To a point, I understand all the howling at the moon by New Yorkers giddy-fied by the Knicks winning the professional basketball championship last weekend. It’s been 53 years since that happened and the Knicks’ title provided a certain reinforcement of the Big Town’s belief in its general global superiority. Plus, spectator sports is a form of shared entertainment, theatrical and—dare we say?—unifying.
Then there was the P.T. Barnum show outside the White House Sunday evening, attended by bold-face names, government officials and thousands of frenzied fans, with multiple reports that it was, as ESPN.com put it, “One of the most entertaining shows of the year.”
There was a lot of serious bleeding by the contestants in that Ultimate Fighting Championship program—and certainly untold brain damage. I was not tempted to watch the manosphere exhibition of punching, head-butting, kicking and the general administration of knocking the stuffing out of each other.
Here’s a confession: In July of 1979, in Trujillo Alto, Puerto Rico, just outside San Juan, I was covering the boxing competition in the Pan American Games when a boxer appeared to separate his opponent’s soul from his body. The “knockee”—as the early 20th Century sports columnist and short story writer Ring Lardner described a knockout victim in his short story, “Champion”—was left lying on his back, his head dangling over the ring apron, tongue hanging out and unmoving, like some chicken who had just had his neck rung.
It occurred to me then why I chose sportswriting over a career as war correspondence. I wasn’t interested in witnessing death. The poor fellow—I can’t remember his name or country—was soon revived, but in the relatively few times I was assigned to cover boxing (both amateur and professional fights) over the years, I was reminded of the barbaric geometry of fitting roundhouse punches into a square ring. Accompanied, on almost every occasion, by fevered, exulting spectators thrilled to see a man administer a lullaby to his opponent with his fists. And boxing, essentially, is far more civil than the UFC wars it led to.
There is more than a hint of ancient Rome, when the original gladiators entertained the public by engaging in mortal combat. Fight nights are a festival of adrenaline, a celebration of testosterone, with so many “manly-art” clichés. Bow-tied referees suggest a courtliness; women in underwear and high heels, prancing around the ring to announce the number of the upcoming round, communicate a stag party.
My last boxing assignment in 44 years reporting fulltime for Newsday was at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center in March 2013, during which a welterweight named Keith Thurman gave macho voice to his “love for putting people to sleep,” and the main event featured 46-year-old Bernard Hopkins as the poster boy of prizefighting persistence at a time of growing concern over traumatic head injury in all sports.
Hopkins retained his world light heavyweight title that night and declared himself “an inspiration” to young kids. There was plenty of blood-letting in all of the evening’s bouts, while the crowd called for more of the same. Public demand, after all, was what allowed organizers of the first Madison Square Garden fight, in 1882, to skirt laws at the time against prizefighting by calling their enterprise, featuring John L. Sullivan, “an illustrated lecture on pugilism.”
It was British sportswriter Pierce Egan who, in 1813, counterintuitively termed boxing the “Sweet Science,” convinced that the endeavor wasn’t just about random pummeling but rather strategizing one’s path to victory. Except there is no getting around the fact that the singular goal of boxing—and, more so, of the savage UFC brand—is to leave an opponent with little imaginary birds twirling over his head. At the least.
Years ago, for the short-lived magazine Inside Sports, I was tasked with seeking out brain specialists and boxing physicians to describe fighting’s potential dangers and learned how the brain isn’t much more than a blob of jello, floating in a fluid and held in place by a scaffolding of fibers. Though well-housed in a skull that doesn’t crack easily, the brain is susceptible to severe damage caused by any blow, by a whiplash of that jello or its bruising from bouncing off the opposite wall of the skull and back again. There can be tremendous torque, “sheer forces,” jerking different spoonsful of the jello mass in several directions at once, tearing brain tissue. Very bad news. And, worse, an epidural hematoma, in which the skull is fractured, severing an artery, and blood fills the space between skull and brain, mashing the brain. Literally to death.
Still, on Sunday, thousands gathered gleefully to encourage the White House thuggery, both in person and at delirious watch parties, surely evidence of the public’s prevailing taste for brutality. Which may parallel Masterpiece Theater’s inability to match the ratings of shows with exploding aliens and heavy artillery. And, furthermore, could be confirmation that we are not a profound people.
As for the Knicks fans, not all the celebrants were civil, either. But that hardly links the UFC’s branding of its competitions as “Cage Fights”—so called because they are staged inside an enclosed, eight-sided chain-link enclosure known as the “Octagon”—with a long-ago portrayal of basketball players as “cagers.”
That dates to the 1890s, when the sport was played inside wire-mesh or rope cages simply to separate players from fans. Those enclosures were phased out by the 1930s, but sports journalists—it’s always the crazy media causing trouble—kept the “cagers” slang around for decades afterwards.
Pretty sure I used that label a couple of times myself in a previous era. But I never had to chronicle outright cruelty—physically or culturally.