World of Hurt
Challenger Thomas "Hit Man" Hearns strikes middleweight champion "Marvelous" Marvin Hagler with a right to the face during a boxing match in Las Vegas, Nevada. April 15, 1985.
On the hubris of fighters and fight fans, and on the cruelty and compassion you need to have to be both
A farewell, an expression of frustration, a reminder
“War. That’s what’s on my mind.”
— Marvelous Marvin Hagler.
A few days ago, we lost a legend in Marvelous Marvin Hagler — a truly great competitor whose career is a case study in how a fighter can be misunderstood, underrated, abused by both the system and the public, and how eventually, a fighter can rise above all that and cement themself as an all-time-great, against all odds. From societal norms to what promotions consider “a draw”, to just plain ignorance, Hagler had to fight every day of his life against way more than just the man in front of him. He was black, he was a southpaw, and he was good — three strikes against him in the eyes of the public, to quote the late, great Joe Frazier.
A few days later after Hagler’s passing, DAZN commentary punctuated a modern classic of a fight in Roman Gonzalez vs. Juan Francisco Estrada 2 with, quite frankly, a comically mistimed statement of: “Hagler would have been proud” — only for the fight to end on an all-time head-scratcher of a decision.
Fitting, if anything, seeing as Hagler’s career ended with what many people consider a robbery against a fellow all-time-great in Sugar Ray Leonard.
I feel like that sentence promptly followed with those scorecards is one of those things that somehow manage to encapsulate perfectly how rinky-tink and bizarre the fight game is, and what a circus combat sports in general end up being more often than not.
To me, this is a reminder. A reminder of how important it is to cherish a fighter’s presence in the fight game while it lasts. They’re not here forever, and a guarantor of a long, happy life the fight game is not. The fight game is also frequently stupid, absurd and cruel.
Hemingway said that you will die like a dog for no good reason. I agree. But in the fight game it’s also quite possible to die like a dog due to others’ negligence to an accompaniment of onlookers’ jeers and whistles, with a board of disinterested judges with an attention span of a goldfish scribbling a wonky-looking L with crayons on a piece of paper on top of that.
I don’t presume to know why Hagler died and I’m not here to be a doomsayer and predict a life of misery and poverty and suffering for Gonzalez, who is by some accounts over 76 years old and fifteen according to others. Push comes to shove only one thing matters here: combat sports are dangerous, they are hard, and nine times out of ten they ruin your body if not your mind, even if you are as careful as one can possibly be.
My grandfather has been left crippled with almost no cartilage in his knees from decades of wrestling, and every morning he wakes up in agony which is left unreadable on his face that looks like it’s made from tough old leather stretched over a slab of granite. His right leg is left deformed by his injuries and bends at an unnatural angle whenever he shuffles around the house on his cane as if someone removed a gear from the mechanism that is responsible for keeping him from toppling over.
Every morning he wakes up at 5am, in good spirits, cheerful as you will, grabs his axe, and chops up a huge pile of firewood which he then carries by himself into the house supporting it with one arm while the other is propped up on a steel cane. I have long since stopped trying to prevent him from doing this because it’s a pointless argument with him, at this point. He needs to move, he wants to do things, he needs to use his strength while he still has it.
Because this is a lifelong athlete we are talking about: stronger, tougher, almost impervious to pain. Ruined. Alive. Still pulling off feats of power and strength and will.
What I’m getting at is that while it is almost accepted (and it shouldn’t be — but that’s a topic for another day, another tirade) that fight promotions and fight promoters are shifty bastards that couldn’t give less of a toss about a fighter’s career and well-being unless they bring them money — if even that — fight fans are also all too willing to just continue sitting there, embedding the shape of their asscheeks into their cushy seats until it fossilises like the shape of a palm leaf in a piece of stone while blowing raspberries at people getting their brains bashed in.
What I’m getting at is that fight fans are lazy, entitled shits. While enjoying combat sports comes with the caveat that you have to accept the moral ambiguity of enjoying watching people beat each other up for money, you also have to accept the moral responsibility for doing so. This is sanctioned violence — the key operating word here being “sanctioned”, and we as fight fans have a moral responsibility to demand better standards from the people who are responsible for running this whole racket. We must demand better judging and harsher penalties for the incompetents — from negligent refs to negligent judges to dodgy managers.
While we’re at it, it would also go a long way if fight fans actually bothered to figure out what the hell it is that we’re watching.
Too often I see people heap abuse on fighters for committing the grave sin of — gasp — losing a professional bout. Too often I hear people yell “paper champ” at fighters who, through no fault of their own, secured a win they arguably may not have deserved due to the judges’ stupidity or, in the case of Petr Yan vs. Aljamain Sterling, a monumental brain fart on part of Yan and his corner.
People need to understand that fighters control very little. The only thing they have some degree of control over is how badly they get their assess kicked or exactly how well they manage to stick to their gameplan — which is more often than not is not even designed by them: it’s the corner’s job to come up with a strategy and then pray to the Almighty that their fighter has the skill and wherewithal to implement it well. You can blame a fighter for bad-decision making or inability to stick to a winning gameplan, but it only goes so far. No plan survives contact with the enemy, and everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. It’s a fighter’s job to try and remember what the hell it was they were supposed to be doing after getting twatted one across the face, and it’s a pretty damn hard one at that. So hard in fact that I do not trust 90% of people currently inhabiting this rock to manage to pull it off.
At the very top of the fight game, losing a step very often means losing your consciousness. It becomes a game of margins so tiny that a single percentile drop in performance or attributes can very often mean the end of your run among the cream of the crop.
It’s true in fighting and it’s true in life: you can do everything right and still lose.
The Sweet Science, the Bitter Art
I’m not here to be a killjoy or to tell you how you should enjoy your favourite hobby. In the modern world there’s no good way to enjoy anything without inflicting some sort of suffering upon a person you don’t even know that lives on the other end of the globe — that’s just the deal we were given. I’m also not here to write manifestos — having grown up in the former Soviet Union I know all too well how easy it is for people in a position of privilege to yap on about how you just don’t know what’s good for you, and how you should hang on to every word they say just because they’ve got a silver spoon up their ass and an AK at the ready.
I’m here to remind myself first of all, just how easy it is to fall into complacency — to just turn your brain off and enjoy the carnage; how easy it is to avoid responsibility and just how good it feels to stop thinking for once. Ignorance really is bliss, and that’s why it’s so goddamn dangerous. It’s easier to run, easier to close your eyes on things, and if you have no strength or mental space left to keep all this crap brewing, simmering inside your skull, then I don’t blame you one bit. Everyone who knows me will tell you just how often I simply dropped whatever it was I was doing just because I no longer wished to engage with anything, felt numb and wanted to simply continue to exist. To just, consume oxygen.
Sometimes not even that.
It’s not wrong. It’s not wrong to feel that way. But it’s wrong to let things stay that way if you wanna get somewhere, if you care.
We can be better, we can be good, and what are sports if not a reminder of how the human spirit can drive the body, the mind, forward, if you are just willing to try? Athletes put their bodies on the line to prove to themselves and to the world that they can do something simply because they want to. Is that really so different from a “normal person’s” dreams and desires? Don’t tell me you’ve gone away from watching Dustin Poirier and Max Holloway beat the everloving mother of fuck out of each other for five rounds not wanting to do anything, something. That’s the beauty of this whole thing. That’s it, right there.
Dustin Poirier said it better than anyone ever could:
“25 minutes to make life fair.”
I’m sorry if this is turning into a cliche storm of empty, pointless platitudes or if this reads like a passage from a self-help book. I wouldn’t know, I don’t read those. I know this is a rambly, stream-of-consciousness mess I’m writing by the seat of my pants with a nuclear hangover that probably belongs more in a diary rather than on a fight analysis website.
But every once in a while some things need to be restated. Some things already said by others need to be expressed in your own words, for your own sake if not the others’. I suppose this is me trying to remind myself why I enjoy fighting — what has drawn me to it in the first place. I have said it many times, and I’ll say it again: fighting is a microcosm of the human condition.
Everyone fights, in one way or another. For every human being there is a silent war going on inside their heart — some are just bloodier than others. Some are simply louder. Some are so impossibly subdued you can’t see the person die bit by bit until it is far too late. But at the end of the day everyone wants their fight to be fair — it almost never is, but everyone wishes it were. Everyone wants control, everyone wants to know they are safe, everyone wants to be treated well — and failing that, treated fair. Almost no one ever gets their wish.
So then, if we can’t get it right now in our actual lives, will it really hurt us that much to try and create the same conditions for the people who take that inner war and unravel it for us in real time, in real life, for everyone to see, with their hands and their feet and their elbows and knees and their souls?
Professional fighting is probably the only place where the human desire for violence can truly be controlled, where violence can truly be fair. For many fighters and for many fans and viewers, it’s a form of escape — from poverty, from life’s mundane but endless troubles, from inner demons. It’s an escape from any number of things that threaten to ruin each and every one of us day in, day out. You can’t fight the concept of despair with your fists, but you sure as hell can squeeze it out of you, punch by punch, for at least a moment. You can take that pain and turn it into victory, into a single hand raised above your head to the accompaniment of ear-splitting cheers of the ecstatic public.
For some fighters, that is the only triumph they’ll have ever experienced in their lives up until that point because back home the sole thing waiting for them for years on end was the mundane cruelty of modern times.
I’ll level with you: I’d rather they didn’t have to fight. I’d rather they didn’t need to fight, but many of them want to. It’s the world we live in, where sometimes the only thing that can make you happy can also just as easily destroy you. Don’t tell me you can’t relate to that. I don’t believe you.
So why not help fighters fight the way they want to fight, without the reminders of how unjust actual, real life can be? I think it’s pretty doable. In fact I think it’s more than doable, we just need to stop thinking about combat sports as if it’s just people smashing each other’s faces for shits and giggles. It’s certainly one of its aspects, but it’s far from the only one. It’s so much more than that.
Stop treating what the promoters tell you as gospel, don’t listen to the clueless commentators who regurgitate the pointless and absurd hyperbole fed to them by the PR department, and most of all stop thinking in old truisms said by someone at some point to justify one bizarre decision or another. “Bringing the fight to the champion” isn’t an actual step-by-step gameplan, “Championship rounds” don’t hold any more value than any other rounds — that’s not an actual criteria that is written by an actual human in the physical document that is the rules — and finally predicting fights using someone’s “body language” as your baseline is fucking stupid.
Expressing yourself and expressing your compassion isn’t “cringe”, caring about people isn’t a sign of weakness, and being wrong is the default state of the human mind. When I was five, I thought wind is a thing that happens when trees sway from side-to-side.
Public opinion can be swayed by members of the public, voting with your money is a thing, and push comes to shove you can at least control what you say and when you say it, and if you’re convincing enough someone else will listen to you. Where there is one good person, you may quickly find another, and where there are two, there are many.
Keeping the house warm in winter is a matter of picking up your axe every morning and chopping.
Afterword
This whole rambly mess started with me trying to write the fourth installment of the UFC’s Meat-Packing Plant series but I quickly realised that some of the things I wished to say do not exactly fit the overall theme I picked for that article, which is supposed to continue exploring the institutional problems that make the sport of MMA the way it is — a shitshow.
In my frustration with my inability to pick a point and stick with it, or at least express some of the many thoughts I’ve accumulated over these last few months in the article, I burned myself out. Again. First by trying to record a whole bunch of podcasts that ended up being scrapped because I felt like they did not fit the standard of what I would personally consider listenable, and wrote a whole bunch of article drafts that too ended up in the bin because they inevitably devolved into me pondering, and then listing, the reasons for my continued existence. The list wasn’t all that long but the reasoning behind every entry was pretty solid — not the least of which being the fact that I love fried chicken way too goddamn much.
And then, after a couple of terrible, fruitless months and two nerve-wracking weeks characterised by outrageous alcohol consumption, I literally just sat down in front of my computer and kept on writing until I wrote this thing in the span of a few hours.
Go figure.
I suppose I may have realised that my own personal standards of quality may actually be kind of stupid and counterproductive to any sort of consistent production schedule. In retrospect, this may serve as some kind of cautionary tale about perfectionism and being too hard on yourself and all that stuff.
At the end of the day the main takeaway from all that is probably the idea that in order to do things, you need to actually do things. It’s a surprisingly hard principle to stick to and an even harder sentiment to live by.
At any rate, I sincerely hope this helps someone going through similar troubles — creative or otherwise — I have to live with daily, and maybe, just maybe, it’ll serve a jumping-off point for people who are afraid of starting a new endeavour simply because they’re afraid of not being good enough.
Just don’t blame me if you actually end up being kinda bad at it.
Thank yourself when you become somewhat good after a while.