The Life of Boxing

Such a match-up like this seems pretty cliché, unable to deviate from the normal rivalries and feuds that boxing advertisements try to hone in on before a match. But any fan of boxing knows that in this match, there is no need for fancy marketing or any other corporate schemes here. Oscar De La Hoya, a legend in his own right, coming out to do battle with the next up-and-coming champion of the present generation, Floyd Mayweather, is a match-up made in heaven for the diehard boxing fans.

But was the match really as thrilling as far as the hype went for it? You could argue either ways. One on side, you saw two great fighters battling it out to see who the dominant boxer was. On the other side, you saw a relatively slow and uneventful fight that doesn't seem to differ much from the recent stretch of boxing boredom.

Some feel that the boxing genre is slowly dying, and that's true in a multitude of ways. There's just none of the fervent restlessness that used to plague the nation when two great fighters would deliver "them fighting words" to one another on live national television. Or the buzz of excitement that used to follow the days before a match, or the days when everyone had at least one favorite boxer they used to keep updates on. Perhaps boxing was just a fad, or maybe it was the characters involved in the boxing industry that brought with them an amicable desire to turn this sport into something that everyone could love and relate to, all the while nurturing their own desire to become what they must've considered "the strongest in the world". Whatever it was, it's proportionally gone now.

You could say that boxing isn't what it used to be, and that could be true. But can you entertain the thought that it perhaps became a something little more deep and technical? It hit me when I was watching the Oscar De La Hoya VS Floyd Mayweather fight, that a lot of the boxing fights nowadays are that of fighting science. Occasionally, a mad flurry of punches will come along in an attempt to land a few punches as well as score a point from both the judges and the audience, but a good length of the fight will be that of two fighters using their inherent talent and developed skills in ways that many of us can never fully grasp. We only see what we see, but we cannot understand what we don't experience. We see two men fighting with their fists, yet can you understand that in that ring are two members of the same order, two men striving with their utmost efforts to understand how they can rise to the world with nothing more than their instincts and accumulated fighting knowledge in order to truly become legends.

So, the next time you watch boxing, don't tear your away from the screen because you don't think it's that entertaining. Watch a little longer and you might just see a glimpse of two men, gods of their own fate, living life to the fullest, a little fuller than all of us who watch them ever will.