On boxing with Nadia Ragbar

Boxing has always been more than a sport. It’s a language. A mood. A box of old magazines pulled off a shelf. The smell of leather gloves. The promise that something meaningful might happen in a small, poorly lit room.

That’s the version of boxing Nadia Ragbar writes in The Pugilist and the Sailor, not boxing as highlight reel or championship mythology, but boxing as texture, constraint, and interior pressure. Her novel follows conjoined twin boxers, but the real fight is inward between autonomy and obligation, escape and attachment, motion and stillness.

Recently, Ragbar sat down with boxing writer and historian Jason Winders (George Dixon: The Short Life of Boxing’s First Black World Champion, 1870-1908) to talk about how boxing works as fiction, why its rituals, ephemera, and stubborn resistance to modernity make it such a powerful storytelling tool. 

It’s a conversation about boxing, yes, but also about why writers keep returning to it, and why it continues to offer a way into stories that have nothing to do with winning a belt.

Jason Winders: Lots of sports out there that are easier to write. Why a boxer?

Nadia Ragbar: I had this memory from when I was very young. I was about 4. We were living in Queens, New York, and my uncles would come over to watch boxing with my dad. I have this very specific image of the apartment and the feeling of it being fun. That’s really all there is to it. I don’t know how often it actually happened, but when I was making a list of things I felt drawn to, that memory kept coming back.

When I decided to make the twins boxers, there was an immediate sense of play in it. And now, I understand the theatricality of boxing. The promotional hype. The spectacle around it.

That’s interesting to me, even as someone who doesn’t watch boxing and doesn’t box.

Winders: Have you ever thrown a punch in anger?

Ragbar: No. I’m really quite mild-mannered. I’m definitely the Bruce of Bruce and Dougie.

But there’s something about the theatrical side of boxing that felt fun to lean into. Once I did, I realized that making them boxers gave their bodies a very particular physicality. Being conjoined twins is already an almost absurd premise, and boxing let me push into their disparate desires and the way their opposing sensibilities collide.

It started as play, but once I was inside it, I realized how much mileage there was.

Winders: What struck me reading it is that boxing is such a perfect sport for contained conflict. You can load it with race, class, ethnicity – all these larger forces – and physically stage them in a ring.

But you don’t really do that. The struggle in the ring is internal. The opponents aren’t especially defined. The conflict lives inside one person or one body, depending how you read it. Was that intentional?

Ragbar: From the beginning, even with them being conjoined, I didn’t want the conflict to come from discrimination or an overtly ableist world. That never felt like the story to me.

The real conflict is Bruce’s internal agony. Boxing is something he simply doesn’t want to do.

For me, the book is about how you decide what kind of life to live on your own terms while still accounting for the people around you. Making them conjoined exaggerates that problem, but it’s really a question of autonomy and community. It’s how we try to claim a sense of self while still being shaped by our relationships.

So boxing wasn’t really about boxing. It was just another constraint pressing in on Bruce.

I also wanted to tread lightly because I don’t have lived experience in that world. I could research and watch fights, but I didn’t want to overstate my authority. That’s part of why there isn’t a heavy focus on boxing mechanics in the book.

Winders: Yet, the fight scenes were beautifully done, and very different from most boxing writing. They’re not obsessed with the physics or the violence.

What you do incredibly well is get inside someone’s head in the ring. That moment where he sees the head switch – that disorientation – felt completely real to me. Rage is chaotic. Violence is confusing. That scene really landed.

Ragbar: That actually connects to something personal for me. In the book, Dougie has these health issues, and my mother experienced something similar. Years ago, she had this mysterious illness that no one could diagnose. She was in the hospital frequently, and it was always serious.

Eventually, doctors discovered that she had a blood clot in her brain. During that time, she experienced a moment when the nurse’s and doctor’s heads appeared to be switched.

She had suffered a stroke, but without long-term effects. She has a condition where she develops very serious blood clots.

That experience informed a lot of Dougie’s illness. I left it deliberately vague. It could be related to boxing. It could be something else. But it came from something very real.

Winders: That half-step away from expectation is something I loved. I assumed the answer was going to be CTE. That would have been easy and completely legitimate. But you didn’t go there. Instead, you make the reader live with uncertainty and frustration. You keep us off balance like any great boxer would. 

You do it again when they get attacked on the streets. I expected that moment to be about hate or marginalization, but it isn’t. It’s just crooked boxers.

Ragbar: I didn’t want them to be stereotyped. I wanted them to exist in a world that’s slightly off from ours, where their bodies are mostly accepted.

There’s pushback, but not constant struggle. The tension comes from within them.

In that scene, I was thinking less about discrimination and more about someone fighting dirty – trying to destabilize an opponent before a match. It’s about jealousy, instinct, and cruelty, not ideology.

Patrice is probably the most overtly hateful character, but he’s also a caricature. He isn’t really a threat, and he doesn’t have much psychological impact on them.

Winders: One of the great characters in boxing, in real life and in fiction, is always the mentor or trainer, the father figure. That’s Dom in this book. How did you think about his role?

Ragbar: He was actually one of the harder characters for me to write. In my earliest drafts, he felt too much like a caricature, which is very easy to do with that kind of figure.

There are so many pop-culture representations of boxing trainers that you almost inherit a voice or a posture without meaning to. I didn’t want him to feel like that.

What helped was thinking about what happens to someone after a boxing career. How do you survive having been a boxer? I started imagining Dom as someone who maybe never quite made it professionally, or wasn’t good enough to compete at a high level, but still found a long life inside the world of boxing.

What really humanized him for me was imagining his life outside the gym. Thinking about his wife. His kids. Being at home with people who don’t see him as a boxing authority at all. That’s when he became three-dimensional for me.

Winders: And he’s also the one who essentially ends the twins’ career, right?

Ragbar: That was partly about solving a plot problem. I knew where I wanted the twins to end up by the end of the book, and I had to figure out how they got there. But it also connected to what I’d been reading about boxing: How disposable fighters are. How easily trainers move on once someone stops being useful.

Dom feels guilty, but not guilty enough to stop. He makes the decision to train the next promising fighter. He carries the guilt, but it doesn’t outweigh the momentum of the system.

Winders: That’s such a big part of boxing. It’s brutally disposable. Once you age out or lose your shine, it’s just on to the next guy. 

Your time period is interesting, too. It’s very contemporary. They are fight now, in Ontario. Why set it now?

Ragbar: That was almost entirely practical. I started writing the book in 2012, so I set it in 2012. That was it. The book took about 10 years to finish, but I ended up liking that distance. Ten years ago feels close enough to recognize, but different enough to feel softer to me. There’s a kind of innocence there.

I needed that distance. It allowed me to lean into something a bit gentler, a bit more off kilter, without it feeling out of place.

Winders: Do you see the twins clearly in your head? Do they have faces for you?

Ragbar: They do, in a way. They look a little bit like Lou Reed to me.

Winders: Lou Reed!

Ragbar: Yeah. They’re identical, but not exactly the same. Bruce feels a bit softer to me. There’s something slightly old-fashioned about him.

Winders: I kept imagining them in the late 19th century. Vaudeville. Sideshows. That whole world. They probably would’ve been rich.

Ragbar: That makes sense. Even the word pugilist feels like it belongs to another time.

I was also influenced by Geek Love by Katherine Dunn. It’s about a carnival family, and there are conjoined twins in it, though they’re minor characters. That book really shaped how I thought about spectacle, exploitation, and identity.

There’s a kind of old-timey, anachronistic feeling I wanted for the twins, like they’ve been pulled out of a different era. I wanted them to reclaim their identity rather than be defined by an ableist gaze or a freak-show logic.

Winders: One thing that really worked for me as a boxing reader was the tactile world you built around the sport. The newspapers, the posters, the magazines, especially the boxing magazines, all of that felt very specific. It felt right.

Those magazines were such a gateway drug for so many people. Ring magazine and all of that ephemera are part of how people learned to love boxing.

Ragbar: That wasn’t entirely conscious at first. It came out of how I relate to the sport as an outsider.

Boxing has this material culture around it that feels very different from a lot of other sports. There’s something about the paper that feels essential to it. Even though I don’t come from that world directly, I’ve always been drawn to the aesthetics of boxing. Those old photographs, the aging posters, the way the sport seems to exist through objects as much as through action.

It’s not just the fights. It’s the ephemera around the fights.

Winders: It doesn’t feel modern in the way other sports do. There aren’t screens everywhere. It’s tickets, real tickets. Paper. Leather gloves that have been worn down.

Ragbar: Exactly. There’s something about boxing that hasn’t fully modernized. It still feels tactile in a way that’s almost anachronistic.

I don’t know if that’s nostalgia or something deeper, but even without having lived through that era, I could sense that boxing carried this history with it, that it lived in the imagination partly through those objects.

So, when Dougie is reading magazines, or when newspapers appear in the book, that felt natural to me. It wasn’t about research accuracy as much as atmosphere.

Winders: And it matters narratively, too. Because boxing hasn’t changed that much. You still have to show up. You still have to be there. It’s not endlessly mediated.

Ragbar: Right. There’s a kind of stubbornness to it. A resistance to becoming sleek or frictionless. That suited the book. The twins already exist a little outside of time, so boxing, with all of its old textures and rituals, felt like the right world for them.

Winders: Let’s talk about the sailing thread, because it runs parallel to the boxing and eventually overtakes it.

Ragbar: That came from a documentary I watched right before I started writing, called Deep Water. It’s about the Golden Globe Race in 1969, a solo, around-the-world sailing competition.

One of the sailors, Bernard Moitessier, was an incredibly skilled sailor. He could have won the race. But instead of finishing, he just kept sailing. He rejected the fame, the prize money, the spectacle of it.

That decision completely blew my mind. For Bruce, that story becomes almost mythic. He’s never been alone in his life, so he romanticizes solitude and autonomy M represents an ideal of the individual rejecting community, expectation, and reward.

That tension between individual freedom and responsibility to others is really at the heart of the book.

Winders: And structurally, you’re writing a book inside the book.

Ragbar: That was very intentional. It was part of the formal conceit. I wanted that sense of conjoining at every level, from character, theme, to structure. 

Early on, I even considered removing quotation marks from the dialogue, so the dialogue and prose would be formally conjoined. That idea didn’t last very long.

Winders: The editor in me just flinched.

Ragbar: Yeah, rightly. It became unreadable very quickly.

Winders: One thing I really loved was the physical problem-solving in the book: The preacher bench. The running scenes. How they sit. How they move.

Ragbar: I tried to understand the twins through their daily actions. Going down into their basement apartment. Getting into bed. Brushing their teeth. Those physical routines helped me understand them emotionally, and that understanding carried into the boxing scenes.

Some physical details I left ambiguous on purpose. I wanted to give the reader enough information to picture them, but not so much that it became clinical. 

The shared third leg was something I always had to keep in mind.

Winders: The preacher bench is such a great solution. Those details show you really thought about how they move through the world.

Ragbar: Even small things like going to a movie theatre raised questions. How does that work?

And then there’s the emotional intimacy of it. Even when they’re angry at each other, they still say good morning. They can’t storm out. There’s no privacy. That’s part of Bruce’s dilemma. How do you fight with someone when you can’t leave the room?

Those moments were actually fun to think through by being a witness to someone’s every moment, whether you want to be or not.

Winders: I want to end by talking a bit about how it feels to let the book go. You’ve lived with it for so long. Are you proud of it?

Ragbar: I am. It took a really long time, and there were many moments where I wasn’t sure it would ever happen.

There’s a lot of relief in it being out in the world. And there’s also gratitude for Invisible Publishing, for the community I’ve found through this process, and for the people who supported me while I was writing it.

Because when something takes 10 years, it can start to feel unreal. You start to wonder if it’s ever going to become a real object that other people can hold and read.

So yes, I’m proud of it. And I feel lucky.

Winders: This book would make a beautiful film.

Ragbar: That would be amazing. I mean, it’s funny, because when I was writing, whenever I got stuck, I would imagine watching it as a movie. I’d think about how a scene would begin, or how it would cut from one moment to another. That helped me move through transitions. It was very visual for me as I was writing.

Jason Winders

Jason Winders is a writer, editor, journalist, ad man, and dad living in Tecumseh, Ontario, Canada. His first book, George Dixon: The Short Life of Boxing’s First Black World Champion, won the 2022 North American Society for Sport History (NASSH) Book Award.