Last month, Erik took a hard look at a staple in Hollywood’s menu of plot devices: the knockout shot. Now we turn to a movie trope that hits a little closer to home. Our very own Sally needs your help in the investigation:
Dear LWON readers,
I’m a boxer with a problem: I can’t punch you in the face.
Okay, I’m not a boxer. For that you have to have fought someone on some Thursday evening in a grotty basement venue in a worrying part of South London full of half-drunk people with complicated motives for standing around watching two people beat each other bloody.
Me, I’ve been training halfheartedly for about three years for my first fight. But that day may never come, because while I can hit a heavy bag like Captain America* and I could probably last the 3 2-minute rounds required for an amateur fight, my fist has never met a face it doesn’t like. Too much, in fact, to harm a single hair on it.
Which is why I find it so frustrating when I see people from all walks of life popping each other in the face on TV and in movies without so much as a flinch. I’m looking at you, Elisabeth-Shue-in-The-Karate-Kid, wearing your pearls and cold-cocking Johnny when he tries to get fresh at the restaurant.Not only does it look easy, it looks fun. I don’t think the most devoted pacifist could watch Bill Murray take out Ned Ryerson in Groundhog Day without needing to suppress a feeling of deep satisfaction. Easy, fun — most of all it looks satisfying.
Here’s what happens when I try. My fist flies true — my brain having identified a willing chin and put my knuckles on their flight path — until about at the halfway point, when at the whim of some primordial air traffic controller in my fish-brain, its path is redirected to the upper arm or the chest. If this weren’t so trivial it could be in the DSM-V.
Freddie, who trains me (and is becoming increasingly depressed about it), recently tried to help me by introducing me to a fearsome creature named Monica who has a reputation at my boxing gym for punching people in the face the way you and I shake hands.
“You don’t feel bad?” I asked her.
Monica looked at me like I was a small cute bug she had just found floating in her coffee. “If they let me hit them, it stops being my problem,” she said in a lazily brutal Eastern European accent.
“You’re never going to put me in a ring with her, right?” I asked in a low voice as we left Monica stonefaced and surveying the amateurs sparring in the ring. Freddie looked depressed.
I like going to to those grotty basement fights. I like watching famous fights on youtube and analyzing the subtle psychology, like why Prince Naseem Hamed lost to Marco Antonio Barrera, for example. I understand about flow.
So what’s missing in me? Is this a neurological twitch? Am I bereft of something fundamental, some survival instinct that has been bred out of me by the mollycoddling effects of civilisation?
Freddie says that you can spot my problem just by looking at my eyes. The fighters that really spook an opponent are the ones that were brought up wrong like Mike Tyson. They don’t want to punch you in the face — they want to end you. You will spend most of your time in the ring running desperately away from them.
The question I have is this: can the eye of the tiger be acquired? Or is it something you just have or don’t have?
Stay tuned for Part Two, in which we follow the leads of boxing psychology experts and LWON readers alike to get to the bottom of this. Hit us with your best shot.
Photo: from Shutterstock
*moderate exaggeration
I have the very same thing happen whenever I tried to spank my kids or the dog even, I would always pull the punch as it were (I wasn’t punching the kids or the dog!).
I’m with Monica on this one: if they let me him them, it stops being my problem. I say this from years of jujitsu, where contact was expected. It is a measure of respect not to pull your punches; you trust your sparring partner to defend themselves. My biggest problem was the reluctance of many of my fellow male students to hit me because they’d been taught not to hit women. A noble attribute — unless we’re on the mat. Then, they are doing me a disservice by not hitting me (or trying to).
But it CAN be learned. And you learn to strike with control, not blind rage.
I have a pronounced scar on my forehead from a head injury suffered while training for my black belt test. It was given to me by one of my best friends. He paid me the compliment of not pulling his swing when he attacked with a bo (long stick), trusting me to block the shot, as I’d done countless times before. Except this one time, I screwed up and my timing was off. I ended up in the ER with 14 stitches. But you know what? I didn’t blame him, and he didn’t blame himself. “You should have blocked that,” he admonished me (once the bleeding stopped). And he was right.
I let him hit me. It became my problem. 🙂
I am NOT tangling with Ms. Jennifer.
Sally, here’s my diagnosis: you’re suffering from empathy. Fortunately for Freddie (not so much for human societies through time), you absolutely can learn to override that empathy. (Evidence: all military training/ war propaganda, ever.) A couple of things that might help: stop liking and admiring anyone you might one day fight; and let yourself be punched in the face a lot while telling yourself you don’t mind. Or simply get into the ring with a particularly intrusive sub editor, while the sting of a destroyed lede is still fresh in your mind. (Jennifer’s approach is much more sophisticated, healthy and mature, of course. But it sounds like it takes kind of a long time.)
Wow, Jennifer, that’s am amazing story. I’d wear that scar proudly too. ANd Peggy Sioux, I guess the dog gets a lot of stern time-outs with time to think about what he did? I would guess effective discipline for kids and dogs has to be mental, so your pulled punches must be a good thing since they force you to look beyond physical punishment.
And Tom, to that last point — all the subs at New Scientist are sensitive, so that won’t work.