This will be another post about fighting, after a quick digression

[COMMENCE DIGRESSION] Having once again been noticed by one of the big kids on the internet playground, I’m tempted to self-indulgently post a response to the response to haggle over small differences of opinion and perceived slights. And if I read the blogosphere correctly, that’s the smart thing to do—go out of your way to pick a snark fight with someone more popular than you in an effort to get them to respond to you so you continue to enjoy the warm glow of their reflected traffic. But Tracy Clark-Flory is both mostly complimentary and mostly right, so I’m just happy to welcome any new readers she sent my way. Welcome.[1][END DIGRESSION]

At the risk of making you think I own only one book about sports, let me refer again to The Picador Book of Sports Writing[2], in which you can find Tom Callaghan’s wicked-great essay “Iron Mike and the Allure of the ‘Manly Art’.” There, less than a week before Mike Tyson’s first-round destruction of Michael Spinks in 1988, Callaghan expresses the dawning discomfort among boxing fans at the realization that the then-twenty-three-year-old heavyweight champion was intent on exposing the truth of what many gussied up as “the sweet science”: this was an ugly business.

An explanation for boxing, at least an excuse, has never been harder to summon or easier to see than it is now, simmering in the eyes of Mike Tyson. Muhammed Ali’s face, when his was the face of boxing, at least had a note of humour, a hint of remorse, even the possibility of compassion […] Valour can be redeeming; so can grace, poise, bearing, even cunning. But this is a nightmare. The monster that men have worried was at the heart of their indefinable passion, of their indefensible sport, has come out in the flesh to be the champion of the world.[3]

Knowing how it all turned out with Tyson (rape conviction, feasting on human flesh, etc.), of course, this seems especially prescient. But even then, when he wasn’t making guest appearances on Webster, Iron Mike was letting it all hang out—no “float like a butterfly” for him, just “I’ll break Spinks…. None of them has a chance, I’ll break them all” and “I don’t like sports, they’re social events” and “I made him pay with his health, I could have knocked him out in the third round [rather than the seventh], but I wanted to do it slowly so that he could remember this a long time.”

There had been bad guys before, but Iron Mike embodied a whole new level of gracelessness, inside the ring and out. And so now this was the face of the sport which had killed nearly 500 men since 1918, had brain damaged so many others (including Ali, one of the most charismatic figures of his time), the sport in which “when Gaetan Hart and Cleveland Denny were breaking the ice for the first match of Leonard-Duran, it was regrettable that nearly no one at ringside so much as bothered to look up or today can even recollect which one of them died. Regrettable, but not precisely regretted.”

But Callaghan gets underneath an even more ugly truth Tyson embodied: “Only the most expendable men are boxers. All of the fighters who ever died […] haven’t the political constituency of a solitary suburban child who falls off a trampoline.” Tyson had come from a background where “you fought to keep what you took, not what you bought.” Few of the high rollers in the ringside seats could say the same, it’s fair to guess. If they were fans of the fight game for its symbolic representation of human conflict (and therefore all of human narrative) or its vicarious jolt of adrenaline or just it’s compelling bloody potential for disaster (hey, look, a car accident!), they still had to know somewhere that the dominance of the paid champion over his opponent was nothing compared to the upper hand held by those screaming themselves hoarse and groaning under the weight of their wallets at ringside. Some can win fights to make it out of the ghetto, signifying somehow the potential inherent in the American Dream; but others can pay them to beat each other senseless for light entertainment, signifying the limits of class mobility inherent in the American reality.

Robert Cohn might have once been the middleweight boxing champion of Princeton, but even as a Jew and a romantic who manages to be both pussy-whipped and scorned at the same time (making him an outsider and an object of mockery to Hemingway’s other characters), that child of a rich New York family would never have become a prize fighter. Fighting for dignity and honour is one thing. Fighting as a piece of entertainment for others is something else altogether.[4]

True, of course, of all sports, and the rationale behind the early and persistent insistence on amateurism at the Olympics. But boxing is not all sports. It is two men (or women) standing face to face and trying to pound each other senseless. Other sports may be some sort of proxy for warfare. A boxing match is just a fight. And while one completely understands why the fighters—even unpaid amateurs, even weekend gym jockeys sparring with their beer buddies—might do it, it is the spectators who are the gruesome part. What part of our brain wants to see two men destroy each other?

All this comes to mind on reading Jan Dutkiewicz and Jeremy Keehn’s essay “Grounds to Pound” in this month’s issue of The Walrus[5], on Mixed Martial Arts.

As their piece notes, MMA—especially as practiced in the UFC—has surpassed boxing in pay-per-view receipts, and at the last professional boxing match I went to a crowded bar to watch, all the talk was about whether this one fight could stave off the coming dominance of MMA. The answer turned out to be no.

So UFC represents the extension of what Callaghan saw in Tyson as boxing. No one can have any illusions that this is anything but brutality, there’s no coming moment where a UFC fan will look into the eyes of a fighter and see a savagery that is surprising. Because according to the marketing of the entire sport, the savagery is kind of the point. Watch this video and see if you’re tempted to call it art:

Or this one, from the reality show The Ultimate Fighter, meant to boost the sport’s popularity on the guy-centric Spike network:

In the first one, you can see a bunch of brutal endings to matches, including some of the brutal “ground and pound” depicted in the photo at the top of this essay, which Jeremy and Jan describe in their Walrus piece as “MMA’s most startling ritual,” in which one fighter pins another to the ground so he’s immobile and then beats him relentlessly until unconsciousness is achieved or the referee intervenes.

In the second, from the glamourous Hollywood version, you see a different kind of ground and pound: one fighter falls down after having his jaw broken by a punch, and after he falls to the ground another fighter whales on his jaw a couple more times. Then we get the spectacle of him crying and moaning for a while before we can cut to the slow motion replay and a bunch of other fighting talking heads telling us how shit-hot cool it was.

And there’s one detail of Jeremy and Jan’s essay that jumped out at me: the purse in the big climactic fight of the piece was $1800. For which full-time manual labourer Chester Post was fighting against doctor’s orders at the serious risk of his eyesight.[6] Of course no one’s in it for the money, but if they had some, they’d be far less likely to feel that they had to bleed and draw blood to achieve some pride and dignity in their lives. Or that’s how it looks from where I’m sitting.

But like I said, I’m not sure why everyone has such a hard time divining the motives of the fighters—you only need to wander into a high school cafeteria or a crowded nightclub to see plenty of dudes whaling on each other for no money at all. For some men, life is an eternal pissing contest, and as is discussed, yes, in Fight Club, when you get used to being punched and realize it doesn’t kill you (and is maybe less physically punishing in the immediate term than, say, running a marathon) it has its rewards in adrenaline.

But MMA fighting is interesting in laying bare the motives of the audience. As Jeremy discusses in the Barthes piece, there’s not really any of the dramatic arc of pro wrestling and none of the dressed up classiness that leads to the volumes of articulate and romantic windbaggery about boxing. There’s just guys kicking the crap out of each other. That’s what it is about. No doubt serious enthusiasts with training are watching for the technical and “scientific” achievement mentioned in the magazine piece. A commenter on Jeremy’s Barthes-post discusses it as a sports fan, saying it has it’s own drama. But when two fighters wrestle on the ground in highly technical and intricate attempts to put submission holds on one another, the crowd boos. They want the ground and pound, the broken jaws, the kick to the face of the man on the mat.

At least that’s what I want. I can sit here all day moralizing, but when I watch those videos above I’m riveted, my heart beats faster and I get sympathetically adrenalized. Then when I get up to walk around I find myself shadow boxing, throwing uppercuts and overhands into the air in front of me before I realize I’m doing it, like a little kid acting out the movie he’s just watched on his way out of the cinema. I’m not thinking in platitudes about what they represent of the human spirit or what they say about society or about the technical mastery of their martial arts. The reaction is purely visceral.

Is that a bad thing? I don’t know. But at least there’s something honest in it. If what we’re watching is two desperate men who have no reason to dislike each other inflict huge amounts of pain on one another because we’re bloodthirsty, then that’s what we’re watching. And if that bothers us on some level, or horrifies us, maybe that’s because it should. And if we get off on it, at least we’re not playing coy about where the thrills are.

[1]Oh, all right, all right, one thing: it is a bit rich to be patronizingly matronizingly lectured on how I should be focusing on defining the hand-holding, post-gendered utopia that will dawn after the revolution rather than ruminating on the gender roles and expectations of men alone, coming as it does from someone writing under the pink-ribboned banner of “Broadsheet,” a “women’s blog.” And I’d point out that Kay S. Hymowitz, a fellow at the Manhattan institute who apparently has been telepathically reading my mind, agrees with me that this is not some generalized, gender-neutral situation, though where I say “guy,” she says “child-man”—to-may-to, to-mah-to, etc. But for reals: Tracy is OK by me, and I’m just genuinely ecstatic she thought I was worth the virtual ink.[1a][back]

[2]If I did only own one book of sportwriting, however, this would be it. It’s the Wayne Gretzky of sportswriting books. Buy it here, or, as I did, find it in a used bookstore and read it in the aisle for an hour before paying $4 for it. Which makes it seem all the better—racking up points while still giving you tonnes of salary-cap space, to use an appropriate metaphor.[back]

[3] He also deals, in 1988, with the requisite disclaimer about applying the label “manly” to anything:

Perhaps it is anachronistic to mention only men. Maybe boxing is an anachronism: the manly art of self-defense. Take it like a man. Be a man. […] But nobody talks about being a man anymore. When it comes to bloodlust, female gills pant up and down too. In the matter of boxing’s fascination for writers, gender has certainly not been disqualifying. Still, the suspicion persists that males secrete some kind of archetypal fluid that makes it easier for them to understand what’s at work here.[back]

[4] One royal pugilist notwithstanding. [back]

[5] And Jeremy’s sidenote-tastic and surprisingly coherent essay Roland Barthes vs. Mixed Martial Arts on his blog The Bironist. [back]

[6] That the stakes are low in the world of Native-reservation unsanctioned fighting should not come as a surprise, but it was one of those cold-water-in-the-face moments when I read it. It kind of takes the fun out of parlour games in which you speculate on whether you’d fight a pro for $1 million or whatever, when the truth is of course that the purse would actually have several less zeros, and the fact that you’d have your shit rocked in a right hurry is part of the reason no one would pay much to see it. This is similar to the way whimsical conversations about whether you’d perform in a porn video for life-altering sums of money are made less engaging with the sober realization that even the long-fingernailed and unnaturally bosomed superstars of porn measure their take-home pay per scene in the low four digits. [back]

[1a] I realize The Bironist has pioneered magically appearing and disappearing sidenotes to schmancify the whole notation process. But my computer at home is so old it depends on hamsters running really fast on wheels to generate processing power, and for some reason I can’t work them hard enough to get the notes to appear. So I’m stayin’ old-skool. Just one of the differences between working for “Canada’s New Yorker” and working for, you know, New York’s New Yorker [back]

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Posted on Thursday, April 17th, 2008 at 6:47 am. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.