“Everyone has a plan till they get punched in the mouth,” said Mike Tyson famously. Many choose to understand the former heavyweight champion’s one-liner metaphorically, as an American rendition of the Prussian military strategist Helmuth von Moltke’s observation that no battle plan survives contact with the enemy. The temptation then is to take the Tyson/Moltke thesis as a figure for preparation, or imagination, and how it is always incommensurate with reality. Thus it’s a description of how theory is incommensurate with practice. Or it’s an injunction to be prepared, but not overly so, to be also flexible, spontaneous, to live in the moment and respond to it.
I, however, took it literally, and in middle age embarked on a campaign of getting punched in the mouth. I took up boxing.
Every 10 years or so I change sports. In college I played baseball and continued with it when I moved back to New York and played on the Brooklyn sandlots. Then there were many years of soccer in those same parks. And when I moved to the Middle East, I started jumping horses. Back in America, I was lost.
It was a friend who had served in one of our hard-charging military units who first emphasized to me how important it was for people to get punched in the face. He wasn’t talking about American adversaries or his own enemies, but men and, to a lesser extent, women in general. “It’s surprising to get punched in the face and scary,” he said. “And you have to learn how to deal with it.”
Of course, the point of boxing is to not get hit, a fact apparently lost on many self-described fans of the sweet science. For instance, a fight fan who says he dislikes Floyd Mayweather because he doesn’t get hit—and indeed Floyd’s defensive technique, and thus his success and longevity until his retirement, was built on the pillar of not getting hit—is someone who is saying he himself has never been hit in the head hard, which is why what he singly enjoys about boxing is seeing other people punched in the head repeatedly. Or he has been hit hard in the head far too many times and is now insensible to the pain of others.
It was when I started to get hit in the face often that I began to recognize how much depends on avoiding it. I remembered that the first thing you’re supposed to learn as a young kid hitting a baseball is how to get out of the way of a pitched ball coming at your head. Until you master hitting the dirt like a chair has been pulled out from under you, it’s hard to feel confident in the batter’s box. I was renewed in my amazed respect for the dog—the animal that braves his face to catch balls and Frisbees and other items thrown by mankind.
The pain of getting punched in the face describes itself on the face—black eyes, bloody noses, cauliflower ears, etc. What’s more daunting is the fear of getting hit hard in the place that we associate with our own self—by which I mean not just the face reflected back to us, but the skull that protects the vessel that holds our memories and histories, our loves and passions, our ambitions and our fears. There is the fear before and the fear after being hit. A former professional fighter I know used to get cramps in his neck after fights, sometimes after sparring. He wanted to say it was because he was using muscles he wasn’t accustomed to using, but eventually confessed it was fear, after the fact of getting hit hard in the face.
If I say that political life is organ-ized around avoiding getting hit in the head, I’m not speaking metaphorically. George Orwell wrote in Nineteen Eighty-Four, “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.” But that’s not really the future, nor is it just the past. Throughout most of history, and still today in many parts of the world, politics is little more than coercion and violence, or someone threatening to hit someone else in the head. Maybe we Americans live in what may turn out to be a rare moment and place in which our politics is based primarily on agreeing not to punch each other in the mouth.
There is nothing but pain and fear in getting punched in the face. I learned nothing, and that’s enough.
