Why fight clubs are booming
In London on business, I mix high and low culture like a Saul Bellow sentence. First up is the FT Weekend Festival, a day of author readings and wine tutorials in a venue (Hampstead Heath) that is itself the muse of poets. By night, I am in the East End’s spartan York Hall, known to some, with a bit of historic licence, as the Home of Boxing.
To be ringside is to feel one’s brow moisten with fighters’ flying sweat and other fluids. Not only they but quite a few patrons can, as they say, “have a row”. I and my friend (with his transatlantic degrees, investment career) cannot.
Among the strangest trends is renewed interest in pugilism, even among the unlikeliest people. Boxing has recovered from a sort of managed decline to become water-cooler material in Britain. Mixed martial arts, which is more than I can stomach, was a marginal sect not long ago. It is now one of the world’s biggest sports.
Conor McGregor edges out all but a few megastars in more established sports as the planet’s most famous athlete. The idea of women biffing each other has gone from anguished public debate to commonplace. Boxercise and other simulations of fighting are as modish as yoga once was. And all of this despite our ever more refined lives.
“Despite”, I say, but “because of” might be nearer the truth.
The central feature of high modernity is our estrangement from the physical. For as long as our species has been around, it has had some bodily exertion — hunting, agriculture, then industry — to survive. The service-led economy stopped it.
It is a vast change to process over a generation or two, and we tend to underrate the results. Think of the natural energy frustrated and impulses contained. They go somewhere. The result: this boom in the hurt business. It answers a human need that a techno-financial economy does not.
Twenty years have passed since David Fincher’s Fight
Club. It spoke to something in 1999, this tale of desk-bound men venting their primal selves through a brotherhood of violence. Since then, there has been another 20 years of industrial decline and of digitisation in our lives. One of the few things rich and poor have in common in the lopsided economy is enforced stillness. The hedgie and the call-centre worker are equally inert.
DH Lawrence said that working in factories rather than with the soil was a huge (and bad) inflection point in history. It would dehumanise us. But factory work still involved physical effort and some danger.
To work with a screen and a phone is much the sharper change. It happened in an era of relative peace and the neardisappearance of conscription in the West. The world asks amazingly little of our bodies. It is natural to see this reaction against modern lassitude as uniquely masculine. Fincher, or at least Chuck Palahniuk, who wrote the novel from which the film was adapted, certainly did. But the trend towards the martial seems to have cut across the sexes. What is seen as feminine form and behaviour have changed. Women may now have muscle to train for strength and not just for fitness. It might even be the new social pressure as thinness once was.
The question is where the fighting fad goes next. The less physicality there is in our lives, the more we seek it out. In The
Hunger Games and The Hunt, people go to the dystopian extreme of human-baiting to break their couch-potato ennui. In an unequal society, it is not hard to see how the demand for martial spectacle could become very dark, very quickly.
In York Hall, Luton’s Kay “Special K” Prospere bests Sam “The Sensation” O’Maison in a unanimous points decision. But not before Ramez Mahmood takes the southern area featherweight crown against Jack Budge over the full 10. It is raw. It is a world away from literary symposiums.
And for those of us who live inside our heads for an income, that is the point.
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