intoning a prefight catechism

The pressure of her media visibility crepitates through every venue in which she appears.

I’LL ADMIT IT, the first time I saw two women boxers collapse into each other’s arms after a bout at a recreational boxing show, I thought, isn’t that just like women? But then I saw two men do it ten minutes later, same smiles, same sighs. There are two elemental life functions that we humans think about alternately too little and too much: eating and sex. Men traditionally have had a third, fighting, and it gives them their perspective on the other two. In a woman who has taken on the third, you see a change in attitude that can take many forms. She stops snacking. She stops “dieting.” She forgets to eat. She eats pasta at midnight. She wears sweatpants—a lot. She stops dating. She kisses her biceps. She picks up a man at the gym for a one-night stand; he’s a nice guy, she’ll see him back at the gym Saturday, probably. She comes out of the closet. She gets manhandled by her trainer every day and doesn’t give it a thought. She feels after her first spar the same way she felt after the first time she had sex—inarticulately emotional, disappointed, empty, cynical, with a strange new sense of alignment. Anxious to do it, discover it, again. Now there is a vital third engagement with life, a way to feel one’s body consume and be consumed, to know and be one’s physical self, to excite and exhaust, to touch and be touched, to unleash her power.