John Steinbeck wrote, "This history is designed now and ever to keep the sneers from the lips of sour scholars." I suppose that's part of why I decided to start a blog—though I'm not entirely pretentious enough to believe that I merit sneers from sour scholars—but I don't think it's a bad idea to keep track of the things you have said or believed. Someday, you hope, you may have to set the record straight. If anyone cares enough about your existence that they would start some nasty tale, then there will be just as many, or more, who will come to your defense.
So, let's talk about boxing.
Johnny Cosas is a great boxer, so I listen to everything he has to tell me about boxing, which is quite a lot. Johnny’s main topic of instruction is defense, which, according to him, is the cornerstone of good fighting. He’s big on the idea that you’re gonna get hit no matter what; just don’t get hit as much. “Stay tight!” he’ll holler at you from outside the ring. “Defense! Defense! Stay tight!” Once, after I put in a few rounds of sparring that Johnny carefully studied, he and I sat down and watched the next bout. He kept telling me that I needed to work on my defense; that I should be sparring less and shadowboxing more. We eventually moved on to other topics, like food and Impalas and our families, and a couple more rounds passed as he told me all about his kids who were trying to figure out where to go to college and how to survive high school and stuff like that. “Hey, Johnny,” I said, “you gotta teach me some Spanish boxing phrases so I can understand some of the things coming out of the other corner.” Johnny looked at me with his little bulldog eyes. “Fuck that, güero—defense! Don’t worry about that Spanish shit until you learn defense!”
There are a lot of metaphors in boxing. I'm going to keep looking out for them.
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