Aging & Wisdom Quote by Budd Schulberg

A brutal comparison is doing all the work here: racehorses, creatures bred for spectacle, are granted retirement with “dignity and comfort,” while fighters, equally commodified, are expected to keep paying in blood long after their best nights are gone. Schulberg’s line isn’t sentimental; it’s an indictment delivered in plain language, the kind that lands harder because it refuses the soothing myth of boxing as pure meritocracy.

The phrasing “when they haven’t got it anymore” is key. “It” is deliberately vague, reducing a whole human being to a single marketable resource: reflexes, toughness, the ability to absorb damage for an audience. Once that asset fades, the system’s affection does, too. By choosing racehorses, Schulberg sharpens the shame: even within a culture comfortable treating animals as property, there’s still a recognized obligation to stop the exploitation at a certain point. Fighters don’t reliably get that moral minimum.

Schulberg knew this terrain intimately. As a mid-century writer drawn to American institutions that promise glory and deliver wreckage, he saw boxing as a showroom for national contradictions: celebration of grit paired with indifference to the grinded-down. The subtext is about labor and class as much as sport. Many fighters come from economic precarity; “retirement” isn’t a ceremony, it’s a luxury, and the business depends on that. The quote forces a hard question: if we can imagine humane limits for an animal built to run, why do we struggle to offer them to people we watch for fun?