A Sharp Portrait of Competitive Girlhood

Many sports, by nature, require you to push your body to the limit—beyond it, even. For young athletes, in particular, we’ve seen the consequences of equating physical pain with elite performance and self-worth, in the form of broken bodies and silent suffering. The less athletically inclined might wonder whether the costs of competitive sport are too high for its rewards. Fights to the death, judged by the turn of an emperor’s thumb, were once popular entertainment. But we’d now think of them as barbaric.

In her debut novel, Rita Bullwinkel confronts the damage and injury of physical competition but offers an insight into why athletes might want to battle on. Headshot dives into the bloody, sweaty, achy world of girls for whom pain is not a side effect but a direct result of the sport they’ve chosen. The book follows eight teenagers as they pummel each other for the right to be named the best under-18 female boxer in America. They have traveled from around the country to a dusty gym in Reno, Nevada, to find out who can best dodge, withstand, and dole out punches. In the process, the novel asks: Why? What makes these girls dedicate their bodies to the ring?

Boxing is a sport in which fists themselves can break, but the name of the tournament these teens are participating in—the Women’s 18 & Under Daughters of America Cup—smacks of pageants and cotillions. It conjures white gloves, not boxing mitts. The awkward juxtaposition seems intentional; although each of the contestants is strange and fierce in her own way, the competition seems absurd. We know from very early on that the tournament matters to almost no one other than the girls fighting in it. There is no audience for women’s boxing. “Even if they were to go and box professionally, hit some women in bikinis in the basement of a casino in Las Vegas,” the novel’s omniscient narrator confides in the reader, “they wouldn’t impress the people who they encounter in their lives outside of boxing.”

The narrator is our entry into the girls’ minds, telling us what they’re thinking but also zooming into the future to offer up facts they are unaware of. At times, the narrator dispenses a cruel-seeming but ultimately matter-of-fact judgment—for instance, calling two of the contestants “delusional” for their dedication to the tournament, but then describing how those delusions are useful and allow them to fight with more focus. Other times, the narration dips closer to the girls’ inner monologues. We learn that one girl has been through enough hardship to understand “that this shit is meaningless”—an awareness that swallows not only the tournament but also all of life’s mysterious losses and victories. Yet she, too, wants to win, to be “the best of the best of the nation.” That repeated best seems like it belongs to her; we are looking not at her but through her at the world.

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These athletes have no real fans. The audience is minimal, mostly just a few coaches, the other girls, and an occasional relative. Family support is varied: One fighter comes to the tournament matches with her grandmother, who has almost no grasp of boxing, while another attends completely alone. One girl wishes that her siblings would come, but they usually don’t. Whether or not the girls have kin with them, they each seem as alone in life as they are in the ring—different though they are from one another, not one of them seems understood. Even two cousins who are both competing are strangely at odds: The younger longs to bond with her relative, while the older feels encroached upon. Boxing is not a team sport. You win alone, and you lose alone.

The contestants’ isolation is accentuated by the fact that all the judges and coaches are men, a dynamic the girls are very aware of. (The verisimilitude with real life—the majority of coaches for women’s college sports are men—will not be lost on most readers.) Often, we see these authority figures through the girls’ eyes; one girl thinks of them as “the men referees, and the men coaches and the men judges and their sad paunches.” These are not mentors. Whereas the girls have devoted a huge percentage of their lives to this sport, the judges, for instance, have less interest than mere hobbyists:

The judges work at Safeway and at Amazon fulfillment factories and inside the casinos with the alcoholic grenades. The white they all wear is not a uniform, but just a color specification … to make sure that they all look the part they are being paid to play. Some of the judges don’t even like boxing. It was from YouTube videos, and a one sheet that [the gym owner] sent, that they learned about the game.

These men know far less than the girls, and yet they are in charge. It is one thing to be under the thumb of the powerful; it’s a harsher kind of injustice to be judged by those with no respect for the game.

Again and again, Bullwinkel emphasizes the indignity of the contest. Reno is a city whose “drag looked like Las Vegas had shrunk its own glowing strip architecture and handed it down.” The physical prize itself, the Daughters of America Cup trophy, is shoddily constructed and would never hold water, having “a slit in the cup where the plastic mold came together”—it’s a worthless symbol of how little even the winner will be valued. Meanwhile, the cost of the girls’ participation is potentially astronomical; one girl has damaged her hand so badly that when she is “sixty she won’t be able to hold a cup of tea.” The knowledge that fighting will someday steal this simple pleasure from her dampens any anticipation of her possible win. It’s a strange move for a novelist to center an entire plot on a competition that barely seems worth it.

Yet this is also Headshot’s greatest strength. The story becomes less about who will win than about what drives each girl toward a battle with no obvious reward. Bullwinkel makes us into fans. The tournament structure—which the book closely mimics—gives Bullwinkel the space to explore different ways of being a teenage girl. Most chapters depict matches, though they’re less preoccupied by muscle movements than by the girls’ pains, fears, and coping mechanisms. One fighter wears a raccoon hat because she figures that looking deranged will throw off her enemies; another is a “people pleaser” who, even as she loses, clings to the “form” she’s been taught; another, whose hair is in “the archetype of a ponytail,” wants to beat her older sisters’ past boxing glory. Yet another was once locked in a shed for 12 hours by bullying classmates. Two of the girls are haunted by memories of dead bodies, and they think of those deaths as they fight. These psychological portraits allow the reader to understand that the girls are not fools or naive, that each has picked boxing because of her own demons.

Underdogs are the fodder of sports fiction from Rocky to Ted Lasso; one of the mythological origins of the Olympic Games is Zeus wrestling his dad. In much fiction, being an underdog is a character’s golden ticket—impoverished boy finds a magic bean and beats a giant is a more satisfying story than poor boy is swindled out of his cow and then his family starves. But here’s the thing: Bullwinkel has written a novel with eight underdogs, and seven of them must lose. Each of the girls walks into the tournament already wounded by life; the indignities they face aren’t limited to those of the contest. Even the girl whose sisters are former boxers—the closest thing to a Goliath that this competition has—is vulnerable in the outside world; her family lives “in a double-mortgaged house in an undesirable suburb” and, lacking status, is “close to no one.” Perhaps the greatest evidence that these girls are all underdogs is that they are competing for this smallest scrap of glory in the first place.

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Reading this novel reminded me of an argument I once got into with a sports fan. I found it hard to get invested in any sport as a viewer. No matter who won, the whole cycle would begin again; there was always another competition. He, knowing well my preferred form of leisure activity—reading—retorted that there is always another novel, another cycle of character-versus-the-world or character-versus-themselves. I couldn’t say much to that. Many audiences are happy to ignore these cycles in order to indulge in their chosen entertainment. Bullwinkel won’t let her readers forget. There is a moment, about two-thirds through the novel, when the question of who will win feels deeply irrelevant. Each of the girls has a compelling reason to be there. Their desires seem to cancel one another’s out. Bullwinkel frequently skips ahead to show us their post-sport futures, which emphasize the longer stretch of their lives, beyond the intense confines of the tournament. One will become a grocery-store manager; another will work in university admissions; another will become an actor. The majority of their lives will take place outside the bounds of this competition. The novel seems to be reminding us that these girls are much more than their places on the leaderboard.

But at the last minute, Headshot offers us something else. The final match arrives, the fight where the branches of the competition all meet. Bullwinkel describes triumph this way: “Today” the victor “need not dream of winning.” It’s a simple sentence that ends the chapter. And it turns Headshot, despite all its subversions, into a brilliant sports novel rather than just an excellent set of character studies. These girls will gain nothing material for their efforts—no fame, no wealth. But for one day, one girl is able to think of herself as a winner. What she receives is the simple fact that on that day, “out of all girls in the country,” she is “the best boxer.” The girl who wins is not the underdog, but she is an underdog, and her triumph is pure. This is sport for sport’s sake. Life is messy, full of death, bullies, and longing, but for the fighters, boxing grants the hope of complete, if momentary, fulfillment.

Following these battling girls through the tournament, we might wish for better conditions, for better treatment of their injuries, for judges who actually care about the sport they’re adjudicating. But futility and indignity don’t diminish the contestants’ bravery. And they are not fools. In a run-down gym, against all odds, they have found a way to taste glory. Bullwinkel’s epilogue is a terrifying fast-forward into the future, past the death of nations and through interstellar travel. In it, she imagines that girls will still be punching. The never-ending cycle of competitive sport becomes less like a futile act and more like a song that is passed down through the generations, growing more powerful in its repetition.