Touch gloves - a celebration of a struggle.
96-93 and 95-93, before the judges need score it, Anthony Oluwafemi Olaseni Joshua, defeats Wladimir Klitschko to become a unified world heavyweight champion, holding the IBF, WBA, and IBO titles, for the boxing enthusiast a fight that encompassed all the great things about boxing - the sweet science - the quickness, the power, the conditioning, the discipline, the guts, only for Anthony Joshua to climb off the canvas, only to go on and defeat his foe, with his battered and bruised, and ‘it’s what life’s about – you just keep on going”, and his highly eroticised end of fight proclamation: “I love to fight”, with a smile, went some way to reinforce his celebration of a bonded struggle, and what transpired was fittingly a labour that men like AJ live and die trying to beat.
Boxing, for a boy “from the street”, to now global superstar, is to speak the eternal and the universal, word by word, of the minutiae of everyday, where enfant terrible has been on the stretch to apprehend the footing and evolution of a vile recreation, and the motives which influence its actors. Thus leading by example, AJ’s fight proclamation: “I love to fight”, in its only way reaffirmed just what it-is the euphoria around his victory is celebrating, certainly when it’s not just the sweet science, not when Muhammad Ali, and for the reasons he was born Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr., the only three-time lineal heavyweight champion who enabled youth to feel proud of the ‘struggle’, and Mike Tyson, who provoked youth to be unapologetic about what one feels about their aggressive retort, and Ray Charles Leonard, best known as "Sugar" Ray Leonard who made it sexy to do so, and the darker shade of the UK never forgetting Nigel the ‘Dark Destroyer’ Benn, who reinforced the “the black as I am” tenacity wriggling through the free-for-all.
And even though the relativity of time allows for supple clarities to appropriate the phenomena, through sport, through fame, and frankly through whatever appropriated sees fit, truth is mien walks amongst a mass of brothas’ , they like to be known as comrades; as they all trance the same battlefield, and listening to the affection of moved tones, and the things they speak of they all have the same thing to say, they all have the same narrative to tell, there is no change in their provoked imagination and hence why it remains the unspoken thing they all talk about, hence why their gloves do the talking, and their physical relationship with the struggle remains the only solitude the pain sustained dare fight, of which the plaudits and the onlookers sincerely respect, and to the naked delight of their hearts content.
While a cultural masturbation seeks out the thrill of its climax, and inundates social platforms with respects from the “endz”, and HMP locales bang their cell allocations in sympathetic solidarity, and video uploads entitled: “Black man is God,” is presented by a culturally refined ‘sista’ wearing a crucifix and full African brigadier, regardless of the physical oxymoron’s, bound to make distinguished black theologians start to sing old Negro spirituals, the euphoria around AJ’s boxing triumph is always going to be more than boxing- the sweet science - when the holy objective is to hurt your opponent, more efficiently that they can do you, thus in this manner the reality of the boxing phenomena theatrically spotlighting what it means to ‘joe bloggs’, and the ‘brotha’ from the ‘endz’, and every other Muslim supposedly one click away from Muhagedin activity, where there is no room for quips anymore, where if you take the BBC’s airing of Being Black: Going Crazy, just a few days earlier, a documentary on mental health in the Black community, and take the news of the death of an eighteen year old, a day or so before that, chalked up to another statistic of ‘knife crime’, none of which ever got, or ever will get the same spotlight attention at the time of aired or publish, from the media or the people concerned, with anything of consequence the relationship with the spectacle of boxing is not far off, not when the fighters all have the same last names, and because they talk alike, and be alike, and have being doing alike from the time the entire modern-era took over from the historical content, thus, by the very nature of the fight game, focus on the attention is the celebration, of the struggle, and ominously the best way mind-set knows how, the relationship between a sport one is not usually enthusiastic about, to a celebration that represents everything personally personified, for the world to see, and caught-up in the brutal excitement the harder it’s becoming hard to see what else could rival such euphoria, than the fight.
The fight, from a boxing perspective exemplified the brutality of physical battle, round after round it embodied a ‘never give up attitude’; the knock downs, the get ups, the swollen flesh fatigue had a hard time stomaching, just the sheer gladiatorial persistence had basic human instinct dangling on its climatic edge, nine months from now children will be named Joshua, when again there is no room for quips anymore, and after news headlines have already stated that “Joshua is proud of his Nigerian heritage” - a correspondents attempt to tell the story of a champion who is not traditionally ‘one of us’ - it typified something boxing is able to transcend, and be much more than just boxing, and mean much more, in all of its respects due a personified exhibition of a private emotion, distressingly epitomised, clarifying the eternal and the universal, of the minutiae of today, why the gloves do the talking and the voices say little else.