This is intended for the “Furries In Sport” anthology upcoming, and I have become rather smitten with Sports Illustrated articles of the era, which had a very distinctive voice that straddled the line between journalism and narratives, and were often outright character portraits.
My primary question is about the choice of phonetic dialogue: Dare I use it in this story? I want the chance to let the character’s voice really have presence in the story, to feel the weight and gravitas coming from that rocky Texan rumble. I wrote it in as an indulgence of the fictional interviewer, explaining it as “[he] has a Texan accent that defies any attempt to transcribe except phonetically. It’s a laconic, rumbling drawl that fits him like his recurve horns and old boxing gloves do.”
I’ve spent some time researching Sports Illustrated interviews of the era for boxers, and found that many of them were these remarkably deft character portraits, such as Lars Anderson’s coverage of Butterbean here: http://www.si.com/vault/2013/07/08/106342559/butterbean
My secondary question is: Do you want to read a sport-related character portrait like this?
This is working-first-draft critique, so let’s not all sweat the typos and whatnot.
Here’s an excerpt from the article:
Sports Annotated #322 - August, 1993
Portrait of the Sport Series - Boxing: Life After The Last Bell’s Rung
In this recurring feature of Sports Annotated, our staff writers take a look at the stories of the people inside the sport, great and small. This month’s feature is Balus Bubalis, the 1968 Texas Pro-Am heavyweight champion, retired from the sport without a professional bout, now the team physiotherapist for the Chehon Dunkers.
It’s a warm spring day in Chehon city, and the windows of Balus Bubalis’ physiotherapy office are open to the breeze. There is a bright green feather on a little white ribbon tied to the top of the windowsill; the incoming breeze makes the feather dance gently. The old water buffalo bull’s eyes are glued to it, his nose to the incoming breeze. The feather belongs to the peach-faced lovebird perched on his left horn in a photo down the hall. She’s no older than six, in the photo. The feather, Balus explains, is the first she shed after learning to fly all again. “Her mama gawt tee-boned christmas day. Poor girl had her left wing shattered. Took me six months tuh git her flyin’ again, after. Brave girl. Y’couldn’t keep her down.”
He speaks with disarming sincerity in his praise for his patients. Balus Bubalis has a Texan accent that defies any attempt to transcribe except phonetically. It’s a laconic, rumbling drawl that fits him like his recurve horns and old boxing gloves do, and as at home on the printed page as his photo. The Chehon Dunkers home arena is as removed from Texas and boxing as can be, but Balus brings a piece of his home state with him in his voice, despite it being twenty-five years since since his triumphs in the Texas pro-am circuit.
As we sit down over a bowl of soup and coffee at a vietnamese diner down the street from the basketball arena, a flurry of spring snow blows in briefly as we sit. Balus greets the waitress by her first name, and is greeted in turn. He is Balus to everyone, from employers and team members on to the staff of the diner. He insists on it with a friendly smile that invites others past the barrier of formalities. He asks us to tackle the tough questions first.
“At the weight class ah wuz in the tahm, professional ranks were made up of the elephants, the rhinos, mebbe the rare occasional polar bear or hippo.” he explains, when asked why his spectacular amateur career had never transitioned to professional fighting. “But yuh look up the rankings of the super heavyweights at the tahm, nine of the top ten were elephants ‘n rhinos. ‘n fergit that! Boxin’ a rhino’s lahk pickin’ a fight with a refrigerator. Yer punches gonna do about as much ‘n yer gonna look jes as stupid fer swingin’ away.”
Before the World Hybrid Boxing Federation reorganized of the sport in 1985, weight classes were the only divisions that separated predator and prey species, armored and unarmored. Balus shakes his head when asked about the revolution. “It needed tuh happen, but nawt fer awl weight classes. Fracturing up the sport intuh species only led tuh worse mis-matches, 'n more injuries.” the bull says. “Middleweight ‘n lighter, that’s where all the real excitement is. Folks watchin’ on TV, they wanna see big sluggers knawk the stuffin’ outta each other. But fer me? Ah’d rather watch welterweights go any day. More speed, more technique, more of the sweet science.”
He’s a man who still calls boxing the sweet science without a trace of irony; and between mouthfulls of soup, he expounds on the value of species diversity in the sport. “Yuh watch the innernational markets raight now, it’s all this new mixed martial arts stuff gonna be big in a decade’s tahm, once they tighten the rules up so it ain’t jes ugly brawlin’. Won’t never have none o’ the grace ‘n discipline o’ boxin’, nawt until it tightens up.”
Balus talks a lot about his concern for injuries in sport; his working life now revolves around resolving the consequences of wounds and broken bones. “Lawta people get broken, in boxing. More of ‘em come tuh the sport broken. Ain’t never been no mistakin’, wherever yuh gawt poor, desperate, angry people, yuh end up with boxers.” Philidelphia, Boston, Detroit, Brooklyn, Mexico city. Yuh see it everywhere, around the world."
Balus’ eyes turn pained as the topic turns to how he got started in the sport. I catch him turning his head to look out the window, at the snow that’s turned to rain. The streaks the raindrops leave on the glass are reflected in his eyes. “Muh daddy wuzza bricklayer, grand-daddy a major in the Vietnamese allied army. Dad came over as a boy from vietnam. He didn’t like it in Texas. Never did. Didn’t like nawt fittin’ in, nawt knowin’ much english. He used tuh drink, 'n after he’d been at the whiskey he went at muh mama. ‘bout the tahm ah wuz eight years old, ah started gittin’ between 'em.”
“Fact is, when yer a boxer, y’gotta have somethin’ feedin’ the fire. Fer me, when ah started, ah wuz thinkin’ o’ muh dad’s hand. That if ah didn’t git up, he’d go hit ma agin. Or muh lil’ brother.” His word pause, for a moment, his right hand fishing his old dog tags out from under his shirt. He wears two of them, and shows them to me: One reads Balus Bubalis, and the other, Ben Bubalis. His grieving silence forestalls any questions.
Instead, words tumble from him, breaking his laconicity as his thumb rolls over his deceased brother’s dogtag.
“So ah always gawt up. Stood up. Took another beltin’, another lickin’. Learned tuh always look ‘em inna eye. Git up atta count o’ eight. Every man ah ever fought inna ring, in muh mahnd, wuz muh pa. Wuzza same fer the guys I wuz fightin’. They all had someone. Brothers. Dads. Bullies. Priests. Sometahms that wuzza worst part o’ winnin’; knowin’ in someone else’s head they’d jes lost tuh someone who wuzzint even you. Not really. Yer both jes stand-ins.”
As I started to write this piece I felt the same way; that it’s common enough to write stories about sports, or the people within them, but there’s more to sports writing than just stories. Sports Illustrated spends a surprising amount of ink and paper on interviews and character portraits, because they lend themselves to an intimacy with the athletes that doesn’t really have an outlet in other media.