By Gregory Clark, (Illustrated by James Frise), November 25, 1922.

“Come,” says Pontius Pilate, “let us go down to the amphitheatre and see a couple of men pound each other into a purple pulp.”

“Right-o,” responds his friend, J. Cassius Brutus, “maybe they’ll poke a few teeth out of each other, or an eye.”

And the two citizens hasten down into the city.

Roman citizens? Nit! Citizens of Toronto, ratepayers, voters on prohibition, radials, supporters of a sporting city council. I changed their names just to make it hard. Their real names are William D. (“Bill”) Skillett, and P. Christopher Munch.

Swish, swish, thud, thud!

Swish, swish, thud, thud, SMACK!

This is music.

Danse music. Man music. This is the music of prize ring, the soft, barbaric music of the box-fight.

Swish, swish, is the sound of crafty feet sliding over the resin on the floor. Thud, thud, is the sound of heels as the two game cocks dance their weird dance about each other, circling, panting, lunging, skilfully poised as Pavlova, pretty, guileful, light as feathers, heavy as down.

SMACK is the sound of a fist, padded with ounces of leather and hair, as it crashes like forked lightning on to the bared teeth of a hurling boxer.

Swish, swish, thud, thud, SMACK!

Music in the foetid caves of our fathers, how many thousand years ago. Music still in the smoke haze of the Gayety Theatre, under the white dazzle of nitrogen bulbs.

The theatre is dark, save for this one blaze of white light on the stage. The audience is not a theatre audience, not even a Gayety theatre audience. It has a quality all its own. It smokes, belches smoke. The air is bitter with smoke. The eyes sting with it. It swirls in the dazzling spot of light on the stage.

There is a continual heavy murmur and mutter of sound filling the house. A fight crowd is a noisy crowd. The murmur is broken by load shouts of praise or blame, scattered shouts of encouragement, long wails of disgust.

Under the blazing lights, the ring is squared in with three heights of white-washed rope. And huddling in close to these ropes, as many as the stage will hold, are the ringside seats with a hunched, intent mass of men, ducking and moving their heads as they watch every move. Every step, every punch of the contestants in the ring.

Three figures in the ring – the two fighters, naked save for light silk running trunks, shining with sweat, lithe, smooth, clean, dancing and swaying elusively even in that glare. The third figure is the referee in a white shirt, who glances closely about the fighters, breaking them apart, bending to watch their hands in batches, barking and bellowing at them.

The first round is nearly always pretty.

It is like some barbaric dance. The noise of the crowd dies down. The fighters jut and poke and jab. You can hear the hissed breaths drawn in by a thousand watchers as some blow fails to go home. You hear the out-blown sniffle of the fighters – a peculiar venomous sound. Swish, swish thud, thud.

Somewhere in the second or the third or the fourth round, it loses its prettiness.

The dance goes out of it. The measure falls slower. The smoke-shrouded crowd out there in the dark becomes louder, there is a buzz of blood in their cries, some madman keeps bellowing an indistinguishable word over and over.

The fighters are losing their grace. They prance not at all. They cling heavily to each other. They are mussed up. Their hair hangs over their eyes. They have blood on their faces. They wipe their bleeding noses on each other’s shoulders in the clinches.

The referee’s white shirt has a stain on it.

The bell —

Tong!

The last round – if there is a last round – is no dance. It is only a fight. A terrible, weary, heavy fight between two broken men. They have been evenly matched, these two. But one is more weary than the other.

He can’t guard his face so smartly. He takes a terrible wipe on the eye. Another on the nose. His eye sockets are both green in this vicious light of the nitrogen bulbs. Blood Is falling from his chin.

His tired adversary will have no mercy though. He makes a desperate effort to prance. It is pitiful. A blow takes him on the chin.

He falls, clumsily, helplessly, piteously. He reclines on one arm, his breath coming in sobs, spitting blood heedlessly before him, while the referee counts loudly to eight ….

He heaves himself to his feet like a stricken thing.

The tired adversary is not too tired to be there, however, and to smash him another on the face.

His arms fumble vainly to guard.

SMACK.

All agleam, white and red, under the shrieking lights, he lies in a huddle on the resined floor.

The white shirt referee reaches out and holds on high the bloody gloved hand of the swaying victor.

“Aaaahhhhhh” breathes the mob out in the gloom, cheers, claps its hands as ladies at a matinee, shouts, swaps money on bets made.

Is this the end?

No. It’s the end of one fight.

There are five fights on the bill to-night. A great big generous bill.

So much for the fighters – marvelous, clean, brilliant boys, brave to the last merciful smash.

But what of the mob out there in the smoky gloom?

Sizing up the fighters, backing their opinions with cash money, turning in their seats, between rounds, to argue heatedly over the merits of fighters.

A queer crowd – dudes and toughs, refined and in the rough, regular fellows and irregular fellows, plain men and fancy men, your neighbor and strange strangers, normal profiles and odd, unbalanced profiles, and stunted faces of men you wouldn’t want to deliver the groceries at home…..

A church crowd has a certain look, a theatre crowd us a quality of its own, a spiritualist seance has a something different from the rest. A fight crowd has that same distinction of quality. You will see these men all assembled no place else.

Among them are some fighters. But the vast majority of them are not fighters. They are fighters by proxy.

What I am going to get at can very easily be expressed in the language of science, of the psycho-analyst. But that murky, fuddly language.

In all men is the instinct to fight. But with the passing of civilized generations, the will to fight has become weakened.

The most Christian and law-abiding of gentlemen knows at least a half dozen men he would like to kick the living daylights out of. But he lacks the will to do it, either because he is successfully civilized or because he has not been handed down the necessary nerve by thoughtless ancestors.

But he can do it, by proxy, as far as the satisfying of his own soul is concerned.

He can sit at this prize fight and get in some terrible smashes at his enemies – by proxy.

BIFF! There’s a stinger for that blankety blanky street car conductor!

SMACK! Aha, what smash that is for that blinkety blank foreman, eh!

He projects himself into one or the other of the fighters before him. You can sense that in the uncertainty at the beginning of a fight. The onlookers are trying to decide which of the two battlers they will be!

Just as in reading a story, you project yourself into the part of the hero or heroine, and thrill to all the adventures and love scenes depicted, the average fight fan – you can see it In his eyes – secretly or even sub-consciously, projects himself into the part of his favorite in the ring.

It is easy to take punishment by proxy.

It is glorious to be a victor by proxy. Such is the talent of the human imagination.

All the pent-up fury of a hundred encounters with overbearing men that you could not lick, can be released in three hours at a box-fight…

Civilization has forbidden us to fight, except under the direction of the king and his councillors, in which case it is one of the highest virtues.

Civilization has left us also the institution of prize fighting by which a lot of dangerous, pent-up steam may be blown off harmlessly, via the imagination.

And all being sons of Adam, and therefore in direct line from Cain and other bloody-minded men, we can still feel the poetry, the music, the charm of this weird dance, swish, swish, thud, thud, this measure beaded with blood, tinctured with pain, which ends so gracelessly –

SMACK!

Editor’s Note: Boxing was one of the most popular sports in the first half of the Twentieth Century.