Sparring with Hemingway

April 24, 1995
Schulberg, whose novel The Harder They Fall was misinterpreted as an attack on boxing, is nonetheless of two minds about the sport, as this collection of essays and reportage from 1954 to 1994 demonstrates. ``As much as I love boxing, I hate it,'' he confesses, asserting at one point that the Sweet Science is not dehumanizing and elsewhere castigating it as ``the slum of sports.'' There are two fine pieces here, the first about Hemingway, the second about Muhammad Ali. While he proclaims his near reverence for Hemingway as a writer, he gives the impression that Papa was a thoroughly obnoxious human being with an aggressively proprietary attitude toward anything or anyone that interested him. And Schulberg's view of Ali, the man who lived up to his own billing as a child of the 1960s, ``the fifth Beatle,'' is a perceptive analysis. But excellent as the essays are, the reportage that fills out the book is pedestrian.