18.02.04 – By Matthew Hurley: At its highest level the sport of boxing achieves a quality of athleticism, courage and drama that is all at once cinematic, barbaric and beautiful. Unlike any other athlete the prize fighter reveals himself the moment he engages in battle. In the time it might take a baseball pitcher to deliver a fastball or a basketball player to complete a simple lay-up a boxer can achieve the ultimate glory or suffer a career altering defeat. So vulnerable is the boxer, and so tenuous his hold on his fistic future that as outsiders looking in true fight fans become at first enraptured by the excitement of the sport and then find themselves living and dying alongside their favorite pugilist. To be a boxing fan is to enter into a love affair that more often than not will end in heartbreak. And yet we keep coming back for more.
That heartbreak has nothing to do with the duplicitous actions of promoters or any of the other unsavory characters that inhabit the world of boxing but in the now aged truism that because of the raw savagery fighters subject themselves to, all too often their stories end in one form of sadness or another. It’s a cycle that spins constantly and catches fighter after fighter in its centrifugal force, chewing them up and spitting them out. From the ring deaths of Benny Paret and Doo Koo Kim to the impairments that engulf the lives of Wilfred Benitez and Gerald McClellan the fight game is littered with epic tales of tragedy and despair. And yet it’s their very sacrifice, their willingness to lay it all out on the line that elevates these men to sometimes mythic proportions.
No, not every fighter can achieve the success and heroic qualities of a Joe Louis or Muhammad Ali, and not every fighter will suffer their particular fates, but to pursue that dream, to be willing to risk everything to achieve even one glorious moment in the sun is why fight aficionados are the most passionate and loyal of sports fans. It truly is a love affair. Fight fans care desperately about these gallant warriors because their struggle engages us in the sporting sense and enthralls us in its basic humanity. Boxing has often been described by many writers as a metaphor for life, full of glorious highs and desperate lows, and the fighter, entangled in all the backdoor machinations of some of the seediest characters a person would ever dare deal with, often becomes an afterthought in some of these cretins pursuit of the all-mighty buck. But the fans know where the true heart of boxing beats – in the chest of each and every fighter brave enough to stick his chin out in the line of fire.
From the local club fighter trying to make ends meet, to the biggest stars waiting in anticipation for that one big super-fight, boxers, all boxers, are heroic in their own way. Not all of them are good, some probably shouldn’t even climb into that ring to begin with, but all of those that do demand and are worthy of our respect in their dangerous quest for nobility. Here’s to them all and may each and every one of them experience at least one moment of glory, however small, however fleeting. Their sacrifice deserves as much.