Punch First, Ask Questions Never

Last night was the Mundine v. Green fight. I know this because several of the regulars at the bar left suddenly, mid-drink and halfway through a sentence, to find other venues with large television screens so they could watch the bout and hurl colourful language at. Who knows? Maybe if I didn't have to spend seven hours in a dank jazz bar I also might have joined them to watch two slabs of meat duke it out. Scores of men around Australia stopped beating their wives long enough to enjoy watching a fight where a couple of grown men punched the snot out of one another and made their opponent's brain slosh around the fluid in their heads.

Which seems to beg the question: Is boxing technically a sport? The Ancient Greeks definitely thought so. It unarguably requires a great deal of physical fitness and training. And you can also bet on it, which is a plus. Sure, repeatedly getting punched in the noggin can cause mild subclinical dysfunction which may or may not result in tremors, slowed motor performances, cognitive deficits, personality changes or even death,but golly, that certainly won't stop you from attaching your name to a Teflon-coated commercial grill which may actually make you more money than your entire boxing career. I say it's a great way for illiterate thugs to make a substantial amount of money. And the losers can take solace in the fact that, should they happen to die in the ring, their corpses will be welcomed by hospital staff who will be more than eager to remove their healthy organs when the hearse stops via the morgue en route to the cemetery.

As much as some of us claim we loathe it, it is hard to look away from a punch on. Many an evening has been lost watching two winos fight over a half-eaten kebab in the car park next door. These bouts tend to be a lot truer in the sense that there never needs to be an army of PR people who have to come up with a better excuse than, "Mr.Tyson was just feeling peckish today" when someone bites their rival's ear off. The added bonus being that since it's not an image bouncing down from the ionosphere you get to feel the warm, morphine-tainted blood on your face and even get to keep souvenirs of teeth at the fight's end.

Even back when I was but a lad in an Upperclass Boarding School, a group of crumbling buildings situated right next door to an oil refinery, fights were fairly commonplace. These future media barons, criminal defence attorneys, surgeons and princes of Industry would take offence from time to time (when some lout would spill a school chum's snuff par example) and soon be engaged in a scuffle. The rest of us would put down our tobacco pipes and our Financial Reviews and race off to watch the pugilists in action. Here we could see humans for what they truly are: savages waiting to be freed.

Knock out the Fat
Fatman