This blog can be accurately described as the truculent cousin of my other one, strategicfailure.blogspot.com, which I have used over the past year to write about politics, baseball, dreams, and, occasionally, boxing. In that context my interest in boxing never seemed to fit with everything else I was posting about, so I have decided to branch out and create a blog that is purely about boxing. Allow me to give a little background on myself: I am 31 years old, and a doctoral student in African history. (In fact, I am currently scheduled to spend a year in Africa doing research, beginning this coming January.) I have published two books and numerous articles, but most of them have been about my first love as a writer, baseball history. I still love baseball, but over the course of the past couple years, as my own political and academic interests have become a bit more eccentric, I have found that the sport’s constant, nauseating celebration of American patriotism and family values has impacted my ability to enjoy the sport. Increasingly, I have turned to boxing as a better alternative for facilitating my own view of the world. I love boxing because, for all its ridiculousness and corruption, it somehow comes across as more honest than baseball. It wears its own violence, its exploitation of the human body, its basic (by most standards) moral degeneracy, exceedingly well; indeed, it often manages to turn these “faults” into attributes worthy of celebration.

Those who dislike boxing often view the sport (a term I use advisedly…it is highly debatable whether boxing is a “sport” at all) as something cruel and grotesque, and for this reason, something to be condemned as appealing to the worst devils of human nature. There is much truth to this view, but from my own perspective as someone who is fascinated by violence and conflict as arenas for struggle and the articulation of masculine virtue, that is precisely the source of boxing’s greatness.

Over the past two years, boxing has also woven itself into the fabric of my own life more completely than any other kind of entertainment. My daughter, who has just turned five, loves watching fights with me, loves picking winners and looking at colorful photos of boxing legends. A poster of Muhammad Ali hangs over her bed. She says she wants to be a boxer when she grows up. In many ways, this blog will be as much about her as it will be about me.

My current plan for this space is to preview and recap fights that interest me, post videos that capture something unique about boxing, review books and articles related to boxing, and explore some of the general themes that make boxing the unique spectacle of violence and defeat, death and triumph, showmanship and determination, that it now is.

Of course, I imagine the format will change as I go along. I hope to tweak the minimalist design I’ve chosen here as time passes, and I hope to connect myself to the larger community of boxing blogs. If you happen by here and have your own blog on boxing, please introduce yourself.