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, it tells the story of a gifted young violinist in Depression-era America who also happens to possess a formidable talent for boxing, only to be lured away from classical music by the powerful pursuit of fame and money inside the ring.
In the current London production, the protagonist is played by Josh O’Connor, whom Knives Out fans have seen with his fists up as a boxer turned priest in Wake Up Dead Man. O’Connor is no less convincing on stage than he is on film, attacking a heavy bag with the kind of raw power that genuinely makes you worry for the safety of his precious hands. Nor is that impressive physical definition entirely the work of a makeup artist or cinematic trickery.
A drama about a seemingly fatal choice between a future as a struggling, impoverished musician and a stone-cold killer in the athletic arena may seem unlikely, perhaps even to the point of absurdity. Yet, it did not feel that way in the room. For a start, playwright Clifford Odets, one of the foundational voices of American theatre, was reflecting a historical moment when New York life was bleak, opportunities were desperately few, and boxing presented a shimmering mirage of escape from deep-rooted poverty.
Equally, it became clear as the performance unfolded that we were watching a kind of profound allegory. As our hero finds his footing inside the canvas ropes, he is steadily losing his more tender self and forfeiting the chance of a quieter, more grounded contentment.
Boxing has always provided remarkably rich material for dramatic stories on both stage and screen. Indeed, there are statistically 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 thematic belief—as held in Odets’s play—that an artistic, sensitive nature is fundamentally in opposition to physical violence.
Perhaps part of the enduring appeal is the way a fighter in the ring so closely resembles the protagonist in a classic Greek tragedy: a human figure stripped down to their rawest possible state, forced to face destiny squarely and learn the absolute limits of their own autonomy. Alternatively, perhaps it is simply the incredible performance potential of the choreographed ballet across the canvas, as human bodies duck, dodge, dance, and explosively collide under the bright lights.
Whatever the underlying reason, it appears that you can load a boxing narrative with almost 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 simultaneously as an excoriating critique of capitalism and the dark, corrosive dangers of the American Dream, and yet also have Ron Howard’s Cinderella Man. The 2005 film, in which Russell Crowe portrays the real-life heavyweight James J Braddock during his iconic title fight against Max Baer, manages to turn that exact same punishing environment into a feel-good fairytale of muscular Christianity.
Is it the fight game’s complex, and often deeply ambivalent, ethics that have kept dramatists and filmmakers coming back decade after decade? Alfred Hitchcock, that undisputed master not just of suspense but of profound moral ambiguity, absolutely loved boxing. His only self-penned film, The Ring, was released 99 years ago this month. It is a silent, black-and-white feature of the era where women wore cloche hats and circular eyeliner, and people’s limbs leap jankily about between frames due to the early camera technology.
Yet it remains notable both for its remarkably realistic fight scenes—the lead actor, Carl Brisson, had actually been a Danish and European champion—and for the director’s pioneering use of point-of-view camerawork to vividly illustrate a fighter sliding helplessly into a dazed concussion.
Hitchcock’s protagonist was a wannabe adulterer, but by the 1940s, a slew of gritty film noirs found the boxing world to be an ideal backdrop for dark tales of vice and viciousness, producing 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 bleak genre, and the tagline on the original promotional poster certainly did not pull any punches either: “Her Soft Mouth Was The Road to Sin-Smeared Violence!”
Then, of course, there is Martin Scorsese. His masterpiece Raging Bull, generally considered by film critics to be the absolute acme of boxing movies, remains a brutal, unflinching watch, portraying its real-life subject, Jake LaMotta, as an abusive and pathological antihero. Interestingly, Scorsese had initially not wanted to make the film at all; it was his close friend and frequent collaborator Robert De Niro who was utterly fascinated by LaMotta’s self-destructive personal story and the extreme physical transformation he would have to undertake to portray him accurately.
Within that artistic ambition lies a huge part of boxing’s enduring longevity in dramatic media: the ultimate physical and psychological challenge it presents for actors. It is almost impossible to convincingly fake a professional boxer’s hard-earned physique, especially on the unforgiving expanse of the cinema screen. Major stars like Daniel Day-Lewis, Jake Gyllenhaal, Will Smith, and Hilary Swank have happily put themselves through months of training hell and daily sparring sessions simply to prove their deep commitment to authenticity.
Mark Wahlberg, famously a dedicated boxing enthusiast, even had a regulation ring built inside his own home and honed his pugilistic craft for five full years before shooting The Fighter. One has to feel a certain sympathy for Wahlberg, however, that it was his co-star Christian Bale who 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 feeling akin to “therapy,” precisely because he gets to immerse himself so completely and physically in the role. “I like living like a fighter, training like a fighter,” he noted during production. “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 monumental contribution to the cinematic mythos of boxing has even earned him an official place in the sport’s international hall of fame.
If you want absolute proof of just how circular the relationship between the sport and its fictional depiction has truly become, you need look no further than Stallone’s trajectory. His original 1976 script for Rocky was directly inspired by the gritty, improbable heavyweight bout between Chuck Wepner and Muhammad Ali the year before. Decades later, in 2016, Liev Schreiber portrayed Wepner in the arthouse biopic The Bleeder.
Looking ahead, audiences will soon see that legendary sporting chapter brought to the screen once more in Stallone’s own biographical film, I Play Rocky. It remains an extraordinary truth of modern culture that even as boxing’s direct popularity as a live spectator sport has experienced declines, its dramatic and emotional appeal to audiences at one remove through theatre and cinema has never once wavered.
