Pullman and Pugilism

Well well, it’s been quite a week. What I’m holding in this picture is a copy of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. If you haven’t heard of him (which I hadn’t until I got here), he’s an incredibly articulate atheist who is very put out with C. S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia because of the message they send children. So in response to good ol’ Jack and all of us who grew up loving The Chronicles, he wrote and published a kid’s series that sends a very humanist message. The books have a really different feel than Peter and the gang in Narnia, but they are still well written stories…all 1016 BIG pages of them. I had a week and a half to knock it all out, as well as put together an hour long presentation on T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland. Yeah, that one’s no cake walk either. If it looks like my left eye is swollen in the picture, it’s because it is. I think I’ve strained it from all my reading ;0). But as of 2:30 last night, I am officially finished with all the work for both of my tutorials, and I have a weekend in Wales awaiting me, so perhaps my eye will recover over my break.

Tonight after dinner, my roommate Adam and I went to the 99th annual Oxford Cambridge boxing match at Town Hall. We had bought tickets last week, and had been looking forward to this ever since. Like I said in an earlier post, I’ve been working out pretty frequently with the University of Oxford Boxing Club while I’ve been over here, so it was kind of neat to see the guys I work out with actually in the ring.

Each school supplied 8 fighters, starting with 2 sets of girls and rounding off with the two heavy weights at the end. Each pair of fighters faced off for 3, 2-minute rounds before the judges handed their decision cards to the announcer, who informed the rest of us of the winner in dramatic fashion. Oxford ended up winning the coveted titled/cup back from Cambridge, who apparently held it from last year.

As Adam and I walked home from the match, I struggled to make sense of my feelings about the evening. One side of me was slightly appalled at the brutality of the whole event. The first Oxford fighter (the lighter of our two females) was gushing blood from her nose before her first round ended and the intensity of the fight only increasing as she became more tired and her defense began to wane. The effect a steady and affective hit parade had on the crowd was also mildly disturbing, but I found myself caught up in the excitement as well. It was as if we could sense when a fighter was rallying all the strength left in a battered and incredibly fatigued body for one final assault before the bell, and we fed off of that barbaric energy. I found myself, perhaps, understanding a little better how the Romans could go to the Coliseum to watch Gladiatorial combat for entertainment. And these feelings upset me a little.

But at the same time, there was an honest beauty in the technique I knew was there in a good fighter. Even with untrained eyes, I could tell who was boxing and who was just fighting. And the boxer’s head won out over the brute strength of the fighter more often than not. I saw the good boxers continually learn from and adjust to their opponents, even in the mere 6 minutes of fighting they had in the ring. By the end, when their opponent was completely wasted, the boxer was still calm and collected and knew exactly how to manipulate the adversary to expose the weak points in his defense and make every punch count.

And so, I’m not sure what to make of this brutally beautiful sport. Maybe they’ll let me in the ring and I’ll get my nose broken or some teeth knocked out and that will make up my mind for me. But until then, I’m still going to keep going to the training and learn what I can while sweating like pig.