Letter: Point of boxing, dogfights is the violence

Saturday, July 28, 2007 | 7:18 a.m.

The audiences who watched Michael Vick's alleged support of dogfighting and the fans who support and watch boxing are the same.

Legality and skill are not relevant to the pleasure received by audiences that enjoy watching the pain endured by man and beast in boxing and dogfighting. The pretense of watching boxing because of the physical skill required to knock a person unconscious demands the possibility of a person being knocked unconscious; and in a dog fight it requires the probability of the dog being killed. This is called pain and violence, and without pain and violence, boxing and dog fighting would not exist.

Sportswriters and fans regularly criticize boxing matches because the fighters do not (as they might euphemistically put it) "mix it up." What they mean, of course, is beat each other relentlessly like two mindless pit bulls with jaws locked on each other until one falls ... or dies.

It takes skill, of course, not to die or get the sense knocked out of you. But the skill required is far from the point. Violence is the point, and fans watch to derive pleasure from the violence, not the skill needed to survive.

Some Roman gladiators possessed extraordinary skills, but their fans in the Forum didn't attend the "fights" to applaud their skills. It was to watch them get maimed or killed. We humans have come a little way from that. We have eliminated the necessity for seeing the boxer die unfortunately that's not so for the dogs.

If I may be redundant, the point is pain and violence. If one enjoys boxing, one enjoys watching pain being inflicted and the violence necessary to inflict it. The two cannot be separated.

There is a little Michael Vick in all of us.

John Dombek, Santa Clara, Utah