Why?

Your eyes throb, and you know that if you take one more right hook you'll hit the ground. Fucker, here it comes, a wide sweeping haymaker that has enough momentum that it will knock you into the land where the little black spots come and your eyes blur and you know for a fact that you will not be able to get your head out of the way if he follows it with an uppercut.

You lean back just quickly enough, and you feel the air swing by your face. You can't hold your arms up anymore, your biceps feel like they've torn off the bone, and you know they're going to snap soon just like those steel cables that hold up the telephone polls do when a drunk driver hits them. You've got energy for one more good flurry, one more hard round, even though your lungs are bungee corded together and they won't expand nearly enough to take in the air you need. If you get hit again, you will die.

Use your leverage. You charge him, two gloves in his chest, and force him back against the ropes. The body, the body! Your hands go down, your forehead on his shoulder, and you start pounding; short, hard hooks straight into the sides of his stomach. His elbows drop, trying to cover, and you come in with one uppercut that has everything you got left on it, and it hits him right in the sternum, and you can hear it, the, "ooooooofff" as the wind gets knocked clean out of him, and his right knee buckles and his gloves drop and he falls off to the side.

You back off, and he is on his knees, gloves on the ground, a grimacing face buried. You did that to a man, in the oldest, toughest, most intense sport there is. It is a war where you will be buried, you will be killed, or you will win. You will ignore that pain, ignore that throbbing death in the back of your head, just so it is him on the ground and not you. And if you die tomorrow because of this fight, you will know that you die victorious, and he will not.


That, my fellow blogger, is why you would want to get in a ring or a cage with another man who wants to hurt you- because it is the only pure thing in this fucked up world of ours.