If boxing is anything more than a sport, it is a business: rational in its pursuit of profit, passionless in dealing with its own consequences, and amoral in pursuing its goals,” our own Rafael Garcia concludes in his meditation on Antonio Margarito, the subject of a hand wrapping controversy in which he was alleged to have illegally fortified his fists with plaster prior to battering Miguel Cotto. Equally divested of its romance is Charles Farrell‘s excellent “Why I Fixed Fights” which makes a persuasive case for why a manager is morally justified in predetermining outcomes because it simultaneously advances business interests while shielding fighters from needless harm.
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“In the real world,” he writes, “boxers and their managers prearranging the outcome of fights, working collusively against a hostile system, makes sense. Fixing fights, even at the expense of the public, isn’t just good business. It’s a survival strategy for the disenfranchised class in boxing: the fighters themselves.”
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Similarly, Sarah Deming, the only female contributor and also a former fighter, writes knowledgeably about the maturation of US Olympic gold medallist Claressa Shields. “Maybe her woman strength was finally coming in. Claressa now knew that she did not have to defeat her anger; she could distil it and let it flow out through her hands. Later, when she played back the tapes of her fights, she would feel the life inside of the work, the basic emotional rhythm.”
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Gordon Marino laments the quandary faced by every trainer: when to stop a fight before it’s too late (an act that some fighters take as a personal betrayal). In these moments of frenzied violence, when the beaten man can no longer defend himself and his brain is prone to incalculable damage, the vicious indifference of boxing is laid bare. The harm accrued will not become visible for years, even decades, after it was sustained, and protecting against such lifelong neurological impairment is precisely why Farrell thinks fight fixing is a moral imperative.
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. In the collection’s final essay, Brin-Jonathan Butler writes about Roy Jones’ decision to keep boxing well beyond his physical prime, locating his obstinacy within a confluence of spiritual and personal reasons that are indivisible from his troubled relationship with an abusive father. It’s an insightful, disturbing look at a man of singular talent fighting late into the twilight of a career upon which, it is clear to everyone but him, the sun has long set.
