Brutal, primitive, exciting

OPINION: Courtenay Place, Wellington, Saturday night, writes Joe Bennett this week.

 The wind scythed around corners and went for the marrow. Yet the footpaths were thick with girls wearing little, girls dressed for sex. The thighs below one tiny skirt were stippled like chicken skin. And their owner was squealing. Not with the cold but with the thrill of Saturday night and boys and booze.

At the door of each bar stood a squat man in a heavy overcoat. He had brown skin and a shaven head and he oozed the capacity to hurt. Between the loud bars stood quiet restaurants, where sober immigrants fed the drunk.

I watched two girls screaming at each other on the footpath. I half hoped they would fight. One was skinny in a little black dress, the other meaty in ill-advised tights. They stood toe to toe, the wind blowing the hair of one into the face of the other. Their faces were ugly with anger. They screamed in English but I understood only the swearing. If they had fought, I like to think I'd have stepped in to separate them. But I expect I'd have just loitered to watch.

Sitting on the footpath, his back against a shop window, was a naked man, Maori, bearded, grim with dirt and cloaked in a blanket, he roared at the revellers, at the wind, in no language I could recognise.

Drugged? Drunk? Mad? All three? No-one was asking. No-one paid attention. He made as much sense as the wind, as the screaming girls.

A couple of middle-aged tourists picked their way through the throng holding hands tightly. Both wore zipped pouches at their waists. Their faces were taut with alarm at the disinhibition. Their guide book hadn't mentioned it.

Outside a sports bar stood a crowd of several hundred. They were staring through the windows at a screen. The screen showed the boxing match billed as "The Fight of the Century". The hype had worked. The crowd was tense with expectation.

A while ago I read a newspaper article about boxing. The writer said that it was an anachronism. It was brutal and primitive. It had no place in a civilised society. Boxing glorified violence and perhaps even fostered it.

Here its immediate effect was the opposite. The crowd was more orderly than the merrymakers on the street.

From where I stood I could see only half the screen. As the boxers climbed into the ring, I caught glimpses of shimmering robes, of tattoos, of an oiled hump of shoulder muscle like the neck on an ox. At the back of the crowd stood four cops in stab-proof vests. They were watching the screen, too. They wore the same faces as the rest of the crowd.

The bell. The crowd stirred and cheered. The men lurched towards each other and sparred. Goliath against Goliath, shambling round a ring, lumbering dinosaurs of muscle, vying for mating rights.

"Go on, hit him," shouted a youth, and people laughed. Then one Goliath hit the other and no-one laughed. The one who did the hitting was a dead ringer for any of the doormen in Courtenay Place. His opponent staggered. The crowd was suddenly pressing in towards the windows, gripped, involved. Drivers stopped their taxis in the street to watch.

The boxer closed in on his victim, shoulders rounded, throwing blow after blow, his head down, his bloodlust up.

The crowd became unselfconscious in their excitement. The opponent fell, and got up again to cheers. Not cheers of support but cheers that there would be more fighting. In came the blows again, vicious, sinking into head and body. Goliath shielded himself inadequately with arms and gloves. The blows kept coming. He fell again. The bell saved him.

Nobody went away. Men, women, policemen, they were all held to the spot. The fight touched something fundamental in them. You could ban boxing, but you wouldn't get rid of that something. Boxing was an outlet for it, by proxy.

A minute later it was all over. Goliath had fallen. The crowd rapidly dispersed. The cops returned to the beat like islands of propriety, itinerant reminders that the daytime rules still operated. Everywhere around me I heard snatches of talk about the fight. It had been visceral and honest. For all the fake publicity, it had been fighting for real. You could see the pain. You did not want to step into the ring.

I drank a beer then wandered back to my hotel room, flicked on the television. I watched an American movie about the attempted abduction of a president. It was implausible and thick with violence. Perhaps 50 people died in the half hour I watched before falling asleep. People were shot without remorse.

This was violence sanitised and glorified. This was fake and glamorous. This was much worse than boxing. This was porn. This was the truly bad stuff. The stuff they give Oscars for.

» Joe Bennett is an English-born travel writer and columnist who lives in New Zealand with dogs. His columns are syndicated in newspapers throughout New Zealand.

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