that “spectating” is a broad category. Different types of spectating (in various places and through different media) have different ways of generating meaning and pleasure. Stopping by a neighborhood softball game, going to a huge stadium and watching sports spectacles on TV are very different activities. Sports are primarily spectated via television and thus viewers are engaged with and subjected to massive corporate-media-industry manipulations, with all the requisite complications. I am not suggesting that watching sports on TV is “bad” per se, but that spectating is a very broad category of activity that needs to be parsed. I will hit this more later.
7 I’m being a little cute and nodding at a certain thread here by using the word text. I’m suggesting that the specific constraints of specific sports allow for certain kinds of expressive relationships: I might have used the word form, but I think it is important to place this argument in the context of critical evaluations of texts. That’s a performance theory nerd-note, but one that needs to be said.
8 Louis Menand, “Glory Days,” New Yorker, August 6th, 2012. Thanks are due here as well to Olympic historian Bill Mallon who helped me clarify some issues and aided me in my research.
CHAPTER TWO:
A PUNCHER'S CHANCE
Authenticity,
Im/materiality, and Physicality
It’s Friday night. I’m standing ringside, a plastic cup of Michelob in hand. It’s a low-end casino and I’m watching live Mixed Martial Arts. Two sweat-slicked fighters are grappling ten feet away. Remnants of smoke-machine-distributed atmosphere drift through the air. There’s a posse of G-string-and-silicon ring-girls with model postures and tolerant expressions to my left. The front rows are full of lethal-looking Russian dudes with bored platinum dates, thuggy steroid users, playas, playa wannabes, and a ton of young men straight outta Jersey Shore outtakes. It’s been a good evening of fights but there haven’t been any really devastating knockouts yet. A couple of guys have gotten dropped hard but nothing huge. I’m a little disappointed.
But honestly, who do I think I am? I’m bald, go to the gym, and have tattoos, so I fit in here, at least at first glance. But I don’t own any Affliction gear, I only make gangsta hand symbols when I’m goofing around for photos, and I haven’t thrown a real punch at anyone in twenty years. I have my tough-guy affectations, but I’m a middle-aged father, I subscribe to the New Yorker, I drink tea, I garden. I’m out of my league here and kind of thrilled about it.
It’s not just testosterone that’s gotten me down here though: I’m intrigued by the explosion of interest in Mixed Martial Arts fighting. MMA carries a lugnut kind of visage, and that’s part of it for sure, but it’s really just an amalgam of other disciplines, infused with the admirable qualities of judo, jiu jitsu, boxing, wrestling, kickboxing, samba, and lots else. I can’t see any reason to think of MMA as significantly different than any other fighting styles, aside from its current commercialization. That’s part of why I am here tonight—though maybe it’s because I want a taste of something real. Not “real” in the phenomenological sense: I’m talking about the right-here-right-now-in-my-face sensuality sense.
It’s worth saying that I like to fight and I admire fighters of all kinds, but my goal here isn’t to defend fighting per se. Instead, my defense of fighting in this context is intended to serve as a route to my larger argument about the value, power, and potentiality of sports, and, even more than that, the exigency of neighborly friendship. But talking about fighting provokes people, so it’s a convenient way to put the argument to a stiff test right off the hop.
What I’m articulating here is an aesthetic desire for sure, but it’s also, and maybe moreso, a political one. I am convinced that sports offer a particular and irreplaceable arena for radical social transformation. All sports—fighting maybe more immediately than most—open up specific and enigmatic possibilities for engaging with pillars of liberatory politics: difference, equity, and solidarity. And, in part, it’s the encounter with materiality that I am after here.
It’s like the difference between walking and driving: sliding by in a vehicle you really don’t see shit. You can’t smell or hear anything, you move too fast, you miss all the subtleties by keeping at a comfortable distance. If you walk (and especially if you walk regularly), you feel places differently. There is something analogous about the physicality, the bodies-on-bodies immediacy and pleasure of sports: it’s the promise of an unmediated capacity to apprehend ethical decisions, the expression of difference, and the visceral encounters with solidarity that interest me.
THEY'RE RUNNING UP THE SCORE ON US
I’ve always been a fight fan. I remember watching a little black and white TV with my dad, and loving Ali sparring with Howard Cosell during prime time. I can mentally replay Hearns-Hagler in omnicolor detail. The Hit Man almost decapitating Roberto Duran. The Hawk. Alexis Arguello. Lights Out Toney. In college I was legitimately (and probably justifiably) embarrassed by my admiration of Mike Tyson and my sparring sessions in the basement of the university athletic complex. Righteous friends and nice college kids took it as proof of my loutish tendencies, so I snuck off to the north end of town on fight nights to watch pay-per-view in biker bars, trained quietly, and kept that shit right to myself. I only ever fought a little and haven’t done it properly for almost two decades now, but remain enthused and attached.
And I’m not embarrassed about it anymore. I’m more confident in articulating why boxing is a good thing and why I watch. And I don’t really mind so much if good people think I’m a bit of a pig. To me boxing specifically, and fighting in general, is an increasingly precious route to cut through the artifice and banality of contemporary life.
In a twenty-first century where what’s real, what’s fake, and what the difference is seems tenuous at best, fighting is a simple, pure pleasure. In the face of a plague of reality TV, WMDs, Facebook “friends,” “conversations” on Twitter, Second Life, and the average kid spending almost eight hours a day staring at screens, looking for “reality” and “truthfulness” is a disorienting mess. Pining for the authentic mostly just sounds nostalgic, trite, and/or painfully quaint. But there’s nothing fake about a sharp right cross in the mouth. There’s no irony, no subtext, no spin, no fabrication, no “reality” in quotes, no disclaimers, no reset function, no replaceable avatar to start over with. It just hurts. And if you’re watching, there’s no way to pretend it’s not happening. That kid’s nose really is pouring blood, his neurons really are scrambling.
But wait. That’s exactly the Fight Club story. Didn’t Pitt and Norton and Palahniuk do all this already? Isn’t the idea that fighting is particularly “authentic” just another lame Maileresque, patriarchal cliché? Really, what’s real about scrapping? And what’s so great about “real” or “authentic” anyways?
At first glance, I’d say it’s pain, the threat of pain, the inescapable physicality that sharpens a poignancy in fighting. It has always been the ostensible realness of boxing that attracted me—I don’t think boxing has anything to do with violence. Violence is coercive by definition; it’s done to someone against their will. You step into the ring voluntarily. It’s painful, risky, dangerous, scary, often damaging, and probably not a great idea on balance, but it’s not violence. Capitalism generalizes intrinsic and extrinsic violence throughout our social and cultural relationships, and boxing is one more site for that expression. The act of fighting is scary, thrilling, and potentially damaging absolutely, but the same can be said for ballet, skateboarding, mountain climbing, scuba diving, riding a horse, mountain biking, and playing hockey. There is danger in varying degrees inhered in nearly every activity, risks to be taken and compromises to be made. Everything has a cost. If you don’t like boxing, if it makes you squeamish, if you think that’s not a risk you’re comfortable with, I totally understand. But that’s an aesthetic choice.
Well-earned physical pain and suffering, whether it’s from grappling,