In Defence of Blood Sport

Friday night. I'm standing ringside, 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 10 feet away. Remnants of smoke-machine-distributed atmosphere drifts through the air. There's a posse of G-string-and-silicone 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 who look like they're auditioning for Jersey Shore. It's been a good evening of fights but there haven't been any really devastating knockouts yet. I'm 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 20 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. I'm intrigued by the explosion of interest in Mixed Martial Arts fighting: it is the fastest growing sport in the world and has inserted itself into popular culture with lighting speed. UFC 129 was held at the Rogers Centre in Toronto on April 30 in front of 55,000 live and just short of million pay-per view fans. UFC 131 will arrive in Vancouver on June 11. You may be one of many who prefers to avert your eyes, but I want to witness for myself its visceral appeal.

In so doing, I am looking for an antidote to the 140-character digital universe. I don't want hear about apps or blogs or social media or virtual anything, I just want a taste of something real, and I don't mean that in the phenomenological sense: I'm talking about the right-here-right-now-in-my-face sensuality sense.

Making of a boxing aficionado

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 omnicolour 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 adoration of Mike Tyson and my sparring sessions in the basement of the university athletic complex. Fist-in-the-air feminist friends and nice college kids took it as proof of my Neanderthal tendencies, so I snuck off to the North End of town on fight nights to watch PPV in biker bars, trained quietly, and kept that shit right to myself. I only ever fought a little and haven't for two decades now, but my love of boxing has only intensified.

And I'm not embarrassed about it anymore. I'm more confident in articulating why boxing is a good thing and why I love to watch. And I don't mind so much if good people think I'm a bit of a pig. To me boxing is an increasingly precious route to cut through the artifice and banality and digitality of contemporary life.

In this 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 the Balloon Boy, a plague of reality TV, Heidi Montag, her breasts and her "Indian name," genetically modified food, the Kardashians, James Frey, "I did not have sexual relations with that woman," WMDs, Temptation Island, Jon and Kate, Facebook "friends," "conversations" on Twitter, Second Life, sugardaddy.com, virtual "community" and the average kid spending seven hours a day staring at screens, looking for "reality" and "truthiness" is a disorienting mess. Pining for the real mostly just sounds nostalgically trite and/or painfully quaint.

And perhaps that's just life: maybe ideas like realness, authenticity and truth are inherently hollow and rendered meaningless. Maybe we're just past all that, for better or worse, in a digital, virtual world.

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 scrambled.

Pain and its benefits

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 male-centric cliché. Really, what's real about scrapping?

At first glance, I'd say it's pain, the threat of pain.

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 not violence.

But boxing certainly does have physical consequences. And perhaps that's why it matters. Well-earned physical pain and suffering, whether it's from a scrap or spending all day digging dirt is sweet relief in a time when most of us sit on our asses all day and "working" means moving our fingers over a keyboard.

Recently Malcolm Gladwell was speaking in town at a business conference and he argued: "If you have 3,000 Facebook friends they're not actually your friends... Weak-tied networks like social media are really easy to put together but that means they're really easy to take apart... [they're] a mile wide but an inch deep."

He's on to something there. Unlike the interactions social media makes possible, fighting has physical consequences. Online, people dispense casual venom because they rarely have to pay a price or suffer physical consequences. There are renditions of consequence on-line: someone chucks you out of a discussion group, you get called names, your reputation can be assaulted, but those outcomes are almost exclusively unmoored to the lived world of bodies.

Worrying about what is real, what is authentic, is not a recent phenomenon, but in a post-modern world it has taken on new contours and nuances. I think Gladwell is right when he suggests that unlike social media relationships, real networks are built on trust. I would add that trust is sought after and prized precisely because there is the possibility of pain and suffering when that trust is violated. What people call online communities are not communities -- they are networks, discussion groups or affiliations. Those virtual meetings are not bad -- in fact they can be totally useful, vibrant and fun -- but to call them communities is not true.

Still standing

In an online landscape divorced from living and breathing consequences, arguments flourish (obviously), but when profoundly abstracted from the world of bodies and stuff, who really gives a damn? Just keep moving. We live in a particularly slippery, confounding time where nothing seems to sit still, everything is replaceable, ethics are apparently relative, sincerity is a joke, playfulness and irony are the currency, absurdity is standard issue and not a lot seems to really matter.

Maybe that's why I'm standing ringside after a long, immobile day writing emails, working on an article and applying for a grant. I know I'm just watching someone else perform, but at least I'm vertical, and there are real people, real sounds, and real action around me.

Tomorrow, in the second part of this essay, I get on the mat myself and receive more pain than I dish out.