Boxing

I just read a fascinating article about Mike Tyson and boxing. Here are the opening lines:
"The conventions of the ring demand that a fighter in training become a monk. For months at a time, he hardens his body on roadwork and beefsteak, and practices an enforced loneliness - even (tradition has it) sexual loneliness - the better to focus the mind on war. Mike Tyson's monastery in the Nevada desert is a mansion....and it could be said to lack the usual austerity...When Tyson is not preparing for fights, he keeps lions and tigers around as pets and wrestles with them. "Sometimes i go swimming with the tiger," he told a visitor. "But personally, I'm a lion man. Lions are very obedient, like dogs."

The article goes on to describe the way Tyson read Voltaire, Machiavelli and the Koran while in prison, also getting a taste for communism as evidenced by his tattoo of Mao Zedong.

The evolution of boxing, which began before the Civil War when slave owners would set up fights between their possessions (often until death), included the battle over shifting notions such as race, masculinity, decency and class. Black fighters in the 1960s were not fighting only for themselves, they were fighting for their race. In addition to this the amount of money and prestige which hangs over boxing; the idea of an 'event' and all that surrounds it, in the streets, in the ring, in the crowd; the entertainment and the gamble; all of this turns boxing into a spectacle which radically differs from other sports. Must think more about this.

A final quote:

"Boxing is ancient, simple, lonely. There is hardly any artifice at all. Padded gloves and the gauze and tape underneath do little to protect the fighters; they merely prevent broken hands, and allow for more punching, more pain. Boxers go into the ring alone, nearly naked, and they succeed or fail on the basis of the most elementary criteria: their ability to give and receive pain, their will to endure their own fear. Since character - the will of a person stretched to extremes - is so obviously at the center of boxing, there is an undeniable urge to know the fighters, to derive some meaning from the conflict of those characters."