A profound ethical breach
I’ve never understood why boxing is a sport in the first place. I still don’t.
Even a temporary and mild brain injury is a brain injury, and brain injuries are bad. Really bad. It’s not like repeatedly getting a bruise to the shoulder. Brains are vital to human functioning and they are easily damaged and the damage doesn’t just go away. That’s why boxers end up with brain damage – it’s cumulative.
That’s why I’ve never understood why we consider it a sport and entertainment.
That of course goes double triple a hundredful when it’s men who claim to be women punching women.
Sports are war substitutes. The skills necessary to win in battle need practice to refine them. You want to practice lethality in a non-lethal way — you can’t kill your own troops in training, after all; that would be counter-productive — so that when required in battle, your soldiers can kill the enemy. Combat sports are, well, combat. Archery, spear-throwing, running, jumping, climbing, swimming, horseback riding, swordsmanship, wrestling, boxing … Many of the most ancient sports have antecedents in military training.
And even getting a repeated bruise to the shoulder is also pretty bad.
I agree with #1.
Spectators go along to a football match to witness a battle royal, not a game of tiddleywinks; though even one of those can occasionally generate a roar from the mob of whatever size looking on. It all arguably taps into the human emotional need to be part of a victory; if not all the time, then at least occasionally. And nobody much cheers for a loser. Military terminology accordingly abounds.
Rome might have fallen, but not her arenas. They are everywhere. As are boxers and their rings, and their onlookers hoping to see a brain being turned into porridge.
A lot of people who have clearly never boxed pronouncing on what the ‘entire point’ is – sure, punches to the head are part of the sport. You force an opponent to defend the head with jabs, but a boxer who only tries to punch to the head is not going to get very far.
But that gets to one of the elements that makes this truly grotesque. Rocky Marciano was famed for the sheer brutality of his offence, just relentless barrages of hard punches into his opponent’s defence, sometimes just beating down the opponent’s arms until the defence collapsed to protect the head and he could start pounding into the body. Notoriously, he had a fight where he declined to land the inevitable knock-out because he wanted to punish a pre-bout slight and force his opponent to quit.
This decision gives mediocrities that kind of advantage, completely unearned, and without risk. It is simple brutality to put a man’s punching power in a ring with a woman.
My father boxed in his youth; I think he started in the army, and competed in the Golden Gloves. He won a trophy; he was very proud of it.
He idolized Ali.
When he was dying of Hodgkin’s, we used to watch boxing matches together (on TV; they aired in Los Angeles on Friday nights channel 13.) This was back in the early ’70s, before everyone knew how dangerous the sport is.
But, I feel I owe it to my Dad to echo what Naif said. The point of boxing is not to cause a brain injury. The point of boxing is to fight, one-on-one, within established rules and bounds, and it requires strength, grace, and perseverance (both physical and mental.)
The men who are competing against women should be thoroughly shamed, but even worse are the IOC officials who’ve let this happen.
I’m not really seeing the lot of people who have clearly never boxed pronouncing on what the ‘entire point’ is – I’m seeing only two at most, Emma Hilton, and me quoting her. And sure, military training is required for the military, but the sport of boxing isn’t military training, it’s a sport.
Also, guilt-tripping me is unlikely to make me decide boxing is cool after all.
Guilt-tripping was not the point, and there are widespread commentaries about the sheer unfairness of it. Whether or not you think it is cool doesn’t really matter, entirely up to you, but the female competitors clearly value it enough to spend years of their lives preparing for this competition.
My point was very simply about the widespread (and reasonable) concern about head shots and that risk obscuring the reality of what did in fact happen. I will expand in the piece with the footage.
No, the guilt-tripping was @ 5.
I wasn’t trying to guilt trip you. Emma Hilton was the one who made the remark about “the point” of boxing being to cause brain injury. Hilton said it. I responded to her statement.
I was sharing personal memories because the subject evoked them. EXCUSE ME.
OKAY.
I expanded on Emma’s point so I did think you were responding to me, which is fine of course, but…blahblahblah, anyway excuse us all every one, said Tiny Tim.