After Oprah's interview with Mike Tyson, I got into a debate with a friend over the "sport" of boxing. I don't like it, won't watch it, and have no interest watching an interview with someone who's goal in life in beating people up done by someone who is clearly a fan.
I pointed out boxing is the only "sport" in which the goal is to hurt the other person, to knock them into unconsciousness.
"What about football tackles?"
The pain they feel is a byproduct of the blocking and tackling, not the purpose.
As long as 1983, physicians groups were calling for a ban because of the intentional injury boxing causes. Now the science is even more exact. Boxing causes brain damage. But it doesn't matter, does it? The "sport" appeals to our animal instincts, and they'll always win out over rational thought.
Amen, Tim.
ReplyDeleteThen there are the martial arts, and "ultimate fighting" or whatever.
Urg.
I always thought the line uttered by Sean Connery's character Jim Malone in the 1987 movie "The Untouchables" was memorable: "Isn't that just like a wop? Brings a knife to a gun fight. Get out of here ya dego bastard!"
ReplyDeleteAt that point (if I'm not mistaken) Connery's character Malone shoots his attackers.
The Fights
ReplyDeleteby Milton Acorn, Canadian Poet
What an elusive target
the brain is! Set up
like a coconut on a flexible stem
it has 101 evasions.
A twisted nod slues a punch
a thin gillette's width
past a brain, or
a rude brush-cut to the chin
tucks one brain safe under another.
Two of these targets are
set up to be knocked down
for 25 dollars or a million.
In that TV picture in the parlor
the men, who linked move to move
in a chancy dance
are abstractions only.
Come to ringside, with two
experts in there. See
each step or blow pivoted,
balanced and sudden as gunfire.
See muscles wriggle, shine
in sweat like windshield rain.
In stinking dancehalls, in
the forums of small towns,
punches are cheaper but
still pieces of death.
For the brain's the target
with its hungers
and code of honour. See
in those stinking towns,
with long counts, swindling judges,
how fury ends with the last gong.
No matter who's the cheated one
they hug like a girl and a man.
It's a craft and
the body rhythmic and terrible,
the game of struggle.
We need something of its nature
but not this;
for the brain's the target
and round by round it's whittled
til nothing's left to a man
but a jerky bun, humming
with a gentleness less than human.