What was incongruous was the way people dressed.
Inside the ring, Michael Buffer wore impeccable black, his throat dredging up a rumble as he summoned his famous line, “Let’s get ready to rumble!” So were the other ring officials, who looked on at the proceedings and quietly flaunted their importance. So were the security people who waited at the steps of the ring, earpieces stuck to their ears, their eyes surveying their surroundings like a camera panning across a scene.
So were the people in the front rows, men and women dressed to the nines. The men wore three-piece suits, the women power dresses, the kind they did in top-level meetings or in executive offices. This was after all a top-level meeting of some kind and they were doing their job as executives. All around the arena, some men and women were equally dressed to the nines, though not as formally as the ones on front rows.
This was Las Vegas after all, too, home of glitter, and people were not afraid to strut. The men’s eyes roved, surveying the surroundings like a camera panning across a scene for reasons other than security, for reasons that had to do with the instincts of predators. Some of the women advertised their assets openly, which were often enough impressive, as they shed off their coats in their seats. They had gone there to party.
In the center of the ring stood the two fighters, clad only in shorts and fighting shoes, glaring at each other, the glare from the spotlights making their bodies glisten in the arena, or cavern, or womb of a cold night. The sweat would come later when the fighters came to blows, Pacquiao stalking like a predator and Marquez striking out again and again like a prey that refused to be converted to the lower rungs of the food chain. It was a scene that leaped out of the past when homo sapiens hadn’t yet distanced itself greatly from the animal kingdom. It was a game that had played out over the mists of time, a game of life—and death, a game of survival, a game homo sapiens with its capacity for art and perversity had transformed into gladiatorial combat.
At breaks between the rounds, a woman strutted around the ring hoisting a placard that announced the coming round, clad in today’s versions of the leaves that hid Eve’s womanhood in the usual graphic depictions of Eden while the combatants panted on their chairs, the blood that spurted on their faces being wiped away by their corner men. It too leaped out of the mists of time, though the more self-respecting community of women which had evolved from and distanced itself greatly from the animal kingdom might have objected violently to the sight. As violently as the combatants themselves tried to bludgeon each other to death, though that had become metaphorical now.
The contrast did little to mute the sex and violence, it did everything to highlight them. It made them give off a scent, all the more powerful in the pulsating immediacy of things, beyond the anemic remoteness of a TV screen. It was a game too that had played out through time, since the great leap the species made toward consciousness, toward self-awareness, toward being human. The game of life and death between civilization and savageness, between Apollo and Dionysus, between the superego and the id, between reason and instinct, between order and chaos, between evolution and revolution, between the need to get along and the need to conquer.
The veneer of civilization, of politeness, of clothes, broke easily as the fight progressed, as the blows became more furious, as the causes became more desperate. The well-heeled crowd shouted out encouragement to their favorite and emitted vituperations at his foe, the hissing and growling and snarling turning into constant din punctuated by bursts of thunderous roars. Everyone was caught in the bloodlust, much as the audience of the Roman arenas might have been, which cheered on the champions to victory and thumbed down the vanquished to their deaths.
You remembered in the bursts of sanity that pierced the brain amid all this that boxing remained a violent sport. That for all the finesse that had gone into it, for all the small acts of kindnesses that had been lent to it—such as limiting the bouts to 12 rounds and empowering referees to stop a boxer from being hurt mortally, which are not found in far more violent sports—it was a throwback to the dawn of man. Which now looked in (literal) light of the present, to have been the darkness of man.
You thought in the bursts of reason that pierced through the madness that there were two ways of looking at this. One was to condemn it as a thing that encouraged violence, that made the mind go blank, that sent the blood rushing wildly through the veins. That for all the adulation that went the gladiators’ way, they were not the role models you wanted the kids to emulate, that in the end they were the pathetic survivors, however magnificently they have survived, of grinding poverty that made this the only way out of it.
Two was to come to tolerate it, if not welcome it, as a channel for the violent tendencies of society. The way that sci-fi argues it to be, in the form of movies that depict a future not far from now where some violent sport or other is sanctioned by a society that has found harmony and peace to dissipate murder and mayhem the way you gather garbage and dispose of it in a garbage can. That at the end of that orgy of ritual bloodletting, of that regurgitation of bile, of that letting loose a primal scream, you do not go out to rape and pillage, you go back tamely, timidly, to your humdrum life.
I don’t know, I am of two minds about it. My mind and heart are fighting it out in one frenetic title match.
It’s all so very incongruous.