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Fight

nytimes.com

146 pointswallflower28 comments

Youngstown was a pugnacious steel city of 167,000 when Loew was born, with boxing clubs anchored in many neighborhoods. [...] A half-century later, Youngstown is down to a population of 65,000, a hemorrhaging of 100,000 people caused by steel-plant closings, a failure to diversify and the absence, so far, of a sustainable second act.

This is a fairly common story in the fighting world. The strength it takes to literally get punched in the face and keep moving forward is built as much by life circumstance as training.

I live in Warren, OH, about 10 minutes from Taylor's home. I moved back here after I graduated in college in 2008. While building my career as a developer, I spent time working in a call center and breaking down cardboard on an assembly line at a local automotive plant.

In those places, the lack of hope is thick in the air. Attitudes are negative, humor is sarcastic and caustic, and dreams are sparse. Just about every business around here has it. Poor service is expected and understandable, frustration is inevitable, and poverty is cyclical.

It's a common story in the rust belt. Hopes and dreams are one of Warren's biggest exports - college graduates who never return, pro athletes who don't look back, and successful entrepreneurs who struggle to find markets and skilled labor in the city limits to re-invest their fortunes. Instead they make donations. Their new businesses are built elsewhere. You'll count as many missions and soup kitchens downtown as you will shops and restaurants.

Hamzah Aljahmi and Anthony Taylor are both tragic figures. Aljahmi was killed pursuing his dream, while Taylor's dreams, undeterred by his physical deficits and crushing poverty, are now forever tainted. Like so many other would-be dreamers in Warren, he'll have to fight off the encroaching bitterness or risk being consumed by it. If that happens, his best scenario is a few acidy laughs on an assembly line. If he overcomes this tragedy, his best case scenario is escape to a fighting life in Las Vegas.

I'll be rooting for him. I hope to watch him on pay-per-view someday. In the meantime, I'll be here, programming remotely, spending my spare cycles daydreaming about solutions to the despair of our common hometown.

From Bruce Springsteen's "Youngstown" -

Seven hundred tons of metal a day

Now sir you tell me the world's changed

Once I made you rich enough

Rich enough to forget my name

(1)http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/brucespringsteen/youngstown.h...

This is great writing.

A beautiful read. A barely related event is the fighter that chose to tap out (signaling that he gave up) instead of knocking out his clearly inferior opponent (and risk injuring him or causing permanent damage).

The commentary along with the video can be seen here [1] and it's refreshing to see that people still have empathy and care about others.

[1] http://www.mmafighting.com/2014/5/21/5736360/morning-report-...

As someone with a concussion right now, it fucking sucks. Nausea, headaches, difficulty 'connecting-the-dots' with thoughts. I tried stepping outside today to fetch something I left in the car yesterday, and it was like turning on the lights to go to the bathroom after waking up in the middle of the night. Forget doing homework or reading those Greg Egan books I just got..

1 month down, (hopefully only) 2 more to go before post-concussion syndrome goes away..

Egan doesn't sound like the stuff you want to read when your brain is not in a great shape :)

Not gonna lie, I made it through the first chapter of Schild's ladder - slowly, but at least I tried. Then I tried reading the second chapter, and that's when I realized I should just save it for when I'll better appreciate/remember it..

I read the first two Orthogonal books, and while I loved the alien biology and culture, the physics were probably the first sci-fi in more than 20 years that I just completely could not understand.

If you're using your computer while you have a concussion try switching to 'white-on-black'. No guarantees but it definitely helped me when I was in that situation.

Looks like a beautiful article. Saved to Pocket. It would be pretty cool if NYTimes changed their app to better support this long-form content or maybe let you save articles to Kindle.

Very short summary: One of the fighters died.

This is an emotional/touching story so read it for that if you like that. If all you care about is the bare facts, then that's the summary.

Personally I just skimmed it picking up random sentences here and there.

As violent as boxing is, it's very rare for fighters to die. Same for Football. Mountain climbing, rock climbing, downhill skiing and snowboarding are more dangerous, but the dangers get much less media attention than the attention over football concussions.

Killed by gravity versus killed by the other players, makes it much less a human story.

Hmm, the lifetime expectancy for football players is surely lower than those others? Football doesn't need to kill you outright to harm you the most.

And they're also activities with significantly lower amounts of brain damage. Ignoring the fact that you're watching poor, likely minority kids give each other brain damage isn't part of watching a snowboarding competition.

There's no way that those other sports are more dangerous than boxing. That's ludicrous. About 5-10 people die per year from boxing [1], while about 1 in 1.06 million people die per day of skiing [2]. That same source estimates that 1 in 1.2 million boxers die per minute in the ring.

1. http://ejmas.com/jcs/jcsart_svinth_a_0700.htm

2. https://www.nsaa.org/media/68045/NSAA-Facts-About-Skiing-Sno...

I've been downhill skiing most of my life and in all that time on the slopes I've never once sustained an injury as severe as getting punched in the face.

You could very easily get hurt more in a minute of boxing than in a lifetime of skiing. It seems crazy to me too to state that the former is less dangerous than the latter. The statistics bear it out, too.

> I've been downhill skiing most of my life and in all that time on the slopes I've never once sustained an injury as severe as getting punched in the face.

I think you're right about injury rates of skiing vs boxing, but I don't find your anecdote convincing. One could just as easily say, "I've been free-solo rock climbing for a decade and I've never gotten more than a blister." Different sports have different distributions of injuries. In some, you're perfectly fine until you're dead. In others, you slowly accumulate damage. Because of this, it's better to ignore anecdotes (even ones involving lifetime experience) and look at stats.

I've read that bare knucke boxing has lower death rates compared to traditional boxing due to the addition of gloves.

FORCE = MASS X ACCELERATION.

The extra mass is something the skull and brain cannot take. Also, the protection of the weapon (hands) assures fights go on linger than in bare knucke boxing. There is conflicting evidence however.

The point of boxing gloves is to protect your hands, not your opponent's brain. Hands aren't meant for punching, and repeatedly smacking them with great force into the hard skull of your opponent can easily damage them.

I suspect bare knuckle boxing is less satisfying (and thus less popular) because fights can end merely because one person can no longer effectively attack, rather than when one person is conclusively defeated by being knocked out. The KO is always the most widely satisfying finish in boxing and MMA.

> Hands aren't meant for punching

Actually...

http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-human-fi...

Very interesting. That's a hypothesis from just last year that doesn't yet have widespread scientific support though, so the jury's now out.

They are less satisfying, but not for that reason so much.

Bare-knuckle fights can go on for a long, long time. I can't find the source just now, but I recall some fights went on for up to 24 hours.

That doesn't televise well.

The explanation I heard for that is that a bare knuckle boxer would be a fool to aim for his opponent's skull, as it would more likely break their hand than knock out their opponent (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boxer's_fracture)

There is an old brawler's adage that you should never hit somebody in the head with your fist unless you can't find something harder to use.

Bare-knuckle boxers trained to throw punches that wouldn't connect bone-on-bone, and thus end up breaking their hands. Barring that kind of injury, bare-knuckle boxing matches often went 20, 30, 40, 50 rounds, until somebody did throw a bad punch and disable themselves, or somebody fell over from exhaustion.

Not quite. When your hands are not protected you avoid hitting hard stuff.

Gloves allow head blows. Now the human body's ability to take blunt force damage is very high, when not hitting the balls or the head. So you get longer and not as spectacular fights.

Same with professional football compared to rugby of old. (although it seems rugby after 90s have similar problems after the sport tried to become more spectacular).

Not disputing the basic thesis here, but it's worth noting that comparing days skiing to time spent in the ring is somewhat specious.

As I understand it (boxing's not my martial art of choice but I know a bit about it), boxers spend most of their time training, not fighting competitively. Per year, you might well find a professional skiier spends more days skiing than a professional boxer spends minutes in the ring.

See https://www.reddit.com/r/Boxing/comments/24r83s/how_many_fig...

I am, of course, assuming that professional skiiers ski a lot, but that seems like a reasonable assumption :)

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