Transcript for the Piece Audio version of Sweet Science

Sweet Science
produced by Tom Niemisto

Narrator: (ambi street) On a cold wintery night in Northfield, I walk up the concrete steps at the Armory building, a community facility with a gymnasium used heavily throughout the year. I was invited to an unusual event here, a new program for the building and, I think, the town: an introductory class for high school students in boxing. (ambi enter) Inside, high school students are shooting basketball until their trainer arrives. Across the gym I see a college-aged guy who looked like he was in charge - he was wearing a bright W-M-C-A t-shirt and a whistle around his neck.

Nathan: My name is Nathan Steffle. This is with the YMCA - it’s a three week program, and right now since this is a beginner course, we’re just working on the fundamentals, working on stance and throwing punches, and like I said today we’re going to be working on defense. (nathan vox fade to bed)

Narrator: Nathan, who was a boxer in college, is an assistant coach for the class. He tells me that for this age group, they try to work on laying a solid foundation physically, and he says that coach Gordon Marino spends a lot of time on the mental obstacles of the sport.

Nathan: It’s a good sport as far as learning about yourself individually. When you’re getting hit and stuff and you might get angry and stuff, but you have to control that so you don’t fatigue yourself, so you don’t get too emotionally into it, and wearing yourself out as far as that goes. (music fade in) Gordon has a really great philosophy about controlling your emotions and it’s good for high school aged kids who sometimes get a little (laughs) rambunctious and stuff. (fade out gym ambi, keep music)

Gordon Marino: You know, boxing makes you take an inventory of yourself, when you’re in the ring you get hit and you feel very threatened and for a minute you feel as though you want to submit, and you feel your vulnerability and you have to look around inside yourself to find what’s there. And so it requires a lot of self-search.

Narrator: Gordon spends a lot of time in self-search, in and out of the boxing ring. He started out boxing at a young age, first as a means of self-defense, but the sport clicked with him, and he was a fierce competitor. While training and competing, Gordon found a remarkable connection to his other passion he was studying at Columbia University : Classical philosophy.

(musical sting)

Gordon Marino: Socrates thought that the important thing was to know yourself – so there’s this connection between philosophy and self knowledge and one gets a lot of knowledge of one’s self in boxing, so I think it’s an intensely mental sport. It makes you take an inventory of yourself look around yourself – so if you think of one of the connections between philosophy and boxing is you have do a lot of self examination when you’re in there.

Narrator: Gordon made a career out of self-examination. Now as a professor of philosophy at St. Olaf College here in Northfield he teaches advanced seminars in philosophy and curates a prestigious library of the writings by the Danish philosopher Soren Kiergegaard. And as a scholar he is particularly focused on existential philosophy, which studies the implications of emotions on the human condition:

Gordon Marino: It’s more of a movement, a bunch of themes that certain writers work on in a certain way – there’s an emphasis on autonomy, choice, freedom, anxiety and the importance of the emotions – and some of those themes come up in boxing: the solitude of bein g in the ring, the choice weather or not to go on, there’s all kinds of them…
(ambi of boxing session)
Existential authors stress the individual a lot, and you’re pretty alone out there in boxing. There’s quite a crossover between existential themes and boxing.
(more ambi)

(ambi - Gordon yells “You brought that back straight, do it again, I like that! I like that!”)

One of the reasons I like about it is often you are reaching kids that aren’t involved in other sports, and there is a tremendous amount of individual attention, so it can be a very powerful relationship between a trainer and a boxer more so than other sports.

Trying to help kids to calm down is a big thing with me. To soothe themselves, especially if kids don’t have anybody else that’ss soothing to them. The kids that have an edge they’re always in trouble people is always getting down on them and [there is] no one to nurture them, so self-soothing mechanism is important.
(musical pause)

Narrator: This new program at the Armory building is a new sport in town for youth, but it’s also his chance for Gordon to serve as a mentor, and bring the lessons he’s learned from boxing to youth, lessons that go beyond the ring:

Gordon Marino: The ability to stand up to a threatening situation – life is filled with tons of them. A lot of times people will reach back to their experience in boxing, people who were in hard financial straights or dealing with an addiction, they’ll reach back to their time in the ring – as a paradigm of when they made a stand.

Narrator: At first glance, it may seem like boxing and philosophy couldn’t have much in common, but Dr. Marino sees a deep connection. He says that actually philosophy is much more combative than most people think and boxing isn’t always about violence.

Gordon Marino: Some people are very surprised that someone involved in something as heady as philosophy or whatever could be involved in boxing but as I’ve explained many times philosophy is an incredibly aggressive academic discipline where there’s a lot of sparring. I’d much rather be punched in the nose than be treated the way some people are. You work on an argument thesis for years and they go after it, so it’s quite violent. So I think it’s important that we expand our definition of what violence is.
We just think of it as being physically hit, and that’s certainly a bit part of violence, but there’s a lot of other forms of violence that go on by people that would never be caught in a boxing ring.

(exit music)

We have yet to see if a boxing league is started in Northfield, for now, Gordon is focused on meeting goals for his students: helping with fitness, managing stress, and maybe helping them with their own self-search.

Dr. Marino writes for several publications including the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, Huffington Post, and is currently working on two books.

(6:57)