[Last year, I
followed the Valentine’s series with a complementary
series analyzing some of the things that just don’t quite do it for me. It
was pretty popular, including my biggest
crowd-sourced post to date, so this year I’m repeating the series—and
repeating the request for your non-favorites for a crowd-sourced post in which
we’ll air some grievances!]
On why
AmericanStudiers can’t forget the sweet science, and why I wish we could.
If I were going
to make the case for boxing’s crucial significance in American history and
identity, I would start here: the story of African American life in the 20th
century can be pretty succinctly told through the sequence of Jack Johnson to Joe Louis to Sugar Ray
Robinson to Muhammad
Ali to Mike Tyson. Or maybe I would
note how many great films use boxing as a metaphor for American history and
identity, from The Champ (1931) to On the Waterfront (1954),
Raging Bull (1980)
to Cinderella Man (2005),
Rocky (1976) to Rocky Balboa (2006), and dozens more besides. Or maybe I’d talk about
all the resonances
of the Hurricane—the boxer, the song, the movie, the history. In any case,
boxing and America seem profoundly and permanently intertwined.
I got a couple
problems with that, though. For one thing, and it’s an obvious thing I guess
but a hard one to get around, boxing is so thoroughly and unavoidably violent
and destructive. I wrote a
post in last year’s Super Bowl series on the necessary hypocrisy that comes
with watching football these days, given what we have learned and continue
to learn about the sport’s impacts on the bodies and (especially) brains of
those playing it. Well, in the case of boxing such violent impact is not only
part of the sport, it’s the most central and consistent part—and indeed, the point
of the sport is for each participant to try to be more violent than his or her
opponent, to damage that opponent sufficiently that he or she cannot continue. To
be honest, the nickname “the sweet
science” seems to me to exist in part to mask the fundamental reality that
boxing is neither sweet nor scientific, but instead (or at least especially) a
savage test of who can sustain the most violence and pain.
It’s hard for me
to argue that such a sport should occupy a prominent role in 21st
century American society and culture. Of course, it’s also undeniable that
boxing has already lost much of its prior prominence, a change that has been
due not to its violence (since the even
more violent Ultimate Fighting is extremely popular at the moment) as much
as to the impression that the
sport is profoundly corrupt. And that’s my other problem with the role of
boxing in narratives of American history and identity—we may have recently become
more aware of the role that corrupt
promoters and organizations, judges and paydays, and the like play in the
world of boxing, but as far as I can tell those
realities have been part of the sport for as long as it has existed. Of
course America has always had its fair share of corruption and greed as well,
but do we want a nationally symbolic sport that emphasizes those qualities? It’d
be the equivalent of the Black
Sox scandal being the norm in baseball, rather than a glaring exception. I
can’t deny boxing’s role in our past and identity, but I can’t pretend I don’t
find that more than a little disturbing.
Last
non-favorite tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other non-favorites you’d share for the weekend post?
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