Boxing washes its face

Ten years ago, in a previous life, I published a book about boxing. Some media outlets were forbidden from covering the subject unless a boxer died in the ring. Championships were held in training grounds, and it seemed like boxing was on its last legs. A mistake. Shortly after the book came out, I met a really cute girl who trained boxing at the gym and told me it was a very complete sport. Within a few months, gyms added rings, and new spaces for brawling began to open. Boxing for children began, and on the corner of Gran Via and Padilla streets, a store selling gold gloves, shorts, and bathrobes, worthy of Versace, opened. Until the mind-blowing phenomenon of Ilia Topuria, the Spanish-Georgian mixed martial arts fighter who won everything.

I can't say I was surprised. I've known for a long time how sports work in Spain: when a Spanish athlete of any kind emerges and wins, that sport becomes the most important in the world. We live in an era of such intense ideological cleansing that it's no surprise it's reached boxing. Hey, I like, or used to like, boxing. I wrote a book and dedicated it to my father, an amateur boxer. When my son was little, he gave him some children's gloves he bought at the gym of the late Xavi Moya. But I'm surprised by the joy with which the media talks about Topuria and shows the video of the beating of Charles Oliveira: he punched him in the face and when he had him on the ground, he continued hitting him. In another era, people would have uproariously protested. However, now they say it was a brutal knockout—as a compliment—and that Topuria is gifted.

It is a time of such intense ideological cleansing that it is not surprising that it reaches boxing.

In this climate of enthusiasm for violence, the time has come to recover Tirant lo blanc . Tirant has just been knighted. To celebrate the marriage of the King of England to the Infanta of France, battles are organized with a high mortality rate among the knights.

Tirant goes to the twenty-six best knights of the kingdom (the top of the Ultimate Fighting Championship rankings at the time), chooses one, and confronts him in a closed arena (a kind of ring). He runs the knight through with his lance. Then he wants to beat a knight on foot (like Topuria, who wants both titles). Unlike the fight with Oliveira at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, the fight lasts a long time, but in the end Tirant deals his opponent an axe blow to the head, knocking him down. Instead of continuing to swing his axe, he asks him if he prefers forgiveness or death. The knight says that Tirant is conceited and would rather die than live a bad life. Then Tirant "threw the dagger and put the tip in his eye, and then gave me a big blow on the head of the dagger, so that it had to go to the other side."

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Forgive me, but compared to Tirant, that Topuria is a wimp. Every Thursday in August, I'll tell you a chivalric tale. Would you like to?