Boxing

A boxing match is a play without words, which doesn´t mean that it has no text or no language, only that the text is improvised in action, the language a dialogue between the boxers in a joint response to the mysterious will of the crowd, which is always that the fight be a worthy one so that the crude paraphernalia of the setting – the ring, the lights, the onlookers themselves – be obliterated. To go from an ordinary preliminary match to a »Fight of the Century« – like those between Joe Louis and Billy Conn, Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, Marvin Hagler and Thomas Hearns – is to go from listening or half-listening to a guitar being idly plucked to hearing Bach´s Well-Tempered Clavier being perfectly played, and that too is part of the story.

It should be kept in mind that boxing and fighting, though always combined in the greatest of boxers, can be entirely different and even unrelated activities. If boxing can be, in the lighter weights especially, a highly complex and refined skill belonging solely to civilization, fighting seems to belong to something predating civilization, the instinct not merely to defend oneself – for when has the masculine ego ever been assuaged by so minimal a gesture? – but to attack another and to force him into absolute submission. Hence the electrifying effect upon a typical fight crowd when fighting emerges suddenly out of boxing – the excitement when a boxer´s face begins to bleed. The flash of red is the visible sign of the fight´s authenticity in the eyes of many spectators, and boxers are right to be proud – if they are – of their facial scars.

To the untrained eye, boxers in the ring usually appear to be angry. But, of course, this is »work« to them; emotion has no part in it, or should not. Yet in an important sense – in a symbolic sense – the boxers ARE angry, and boxing is fundamentally about anger. It is one of few sports in which anger is accommodated, ennobled. Why are boxers angry? Because, for the most part, they belong to the disenfranchised of our society, to impoverished ghetto neighborhoods in which anger is an appropriate response.

Each boxing match is a story, a highly condensed, highly dramatic story – even when nothing much happens: then failure is the story. There are two principal characters in the story, overseen by a shadow third. When the bell rings no one knows what will happen. Much is speculated, nothing known. The boxers bring to the fight everything that is themselves, and everything will be exposed: including secrets about themselves they never knew.

Boxing was once a gentlemen's sport. It has turned into, at least on the professional level, a grotesque sideshow, on a par with professional wrestling. It is entertainment, not sport.

In the ring, death is always a possibility, which is why I prefer to see films or tapes of fights already past – already crystallized into art.