It was Friday at the end of a week where annoying trivialities had run together like tributaries into a mighty river of bad vibes, so that I found myself unable to shake off a sense of antagonism directed at inanimate objects and indifferent strangers alike. I had vague plans that night to go listen to a jazz band play around the corner, but I wasn't feeling it. Listening to live music would only have given me a chance to sit and drink, reminding myself how pissed off I was. I needed an escape more visceral than any art form could provide, something that, if not participatory, would at least create a greater illusion of being so. This was when my co-worker and friend Victor showed up and saved my weekend: he popped around the corner and said, "Hey, there's a fight tonight. Do you want to go to the Blue Horizon?"
   The Legendary Blue Horizon is a boxing venue in the same way that Wrigley Field is a baseball diamond. Although it doesn't share the latter's dimensions (the building itself is actually converted from three Victorian rowhomes and couldn't have a capacity over a few hundred), its reputation as a great place to watch boxing is unparalleled—although it's not insignificant that it's one of a tiny handful of clubs left in the United States devoted specifically to the sport. Ring Magazine voted it the best place to watch boxing in the country, ahead of Madison Square Garden and Caesar's Palace. This could well be true; all I know for sure is that the space is unbelievably cool. The building is located on Broad and Girard, due north of City Hall, a questionable neighborhood even by Philadelphia standards. The entry hall has high ceilings of aging plaster painted and repainted off-white, musty with age and sweat but not overpowering, flavored by the slightest whiff of cigars long smoked. The doorway was packed, unsurprisingly, with men; men with extra-large shirts and thick necks, gelled hair or baseball hats, mulling in groups so uniform it was hard to tell where one stopped and the other began. Middle-aged women in Blue Horizon hats and T-shirts sold the same at a fold-out table near the will-call window, possessed with the same patient, almost-bored serenity they would have had at a neighborhood fair or church function (the Legendary Blue Horizon is actually owned and operated by the Horizon Church, and between events the club functions as its social hall). A shy young girl stood in a corner, as her father told an employee that it was her first time at a boxing match. It was also mine.
   Although the presence of church ladies and little girls did take the edge off, the Blue Horizon still had an atmosphere of unpredictability and free-floating masculine aggression that reminded me of a men's locker room. The beer was in cans, Budweiser or Bud Light (for the ladies I guess), but they would pour them into plastic cups so you had nothing heavy to throw. The bathroom was predictably disgusting, with a large portion of the floor under two inches of "water" by my third go-round. Victor's observation summed it up: sometimes, it's better not to wash your hands.
   Once on my way to the bathroom I walked into the middle of the line, thinking it was the end, and got into the sort of macho conversation I hadn't had since graduating from an all-boys high school. A guy got in my face saying it wasn't the end of the line, I apologized and told him to take it easy, and he smiled, backed off, and we were best friends. "Hey, man, just be careful, there's a lot of testosterone in the air," he rightly observed. It was straight out of Jane Goodall, a posture of aggression met with a refusal to back down, followed by acceptance. The whole night was like that, all of us young men brought together by the cheerful antagonism that underlies all male homosocial relationships, a friendliness so aggressive it seems to be searching for a way to become violence.
   (You can tell that this is not an American sport, at least in origin. There are no objectives, no balls or goals, no strategies beyond teaching your body how to react to pain, your eyes to watch for openings, and your hands to exploit them as quickly and powerfully as possible. And yet I was reminded of chess, trying to defend while searching for weakness, one fighter punching while the other blocks and waits to launch a volley of his own. And as they search for holes between and around each other's arms, it happens that their fists are moving in the right direction from the right place at the right time, perfectly triangulated like rocketships headed for the moon, and connect with the jaw or chin or cheek; the head jerks back, the body shudders with half a quiver, and the arms held defensively slack for the briefest of seconds; then before you're done cheering he's dropped back, shaken his head clear, and is trying to get in one of his own.)
   The main hall of the Blue Horizon is an auditorium, with a stage on one end, a flat floor, and a balcony surrounding the stage like a theater. In the middle of the floor is the boxing ring, much smaller than it looks in the movies. Victor and I sprang for the sixty dollar tickets which landed us the VIP seats, but the rows of folding chairs didn't seem to be numbered according to any logic we could ascertain, so we moved up to the front, immediately behind the roped-off section where those who either were people or knew people sat. (The list that night included local television news personalities and Joe Frasier, who runs a gym nearby and always comes to watch his various protégés in the ring.) There were two ring girls, one of whom had the bad fortune of being significantly less attractive than the other; the attractive one, "Katie," had her name tattooed on her arm. Three goth looking guys sat next to them, and Victor and I spent some time trying to speculate whether they were from some band we'd never heard of that might have been passing through. (They weren't.)
   That night (as with boxing events in general) there were a series of fights progressing toward the main event, the idea being that the fights would become better as the night progressed. This probably would have been the case had not the next-to-last fight been so good, and the reigning heavyweight champ of Pennsylvania not been so obviously (in the words of a fellow audience member) "fighting for blow money." A large man whose fighting trim vanished long ago, the champ staggered and fell ridiculously early in the main event, yanking himself back up on the ropes with a used-car-selling grin on his face. Because you can feel how out-of-it the fighters are yourself, your mind becomes blurry when they get it, and it's not just the Budweiser. Although your ears don't ring when they get hit, your memory of what that's like is present in your mind, the way a vivid description of food can make you hungry, or a picture of the snow can make you cold. Though the champ hung in for a few more rounds, that automatic grin was when we knew it was over.
   The basic action of boxing is repetitive: stagger forward, attack, push your opponent against the ropes, hug, break, and repeat—over and over again. Then you hear one chime, signifying thirty seconds left in the round. Thirty seconds later the bell rings for real. The fighters return to their corners and you get to see the girls. (The best part is when they climb into the ring.) If one of the boxers has been particularly woozy, the doctor is called in to see if the boxer can keep fighting, or if they'd risk brain damage more serious than what they've already presumably sustained. If the latter is true, the other person wins by technical knock-out. The only white fighter we saw, from the first fight, lost by technical knock-out; I was reminded of Glass Joe from Nintendo's "Mike Tyson's Punch-Out". (Make it quick...I want to retire!) All the way through that fight there was a man in the back of the auditorium wearing boxing trunks, shoes, gloves, and what appeared to be a terrycloth towel with a hole cut out for his head, headphones on, already drenched in sweat, listening to a Walkman tucked into the back of his shorts. He was one of the competitors from the second fight, a heavyweight with a whopping 0-14 record, by far the worst of any of the fighters we watched. Short, squat, slow and determined, the Blue Horizon's King Hippo entered the ring against a tall, lean opponent in a match-up that had even total ignoramuses like myself shaking our heads at the foregone conclusion. And then King Hippo started taking punishment, getting hit over and over again for five rounds, falling briefly only when he went for an uppercut and slipped at the same time. You kept waiting for him to fall, watching him almost stagger around the floor, but his small red eyes were narrowed in an almost instinctive determination that kept him holding on, even throwing half-hearted punches; if he had his weakness, he wasn't telling (ha ha ha!). Unfortunately for him the fight didn't last long enough for his opponent to keel over from sheer exhaustion, and he lost by unanimous decision.
   The surprising thing about this story is that it wasn't inspiring or sad. At the time it hardly seeming worthy of comment. He fought, he lost. In the same way that the crowd cheered louder for Katie than they did for her co-worker without a second thought, the subjective implications for a competitor's ego does not enter into the audience experience. A fight does not invite interpretation, only the visceral, primitive response that comes from watching one human being beat up another, a thrill equal parts empathy for the man throwing the punch and empathy for the man receiving it. For a movie like Rocky to find a theme in the sport, the filmmakers have to exaggerate it—all punches, no blocks—and squeeze inspiring speeches into the time it takes for a professional dancer to sexy-walk in a circle twenty feet in diameter. By the time he's fighting the Soviet in the fourth movie, there is No Possible Way he could have come back and won had the narrative not demanded it. This is not to say boxing is uncinematic. Rather it is cinematic in the way sex is cinematic—the more artistically realized the film versions, the less they remind you of the actual activity. (The way that attacks usually end in embraces, fighters leaning their heads on each other's shoulders to rest, demonstrates the intimacy already implied by any sort of one-on-one physical competition.) The problem is a universal one; the paradox of any medium is that the more skillfully implemented, the more attention it calls to itself. And it's in its lack of mediation that this dirty sport finds its purity, and as a spectator you find release. It rubs your face in your ancestry, providing an atavistic thrill you share with the caveman who saw two other cavemen get into an argument and first figured out a way to settle the matter without anyone getting killed, before going around to the other cavemen collecting bets.
   Of course, boxing does not exactly represent the best of humanity, or my enjoyment of it the best in myself. If aestheticizing violence is grilling a steak, boxing is about three seconds on either side, dripping with juices that are probably not healthy but still taste so good. And yet when Victor and I left the fight and stopped by Checker's next door for a bacon cheeseburger and fries, I felt purified, as though I had successfully gotten back in touch with something important and had been left indifferent to my various frustrations and disappointments. The conflict in the ring had been forcefully real enough to literalize any internal conflicts I'd brought with me, the resolution of the fights actually serving as the resolution of something deeper, of conflict itself. My sight was cleared of all obstruction so that I saw only a vast horizon of limitless blue, serene in its status as legend.
   And however symbolic and temporary that resolution might have been, it's also the reason we watch sports in the first place, or see movies or read books or play video games or anything. Maybe it doesn't ultimately do us any good, but damned if it doesn't feel like it does. And if I had to come down on boxing one way or another, I'd have to paraphrase the great ringside philosopher Doc Louis: "Join the Nintendo Fan Club today, Little Mac, for tomorrow we die."

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