Boxing

Over the past few years I've developed an appreciation for boxing. I can respect the skill, strength, toughness, and bravery of people who participate in a sport that's essentially competitive brain damage but I would never pursue it as a hobby, I depend on my brain for a living.

My dad told me that there was a time when all boxing matches were free on the television and then someone had the bright idea to invent pay-per-view. In that moment if the general public had collectively decided to boycott the idea of paying for sports, the promoters would have abandoned the attempt and gone back to free fights. My disappointment with the outcome of this experiment has colored my entire philosophy. It's one of the fundamental reasons I use free software and it influences my approach to money. That we still have pay-per-view fights tells me there are markets out there which I will never understand.

To me, boxing seems more effective and graceful than other martial arts. I grew up in the 80's when karate was the rage but I was always disappointed when I saw real fights and discovered they were nothing like the kung fu movies on the TV.¹ The grace and precision promised by karate to 12 year old na was a fantasy. In every non-exhibition karate fight, fighters reverted to brute force and the smooth back and forth exchanges seen on kung-fu theater were replaced by awkward feints, cringing recoils, sloppy punches, and unbalanced kicks.

Now we have ultimate fighting where fighters are allowed to do everything but gouge eyes and strike groins and we're finally seeing the development of effective martial arts though bouts usually devolve into two men rolling around on the ground attempting to dislocate limbs, punch without reprisal, or choke their opponent into submission.

I find the restrictions in boxing makes the sport more entertaining. Boxers are only allowed to use the front of their fists, are not allowed to hit below the belt or strike the back of the head, are not allowed to cling to the other fighter for too long, and fights can be stopped if the referee feels a fighter is too injured or is not participating.

The referee is often as valued as the fighters. He's expected to know when to stop the fight and is often expected to have the reflexes to catch a fighter that is knocked out and falling to the canvas. I idle in the boxing subreddit and the discussion among the amateur boxers and enthusiasts often centers around the referee's skills. They argue whether he should have stopped a fight earlier and they applaud moments of good judgement when he interceded before a fighter got seriously hurt.

My interest in boxing was kindled by a manga I read called 'Hajime no Ippo' which is a standard-template Japanese sports manga with outlandish characters loosely based on real world fighters. You can read this manga online and I encourage you to do so despite it being 1900 chapters and still unfinished. After following this series I subscribed to the obnoxious r/boxing subreddit. Participants in this reddit spend 80% of their time discussing the manufactured hype around fights and speculating about how legendary fighters would fare against modern day fighters. The only reason I've stuck around is they often include short clips of fights highlighting slick moves or longer videos breaking down the tactics happening at impossibly high speeds.

In boxing I've finally found the promise of kung-fu movies. In slow motion it's possible to see people exchanging blows, with pinpoint accuracy, drawing blows only to slip and counter them with other blows, or you can see them react to a blow with another, more direct blow designed to arrive first. Some blows are only there to obscure the vision and some punches are thrown in a way that makes them less visible to their opponent. The restrictive rules seems to encourage finesse.

It's also interesting to see the physiological freaks. These fighters are ever present in modern day manga but there really are people out there with strange talents who choose to skip the conventional boxing wisdom and go their own way.

Prince Naseem used a bizarre baiting and counterpunching stance with some freakish natural skill to win the local belt only to fail when he fought a solid Mexican boxer. Watching him jump up and down and flop around like a fish to avoid punches is just bizarre. It also helped that he was an asshole in real life so a lot of people watched his fights to see him go down.

Tommy the Hitman Hearns had a tall lanky frame with freakishly long arms which he used to throw whipping jabs from an impossible distance. His most interesting fight might have been against another champion and a different freak of nature, the Argentinian Robert Duran who specialized in close fighting, pressing his head against his opponents chest and using body blows and uppercuts to grind them down. Hearns eventually went up against another beloved fighter (Marvin Hagler - a more conventional freak) and lost.

Mike Tyson is well known and his history is almost as interesting as his domination of the sport. As an 180lb 11 year old hooligan he was beating up grown men and breaking and entering until he was found by a trainer named Cus D'Amato who had some peculiar theories on boxing. Cus adopted the troubled boy, trained him in his weird style, and he came to dominate the sport. As an emotionally damaged youth Tyson would cry before matches. His downfall when Cus died was interesting in the same way as watching a train crash.

Mohammed Ali developed the trash talking hype that overshadows the sport today. Fighters often fake a rivalry, start fights during press conferences, or the ritualistic process of weigh-in. Ali was charismatic with a well-honed sense of humor which irritated his opponents and delighted fans. His fight against George Foreman (another freak of nature) in Zaire was so crazy there have been several documentaries made about it.

More recently we have Tyson Fury a man described as a walking bag of milk and his trilogy of fights against Detonay wilder a lanky man with what was hyped as the most powerful right hand in the game. Their fights were interesting.

Boxing is divided into a huge list of organizations and each organization divides their boxers by weight using this complicated table This means is it's in a boxer's best interest to cut weight so he can fight against smaller opponents, but not to cut so much weight he damages his strength and endurance. This is the reason many professional fighters (with the exception of the heavy weight classes) have very little body fat and the extreme measures boxers take to bleed off water weight before the official weigh-in is crazy: running wearing sweat suits, spitting constantly, or chewing dried mushrooms and spitting them out when they've been hydrated with spit. It sounds miserable. Boxers could gain as much as 15-20 pounds of (mostly water) weight gain between the official weigh-in and the time of the fight.

I'm also impressed of stories of boxers fighting with broken hands. Or Inuoe a Japanese champion that won a fight after he broke his skull in the second 3min long round and won the fight in the 12th. His face is still lopsided. It's also common for fighters to pee blood from kidney damage and I've watched documentaries about what boxing can do to the brains of some people.. The doctors in that film say we basically don't know why some people are more susceptible to brain injury.

So I'm still subscribed to the boxing subreddit and I enjoy the occasional fight breakdowns and highlights but at the same time I'm turned off by all the manufactured hype and what-if discussions. If you take anything away from this post, go read hajime no ippo. It's freely available online and it covers all the weird and interesting aspects of the sport.

posted by na on June 2, 2022 20:01