Sanctioned Violence
The realities of amateur boxing
NORAH BOWMAN
I can hit my opponent as many times as I am able. I can break her nose, smash her teeth, and knock her unconscious. I can, if I am able, give her a three-day headache and make her forget her name and her hometown.
Training to box is one thing –– running fifteen flights of stairs, catching a medicine ball with your stomach, throwing combinations at the hand pads. It is great fun — fun akin to the pleasure of riding a BMX down a pot-holed dirt road, or building your first tree fort, or shot-gunning your first beer. Training to box is visceral, sweaty, dirty pleasure. Not so for boxing itself, at least not for me, I learned.
After a winter of training, the trainers at Pan Am Boxing Club started to ask me if I would “get my physical.” No, not an awkward come-on; this is one of the great insider compliments of a boxing club. With a Manitoba Amateur Boxing Association physical exam, I could start contact sparring.
So I got my physical. I walked out of the U of M medical centre with the yellow form folded tightly in my back pocket. In the past months of training, I had watched every boxing movie at Movie Village. I bookmarked the Women in Boxing website. Sometimes in my sleep I would wake up throwing combinations, obsessing over the perfect hook and cross combination.
I took the physical form and forty bucks registration to the boxing club and I gave it to the trainer. He didn’t exactly smile. He gave me the insider nod, like when the guy at Music Trader approves of the CD you bought. Silent mutual approval; an understanding that you are both ready for what you both know is great.
What this moment of mine really means is that after training, I can now strap on headgear still damp with the previous boxer’s sweat, put on huge protective sparring gloves, slip in my mouth guard and join the boxers around the ring.
The first time I got in the ring I was too dumb to be scared. My hands were up, but I walked right into a hard and fast right cross. I didn’t know that being hit in the head is unlike any other sensation — and I mean any other. Sure, there are stars and everything is slow and all the voices are far away, but there is also a deep, terrifying pain. Learning to feel this — to look right back and make my opponent feel like this — this was my first lesson. The lesson known as “Taking A Punch.”
I sparred for a few months. I took a lot of punches. I nurtured a lot of fat lips, a swollen nose, and a burst vessel in my eye. I landed one punch for every ten I took. I had intimate and exciting conversations in the locker room after sparring. I trained as hard as my body let me. I studied the better fighters.
What I didn’t ever do was really learn how to take a punch. Now, after a few months of sparring, I have decided that I don’t mind not learning that lesson. Getting hit hurts, and hitting someone else means wanting to make them hurt a lot too. Inside the ring, between the first bell and the last bell, I can hit my opponent as many times as I am able. I can break her nose, smash her teeth, and knock her unconscious. I can, if I am able, give her a three-day headache and make her forget her name and her hometown. After we do this to each other we likely shake hands, smile and say “Good fight.”
Violence. This is polite, sanctioned, controlled violence. Boxers don’t die in amateur boxing. At the Pan-Am the trainers watch us like hawks, and more than once told me to get out of the ring when I was hit too hard and stumbling too slowly.
What I now know about myself, though, is that I don’t want to learn how to get hit and hit back as hard as I’ve just been hit. Not unless there is something more than a bell and a pat on the back to compel me. Not unless there is the safety: the real, nonsanctioned, no-headgear protected, no-trainer controlled, safety of a person at stake. I’m not, it turns out, as much of a fighter as I thought. I’ll hit the heavy bag and I’ll one-two the hand pads. But neither in the ring of sport, nor the ring of war, am I suited to voluntary sanctioned violence.
But hey — don’t think I’m taking down the Muhammad Ali poster from above my bed just yet.
