Best of CASE District V Award
 

Institution: University of Notre Dame

Title of entry: "Novice Boxer" by Patrick Griffin, Autumn 2021, pgs. 38-42a

About this entry: Patrick Griffin holds an endowed chair in history and is the endowed director of Notre Dame's celebrated center for Irish studies. He has recently been a visiting endowed professor at the University of Oxford. He also likes to box--a sport he adopted in his middle years. We met for coffee and we talked about all this and what he gets from boxing. The reasoning is physical, mental, and spiritual. I asked him to write about it. He explains in this first-person essay.