Three of my greatest joys in life are watching sport, going to the theatre, and playing the violin. So it felt almost embarrassing to discover a classic play that combined all three, yet I had never heard of it before. To be fair, Clifford Odets’s Golden Boy has not been performed in the UK in more than 40 years, and its curious premise may be one of the reasons.
Written in 1937, the play centers on a gifted young violinist in Depression-era America who discovers he also possesses a formidable talent for boxing. Lured away from the concert hall by the intoxicating pursuit of fame, fortune, and validation inside the ring, the protagonist faces a profound existential dilemma. In the current London production, this complex character is brought to life by Josh O’Connor, whom Knives Out fans will recognize with his fists up as a boxer-turned-priest in Wake Up Dead Man. O’Connor is no less convincing on stage than on film, attacking a heavy bag with the kind of raw power that genuinely makes a spectator worry for his precious hands. Nor is that athletic definition entirely the work of a theatrical makeup artist.
A drama built around a fatal choice between a struggling, impoverished future as a musician and a lucrative life as a stone-cold fighter may seem unlikely, perhaps bordering on the absurd. Yet, sitting in the theatre, it did not feel that way at all. For a start, playwright Clifford Odets, recognized as one of the foundational voices of American theatre, was faithfully reflecting a historical era when New York life was desperately bleak. Opportunities were scarce, and the boxing ring presented a mirage of escape from crushing poverty. Equally, it was immediately clear that the audience was watching a powerful allegory. As our hero finds his footing inside the ropes, he progressively loses his more tender self and forfeits any chance at a quieter, more grounded contentment.
Boxing has always provided extraordinarily rich material for stories on both stage and screen. Indeed, there are more Hollywood movies dedicated to boxing than to any other single sport. Writers, directors, and performers are endlessly drawn to the discipline, despite the common cultural belief—highlighted in Odets’s play—that an artistic nature stands in direct opposition to physical violence.
Perhaps part of the enduring appeal lies in the way a fighter inside the ring closely resembles the protagonist of a classic Greek tragedy: a human figure stripped down to their rawest state, facing an unrelenting destiny and learning the hard limits of their own autonomy. Alternatively, the attraction may stem from the inherent performance potential of the choreographed ballet across the canvas, where bodies duck, dodge, dance, and explosively collide under the bright lights.
Whatever the underlying reason, it appears that a creator can load a boxing narrative with virtually any amount and variety of subtext, psychodrama, or heavyweight themes. Thus, it is entirely possible to have an Odets play set in the grim, exploitative fight world of the 1930s that functions as an excoriating critique of capitalism and the dark dangers of the American Dream, while simultaneously producing Ron Howard’s Cinderella Man. The 2005 film, in which Russell Crowe portrays the real-life heavyweight champion James J. Braddock during his legendary title fight against Max Baer, manages to transform the exact same gritty environment into a feel-good fairytale of muscular Christianity.
What is it about the fight game’s complex, and often deeply ambivalent, ethics that continuously beckons dramatists? Alfred Hitchcock, a master not just of cinematic suspense but of profound moral ambiguity, was famously captivated by boxing. His only self-penned film, The Ring, was released nearly a century ago. It is a silent, black-and-white feature from an era when women wore cloche hats and circular eyeliner, and actors’ limbs leaped jankily between frames. Yet the silent picture remains notable for its remarkably realistic fight scenes—its lead actor, Carl Brisson, had been both a Danish and a European boxing champion—and for Hitchcock’s pioneering use of point-of-view camerawork to vividly illustrate a fighter sliding into a disorienting concussion.
Hitchcock’s protagonist was a wannabe adulterer navigating personal temptation. In the 1940s, a slew of gritty film noirs discovered that the boxing world served as an ideal backdrop for dark tales of vice and viciousness, yielding classics such as Body and Soul, Champion, and The Set-Up. Stanley Kubrick’s second feature-length film, Killer’s Kiss, firmly belongs to the same gritty genre, complete with an original poster tagline that pulled no punches: “Her Soft Mouth Was The Road to Sin-Smeared Violence!”
Then there is the formidable cinematic legacy of Martin Scorsese. His masterpiece Raging Bull, generally considered the absolute acme of boxing movies, remains a brutal and uncompromising watch. It portrays its real-life subject, middleweight champion Jake LaMotta, as an abusive and pathological antihero. Interestingly, Scorsese was initially reluctant to make the film; it was his close friend and frequent collaborator Robert De Niro who became fascinated by LaMotta’s self-destructive life story and the extreme physical transformation required to bring it to the screen.
In that reluctance and subsequent dedication lies a massive part of boxing’s incredible longevity in dramatic arts: the ultimate, unforgiving challenge it presents to actors. It is nearly impossible to convincingly fake a professional boxer’s physique, especially under the microscopic scrutiny of the cinema screen. Major stars such as Daniel Day-Lewis, Jake Gyllenhaal, Will Smith, and Hilary Swank have all willingly put themselves through months of training hell and punishing daily sparring sessions simply to prove their absolute commitment to authenticity. Mark Wahlberg, a noted boxing fanatic, went so far as to have a regulation ring built directly into his home, honing his craft for five years before shooting The Fighter. One can only feel a twinge of sympathy that his co-star, Christian Bale, ultimately walked away with the Academy Award.
Michael B. Jordan, the star of the modern Creed franchise, has described the grueling process of making those films as akin to therapy because it allows him to immerse himself so completely in the character’s physical and mental state. "I like living like a fighter, training like a fighter," he reflected. "I’ve broken my hand a few times doing this movie. Hands swollen. Like, I wanna feel it. I want to go home and ache." Meanwhile, Sylvester Stallone’s massive cultural contribution to the sport’s cinematic history has even earned him a well-deserved place in boxing’s international hall of fame.
If further proof were needed of how circular the relationship has become between the sport of boxing and its fictional depiction, one need look no further than Stallone’s own trajectory. His original 1976 script for Rocky was famously inspired by the gritty, improbable heavyweight title bout between journeyman Chuck Wepner and Muhammad Ali the year before. Decades later, in 2016, Liev Schreiber portrayed Wepner in the arthouse biographical drama The Bleeder. This historical continuity underscores an extraordinary truth: even as boxing’s own mainstream sporting popularity has fluctuated and declined, its dramatic appeal to audiences at one remove has never once wavered.
