Though ESPN is now my homepage and I regularly have 15-20 different tabs of sporting-related articles open at a time, I didn’t like the majority of sports when I was young. My family never gathered around the TV for Hockey Night In Canada, and the only sports programming my dad did tune in for, my parents deemed unsuitable for a child. But this only served to enflame my interest in the one sport I wasn’t permitted to like—boxing.
My dad loved to tell me how, 45 years ago last Tuesday, the second-greatest Canadian fighter in history, George Chuvalo, stood 15 rounds with the champ at Maple Leaf Gardens. My father, 14 years old at the time, listened to the radiocast of the fight from his bed and winced along with every blow to the iron-jawed Croatian-Canadian. Still, through 15 rounds he was convinced that Chuvalo was in it, that he might deliver the greatest upset of all time.
Years later, he saw archival footage of that same fight and was shocked to see the one-sided beating Chuvalo had received. In this way, the demise of radio was a body blow to the sport of boxing. No longer could mismatched or boring fights hide beneath an electrifying shroud of patter woven by dulcet-tongued broadcasters.
When I reached the age of 10, I was no longer required to leave the room when the TV turned to boxing. But my first reaction upon seeing a fight was horror. My parents’ pacifism (and veganism) had rubbed off strongly on me, and the sport seemed barbaric to my youthful eyes. Still, it was something my father and I could talk about, so I stuck it out. Over time I developed an appreciation. Not for the sociopathically brutal Mike Tyson, but for some of the other great fighters of the 1990s and early 2000s, like Lennox Lewis and Roy Jones, Jr.
When I was 14 I joined a boxing club with my father and best friend only to quit after realizing that, along with being strongly against violence done to me, I really didn’t want cauliflower ears. A year later I pitched in to see my first ever pay-per-view match—an egregiously overhyped spectacle wherein Oscar de la Hoya, the Golden Boy, suddenly looked very, very old against an unimpressive Shane Mosley. Two summers ago, after a long, late day at work, I remember ignoring both signage and the safety of my fellow commuters in order to get home, pick up my dad, and then sprint off to the nearest bar to watch Manny Pacquiao fight against the highly heralded Ricky Hatton, who was out cold before we completed our drink order.
These memories are bittersweet to me. All these little failures, all these weak title fights and HBO pay-per-view extravaganza flops have signalled the end of boxing as I know it. The sport is dying, soon to be universally replaced by mixed martial arts and the insufferable Dana White.
Boxing is special to me because of the bond it helped me forge with my father and, most of all, because it was beautiful. Rest in peace, boxing.
