Boxing is all about how cool and controlled and clear your mind is. Violence only gets in the way of you winning a fight. It's a sport that's more about the strategy than anything. You lose or you win in your head.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
There's a truth to the violence of boxing. You have a very real threat, an opponent.
Boxing is like chess. You encourage your opponent to make mistakes so you can capitalise on it. People think you get in the ring and see the red mist, but it's not about aggression. Avoiding getting knocked out is tactical.
It's less about the physical training, in the end, than it is about the mental preparation: boxing is a chess game. You have to be skilled enough and have trained hard enough to know how many different ways you can counterattack in any situation, at any moment.
In boxing, you get hit, it's painful, then you sit on the stool when the adrenaline is gone and you feel that pain. And then you fight the next round.
Although not considered a martial art, boxing is really a martial art. It's a very limited martial art as long as you agree to just box... but in an actual physical fight against someone who's just a wrestler, you're going to get killed.
It's not just the physical aspect of boxing, it's the whole fighter mentality that has been ingrained in me through the years as a competitive athlete. One of the hardest things you'll ever do is to box - to get into the ring and to face off with somebody whose whole goal is to knock you out, to hurt you, and to be able to fight back.
Fighting means you could lose. Bullying means you can't. A bully wants to beat somebody; he doesn't want to fight somebody.
Boxing is a formal, ritualized creation of crisis.
Boxing's a sport that gives you licence to act like an idiot, I think.
Boxing is about being hit rather more than it is about hitting, just as it is about feeling pain, if not devastating psychological paralysis, more than it is about winning.