Fanatical Violence

About the riot after last weekend’s Mike Tyson-Evander Holyfield fight, we heard very little. So accustomed are we Americans to the possibility of gunfire, the happy sound of popping champagne corks sent thousands of boxing fans into a panic in the lobby and the parking lots of the MGM Grand. After a two-hour melee, 40 people went to Las Vegas hospitals, while, across town, three teenagers were shot at a post-fight party.

Violence is a familiar companion to us. One outrage follows another on the 11 o’clock news, as we wait for the weather forecast and the baseball scores. Plainly, a riot in some marbled gambling casino in Las Vegas is not big news.

But precisely because violence grows routine in our everyday lives, we are horrified, transfixed by the athlete’s monstrous failure. All week, the persistent conversation across America concerned Tyson. On talk radio, at the exact hour when Hong Kong was reclaimed by China, Americans were busy talking about the Bite. In balletic slow motion, on television all week, over and over, you could watch Tyson reach his mouth to Holyfield’s ear.

In real life, in violent gang fights, kids bite each other on the face, tear at each other’s noses and ears. Worse, they swing at each other’s skull with a bat or they slash at opposing flesh with a knife or aim a gun. (One kid told me recently that he prefers a knife to the gun because the knife prolongs pain.)

In real life, our prisons have become gladiator pits in which the mouth be- comes a lethal weapon. (One ex-convict tells me that only the lips are safe in combat--to go for another man’s lips is to trespass too much upon some area of the erotic. “Ears are easy,” he says with a laugh.)

In real life, despite elaborate rules of engagement, soldiers have been desecrating each other’s bodies since memory. Scalps, fingers, testicles--these are the unhymned trophies of victory, never described in heroic tales.

Because we know of these things, because brutality stalks our world, humans long for encouragement away from the brutal. What does the athlete promise us, finally, if not that--evidence that humans are more than brutes?

The athlete, he (and increasingly she) straddles some line between the realm of the animal and the realm of the angel. The athletic event is plainly a test of body--of strength, endurance, force. But the athletic competition is always governed by intricate rules. And animal skill is honed by intelligence and concentration. Body and mind working together--the spectacle astonishes the crowd.

Because I was never a graceful athlete, I have long been impatient with literary romanticism on the subject of sports, in general, but especially boxing. Who wants to read a hymn to boxing from some overweight writer? And why has boxing interested so many writers, from Joyce Carol Oates to Norman Mailer (who, in real life and in a scuffle, once bit the ear of actor Rip Torn)? The best of the lot, I long thought, the person who has written about boxing with most elegance is A.J. Liebling, who called it “the sweet science.”

But only this week, after Tyson’s telling failure, has it occurred to me why so many writers might be interested in boxing. Here is a sport of naked and brutal intent. But for all its muscularity, boxing demands intelligence, restraint and self-control. Is there anything more extraordinary than a boxer’s ability to stop, mid-swing, at the sound of a bell?

Poets have been singing of athletes for as long as humans have imagined a rhyming line. Ancient poetry celebrates the athlete--the runner, the wrestler, the discus thrower--his poetry of body and spirit.

In the realm of ideals and epic poetry, the athlete cannot be a brute. The true athlete teaches an entire society how to take control of our brutal instincts. The athlete literally minds his muscles, governs fury, manages exhaustion, channels rage. The athlete turns contest into an exercise of the mind and will.

About the Tyson matter, more than one sportswriter this week repeated the commonplace--that boxing has always given kids in the slums a way out. But what happens when the kid brings the streets with him into the ring?

Truth is, Tyson is not exceptional in today’s America. There are Tysons all over this country--in suburbs and inner cities--just as violent, as suicidal, as sad, as ready to frenzy, out of control.

Truth is, too, the athlete--the ideal about which the ancients sang--is becoming rarer in our society. Our real world is slipping onto the playing field. The chaos in the parking lot is becoming the chaos in the ring.

The sports pages used to be the part of the newspaper where you could leave the real world and escape to idealized contests. No longer. Today’s athlete, both professional and amateur, is under arrest for gun possession, or drug charges, or wife beating, or murder. The thug plays football, the thug plays baseball, the thug is a boxer. Fans of hockey cheer when thugs duke it out on the ice.

It is not only in this country where real life is invading the idealized grounds of the playing field. In San Salvador this week, officials at the World Cup preliminaries were worried about the physical safety of the visiting American team. It was not the opposing players who posed lethal danger. It was the fan in the bleachers who threatened mayhem.

Etymologically, the word “fan” is related to the word fanatic, and leads us back to bedlam and to madness. (In Spanish, sports fans are called fanaticos.) We dare not forget it. If athletics can enoble the spectator, they can also be undermined by the spectator.

England, sweet, gentle England of the travel posters, is famous for its Saturday football goons. They stand, all through the soccer match, waiting in the pit of a dank stadium for the chance to push through the fence and attack the fans of the opposing team.

In America, arguably the most popular spectator sport today is professional wrestling. The steroid circus. Any night of the week at the matches, you can watch some cartoon monster feign to bite the neck or the face or the ear of his heroic opponent. But if the contest is utterly fake, the audience is real.

Take a look sometime when the camera pans the audience at a pro-wrestling extravanganza. There are adults in the audience, there are parents, grandmothers, typical Americans, for whom the spectacle of mayhem is worth 15 bucks.

There are ancient examples when the everyday violence of the streets, mundane blood lust, invaded the idealized realm of athletics. Ancient Rome offers the best example.

The Roman mob came to the Colisseum, wanting brutality not grace. Let the brutes fight it out--the last one standing is winner. Or let man fight it out with the beast.

The good news this week was that Americans were troubled by the spectacle of an athlete biting his opponent. We were shocked by the brute. But the truth is we live in a country so brutish now that the popping of champagne corks reminds us of guns.