Get Her Off the Pitch! Read Online Free PDF Page A

remember this evening. ‘Why do they hate Donald Trump so much?’ I asked Rob. ‘Do they even know who he is?’ When the presence of Jack Nicholson was announced, however, they stopped booing and gave a big cheer. Perhaps they were scared of him. It was a mystery I never got to the bottom of.
    On the plus side, however, it’s a big arena, holding over 21,000 people, and there was plenty of salt popcorn. Rob and I had seats quite a long way back from the action, but we had taken our binoculars, and there were large screens suspended above the ring. I felt really, really bad about how I’d been planning to murder Rob and dispose of his body, but I won’t go on about it. I was now quite glad he was there. And I have to say, the build-up was horribly prolonged for someone already near to a state of hyperventilation, privately fretting about what might unfold within the next hour. Boxers have been known to die in the ring, you know. They have also died in hospital afterwards, without recovering consciousness. The crowd goes crazy, I was informed, at the first sight of blood. Holyfield was predicting a knockout in the third. Although JoyceCarol Oates insists in her book that boxing is statistically less dangerous than other mainstream sports such as horseracing, motor-racing and American football (and that therefore liberal middle-class hand-wringing about boxing is less straightforward than it looks), it’s still true that boxing is all about efficiently biffing someone on the head, which is the most violent thing you can do to another person without resorting to weaponry (or to crime).
    It’s all to do with how soft the brain is, and how little protection it has inside the brain box. If the boxing authorities could only find a way of packing the fighters’ cranial cavities with little polystyrene balls, or kapok, or feathers - just for the duration of a fight - a lot of squeamishpeople in the wider world would definitely relax more. But no one has ever come up with a suitable material (or indeed, even tried to), so the brain is left to slosh about inside a hard casing, which isn’t such a good idea when organised biffing is going on. Basically, if you carefully place a nice wobbly milk jelly inside a biscuit tin and then kick it against a wall for half an hour, you get a fair idea of what happens to the human brain during a heavyweight fight. A wellaimed blow from a professional heavyweight carries the equivalent force of 10,000 pounds, says Oates - and you can’t help wondering whether boxers themselves are deliberately cushioned from this kind of information.
    As an ersatz sports writer, I loved the drama of all occasions. I never felt it was my job to testify to greatness, as some sportswriters do; it was my job to see how an unwritten story ineluctably formed itself, in front of my very eyes, from quite unpromising basic ingredients - such as a flat rectangle of grass with lines on it and twenty-twomen in shorts; or an undulating landscape with flags and sand pits at intervals, and dozens of individual men, dressed in natty knitwear, each with a small white ball and a bag of sticks. Waiting for the start of my first heavyweight fight was a moment of reckoning. The basic ingredients here were a spot-lit ring with ropes, and two very large men wearing padded gloves, with designs on each other’s sense of physical well-being. A heavyweight fight was completely different from all other sporting occasions I’d encountered because this ineluctable drama contained in it the potential for ineluctable tragedy, and this was the first time I’d ever had to address anything quite so serious. As Joyce Carol Oates kept reminding me, this was not a metaphor for something else.
    I still wished they would get on with it, though. Even when the fighters finally made their appearance in the arena the suspense was terrible, because it took them such a bloody long time to reach the ring.