Boxing is like a mating dance between two birds

I walked into my first sport a year ago with a hangover; it only felt fair for me to walk into my last one drunk. In what felt like the sartorial challenge of the season, I had a girls’ lunch booked for the early afternoon and a boxing match in the evening. I got to the East End at 6pm, three white wines and one single espresso down, feeling on top of the world.

As it turned out, my night had barely begun. The first note I wrote down once it started – “boxing has foreplay?” – was the one great lesson I learned that night. I’d expected the fighters to beat each other to a pulp relentlessly, but contact occurs relatively rarely in the ring. Like two birds in an overly complicated mating dance, opponents spend most of their time sizing each other up, trying to find openings, and figuring out their next move.

At the risk of stating the obvious: it was mesmerising, and witnessing the rising tension finally getting punctured by a swift and precise blow to the flank was exhilarating. It was also interesting to notice just how different each fight was. Somehow, some of them felt taut and intense while others slacked a bit, or felt bouncier.

I didn’t always understand the rhythm of it all, and was left especially baffled by the many instances of what looked like one fighter requesting a time-out by… aggressively hugging his opponent? “Wish I could do that in meetings,” I typed in my phone. Another source of confusion was the particular design of the shorts. Somehow, I ended up picturing the remnants of some ancient civilisation, where nipples must be celebrated but the bellybutton hidden at all costs.

On a related note: how does one win a boxing match? I have absolutely no idea! I watched so many of them back to back and I truly could not tell you. There’s fighting and fighting and fighting, and then at some point there’s a little bell and one boy gets some points and the other boy gets more points than that.

I found the whole thing entirely opaque, but it didn’t dim my enjoyment. Instead, it forced me to rely on the cheers from the audience, which would have been hard to ignore anyway. For every boxer in the ring, there seemingly were about a million people out to support him.

Some of the evening’s favourites were Dean Gardner (“Deano! He’s Dean! He’s mean! He’s from the Philippines!”) and Cillian Mills, wearing beautiful sequinned shorts adorned with the Irish and Jamaican flags. The whole thing was, without wishing to get too bleeding heart about it, quite the counter to the idea that predominantly white working-class spaces are inherently insular.

Fighting and catharsis may be the point, but boxing is clearly about so much more. I witnessed some real community there, and briefly celebrated one fighter’s win with his former schoolmates. I saw moments of unexpected tenderness, as those wired and wiry men would sit and obediently lap at the water their handlers gave them. I laughed and whooped and cheered and stayed for nearly three hours when I’d planned to be there for one.

For a little while, I got offered a window into a universe I had no idea about, and came out feeling like the world’s jolliest impostor. Oh, and do you know what the best thing was? I felt completely fine the next day. Marie out!

Photograph by Taka G Wu/Alamy