Father and Daughter Develop Bond Over Boxing

I am not a sports fan. I've never been athletic, and watching sports just makes me feel jealous and lazy. I like reading and writing, and so does my mother. My father, on the other hand, also not much of a sports fan, has always been obsessed with boxing. Old-time boxing. He watches ESPN Classic all day long and records the shows he likes. Then he watches them over and over again, as though he's looking for something he can glean from them, something he missed the last twelve times he saw them.

At first, I thought the sport was barbaric. Two men get into a ring, their testosterone surging, and try to beat each other up-a true chauvinist macho-man sport. My mother agreed; she'd leave the room when my father would put on an old black and white fight. She'd say, "That's disgusting!" and the two of us would roll our eyes. We tolerated it because my father rarely gets excited about things; he's an old-fashioned kind of guy and when he has a passion, we're happy for him so we let him run with it. I figured that this, like his obsession with the O.J. Simpson trial of '95 and Kung-Fu craze of '97, was a phase that would come and go, but I was wrong. And then one day, he explained it to me, and I understood.

"Boxing isn't just a brutal sport," he said to me. "There's a lot more involved. It's a microcosm of life."

"What does that mean?" I asked.

What my father explained to me was what could be seen in fifteen rounds, the way a fight seemed to span a lifetime of trials and tribulations-ups and downs and everything in between-only to have a victory snatched away in an instant.

"What causes that?" he asked, not really looking for an answer. "What would make one man in 1929 during the Great Depression and the Stock Market Crash, being a multi-millionaire one day and totally wiped out the next, jump out a window and commit suicide, and another man in the same situation become only more determined than ever to get it all back?" I had no idea of the answer.