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Yet it is reasonable to assume that boxers fight one another because the legitimate objects of their anger are not accessible to them. There is no political system in which the spectacle of two men fighting each other is not a striking, if unintended, image of the political impotence of most men (and women): You fight what’s nearest, what’s available, what’s ready to fight you. And, if you can, you do it for money.
If boxers as a class are angry one would have to be willfully naive not to know why. For the most part they constitute the disenfranchised of our affluent society, they are the sons of impoverished ghetto neighborhoods in which anger, if not fury, is appropriate - rather more, perhaps, than Christian meekness and self-abnegation. (It was only in prison that Sonny Liston, one of twenty-five children born to a sharecropper’s family in rural Arkansas, had enough to eat.) Where there is peace, Nietzsche theorizes, the warlike man attacks himself, but what precisely is “peace”? and where, in ghetto neighborhoods of unspeakable squalor and malaise, is it to be located? Boxing may be a way of cruelly assaulting one’s self but it is most immediately a way of transcending one’s fate. Going to war, like Marvin Hagler, and making millions of dollars from it, is distinctly American.
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