I thought about something the other night as I watched a fucking classic movie (Raging Bull). Is boxing not one of the more tragic essays of humanity?? A guy will literally fight and claw his way to the top through all sorts of opponents. Yet he ultimately loses in the end. Whether he loses the fight, his finances, his health or his life, boxers lose in the end. Yet there is beauty amidst all that carnage of body and soul. The beauty is for a few brief golden moments, a man stands on his own and overcomes fear, doubt, pain to emerge victorious. Victorious in the fight and in winning over the hearts of onlookers. Some guys carry that beauty on for years. Others only for that one golden moment usually frozen in moment by photographs. If you remove all the corruption and greed, we see in boxing humanity at its rawest and reaching a zenith of beauty rarely unparalleled. To see someone who is 'hungry' go to a complacent mess is the part that makes it painful and shadows the beauty. For we are witness to a metamorphisis where the glamour was the change and not in the results. Perhaps that is why we are magnetized to boxing. We are enamored by the tales of guys who fall after their fame after we watched a brilliant climb. Maybe we see a glimpse of ourselves if we never succeded in our own small lives. Perhaps that is the reason why there is rarely a reunion of boxers or a 'where are they now?' in boxing. It is too painful and reminiscent of our own lives and the shortcomings that are associated with it.