A big fight is a force.
The great Norman Mailer once described a heavyweight championship as a vortex, “as charged as a magnetic field”.
Mailer wrote those words in The Fight, his remarkable account of the legendary 1974 Muhammad Ali v George Foreman fight, the “Rumble in the Jungle”.
Mailer wrote those words in a darker, more personal context than they are used here.
That was a heavy night with Don King and he was actually pondering the fragility of human life and one’s hold on it, but those words are so right.
A big fight is a force to which it is impossible not to be drawn.
That fight, more than 40 years ago now, resonates still, even if it carries no great implications for our age.
It exists in and of itself, a great monument of its time and an enduring point of cultural reference.
From it emerged great literature, not least in Mailer’s book, and later film, but overwhelmingly an entire vocabulary that went far and beyond just sport.
Immediacy prevents conferring any status to Floyd Mayweather Jr’s fight with Manny Pacquiao, but certainly, if one had a working pulse, it was impossible not to feel its force, to be drawn into that vortex.
There were few spaces of the world, real or virtual, you could travel in recent months, and particularly the last few weeks, without coming across some reference to this fight.
Jimmy Kimmel and Justin Bieber as part of their entourages will somewhat rob it forever of some seriousness.
Alternatively, maybe it is just the right kind of garnish for boxing, trampling across as it does so many boundaries, between sport, entertainment, tragedy and comedy.
But it had force, created if nothing else by pure anticipation.
How could it not, given that so many had wanted to see this for so long? Did it provide the right release?
Here is the thing about boxing.
To the casual observer – and that this fight attracted so many is testament to its bigness – boxing works best when operating at its simplest, most dumbed-down level of spectacle.
If blood and bruises and blackened, puffy eyes are visible, if there are knockdowns, obvious pain and wincing, if fighters are on wobbly legs, there is spectacle.
That is one of the reasons why Mike Tyson’s appeal went so wide.
In his early career, he reduced boxing to its most understandable and appreciable: knocking people out, drawing blood, looking mean and vicious.
It is why the Las Vegas fight between Marvin Hagler and Thomas Hearns exactly 30 years ago was so monumental.
In less than three full rounds, the pair, among the greatest ever, went at each other with such unrestrained fury they created exactly the kind of unruly brutality that is boxing’s central implication.
That fight radiates a violence even now and no watching human can deny its force, whether it is to be appalled by it or scared, to be exultant or energised.
There is a science to it, but sometimes, the simplicity of men beating each other up trumps everything.
This fight was a reminder that one of the ways man wins a fight is by not getting beaten up, as opposed to beating the other man down.
Mayweather’s masterful elusiveness stood out again and it holds appeal, but in a contrarian way.
Its reactivity and subtlety can be appreciated, if not widely loved.
There were stirring moments, but nothing prolonged.
This really was science, feeling ultimately like walking into a movie theatre expecting to watch Interstellar and instead sitting through an actual lecture on theoretical physics.
osamiuddin@thenational.ae
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