I enjoy watching boxing on tv, and Friday night, the spousal unit, my father and myself went to attend a local boxing event at the Melody Tent. It was a blast!
There was a little ceremony right at the start of the night to honor a local former boxer named Kippy Diggs. I know nothing about Diggs, but during the ceremony a half-naked man with a shaved head and many, many tattooes was trying to heckle him. Well, maybe heckling is the wrong way to put it. More like, "jumping up and down and waving a sign with some vague reference to Diggs' cowardice". Weird, weird, weird. If anyone could tell me what that was all about, I'd love to know.
The highlight of the evening was a pair of very evenly matched welterweights, billed as the "co-feature", a Canadian named Mackie and a semi-local made good named Oliveira. It was one of the better fights I've ever seen. They went ten rounds, and were both skilled and energetic fighters with a lot of crowd support.
Their spirits and the crowd's spirits were incredibly high by the end of the fight, and you could tell that they were both just completely into it, respected each other and were loving what they were doing. Their hug at the end during the judging was clearly very emotional and heartfelt.
The featured fight lasted only two rounds, a full first round and only a few second into the second round. (Feh.) So it was a good thing that the co-feature was so good.
Some of the undercard fights were pretty good too.
There was one woman's fight featuring another Canadian, and I didn't catch her opponent's background. Women's boxing is interesting because you never know quite how it's going to turn out. Women don't show muscle tone the same way men do, so a very "soft" looking women may turn out to be really tough and quick. Also, no woman fights unless she's REALLY into it, so women's fights tend to be intense just because of the spirit being displayed.
There was a pair of heavyweights that did pretty well, and the last fight of the night was between an Irish-by-way-of-Southie kid, and an opponent with an Arab name.
I thought things were going to turn ugly for a moment, because the Southie clearly was picking up some support among certain elements just for being white and Irish, and Rasheed was clearly picking up hostility just for having an Arab name. My father and I like to root for the underdog, so we started cheering and clapping for Rasheed because we thought he needed our support. Rasheed won, and people seemed to more or less deal, which is cool.
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