The pearl and diamond of fightless fighting
[ by Charles Cameron — Sun Tzu meets Willie Pep ]
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Sun Tzu‘s fightless victory is like the Platonic pearl, ideal, perfectly spherical. Pep‘s blowless round is like a cut diamond, multifaceted — some claim the tale is true, some that he fabricated the tale years later, some that it was a boast he made before the fight — one version suggests Pep told St. Paul sports writer Don Riley, who was covering the fight for Minnesota radio station WMIN:
Pick a round, I’ll throw punches, but I’ll never hit him. Check the scorecards after, and see if the judges fall for it.
Who knows? A good tale frays into a thousand fugal strands in the Ocean of Story.
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The curiosity:
The more facets a diamond built to approximate a sphere has, the closer it comes to the Platonic sphere.. Quite what the analogy with narrative variants would be, currently escapes me.
