I'm teaching her boxing. She has seen the art and beauty, the strange ballet of Vasyl Lomachenko going into the matrix, the uncanny turns and spins, punches in bunches and the technical mastery of a sport where an elegant queen can watch among the common rabble from the red-light district, boxing has always had the white-glove and white-shoe society mixing with the criminals, the unruly and dirt-faced drunks from the bars, the gruff and angry dockworkers spending their hard-earned pay for a ticket just to see a fight in some dark, smoky arena full of louts.
She hasn't seen the savagery or when the first 3 rows of the crowd are covered in blood. David Benavidez ripping someone to the body, then viciously following it up with a combination meant to injure and destroy. She hasn't seen some hulk..behemoth human biscuit head like Tyson Fury maul his opponent, to absorb them and bludgeon and beat them down; at his peak he leans on fighters and they can't get him off of them and he just clubs them into oblivion, he sets it all up with a hall of fame jab.
That's why I love boxing. The duality. It can be picture-perfect and beautiful and it can be cruel, cruel as a lion crunching the neck of a baby hyena, it's instinct, it’s survival, it's quiet and sad when a fighter you like lays gasping and broken in a heap on the canvas, Nonito Donaire, ..yeah...that was terrible when a young, Japanese killing machine named Naoya Inoue destroyed the aging warrior Donaire, it was probably the worst feeling and emotion I've ever gotten from watching a prizefight, the young lion slaughtered the old one and there was no mercy or respect, it was brutal, it was death, if it's possible to cry with a smile, I did, that's boxing.