🔭 The Boxing Essay

Come out strong and establish your reach. Probably. I don't really know boxing. I saw it on “The Simpsons.” The one where Homer boxes Not Mike Tyson. The same Not Mike Tyson who bit that guy's ear and got a face tattoo. He raises pigeons, too. Not like I did — force-feeding a hundred frozen peas down the beak of an orphaned baby-dinosaur-looking chick four times a day — but in a pigeon loft. It's a whole chapter in that pigeon book, “Pigeon,” where the author never gets to meet him. A poor man's “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” because he didn't talk to Don King and Mike Tyson doesn't have a wig guy. He does have a video game, though — “Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!” I haven't played it, and I'm not sure if he actually owns it, but I've watched speedrunners wearing blindfolds pwn it to raise money for cancer research. To stop it, I think. I never checked. I'm pretty sure Mike Tyson hit his wife, too. He bragged about it and everything. Best punch of his life or something crazy like that. 

Didn't Bukowski write a story about boxing with Hemingway? Probably more than one. He hit his dad in “Ham on Rye” and hit women in real life. Super problematic. That ending to “Ham on Rye” at the penny arcade was brutal. Hey, do they still do that Penny Arcade webcomic? Even after the whole “dickwolves” thing? Katherine Dunn wrote about boxing, too. I hope Tim Burton never makes “Geek Love” into a movie. Nobody likes it for the right reasons. Oly Binewski is my Patronus.

Wasn't boxing just in the news? Those women boxers at the Olympics who weren't really women but then it turned out they really were women and the whole thing was a Russian psyop. Or maybe Russians just really think like that. And J.K. Rowling weighed in because it's really important that she weighs in on things like that because of all the boxing in those Harry Potter books, which, in a fairer world, would've been about Hermione. I’m pretty sure that isn't a real name. It's like Greek or something.

Training's like seventy percent of the “Rocky” movies. Train with beef. Train with your good arm behind your back and your feet tied together. Because because, that's why. I'm pretty sure Sly wrote the script for the first movie over a long weekend. I'm also pretty sure his mom was in the OG run of G.L.O.W. and she can read people's fortunes by looking at their butts or something. IRL, not on the show.

Why are they called “boxing gloves” anyway? The fingers aren't delineated; they're “boxing mittens,” really. Maybe I should watch some Joe Rogan “Fight Companion.” No, I'm not watching some Joe Rogan “Fight Companion.” His problem with the women-not-women-but-really-women boxers would probably be about testosterone. Anyway, if not-women ever do start hitting women for gold medals, I know plenty of guys from the old neighborhood who're ready to turn pro. And they all deserve a kick in the balls.

My sister boxed in high school against her boyfriend's friends' girlfriend. She was the champ, apparently. They egged me on to fight her. Peer pressure. And I did it, and I'm horrible and I didn't get a medal. I still feel awful about it. The hitting her part — not the not getting a medal part. Trophies are for idiots and serial killers.

My wife boxes, too. Well, she whales away on mattresses and the pads I hold up for her when she needs a proper target. Childhood Ghosts, Rape Ghosts — she bodies them all. Sometimes it helps. We tried with her holding the pads once. It felt truly, deeply wrong. If there are guys lining up to hit women this way, they're monsters.

I've only ever been in one real fight. Fifth or sixth grade on the playground, versus Shane Something-Something. He boxed my ears around the tree stump head of Kim Chick who got between us to stop the fight. When I boomeranged back to town a decade later, she made sure I never got a call back from her manager about a clerk job at a convenience store. That stay-nowhere job would've ended up with me wrapping a belt around my neck. And not the fun way. Thanks Kim!