By Bart Barry-
SAN ANTONIO – Friday the emergency alert came on everyone’s cell round noon local time and read “punishable by a fine of $250” for those Texans caught in public maskless. To get ahead of what petulant witlings compose his base, too, the governor went so far as to say one’s nose and mouth must be covered by his mask. A timid, halting ascent from madness this has been; first mayors were forbidden from requiring masks then private companies were required to enforce masks then finally, after trying every other thing, the governor started to do the right thing.
Often wrong but never uncertain, Texas officials now indicate their new plan will suffice with much the confidence they brought to their premature-opening plan. The townspeople, spooked, again, ain’t likely to sustain an economic recovery any time soon, howsoever desperate they are for it.
Boxing brings no respite to their anxieties. Given an open platform on America’s largest sports network prizefighting has shoveled refuse at us, reminding aficionados if not network execs why giving promoters exclusive contracts is such a terrible idea. Thus far it’s only ESPN that looks rolled, but soon it will be DAZN’s turn. Everyone will tell you he’s doing the best he can in extraordinary circumstances – the fighters just want to make meaningful fights; the promoters are hustling everywhere to bring you high quality whatevers – and everyone is lying. The fighters, finally freed from an obligation to look hungry, are, with nary an exception, fine with a sabbatical. The promoters, given a choice between taking a financial loss to keep their best men busy or waiting them out, fill their cards with an ever dwindling demographic: Men who need money enough to risk their lives for it, and are COVID-19 negative.
This portends nothing so much as tuneups far as the eye can see; excepting only Tyson Fury and Canelo Alvarez every other a-side fighter intends a couple tuneups before reimmersion, which means a probable end to competitive prizefighting till at least March.
And they’re right. This period of lost immersion will be ruinous to many prizefighters. They’ve lost the language of the thing. Few are the men who’ve suffered a professional fighter’s trainingcamp and would endure it again freely. If a man is already in the masochistic rhythm of prefight rituals and some shortmoney opportunity arises he takes it because it may be his rare shot. But when he knows no momentum lurks, win or lose, better to find a job doing something else. Hell, not even the oftcited ecstasy of a crowd is on offer till 2021.
This lost immersion affects every performer, every audiencemember. Last week I was reading Based on a True Story by Norm MacDonald, the Canadian comedian, and considering how this idea of immersion explains much of what is lost by such a performer if there is no audience. To watch MacDonald on YouTube clips is to laugh a goodish amount though nowhere near so much as do those oncamera with him; something about the man’s simple presence is funny, that be his unconscious competence, and often as not you find yourself laughing at laughter’s contagion more than his jokes. And he knows this and has spent decades observing it in others and cultivating it, immersing himself in what is funny till he glows with it, tastes like it, stinks with it.
MacDonald has found a way to make others laugh without being funny, the way some men – accounts of Sonny Liston spring to mind, here – needn’t do a single menacing thing to frighten a room. Some of this is repetitions, certainly no one ever achieved unconscious competence without a stint in conscious incompetence, but more of it is lifestyle. Regardless of talent MacDonald never would’ve become automatically funny without immersion in other comics – not watching them on YouTube but being in the same room with them for thousands of hours, laughing with them and being laughed-at by them, capturing the essence of what is funny then distilling it and distilling it till he knew it by scent and flavor.
Boxing works the same way, though at a rate faster as it is corrosive, because being unconsciously funny is a hell of a better life than being unconsciously violent. The common metaphor we use for boxing’s unconscious competence is edge or something similarly dangerous. It is a full being; a man who is in fighting trim and reflexively belligerent and unblemished by mercy; a man so complete in his commitment to sanctioned violence th’t he enters a confrontation with a clear mind and reacts; a man who no longer has to think how to hurt another man but be given the opportunity. It is not a pleasant state, whatever its rewards of status, and who that might escape it wouldn’t? And most every prizefighter you can name and more certainly those you cannot are now on a forced sabbatical from this, starting 100 days ago.
Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry
