"The third man in the ring makes boxing possible"
About this Quote
Boxing sells itself as pure, sealed combat: two bodies, one outcome, no alibis. Oates punctures that romance with a single quiet addition: the third man in the ring, the referee, the figure whose job is supposedly to disappear. The line works because it flips our attention from violence as nature to violence as governance. Boxing isn’t just two fighters expressing will; it’s a ritual that has to be curated, bounded, and periodically interrupted to be legible as sport rather than assault.
The “third man” is logistics and legitimacy in one body. He enforces time, space, and rules, but also provides the moral fig leaf that lets spectators watch without feeling like accomplices. If someone can step in, count, separate, wave it off, then we can pretend the event is controlled, humane, even uplifting. Oates, a novelist with a sharp taste for American myth, is pointing at the scaffolding beneath our appetite: we need an authority to certify that what we’re enjoying is acceptable.
There’s darker subtext too. The referee doesn’t just prevent harm; he calibrates it. He decides when damage has crossed from thrilling to intolerable, often in milliseconds, often under the roar of a crowd that wants one more round. “Makes boxing possible” is less compliment than indictment: the sport depends on a mediating conscience, outsourced to a single person, so everyone else can keep cheering.
In Oates’s larger project on boxing, the ring becomes a miniature society: violence permitted, then moralized, by the presence of a rule-keeper. Without that third man, the spectacle collapses into what it always threatened to be.
The “third man” is logistics and legitimacy in one body. He enforces time, space, and rules, but also provides the moral fig leaf that lets spectators watch without feeling like accomplices. If someone can step in, count, separate, wave it off, then we can pretend the event is controlled, humane, even uplifting. Oates, a novelist with a sharp taste for American myth, is pointing at the scaffolding beneath our appetite: we need an authority to certify that what we’re enjoying is acceptable.
There’s darker subtext too. The referee doesn’t just prevent harm; he calibrates it. He decides when damage has crossed from thrilling to intolerable, often in milliseconds, often under the roar of a crowd that wants one more round. “Makes boxing possible” is less compliment than indictment: the sport depends on a mediating conscience, outsourced to a single person, so everyone else can keep cheering.
In Oates’s larger project on boxing, the ring becomes a miniature society: violence permitted, then moralized, by the presence of a rule-keeper. Without that third man, the spectacle collapses into what it always threatened to be.
Quote Details
| Topic | Teamwork |
|---|
More Quotes by Joyce
Add to List
