A Story With Title in Postscript

By Even

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They started saying the sport had gotten pretty weird—in America and Europe anyway. I might’ve even said the same thing once or twice. It was weird. But things change; times change; you gotta roll with the punches—if you’re allowed.

To keep things fair, they don’t actually allow that anymore—in the sport, that is. You gotta stay in bounds when you’re taking it—you can’t twist your body. You can wince, but you can’t roll—how sporting does that sound?

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Anyway, it made a lot of people question what they loved about boxing, I think, when they introduced the robots and classified it as “self-harm”. I can tell you that a lot of boxing fans really didn’t know what to make of it—they looked to each other... no clue, and hardly a thing to say. You don’t see any society do that too often. They didn’t know what to make of it and they didn’t know what to make of the way the world was changing either. The kids—whatever—grew up and were taught by who—well, who do you think? Who taught them two consenting adults can’t sign an agreement and just fight and nobody can press charges for assault? Those safe-space nut-jobs, with their “‘exploitation’ narratives”. See? We all had to learn the lingo. Anyway, those are the ones that started it. And of course any old district attorney could file charges for assault, and we thought, ‘well, that would be the end of boxing’, but then they came up with the robot idea.

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A man fights a bag, then gets beat up by a robot—that’s essentially how it works. It’s definitely not the same flavor that it used to be—but what are you going to do; real boxing—man-to-man boxing—is even illegal to broadcast in the US and Europe. So, robots… and it was pretty weird.

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For a time, guys boxed those bags just as if they were in a ring with another man. And yet, somehow that was probably the most unnatural era—before Darren Deehee came along. Back then, the virtual reality contact lenses were a little bigger, so they bulged out of their eyeballs a little and the boxers always looked kinda crazy-eyed, in a way—you know how dogs walk around when you put shoes on them, or cats get all awkward when you stick tape to them?—they don’t actually have to act any different, yet they do—they exaggerate everything. And the boxers looked around all bug-eyed, but that wasn’t really it. I don’t know what was so unnatural about that era compared to later on—by all accounts it should be the other way around. They way boxers boxed back then was closer to what would work in a real fight—the focus on form, the—at least pretense of—bobbing and weaving (even though that was now unnecessary). I guess, for the boxers back then, they knew they were putting on a show, and they acted like it, until Darren Deehee.

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No one even knew who Darren Deehee was at the time. Back in the old, old days, a boxer would make his name by boxing against progressively tougher opponents, but that was only done because you had to match two people together—and only two; no man’s fight against another could ever be replicated, you see? But once they started measuring the punching force, and how on-target the blow was, from what direction, with the timing, etc., they could use the same data from one fight against any number of other boxers. Guys still take on progressively tougher fights, but that’s just to make sure they can handle the next tougher one, especially after Deehee.

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Darren Deehee didn’t do it like that, by the way—he came out of nowhere at full throttle. He didn’t bob and weave at all—no pretenses—he wasn’t putting on a show. Yet, then again, he was. In that one fight—the only fight he ever needed to fight—he hit so hard, and he hit with such rapidity, and he hit from so many directions, and his hits landed so perfectly; that it was… definitely a show. Those punches could break ribs, and many would even break a large man’s arm (even if the arm were held next to the body), and they did.

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There was no time for pause if you went up against Deehee’s blows—no time to breathe. Some guys who were prepared for that fact held their breath when going up against him. They had their lungs popped.

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They could always duck out, of course—just roll away from the padded backboard and lose the fight. And they would, eventually; all of them. No one ever survived until the end, and I say “survived” deliberately. There was a fighter who easily conquered all the other best fighters on record, and he was determined to weather Deehee, so he lashed himself against the backboard in that final fight.

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When he died, the coroner called it a suicide, of course.

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Yeah, it may be strange, but at least everybody gets the same deal, and maybe it is better this way—more standardized, certainly. You just fight the bag, then you can block all you want at the level you think you can take. But you gotta stand there and take it—take it all if you want to win. Key thing is to outlast, of course, but sometimes that’s impossible. Meaty arms—they won’t be much protection against Deehee—those arms will eventually break during the fight—the backbone too. Nobody could ever stand up against Darren Deehee—he just hit and hit and hit so unfathomably hard; he literally crushes them (in the present tense), and his data—the record of his moves—lives on, to fight on, like it were some intellectual debate that he’ll forever win.

Oh yeah, and the guy who died? He was all the boxers—all the boxers—who’d ever come before.

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Postscript:

Title:

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I Am He, And My Arguments Are

Strong