It's not quite the real thing, this fight, but at 38 it's about as close as I'll ever get. My opponent will be carefully selected to avoid a complete mismatch. He too must be a first timer and if he's younger than me, it can't be more than 5 years - I am 38. Beyond that, regular amateur boxing rules apply, the only difference being we fight for three rounds of 2 minutes instead of three rounds of 3 minutes.
I've been reluctant to call it 'White-Collar' boxing. One reason is that there is no guarantee my opponent will have a white collar job, even though I do. So I feel I deserve some credit for accepting the risk that my opponent might spend his working days punching holes into concrete.
But the main reason is that, until recently, my gut reaction to white collar boxing was that it was for wankers; investment bankers and real estate agents punching the shit of each other to find their inner warrior.
It's natural to want to distance yourself from wankers, but I don't think that having superior reasons for doing something this dangerous makes one less of a wanker. And I don't really have a superior reason. I don't have a deeper than average interest in violence -- although the average interest seems pretty high. If there's a deeper psychological impulse at work, as there surely is, then I'm not smart enough to write about it. So if I can get the 'why' out of the way up front, the reason why I'm doing this is pretty simple: Boxing is good for you.
It's natural to want to distance yourself from wankers, but I don't think that having superior reasons for doing something this dangerous makes one less of a wanker. And I don't really have a superior reason. I don't have a deeper than average interest in violence -- although the average interest seems pretty high. If there's a deeper psychological impulse at work, as there surely is, then I'm not smart enough to write about it. So if I can get the 'why' out of the way up front, the reason why I'm doing this is pretty simple: Boxing is good for you.
