The Closed Fist

Tonight there's a big boxing match between Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Juan Manuel Marquez, in Las Vegas. Classic scene, middleweight contenders, a horde of A-list entertainers, you could be back in the early 1980s, or the 1950s.

I've been hearing a lot about the death of pro boxing, as a sport. Mixed Martial Arts has savaged boxing's appeal, partly because of MMA's immediacy and relative newness as a viable sport, and partly because MMA seems less rife with criminals taking advantage of the fighters.

The thing a lot of the general public is missing about boxing concerns something many people are willing to dismiss: tradition. And I'm not talking about just the tradition of the Great Fighter, the Sugar Ray Robinson/Ali/Haglers of history. There is that factor, the permutation of spectacle that has forever been the draw when two powerful, almost supernaturally enhanced duellists take to a spot of earth to impose their superiority.

But there is also the tradition of boxing as a structured engagement. MMA proclaims that it is superior in quality to boxing due to "free style" enhancements; the fighters are all trained in multiple techniques, limited only by their natural abilities. The best fighters in MMA are still the best fighters, as are the best boxers the best in their sport.

But there isn't really a competition between boxing and MMA, or shouldn't be. What will forever seperate boxing is, in fact, the very restrictions MMA proponents use against it: boxing is an artform, requiring an adherance to basic rules which prohibit the fighters and, in a very real way, legitimize their boxing skill.

And that's the point: boxing is a type of specific duel, as was sword-fighting, or pistols, or knives, or jousting. The fighters had particulars they had to adhere to, as "civilized" men, a point that shouldn't be dumbed down in our dumbed-down society and culture.

There is something to be said for civil physical discourse. MMA has proven itself to be a visceral vignette of battlefield fighting, the sort of free-for-all set in a clean environment instead of in some muck between soldiers. MMA dallies with the survivalist's themes, providing a new generation the "Fight Club" they have been seeking, instead of the more cryptic and damaging physical dangers of War.

Boxing, for whatever else could be said about it, is a strict culture of self-examination (as pointed out in Joyce Carol Oates' fascinating book ON BOXING, which I urge any of you cats/kittens to find): the boxer seeks to confront his own fear, his own weakness, in the Other. What the boxer fears, what his limitations are, he seeks to exploit in the Other, to destroy those weaknesses, those fears. That boxers are allowed to do that in such a transformative place as the Ring, the hallowed ground of agreed-upon conflict (unlike the "locked" "imprisoned" pretense of MMA's Cage, which devolves men into animals in society's perception more than the Ring ever has, and has not been addressed by MMA's earnest desire to make the sport "legit"), is a kind of joyous social contract between men of all ages, all races. To lose that in the face of this culture's ignorance of the beauty of boxing, is truly shameful.