“There’s something very noble and heroic about the sport. We both remember back to the Muhammad Ali era, when I grew up,” said [producer] Jeffrey Katzenberg, nodding to partner Burnett.”
How clueless do you have to be, in plugging a boxing show, to mention in the same breath Muhammad Ali, whose brain-damaged wreckage has very little of the noble and heroic about it? What is it with these people trying to sell us boxing?
For those who don’t know, boxing is an exercise that uses two remarkable devices in a very odd way. One of them is a servomanipulator of incredible versatility, delicacy and precision, a gadget that can play a violin or caress a cheek or fix a watch or carry a suitcase. The other is a computer with capacities we still haven’t exhausted. It’s small enough to carry around at all times, and it can write a sonata for the violin, do rocket science and every other kind of science, and give advice to children. Try that with your laptop. Oh yeah; this computer is capable of love…the real thing, not reciting a script.
What’s truly amazing about boxing is how these wonders are used. You might think the computer could be hooked up to instruct the servo to make something incredibly cool, but you would be wrong. In boxing, the game is to take the servomechanism and use it like a hammer to whale on the computer until its little lights go out and it stops working. Usually the computer can be rebooted after this abuse, but it loses something every time and eventually winds up with dementia pugilistica, mumbling and bumping into things, cadging free drinks in cheap bars. If this isn’t substance abuse, I don’t know what is. It’s right up there with using a big Rubens painting as a tarp over your woodpile, but especially blasphemous in its trashing of God’s most remarkable creations.
A century ago the guy swinging the servo had to be careful not to break it on the computer case, but not enough lights got put out for good business, so we now wrap it up in padding that allows super-destructive, full-force whacks, and everyone watching has a good chance of seeing some real damage.
Should this be legal? Probably; the boxers are grownups and have to be allowed to manage their own lives. What I can’t understand is how this savagery can even be discussed by people who claim to be civilized, much less sold for money and treated like a sport. I know, people get hurt in all sorts of sports, but this is the one where the whole point is to hurt people, and not just arms and legs but the part that makes us human. Sure, there’s lots of cant about the science of defense and tactical blows to the body, but it’s the KO that sells the tickets. See the camera linger over Rocky Balboa’s bloody, blind, weaving face in the movie: sport? skill? Give me a break.
Katzenberg, you’re beneath contempt, beneath tobacco merchants. Mark, do you really want to ‘reform’ something like this? Fight fans, you raise a troubling problem for a free society: what should we do about bad behavior that doesn’t justify being made illegal? Our habit lately is to want to outlaw anything offensive or immoral, but this is a letoff. Boxing should have its lights put out by social disgrace, the way we taught each other that lighting a cigarette in someone else’s house or a bus is uncivilized and disgusting. The next time you think you want to watch a fight, think about your kids watching you at the moment the blood sprays and the brain slaps the inside of the skull. The next time you walk into a water-cooler conversation on the fine points of this sick behavior, try walking away the way you’d leave a conversation about setting cats on fire.