Whenever anyone asks who my favorite opera librettist is, I avoid hurt feelings within the business by telling the truth: my favorite opera librettist is Sylvester Stallone.

This statement is true, of course, to the degree that the Rocky movies — which Stallone wrote, as well as acted in — are operas. And for my money, the Rocky movies are 100% operas. Mention the original, and anyone on the street can sing you the decades-old orchestral music that came along with the story. The story blew the orchestral music out into the cultural consciousness, and vice versa — the story and the music have become interdependent. I know no better definition of opera.

Not to mention the fact that the entire franchise also gets more operatic as you go. By Rocky III and Rocky IV, the narrative formula has been so clarified that the whole movie is blocked out in just a few clean set changes. Dramatic irony is packed in at operatic levels — as in Mickey’s death scene, when Rocky has just lost, but with one word lets Mickey die believing he won:

A training montage just before the final fight can be depended on like a Rossini crescendo. Besides the delicious formula-fulfillment, such montages are an operatic device in that the music conveys reams of meaning while limiting the use of language. Perhaps people who think they are cheesy (I don’t) are really just uncomfortable with the ability of soundtrack to overtake dialogue.

(By Rocky IV, it’s become a double training montage — again, a self-conscious game of musical form:)

Larger-than-life one-liners rule the day:

…and so on.

Go outside the Rocky franchise, and whatever is operatic about boxing (or pugilistic about opera) only gets more literal. Go to Raging Bull, and you literally get the intermezzo from a Mascagni opera:

Conversely, you can go to the opera world, and find that one of the most successful contemporary pieces of the last few years is an opera about boxing — Champion (music: Terrence Blanchard, libretto: Michael Cristofer), based on the life of Emile Griffith — and the death of his opponent Benny Paret in the ring after Paret allegedly used a homophobic slur against Griffith at weigh-in. After several successful productions, Champion is currently scheduled for an April 2023 performance at the Met:

There is also Shadowboxer (music: Frank Proto, libretto: John Chenault), about the life of Joe Louis, Outside the Ring (music: David Shenton, libretto: Christine Steyer & Paul Geiger), also about Louis’ geopolitically epic rivalry and subsequent friendship with German Max Schmeling, and Approaching Ali — an opera for which the librettists (Mark Campbell & Davis Miller) based their work (with music by the wonderfully named D.J. Sparr) on Miller’s memoir of his own conversations with Muhammad Ali:

All that to say: if so many contemporary operas on one subject succeed, it’s safe to say that the subject itself is operatic.

But why? Washington Post critic Anne Midgette has drawn some interesting parallels between opera and boxing— including the fact that Jack Johnson once played a supernumerary role in a 1936 production of Aida. When asked about the experience vis à vis boxing, Johnson replied: “It’s the same crowd and the same lights.” Midgette notes that opera and boxing involve “the same athletic element… a physical feat, the result of long years of training brought to bear on a few key minutes,” and I think she’s exactly right. There’s also the operatic showmanship of boxing, right down to Ali’s speaking in rhymed couplets.

(And you can’t forget the story about Franco Corelli: how, locked in a stage embrace with soprano Birgit Nilsson and convinced she was upstaging him by refusing to release her high note, Corelli cut it off himself by biting her ear. Is there any other frame of reference here but Tyson-Holyfield?)

There’s also the sheer directness of the form. Among all possible ways of telling a story, opera could be construed as the most earnest. Let me assemble a really expensive orchestra and tech crew and sing to you exactly how I feel inside, really loud. It’s not a genre for people who like indirection. In the same way, boxing seems to be the most earnest of sports — the kind of zero-b.s. struggle all other sports fail to become. Let me just try and hit this person. Boxing is the primal activity other sports avoid by way of balls and fussy rule-keeping.

Opera and boxing both put off the easily embarrassed, the cynical, the safety-obsessed among us. Both are for the idealistic, all-in, YOLO types.

Still, I had been wondering if the opera-boxing connection was all in my head — until recently, when I had the chance to chaperone some Vanderbilt students on a trip to a boxing gym: Fighters Nashville, run by 2012 USA Gold Medal Olympic boxing coach Christy Halbert. What Christy has built at Fighters is nothing short of life-changing: in addition to offering training by professional coaches, sparring, and fitness boxing, Fighters is a non-profit organization that offers after-school mentoring to area youth. (If you’re ever through Nashville and want a workout that will massively shake up your usual workout, get a day pass to Fighters and let Christy’s coaches run you through their bag circuit.)

Within a minute of meeting Christy, she said, as if on cue: “My mother is an opera singer.” (True story — her mother is Marjorie Halbert, who started the Opera & Musical Theater program at Belmont University.) So there was the connection again, staring me in the face — is it heritable? At a genetic level, are boxing and opera the same thing?

Which seemed, of course too far-out a theory until immediately after my visit to Fighters, when I took a trip to visit my parents. We were digging through old family photos, when I learned that — whatever tiny contribution I make to the world of opera, here were the now-apparently-requisite credentials to do so — I had a great-grandfather who was an amateur fighter:

Anyway, the human mind more often goes wrong seeing false connections than missing true ones. Best to close with a passage from Norman Mailer — in which, after covering the Rumble in the Jungle, Mailer doubts himself and the sweeping comparison he has just made between boxing and chess:

Since Norman was always too ready to serve as a matrimonial agent to the meeting of large ideas, and prone to offer weighty metaphors without constructing a seat, he tried these days to be careful. A writer does well to work on his vice.

Still, he liked the new idea.