Though this may be disputed by those with weak hands and uninformed minds, it is largely accepted that boxing is the most difficult of sports. Golf may be more frustrating, baseball may be more complex. Wrestling almost certainly requires better conditioning and many sports require more strength. Still boxing is the hardest, if for no other reason than it requires the athlete, the fighter, to excel under the considerable duress of his (or her) opponents best blows.
Moreover, though it takes a team to properly prepare for a fight, the fighter enters, fights and stands alone on the ring. So while a team has a system for support during competition, and can deflect blame thereafter, the fighters have only themselves. Finally, the format of the competition is itself inherently difficult. While other sports have pauses in action, planned breaks and intermissions and available timeouts, boxing is continuous, from bell to bell. Stopping is, in and of itself, grounds for defeat.
Consequently, boxing represents a significant challenge, but it also presents a interesting opportunity. It is, in it's essence, an ultimate expression of competition. That is to say reflects the principles of evolution not only in terms of fitness, but also survival. Fighting is the base condition of human life, as life itself must battle its alternative. One fighter prevailing against another is an inevitable echo of the victory of lesser organisms and the existence of the world we know. In other words reality itself was formed in the same manner as the combat sport. Victory or defeat. Survival or death.
It is for this reason that the breakdown in the order of less consequential sports, such as hockey or football, results in blows being thrown, while an inverse situation is absurd. Imagine a irate fighter trying to throw a pigskin or shoot a puck! This would not, and could not, happen because the other forms of competition are elaborate constructs set up as imitations of fighting, just as fighting is an imitation of life. Accordingly, prevailing in the ring represents monumental illustration of existence, a victory that transcends the limits of sports and speaks to the shaping of reality.
You might wonder what the world would be like without you, or without life, but these questions are inconsequential. There was never a reality without you or without life. If two different variables ever existed, their diversity predicates an inevitable inequality. Victory and defeat, life and death were never an option, but a requirement of variance. This disparity shaped reality and the world with you, me and everything else was a certainty.
On my twenty-fourth birthday, on a two-fight win streak, I celebrate boxing and life.
