All his life, Ernest Hemingway required male friends to prove their manhood by taking a physical risk. During a visit to Spain, he shoved Donald Ogden Stewart, his model for Bill Gorton in The Sun Also Rises, into a ring with a young bull. His fiction consistently showed bullfighters, hunters and game fishermen as figures of sexual potency.

In The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, an amateur hunter in Africa shows cowardice when charged by a lion. Contemptuous, his wife sleeps with the professional hunter leading the safari. When the husband redeems himself by facing down a buffalo, she shoots him—whether by accident or design isn't clear.

About boxing, Hemingway was boastful to a degree that shook his compatriots. He startled novelist Josephine Herbst by saying "My writing is nothing. My boxing is everything." Before challenging Morley Callaghan, he had already boxed with Ezra Pound and Harold Loeb, who inspired the character of Robert Cohn in The Sun Also Rises—an incident used in the novel.
Boxing also appears in such short stories as "Fifty Grand" and "The Battler." In later years, he built a ring at his Key West house. When locals protested his success in game fishing tournaments, Hemingway invited them to settle matters in the ring, and surprisingly knocked down all corners.

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