The following reflections are impressions of my viewing of three boxing matches on 12/13/14. I typically analyze such contests in terms of body mechanics and stylist nuances. However, as I have been engaged in writing Incubus of Your Sacred Emasculation for the past week I decided to view these events from the perspective of masculine determinism.
I train a boxer, so it is my duty to keep up on the state of his art. Ironically enough the state of this very primal art is best tracked trough one of Man’s most denatured portals on the Masculine End Time, the TV, specifically the big money broadcasts of HBO. If you have done enough business you will find that at some junctures what is best for the primal masculine spirit is also best for the lich-like businessman’s bottom line. In this case we have a situation where HBO has the money to sponsor real fights without kneeling to sponsors and promoters, and their announcers have the latitude—as the mouthpiece for the big money players—to say what they want.
Sports announcers are typically paid to lie. A great example of this sticks out in my mind from the late 1980s, when I was watching Top Rank Boxing hosted by an announcer named Tompkins, whose first name I forget. He had just finished interviewing Tracy Span, an up-and-coming prospect, about a possible fight with Edwin Rosario. Tompkins was laudatory, playing the part of the ages old herald sending the young hero off to take down the old hero. The program cut away to a commercial, but did not. The viewer was treated to a still video of ringside as the color commentator asked Tompkins off camera, “So what do you think of Span’s chances against Rosario?”
Tompkins fairly sneered, “Rosario will beat the piss out of that kid!”
A producer quickly shut this honest conversation down and a commercial came up on the screen. The HBO crew usually includes a fighter who is allowed to say what he wants, such as Roy Jones Junior, who had this to say about the poor decision in the Diego Chavez versus Timothy Bradley fight and the outright robbery by corrupt judges of Mauricio Herrera after he was awarded a one-sided loss after beating the piss out of Jose Benevidez.
“The problem is today’s society. We want to see knockouts.”
The point Roy is making he feels keenly as a fighter, that in order to win significant money fighters prostitute themselves and their art. Indeed ancient Roman society classified prize-fighters with actors and prostitutes as they all served the purpose of the greater rotting society by providing the soulless masses with the opportunity to see a real living soul—a Man—extinguished. The unaccomplished degenerate masses want nothing more than to see an ascendant human fail, then and now. The Romans were a good deal more honest about this than our own more thoroughly denatured society. Roman actors were in danger of being felled [often being slaves who were actually killed during the play]. Roy’s point is that women, and denatured men rarely have the patience necessary to sit for, no less pay to see, a nuanced manhood ritual.
Whether it is a car race, a boxing match, or an MMA fight the masses have three sentiments in regards to the men who strive in these ritual forums. The prevalence of these crowd sympathies point to the herd mentality of civilization and are usually present in a body of spectators in the following proportions:
1. Most spectators wish to see a disastrous failure [car wreck, KO, or submission] as this imbues them with a sense of justification for not striving so intensely themselves.
2. A slight majority like to be witness to the victory of an unbeatable figure. Obsession with unbeaten fighters such as Floyd Money, who is one of the richest athletes on earth by virtue of his abject cowardice and refusal to fight the only rival regarded as his equal, holds an appeal that is in symbiosis with the desire to see failure; with the unbeaten champion providing evidence that to strive and struggle in such risky circumstances as a fight is futile, doomed by a preordained force.
3. A minority of spectators look to the craft itself, and the struggle of the fighters as an example of masculine ascent; proof that the character and attributes traditionally valued by men can be cultivated for the purpose of beating the odds, of beating the corrupt system.
The second fight in this trio of action-packed bouts pitted Andy Lee against Matt Korobov, an Irishman versus a Russian, with both being handled by American trainers. On paper and in person this was a one-sided matchup, with Roy Jones commentating on Andy Lee’s courage stepping in with what seemed like another Eastern European cyborg boxer, “God bless his soul.”
Korobov was proving the odds makers right as he dismantled and hurt Andy—then the scrappy Irishman knocked him out. As Lee put it afterward, “He was giving me a nightmare …God blessed me with a right hook. I can’t take much credit for it.”
This was one small victory for a man against the money machine that had contrived to make of him a profitable sacrifice.
Boxers once fought before the altar of the patron god of whatever sacred contest hosted their bout, literally providing a blood sacrifice for a religion that essentially amounted to ancestor worship. The vast material cult that is modernity seeks to devour, devalue and invalidate men and manhood at every turn. But something that big, that vast, has got to have innumerable chinks in its armor with all that is needed for it to eventually fall being an enemy that won’t quit—won’t submit.
