Love Quote by Budd Schulberg

Boxing is the perfect machine for producing moral whiplash, and Schulberg puts that contradiction on a loop. The line is built like a clinch: love, hate, love again. It refuses resolution, because the sport itself refuses it. You can be seduced by the clean geometry of footwork and timing, then recoil at the blunt fact that the goal is to damage another body for entertainment and money. Schulberg doesn’t pick a side; he admits the addiction to both sides at once.

Coming from a writer best known for staring directly at American hunger and hustle (notably in On the Waterfront), the quote reads less like sports chatter and more like a miniature diagnosis of a national pastime: we romanticize “heart,” “discipline,” “comeback,” then quietly outsource the consequences to fighters’ brains, their families, their later years. The repetition isn’t redundancy; it’s the rhythm of spectatorship. Every great bout renews the romance. Every ugly one brings the shame back.

The subtext is complicity. Schulberg’s “I” is important: not “boxing is” but “I love” and “I hate.” He’s describing the fan’s bargain, the writer’s bargain, the culture’s bargain: we keep watching while telling ourselves we’re ambivalent, as if ambivalence were a moral alibi. The quote works because it captures boxing’s central truth: beauty and brutality aren’t opposites here; they’re co-dependent.