Award-winning writer finds philosophy in boxing, but not without learning 'the craft'

Carlo Rotella has no illusions about his place in life.

He was that "reporter guy with glasses" who sat beside boxing rings with a body he readily admits is made more for fleeing than fighting.

"My feeling is if you can do this with your thumb and your pinky," he said, connecting his fingertips around his wrist, "then you're not fooling anybody."

The Brookline resident may not have ever taken home the belt, but judges of the 2007 Whiting Writers' Award think he has the makings of a champ.

Rotella, who married philosophy with boxing in his 2003 book "Cut Time: An Education at the Fights," was one of 10 "emerging writers of exceptional talent and promise" given the $50,000 award.

Popular past Whiting award winners include Jonathan Franzen, author of "The Corrections;" Michael Cunningham of "The Hours" fame; and Jeffrey Eugenides, author of "The Virgin Suicides" and "Middlesex."

Rotella, who is working on his fourth book as he teaches English at Boston College, was one of three nonfiction writers honored this year.

"It makes me feel like it's an advance on work I'd better do to live up to the confidence they showed in me," Rotella said with a quick, wry laugh.

Judges of the national award, however, had few doubts in choosing Rotella.

"Though quite a few of them remarked that they came to the book without any interest in boxing, they were won over by this skilled and surprising prose stylist," said Barbara Bristol, director of the writers' program at the New York-based Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation.

"They found his portrayal of the sport and its practitioners resonant and engaging, and saw it as a perceptive and lucid meditation on many things, including masculinity, violence and age," Bristol said.

A Chicago native, Rotella grew up in the 1970s when heavyweight champion Larry Holmes reigned the ring. He had a fascination with boxing, but said he never got "close up."

Rotella found his life coming full circle when he landed his first teaching job at a college in Easton, Penn., just a stone's throw from Holmes' training gym.

"He had a lot to say, but no one ever asked him," Rotella said. "Fight people write great dialogue for themselves, and the thing is to let them speak their piece."

What ensued grew from a magazine piece for a literary quarterly to 248 pages of interviews with legends and underdogs that nourish lessons on conflict, teaching and why Grandma saved to go to Sicily every year.

But that didn't come without years of earning his chops as a student and observer.

"You have to be true to the boxing as boxing," Rotella said. "Once you do that, then you can also connect boxing to things beyond boxing. You can't take the shortcut to metaphor."

But as he watched Holmes, the main figure in the book, train fighters in the gym, Rotella had quickly seen connections to his career - some less applicable than others, however.

"If you don't do a good job and you don't pay attention, you get punched in the face," he said. "Teaching and learning have immediate, visible consequences."

He also watched fighters relearn everything, including instincts - for example, boxers are taught to step into an opponent's punch to cut his or her leverage.

With that in mind, Rotella said he began to re-examine himself as a teacher as he watched Holmes.

"[Fighters] have to come much more than halfway to [their] teachers. No one is going to come and 'teach' you how to box," he said. "The main thing I learned was to come less than halfway to my students - not to make it too easy for them."

But when it came down to it, Rotella was interested in the people beneath the gloves. Interviews in the book spare no expletive, evoking an uncensored look at what Rotella calls a "craft" passed down orally, like folklore.

"There's a lot of downtime in a fighting life, so a lot of fighters are talkers," he said. "People always ask the exact same questions to athletes, and if you give them a chance to talk, they'll tell you something different."

Entrenched for years in a world where luck was regarded as a delusion and hard work was king, Rotella said the values among boxers resonated with his diligence as a writer.

"It's a craft and you can work at it," he said. "It's a challenge to find words for what people do and how they move. It asks a lot of you as a writer, descriptively and analytically."

Rotella said "Cut Time" didn't happen by taking a sabbatical and locking himself in his study with a typewriter - "I have little kids," he rationalized - but by picking up freelance jobs that fit his vision.

"In part, I used magazine assignments to write the book," he said. "Some of the time, I had chapters in mind that could only be chapters in the book. I knew I wasn't going to get an assignment to write about my grandmother."

Jessica Scarpati can be reached at jscarpat@cnc.com.