There is a tragic quality about a prizefighter. He can be champion one day and dead in the streets the next. It is what makes him a compelling figure. The prizefighter is a piece of meat, but he embodies the strength and frailty of our humanity.
The rise and fall of a fighter has been played and replayed over the hundred or more years of organized boxing. As a fighter rises, we wait for his demise. That is why Mike Tyson is still a compelling figure in boxing. We want to see him succeed again, because we know that his fall will be all the more spectacular. It would be naïve to present the prizefighter as a glorious figure of success. Many are decrepit and pathetic human beings. However, it would be inaccurate to merely portray them as victims of an exploitive culture of violence and entertainment.
A PBS documentary on the first recognized "black" World Heavyweight Champion Jack Johnson demonstrated how he was a skillfully self-promoting and financially successful champion. Of course Jack Johnson, in spite of his savvy in and outside of the ring, eventually fell victim to his own proclivity for women, with a little help from trumped up charges of prostitution (violating the Mann Act). But what brought Jack Johnson down is precisely what makes him a compelling figure. The arrogant braggadocio, the confident and supremely talented showman who appears utterly invulnerable, attracts audiences and animates the spectacle. But people do not want heroes who are invulnerable, even Superman had to die.
Jack Johnson was never a hero and never claimed to be. He told the world to fuck off when they questioned his relations with white women, because who would make him do otherwise? Jack Johnson was an intimidating human specimen, and when he told the world off, no one was going to change his mind.
But of course there is a Hobbesian quality to the downfall of a hulking champion. In the state of nature, Hobbes contends, even the most strongest and capable individual will succumb to the subversive activity of the weakest. Those who loathed the sight of a black champion schemed to depose Johnson. A man’s downfall is never exclusively the product of conspiratorial action; he himself plants the seeds of his demise. He relished the role of a promiscuous, virile, and dominant pugilist. In the end, he was not invulnerable. Jack Johnson, to paraphrase a modern wrestling promoter, screwed Jack Johnson; and that is why is he a legend.
To fall is to be human. To plummet from great heights makes a man legendary through infamy. The one who falls and falls hard, we eulogize. Johnson, Liston, La Motta, Foreman, Tyson, and the list goes on and on. Whether it was Foreman in Zaire 1974, Liston in Miami 1964, or Tyson in Tokyo 1990, they were all unstoppable beasts that were stopped. They all reinforce what Hobbes intimated, “nobody is naturally invulnerable”. Indeed, we find comfort in that and find even greater comfort in the spectacle that tears down the most intimidating figure. Modernity has a taste for scandal and failure-as-spectacle. It is bemusing in profoundly superficial ways.
