Fight Game

I’m a sucker for sports, including spectator sports. My own activities have always been of the individualist type. I fish. I like to hit tennis balls. I sure wish I could get to a good mountain for some more skiing. I like danger, I like speed, I like surviving danger.
Though I haven’t done any team sports since crew in college, and there I only participated freshman year, I respond to some team efforts much like anybody else with a TV set. I can get in an uproar during a World Series. Michael Jordan kept me hyper for close to a decade, and when he retired, I segued straight to the Spurs, then the Lakers. (It’s amazing how boobland can ride winners, then ride another winner. In boobland it seems like we win almost all the time.)
But I don’t know that I’ve ever gotten as excited over the Yankees or the Bulls as I used to get when Cassius Clay, then Muhammed Ali, boxed. Even on the couch with the sports page or the radio or the tube, I guess I’m really an individualist even for spectator competitions. Hell, I got almost as excited as a kid when Joe Louis fought as I did when an Ali fight was broadcast. Hell, I got almost as excited when I read a boxing magazine biography of Jack Johnson which was lying around the army base at Camp Drum.

It’s not just fighting. I’d go berserk over Jean Claude Killy, over Nadia Comaneci.
And my excitement over boxing puzzles me: it’s so out of synch with my theoretical morality: fighting / bad.

But I initiate this post over another puzzlement: even if fighting rouses our blood lust -- David and Goliath, US against Hitler ... -- how can people possibly respond so to staged fights? to fights where the combatants hold nothing serious against each other? Ali had to invent reasons to not like Joe Frazier.
The newspapers made a big deal about Louis versus Max Schmeling, stacking politics behind sports.

This puzzlement infects my enjoyment of some of the outstanding movies that have been made that center around boxing. Raging Bull! What a great film: in so many ways. I liked Girlfight a lot, the first half of it anyway. Million Dollar Baby was good; though not to my mind quite as good as claimed.
The other night I watched the DVD of Cinderella Man. I put that movie on a plane at least half-way toward Seabiscuit. The sports side was good. The picture of the Great Depression was even better. And the human story was tops.
Still, in Seabiscuit horses were running in circles. I don’t mind. In Cinderella Man Max Baer was trying to take Braddock’s head off. He hit him in the nuts at least twice. It was deliberate. Why wasn’t he severely penalized?
In a real fight of course you hit the guy in the nuts. And in the kidneys. Anywhere you can hurt him. And that’s what old style boxing used to be. And of course, old style, only a fool would hit a guy to the head. The skull is hard; the hand is fragile.
But the Marquis of Queensbury changed all that: for the delectation of the gentlemen bettors. Separate the guy from his brain. Who cares? so long as the betting prospers?

But what did Max Baer have against nice Jim Braddock? What nice James J. had against Max was simple: he wanted to move into a bigger house.

If Hitler killed Poles, Jews, Commies ... it was one thing. He was trying to deny Germans’ humiliations. Country meant something to him. If Goliath tried to kill David, well, the Jews were enemies of the Philistines. And visa versa when David killed Goliath.
When Clay humiliated Big Bad Sonny Liston, that was one thing. Sonny Liston was big and bad. But why should we want Ali to take Frazier’s head off? Or Forman’s?

Aren’t we embarrassed that the fight game is just about vanity? about money?

I think we should stage fights between real enemies. Broke as I am, I might scrape to pay to view Bush against a terrorist: where the terrorist stepped forward to fight Bush, the way David stepped forward to fight Goliath. And the hell with the Marquis of Queensbury. Leave off the gloves. Leave out the rules. Forget about rounds, times out. Never mind height, or weight, or reach, or age. Have at it till one of them can’t continue, or is dead.