101. Blow by Blow
I needed the break but I’m happy to be back blogging away. For no particular reason I’ve decided to talk about the sport of boxing this week. This is probably not a subject that the ladies will enjoy but I wanted to explore why it is that men (and more recently women} find the idea of trying to bash another person’s brains out appealing.
The sport goes back as far as the Sumerian civilization and, later, the early Olympic Games. Then in the eighteenth and into the twentieth centuries, bare-knuckle boxing was popular before the Marquess of Queensbury introduced the set of rules that apply to modern boxing with gloves, as well as the originally 15 rounds of 3 minutes each, now reduced to 12 rounds.
It was also regarded as a normal sport for schoolboys, certainly in the years that I was at school until 1954. Most schools have now dropped the sport, but clubs and gyms have continued to make the sport available to men and boys of all ages.
John Sholto Douglas, the 9th Marquess of Queensbury (1844–1900) was a keen sportsman and a great supporter of boxing. He also played cricket, rode racehorses and was an active foxhunter. Regarded as a brutish man; he became infamous for his attacks on Oscar Wilde, due to the fact that his third son Alfred “Bosie” Douglas had an affair with Wilde, resulting in the writer eventually being jailed for two years. It was also rumored that his first son Francis Viscount Drumlanrig had an affair with the Liberal prime minister, Lord Roseberry. The marquess was also the founder and patron of the Amateur Athletic Association of England that drew up the boxing rules and named them the Queensbury Rules.
I was surprised to discover that women’s boxing goes back as far as the early eighteenth century. A women’s exhibition match was held at the 1904 Olympic Games, but women’s boxing was only formally added to the Olympics as late as 2012.
So, what’s the attraction to the sport? From the point of view of the spectators, vicious contact sports go back to the Roman Empire and probably much earlier. Roman gladiators fought to the death – to the delight of the spectators, including the emperor and his cronies.
Public executions ranging from hangings, the guillotine, the electric chair to (more recently) lethal injections have been attended by spectators. It seems that we of the human race have some kind of fascination with violence.
But what about the contestants? How do they feel about boxing? I can speak from personal experience, having had my first match at the age of about seven at a prep (primary) school in Weybridge. Did I go into the ring terrified of getting hurt? No. My reaction was simply that I wanted to win. I wanted to prove that I was stronger and perhaps more skilled. I had been fortunate that my uncle had given me a priceless tip about the sport. He explained that trying to land an effective blow on your opponent depends on your ability to punch hard and that most beginners simply swing their fists in the hope of hitting the other person. However, if one swings the shoulder behind the punch, it adds more power and weight to the blow.
Did I want to hurt my opponent? Was I naturally aggressive? Not really, I just wanted to win in the same way that I wanted to win at tennis, rugby or any other sport. If the sport involved some violence, so be it. I was just determined to be better at it than the other guy. I won my first fight but in the second I was beaten by a kid who was more skilled than I was. It was a valuable lesson. The fact that I was clearly stronger did not necessarily mean I was bound to win. I never lost another fight after that.
Arriving in South Africa as a skinny, rather malnourished ten-year-old with a lisp and difficulty pronouncing my rs, I was a prime target for the bullies at St. Georges Grammar School where I spent two years when we first arrived in Cape Town. After a prolonged bout of teasing and mocking, I finally lashed out at the bully-in-chief and caught him on the side of the chin. He staggered back and nearly dropped, then looked at me in amazement. They never touched me again.
I joined the school’s boxing club. The school employed a wonderful old character called George “Panther” Purchase, a former South African middleweight champion, to coach us. He drove an old and rather battered Plymouth, cramming the four boys from the school into the vehicle as it wheezed its way to the gym where we trained. I fought in two tournaments, winning both, before my parents sent me off to Michaelhouse outside Durban in Natal. My uncle Dennis had been there previously. My mother went to the sister school, St. Anne’s. Despite it being about 1,200 miles away from our home in Cape Town, it was felt that I should attend one of the five top schools in the country. Panther Purchase was saddened. He had entered me into the Western Province championships the following year and he felt I could win it.
MIchaelhouse had a boxing team, but for some reason or other I did not join it, rather concentrating on rugby, hockey and athletics. However, my good friend Derek Lucas (a giant of a young man who became the school’s heavyweight champion at the early age of sixteen) was obliged to box in an exhibition match in order to retain his title. The problem was no one wanted to oppose him even in an exhibition match. He had approached some of the teachers but even they refused. Derry, as we called him, had knocked out most of his previous opponents and had reached the final of the Natal Provincial Junior championships, only to be knocked out himself. He had what was called a “glass jaw.” No matter how strong he was, a blow to the jaw put him out for the count. I was always inclined to accept a challenge and when Derry pleaded with me to oppose him in the exhibition match, I accepted, thinking “we’re good friends, he won’t want to hurt me.” Just before we went into the ring, Derry turned to me and said, “Hit me as hard as you like but if you go near my jaw, I’ll knock your head off your shoulders!” I regret that it wasn’t much of a fight. I spent the three rounds hammering away at his body and avoiding his head and chin like the plague. Anyway, it gave him the title – and a few comments from teachers who had turned down the offer to fight Derry, to the effect I was mad to have gone in the ring with him.
The following year, Derry had left the school. I was a year behind him, and I was asked to enter the school championships in order to contest the now-vacant heavyweight title. I agreed but soon discovered that, after opposing the fearsome Derry Lucas the year before, no one wanted to fight me. So, to my chagrin, I had to fight another exhibition against a middleweight, Duncan Starling, who was also unopposed. He also happened to be the most skilled boxer in the school. I took the fight rather casually. One of the rules of an exhibition was that one should never knock out an opponent but rather show one’s pugilistic skills.
Duncan clearly had not been given this data. He was not that much smaller than me and he was a tiger. In the first round, for the first time, I received a hammering and at one point felt I was about to be knocked out. I had pulled my punches up until that moment, but for the sake of survival I started to box for real. By the end of the round, Duncan was staggering. My punches were powerful and despite his superior skills, I had him literally on the ropes. We got into a clinch and I muttered to him to stop trying to knock me out or I would return the compliment.
Duncan didn’t really get it and the next two rounds were rated one of the best fights ever seen at the school. We came out of the ring, both bleeding profusely. I had nothing but admiration for Duncan who was not intimidated by fighting a bigger boxer. It was my last fight in the ring, although I had a few more later as a bouncer and other confrontations.
During my three years in British television, I met a number of world champion boxers, ranging from Floyd Patterson to Henry “Hank Homicide” Armstrong and Georges Carpentier (an amazing small and dapper French gentleman who had somehow won the Heavyweight title despite being many pounds lighter than his opponents). I became friendly with Freddie Mills who appeared on a number of TV shows as a colorful and comedic personality. He was the only one of those I met who was clearly a little “punch drunk.”
So, what do I feel about the so-called “noble sport” of boxing today? It’s a crazy and foolish activity, but like a number of other dangerous and life-threatening pursuits, the adrenalin rush overrides all other considerations at the time. This will make sense to some and sheer idiocy to others. So be it!
Today, I’m content to confine my fading adrenalin rushes to the excitement of seeing the ExoBrain technology rapidly evolving to the point where the ExoBrain III is revealed to the world, in addition to my other creative pursuits. Fortunately, boxing and rugby didn’t scramble my brain cells to the point where my creativity was impaired. Combining the arts with violent contact sports may seem oddly contradictory but it has somehow worked for me. I can’t wait to combine my writing skills with the ease and simplicity of the ExoBrain computing system as soon as it is launched.
An ExoTech Ltd shareholder, Chris is currently authoring two of the four books to be published the day ExoBrain launches and has helped to create ExoBrain’s introductory video to the Confidential Technical Briefing. Chris has spent his working life in the film and television industry, starting with BBC Television in London, then ATV in Birmingham becoming, at the time, the youngest Studio Manager in Britain.
Later, in South Africa, he wrote and directed film and TV commercials, having four South African entries at the Cannes Advertising Festival. After a number of years of writing and directing or producing documentaries (eight international awards) and corporate videos, he concentrated on writing feature film screenplays (five screened) and television series (seven screened). He has a novel, ”Pursuit of Treachery,” with a literary agent and is currently obtaining finance for an action adventure feature film he has written and is co-producing. He is a published poet and has given many readings.