Top Ten Nick Paumgarten Pieces: #7 "The Ring and the Bar"

Bob Bozic (Photo by Steve Pyke for Nick Paumgarten's "The Ring and the Bar")

Nick Paumgarten is an excellent profile-writer. He’s written memorable pieces on Billy Joel (“Thirty-Three Hit Wonder”), Elvis Costello (“Brilliant Mistakes”), Mickey Drexler (“The Merchant”), St. Vincent (“Singer of Secrets”), and Yvon Chouinard (“Wild Man”), to name five that come quickly to mind. My favorite is “The Ring and the Bar” (January 30, 2012), a profile of bartender and former heavyweight boxer Bob Bozic. Here’s Paumgarten’s description of Bozic:

Bozic, who is sixty-one, is a stocky six feet two, with bearish arms and shoulders and the belly of a man who likes a beer at lunch. He shaves clean what hair there’d still be over his ears; he’s got a melon. His features manage to seem both doughy and sharp—with his arched eyebrows and his piercing eyes, he looks a little like Lenin after a back-alley beating. He speaks in the sinusy muffle of an old prizefighter and has a bulldog laugh, all grunts and snorts. He often taps your arm or shoulder when he’s telling a story, to make sure you’re listening. He tears up easily, thinking about all that he has been through and the people who have put up with him.

That passage makes me smile every time I read it, especially the part about “with his arched eyebrows and his piercing eyes, he looks a little like Lenin after a back-alley beating.”

Bozic is a great talker. Paumgarten says,

Bozic isn’t the first boxer or barkeep to talk a lot; everyone’s got a story, pal. But his, hopping from Belgrade to Afghanistan, from memories of a vagrant stretch on the streets of Toronto to a bout against Larry Holmes at Madison Square Garden and a possible claim on a Serbian spa and a coal mine in Kosovo, tests the confines of the form. He tells his tales without bravado or bombast. He often punctuates them with a shrug, as if they were nothing to him.

Note that “everyone’s got a story, pal.” It’s Paumgarten momentarily shifting into indirect free style, talking like a bartender. It’s nothing major; just a neat bit of technique that Paumgarten uses to roughen the texture of his prose. 

Another of his techniques is use of the first-person perspective. “The Ring and the Bar” contains several examples of it, including this beauty:  

Bozic at sixty-one, shadowboxing in front of a floor-to-ceiling mirror at the Church Street Boxing Gym, in lower Manhattan, on a recent weekday morning. He jabbed at his reflection, exhaling sharply, like an air brake. He had me hold the heavy bag for a while as he pounded it. I pressed my head into the bag, to absorb the blows. “This is when you feel who you are,” he said.

I think that is one of my all-time favorite New Yorker passages. The use of a sentence fragment to set the scene; the vivid figuration (“exhaling sharply, like an air brake”); the indelible image of Paumgarten pressing his head into the punching bag as Bozic pounds it; the meaning that Bozic extracts from the experience (“ ‘This is when you feel who you are’ ”) – the whole thing is total perfection!

“The Ring and the Bar” tells the story of Bozic’s life: his family’s roots in Serbia; their emigration to Canada; Bozic’s birth in Windsor, Ontario; the family splitting up; his mother giving Bozic up to a foster family; “Bozic, at sixteen, living hand-to-mouth on the streets of Toronto”; Bozic training as a boxer at the Lansdowne Training Club, meeting, among others, Canadian heavyweight champion George Chuvalo; Bozic winning the Canadian national amateur heavyweight championship in 1969; Bozic fighting Larry Holmes at Madison Square Gardens in 1973. Paumgarten writes,

No one gave Bozic much of a chance; at the weigh-in, he overheard Duke Stefano, the matchmaker, assure Don King, the promoter, that Bozic wouldn’t give Holmes any trouble. Holmes was already known for his jab. Bozic, at the outset, thought he’d test it: “You know how a batter takes the first pitch? Well, I took the first punch. Eight seconds in. It broke my nose. I thought, This is another level. This is gonna be quite an evening.” Two rounds later, a right knocked out several of Bozic’s teeth. Holmes beat him badly, but Bozic stayed upright and went the distance: “There is something almost cleansing about getting a whooping in front of a big crowd and yet not giving in. Just give in to your master, walk right into that buzz saw.”

“The Ring and the Bar” begins in the Fanelli Café, where Bozic works, and ends in the Pembroke Room, at the Lowell Hotel, where Paumgarten joins Bozic and his twenty-year-old daughter, Vesna, for tea. The ending subtly hints that Vesna may have inherited her father’s gift for storytelling.

What a pleasure to revisit this great piece!