I?m dismayed by all the hand-wringing over what happened to Magomed Abdusalamov following his heavyweight bout with Mike Perez?
?There shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.??Matthew 13:42
I?m dismayed by all the hand-wringing over what happened to Magomed Abdusalamov following his heavyweight bout with Mike Perez at the Garden on November 2. In fact, it?s gone beyond hand-wringing; we?ve entered the masochistic spanking stage. Not much longer, surely, before I come across an article entitled ?Thank You, Sir! May I Have Another??
Are we mice or men? What?s that I hear, a squeak? Come now! We?re red-blooded boxing fans, not pigeon-chested fugitives from Woodstock who have nothing better to do with our time than navel-gaze, grow our hair long, and seek out vintage love beads on eBay.
Pray for ?Mago,? by all means, but let?s not use him as a poster boy for the supposed savagery of the sport; let?s not join the gray and dreary ranks of the perpetually outraged, the prissy moralizers, the nose-in-the-air nannies, the finger-waggers, the tut-tutters, the Carrie Nations with their pitted little hatchets of gloom and doom.
No illusions, deceptions, delusions, or spoonfuls of sugar to help the medicine go down:
?A professional boxer?s hand moves at a velocity of forty-six feet per second. A one-and-a-half pound fist, small for a heavyweight boxer, delivers 2,800 newtons. One newton is equal to the force exerted by the weight of a falling apple, so the gloved fist of a boxer contains the force of a pickup load of apples ? sufficient energy to burst a concrete slab one and a half inches thick. For maximum impact, the punch should land at 80 percent extension, and the desired termination point should be somewhere in the opponent?s mid-skull. Fortunately, bone can withstand forty times more force than concrete, and a cylindrical bone less than an inch in diameter and 2 1/3 inches long can survive more than 25,000 newtons. Hands can withstand even more than that, because tendon, skin, blood, and gristle absorb some of the impact. A hand, by rough calculation, absorbs 2,000 times as much force as concrete before breaking. To accommodate such blunt power, the brain must absorb the impact in its jelly sack.??Joseph Monninger
Sure, boxing has its brutal aspects and occasional tragedies?and no less tragic for being occasional. But what do you expect from a sport that involves two guys hitting each other? Not your shot of scotch? Prefer a cup of herbal tea? Suit yourself. Gaze at the stars, read poetry, immerse yourself in synchronized swimming, but spare the rest of us the pearl-clutching of a gaggle of biddies delicately choking on their watercress sandwiches with the crust cut off at the mere hint that there may be an exclamation more robust than ?Oh dear.?
What we owe men like Frankie Campbell, Ernie Schaaf, Jimmy Doyle, Sam Baroudi, Benny Kid Paret, Davey Moore, Deuk-Koo Kim, and Frankie Leal is honor. And there?s no honor in using their sacrifice as a club to cudgel the sport for which they died.
In the 1963 film, Captain Newman, M.D., Colonel Norval Algate Bliss (Eddie Albert) accidentally spills his drink on a fellow officer. A simple ?Sorry? would have sufficed, but he apologizes over and over again, indicating a depthless sorrow for the men who died under his command. So riddled with guilt was Colonel Bliss that he eventually threw himself from a water tower.
I won?t be joining him.
