To the untrained eye, boxers in the ring usually appear to be angry. But, of course, this is »work« to them; emotion has no part in it, or should not. Yet in an important sense in a symbolic sense the boxers ARE angry, and boxing is fundamentally about anger. It is one of few sports in which anger is accommodated, ennobled. Why are boxers angry? Because, for the most part, they belong to the disenfranchised of our society, to impoverished ghetto neighborhoods in which anger is an appropriate response.
|