Wednesday 1 February 2012

Wynford Vaughan-Thomas on: Boxing


It was a chilly Friday afternoon and I was minding my own business, exercising my pointing finger, when that bloody blue car quietly crested the hill.  My heart sank and I watched Coyote and Roadrunner slowly approach the gate by my viewpoint...

...and they carried on!  They drove past!  Coyote honked his horn at me and that was it.  Oh, the sigh of relief was divine.  Well; it would have been...if I wasn't made of slate.  But you get the idea.  I resumed flexing my pointing finger with a smile; it seemed they had finally tired of dragging things up the Dylife mountain road and braving the sub-zero temperatures to create ridiculous blog posts.  What is a blog, anyway?  Is it a big log?  Or something to do with a lavatory?  The mind bloggles.

Alas, my relief was short-lived.  The following day they reappeared and shoved a boxing glove on the end of my hand.  Bastards.

Boxing.  It's not like it was in my day.  Back then (when everything was in sepia), boxing was something that happened inside pubs.  None of these namby-pamby gloves and gumshields, oh no.  Just men - very drunk men - knocking seven shades of crap out of each other after a disagreement over what type of cheese was in the ploughman's.  Bare-fisted, badly coordinated men flailing around blindly, slurring expletives at each other through cigarette-toting lips.  Then when the bartender finally settles the argument by revealing that the cheese was indeed cheddar, they shake hands and buy each other a pint.

Today's boxing: two athletes engaged in a testosterone-fuelled sport that combines stamina, speed, power and grit.  Locked in round after round of muscle-jarring, bone-cracking battle to claim the ultimate prizes...a belt and a purse.  A BELT and a PURSE.  No wonder more women are taking up the sport these days.

I prefer croquet.  Much more masculine. 

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