People who are turned off by fight sports, I think, most of them are inuslated from the real world.
“Two people fighting, it’s barbaric, we’ve progressed from the caveman days. We should ban boxing!”
Those folks saying some version of that should tune in to the “Countdown To Canelo vs GGG 2” docu-mercial.
They will hear both Canelo Alvarez and Gennady Golovkin share some insights into what the real world can be like. Brutality is ever present in pockets where the well scrubbed and monied don’t dare to tread, where the mass media is not present, where day to day living is more often a dangerous endeavor than an hourly grounds for offering praise to an almighty for the grandeur of it all.
Both fighters, who glove up for a boatload of cash September 15 in Las Vegas, and on pay-per-view, came from places that entitled folks like me read about, maybe, but can’t truly know unless they are from that place.
“One time, one of them tried to throw a rock at me,” says Canelo, who grew up in Guadalajara, Mexico.
“He actually threatened me. I knocked him to the ground, and he was laying there. And then I grabbed him by the head, and then I pummeled him to the ground, like this,” he recounted, grinning slightly. “And that’s when my sister-in-law came out. And she said, ‘Let go, you are going to kill him!’’’
Yes, violence is present, all day, every day, everywhere, some places more than others. That’s something to think about when some of you opine that we should be ruthless about our borders, let nobody in. Hello, people come from places that make the worst of our neighborhoods look like Beverly Hills 90210, and that’s why they sometimes trek a thousand miles to try and gain entry to our soil.
The narrator informs us that most often, there are no “draws” on the street. The rules, the regulations are not so often present or adhered to. Passion boils over; sometimes to a lethal level.
In Kazahkstan, GGG recalled, he used to scrap on the street, too.
“He grew up on the streets,” trainer Abel Sanchez says. “Probably the roughest part of Kazahkstan.”
Nobody going to take my shoes or shirt. I will fight them to defend against that.
“Everybody has gun, everybody has knife,” GGG says, while he’s getting made up to shoot a commercial with Canelo. “Everybody has baseball bats.”
So, there were drama shows back then, too. But the stakes were so different. Pride, mostly. Pride, no purse.
Canelo had maybe 100 street fights, he shared. Yep, being a redhead ain’t easy. Being different meant being bullied. From age five until 12 or so, he’d scrap. No gloves, no refs, no mercy.
We see Rosie Perez, the fight fan/actress, speak to the appeal of watching a street fight, and she doesn’t apologize for that side of us which is entertained by such fare. So, do you understand that it is better that we have professional fighting, organized, structured, with rules and regulations?
Fighting is in the blood and bones of some of us, or, I should say, them. Yes, better they sort it out in Las Vegas, and get paid pretty pennies to do it. They are the lucky ones; in so many places, the fighting takes place in alleys, in grubby streets with no oversight. They are different, built different in heart and mind, and these guys were born to do this.
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