Writers on Fighters: Gwendolyn Brooks’s “Black Steel”
M. Abduh
27 November 2025

On March 8, 1971 in Madison Square Garden, Muhammad Ali & Joe Frazier met in what was dubbed “The Fight of the Century.” While Ali had been exiled from boxing for refusing the draft during the Vietnam War, Frazier won his vacated title. Ali insisted that he had not lost the crown in the ring, so  he remained the champion. Frazier welcomed the challenge & even lobbied for Ali to get a license. 

Upon Ali’s return to the boxing, this fight was the most highly anticipated event in sports. The first time in history two undefeated heavyweight champions would meet in the ring. It was the beginning of a bitter rivalry. The start of  an epic trilogy. 

Before the opening bell, the drama & the poetry of the blood feud appeared in the poem “Black Steel” by Gwendolyn Brooks, commissioned for the fight and printed in the fifty-two page official on-site program. 

In it, Brooks employs metaphor, alliteration, whatnot to detail this “roaring thing,” this “Calculated Blaze.” But ultimately she reminds the combatants, reminds us all, that black love remains unbeaten:

But
when the last bell’s business dulls away,
know that the echo’s message is black love.
Pick up the pieces of the Brotherhood.
Let
black love survive the Calculated Blaze.
Let
black love survive the Challenge and the Blood.

Black love somehow survived Madison Square Garden, Fort Pillow, Birmingham, Watts, Kinshasa, Manila. The last bell still dulling away. Still picking up the pieces.

Writers on Fighters: James Baldwin on Patterson vs. Liston
M. Abduh
26 November 2025

“The Fight: Patterson vs. Liston” was originally published in the February 1963 issue of Nugget Magazine & later collected in The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings.

James Baldwin is not known for writing about boxing. Even in his profile of the Patterson-Liston fight, he begins by admitting that he knew little about the “Sweet Science” or the “Cruel Profession”: “I am not an aficionado of the ring,” he said, “and haven’t been since Joe Louis lost his crown.” Still, he masterfully profiled the fighters & their camps, captured the days leading up to the event, & contextualized the cultural significance of the contest. The fight itself, though, gets barely a paragraph. The profile ends—after Liston demolishes Patterson in two minutes—with Baldwin having a drink with a writer who knew plenty about the sweet science: “We started walking through the crowds and A. J. Liebling, behind us, tapped me on the shoulder and we went off to a bar, to mourn the very possible death of boxing, and to have a drink, with love, for Floyd.”

Sixty-three years later, Liston & Patterson are gone. Baldwin, too. Boxing is still dying. We are still mourning.

Writers on Fighters: August Wilson & Charley Burley
M. Abduh
3 November 2025

Many call Charley Burley the “uncrowned champion.” He was a dangerous fighter. So dangerous that several great champions (including Marcel Cerdan & the greatest pound-for-pound fighter in history, Sugar Ray Robinson) refused to face him. He belonged to a group of fighters known as “Black Murderers’ Row,” a name born of injustice & fear. They were Black men denied opportunity, men who beat opponents to death.

Burley fought from welterweight to middleweight, but he was known for knocking out heavyweights. As respected as he was in the boxing world, he never got a title shot. He never saw the big purses. So, he returned to his hometown of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, & worked as a garbage man.

At the time, Burley lived across the street from a boy who would become one of America’s greatest playwrights, August Wilson. Wilson went on to write an epic cycle of ten plays, each capturing a decade in the life of Black America during the twentieth century. Perhaps his most famous is Fences, set in 1957 & featuring the central character Troy Maxson. Few know that Troy Maxson was based on Charley Burley.

Wilson’s father, a European baker & a notorious drunk, was rarely around, & Burley became something of a surrogate father to him. Wilson said of Burley, “They call him the uncrowned champion. He was in Bert Sugar’s 100 Best Boxers of All Time. That’s a lot of boxers we’re talking about there. And he lived directly across the street from me, and since I grew up without a father, he was really a very strong male image for me in my life. And the fact that he went and knocked people out only added to the intrigue, the mystique of the male being conqueror.”

Professor Laurence Glasco summed up the relationship, saying that Burley was Wilson’s first idea of what it meant to be a Black man. He admired Burley because “when he walked down the street, guys looked at him with pride and awe.”

Just as Burley was denied a title shot, especially by white fighters, Troy was denied the chance to play in the major leagues. Despite their greatness, racism kept both men from rank & riches. Two men from Pittsburgh’s Hill District, both working the rubbish instead of reaching glory in their games.

Wilson captured that contradiction in Fences, the glory & the frustration of being Black in America. From the life of one of boxing’s greatest fighters, he created one of the stage’s greatest characters.

Imminently Dangerous
By M. Abduh

During the pandemic, I drove by Joe Frazier’s old gym. Seeing his faded name above a furniture store sign made me sad—even sadder to know he spent his later years living in a small apartment upstairs.

I thought about how great, how proud a champion he was. One half of some of boxing’s most epic bouts—Madison Square Garden to Manila. Blind in one eye, he made no excuses. He just shrugged, bobbed & weaved, & threw left hooks.

I thought about the prospects who trained there. The wars they fought. I pictured Smokin’ Joe leaning on the ropes, watching his young fighters spar: “That’s it. That’s it. Move them feet.”

Now, they say the city may tear it down, calling it “imminently dangerous.” To them, it is just falling brick & wire. Just a fading name above an old furniture store. To us, it was the cornerstone of the neighborhood. The keystone of the Philly fight game.

Song of the South
By M. Abduh

Some weeks ago, I came across One Hundred Poems from the Chinese, a volume of classic writings by Du Fu, Su Tung P’o, & others, translated & edited by Kenneth Rexroth. The collection is remarkable, but the first section—comprising thirty-five pieces by Du Fu—is most striking. The poems are imagistic, ironic, & introspective. Du Fu’s ability to describe a wine jug or the moon above his thatched roof is awe-inducing. These poems enthralled me, sending me in search of all things Du Fu.

Biographers declare him China’s greatest poet. Some even call him “China’s Shakespeare.” (I’m sure they mean it as a compliment.) However, Du Fu preceded Shakespeare by nearly eight centuries—writing around the time of Beowulf—making Shakespeare “England’s Du Fu.” & although he did not leave a traditional memoir, many of his poems are autobiographical. We find him visiting & drinking wine with Li Po, walking a wartorn countryside, & returning to his home & family after months in exile.

He wrote about the An Lushan rebellion & cold noodle soup, the horizon & a hairpin, expounding on the common and the cosmic with equal artistry. His work explores themes of isolation, loss, friendship, love, & despair while capturing the profound and simple wonders of the world:

Heartbroken, aging, alone, I sing
To myself. Ragged mist settles
In the spreading dusk. Snow skurries
In the coiling wind. The wineglass
Is spilled. The bottle is empty.
The fire has gone out in the stove.
Everywhere men speak in whispers.
I brood on the uselessness of letters.

Of course, I do not know a single character of Chinese. (That did not deter Pound, though.) So, I must acknowledge Du Fu’s translators, particularly Kenneth Rexroth. Of all the translations I consumed, his are the subtlest, the most vivid. 

I read Du Fu’s work, & I am transported—I hear the song of the South & the echo of chopping wood. I sit at a table littered with empty wine bottles & lobster shells. I lean against the temple wall in the bottomless night, as ten thousand organ pipes whistle & roar, as the war wagons rattle outside.

Writers on Fighters: Langston Hughes & Joe Louis
M. Abduh
31 August 2024

Langston Hughes wrote of the trials & triumphs of Black folks in poems such as “I, Too,” “The Weary Blues,” & “Mother to Son.” He penned essays, short stories, children’s books, novels, & plays on almost every aspect of our lives—from Harlem to Scottsboro, Alabama, from the blues to boxing. After witnessing Joe Louis’s loss to German heavyweight Max Schmeling, one of those great trials, Hughes wrote,

“I walked down Seventh Avenue & saw grown men weeping like children, & women sitting in the curbs with their head in their hands. All across the country that night when the news came that Joe was knocked out, people cried.”

This was because “The Brown Bomber” was more than just a fighter to those who gathered on stoops, in barbershops, bars, & living rooms to listen to his fights on the radio. He was the pride of his people, as Hughes explained,

“Each time Joe Louis won a fight in those depression years, even before he became champion, thousands of Black Americans on relief or W.P.A., & poor, would throng out into the streets all across the land to march & cheer & yell & cry because of Joe’s one-man triumphs. No one else in the United States has ever had such an effect on Negro emotions—or on mine. I marched & cheered & yelled & cried, too.”

Louis would avenge this loss two years later, knocking out Schmeling in the opening round of their rematch. After the fight, Louis said, “If I ever do anything to disgrace my race, I hope to die.” Moved by such triumphs & testaments, Hughes wrote of Louis in a poem, “Joe has sense enough to know/He is a god/So many gods don’t know.”

Haiku of a Native Son
M. Abduh

Leaving its nest
The sparrow sinks a second
Then opens its wings.
— Richard Wright, This Other World

When living abroad, Richard Wright’s book of haiku, This Other World, was a constant companion. The first thing I read in the morning, the last thing at night. Wright filled each three-line, seventeen-syllable poem with imagery & irony. His work deepened my love for the form. An ocean away from my home & family, these poems poured into me when I felt emptiest.

For Wright, creating haikus was a way to convalesce, to recuperate from a lingering illness, as his daughter Julia Wright stated,

He was never without his haiku binder under his arm. He wrote them everywhere, at all hours: in bed as he slowly recovered from a year-long, grueling battle against amebic dysentery; in cafes and restaurants where he counted syllables on napkins; in the country in a writing community owned by French friends, Le Moulin d’Ande.

Back at home among family & familiar faces, I still turn to these poems, in coffee shops & diners, by the river. Still read them often, to be filled time & again to bursting.