of an effort to make The New Yorker’s archive more accessible to readers, this story was digitized by an automated process and may contain transcription errors.