"Pick Your Punch" and "Not What You Want, Never When You Want It"
Two CNF Micros by Jack B. Bedell, Artwork by Oliver Murdick
Pick Your Punch
Instead of coming in to ask what whole fight we should watch, lately my son’s been asking me for favorites lists, like who had the best jab or defense or what’s my favorite round ever. This time it was best punch I’ve seen. That one caused some real conflict. I mean, should I pick a punch I loved because I was begging for it to happen, like Frazier’s godly left hook that dropped Ali in their first fight, or the miracle right Marciano threw to rescue his second title defense against Ezzard Charles? Or should I pick a punch that had to happen for everyone’s sake, like Joe Louis’s cross that floored Schmeling and shut up Hitler for a bit? Then what about brute force punches like Liston’s H-bomb rights in both his bouts with Patterson or the Lennox Lewis shot that opened Klitschko’s eye socket? Because of the whole who-what-when-where of watching it happen with my dad, though, I had to go with George Foreman’s walk-by uppercut that crumpled Gerry Cooney. The casual violence of it. The thump. The way Dad smiled when he heard the punch, how easy it was to tell that sound echoed back through 70 years of punches he’d seen. Yeah, that was definitely one to revisit.
Not What You Want, Never When You Want It
My son came into the room last night with an existential question. He really wanted to know why we never got to see Lennox Lewis and Mike Tyson fight in their primes. As much as I wanted to counter his question with “Which prime?” or the even more dangerous “What difference would it have made?,” I told him in an ideal world some international boxing agency would take care of us by setting up the schedule of fights between contenders and champions, like the NFL or NBA or even World Rugby does. But boxing is far from ideal, and the alphabet soup of governing bodies care more about the earning potential of their belt holders than finding out who the best heavyweight of a generation might be. So we’ll never get Bowe/Tyson, or Lewis/Bowe, or even Tyson/Holyfield until it’s too late, or too predictable. We get to watch Tyson way past his expiration date eating jabs and eventually being floored by an in-shape, still-prime Lewis. As a perk, though, the system frees us to believe Tyson would’ve cakewalked Lewis in their 20s, or that Joe Frazier would’ve stepped right through Kenny Norton, or that Riddick Bowe or George Foreman would’ve fed Tyson his own teeth. And in the end, those kind of fantasies keep us afloat until the next big fight they sell us.