Channeling Norman Mailer

The Calzaghe-Jones fight is tomorrow night. I’ve always deeply respected boxing, and ever since getting HBO it’s become a new little hobby, a slight step up from my main collegiate hobby of gluing beer bottle caps to the ceiling, or testing which detergents actually make for the freshest smelling laundry. But anything requiring a hot glue gun or sniffing your sweatpants like crack either belongs on closed-circuit television or in a halfway house, definitely not fraternities. Yet for a pale weak washed up distance runner, such as myself, the badass tattooed prize-fighter seems to exhibit a strong allure. Ever seen that nanosecond glance between a fighter right after a knockout and his girlfriend sitting ringside in a cocktail dress? It’s the human equivalent of a lion killing a gazelle and then roaring to the whole pack that the feast is ready, pretty hot. I guess we’re most drawn to that which best conforms to our own self delusions. Ha. Ha. Both fighters are future Hall of Famers and looking to finish their careers with a big win. They’re also both superlative businessmen, their promotional outfits co-produced this whole thing from start to finish, an extreme rarity. They are simultaneously partners and adversaries. This makes for an entertaining pre-fight build-up, as two people who clearly like each other have to exhibit faux-hate to make for a more compelling narrative. Their incentive is to advance their business interest by pretending to hate the one person for whom their business interest actually depends. This split-personality incentive actually makes for a fuzzier, more intelligent sport (and also more enduring because they are masters of their own destinies). And as far as picks, from the guy who thought the Seahawks would be incredible this year no less (on a related note: dammit), Calzaghe is the very real deal. He can shift between straight power punches and super-smooth combos at will, and is flat out awesome in the later rounds, where so far no one has been able to keep up, even a little. He does seem undersized relative to Roy Jones Jr, the first man in over a century to carry both the light heavyweight and heavyweight titles, and size can overcome even significant ability gaps. Otherwise he seems hard to beat – except maybe by a close friend.