Punching pink
Jeremy Clarke
My boy has got this extraordinary idea into his head that if a man wears something pink he must be gay. He voiced this strange prejudice again the other day, in a shop, as I was trying on a pair of pink boxing gloves.
My trying on a pair of pink boxing gloves in a shop came about as follows. Twice a week I used to attend a Shotokan karate club. At the end of each session the teacher (sensei) would tell us to pair off and fight each other free-style (kumite) for a couple of minutes. We were supposed to pull our punches, ‘half-contact’ so-called, but the coloured belts were too clumsy and some of the black belts too malevolent for such nice judgments, and our esteemed sensei would walk around the dojo (training area) going, ‘Oi, oi, oi! Half contact!’ I was easy to beat. Everyone agreed on that. My fighting style owed too much to ki (spirit) and too little to technique and I used to hang my chin out, as our esteemed sensei so aptly put it, ‘like a f–—ing lantern in a storm’. I fought, others said, as if the object of kumite was to sustain as much brain damage as possible. But I didn’t mind taking head-shots. I think it is as important to be able to take a punch up the bracket as it is to dish one out.
My technique was poor mainly because I’m naturally stiff in the hips and therefore unable to get maximum power in my punches or execute the higher, more flamboyant kicks. I was stuck on brown belt for ages because of this. To try to remedy this depressing situation I went to yoga classes. Unfortunately, at yoga I learnt more in a month about my body than I’d learnt in ten years of marching up and down punch ing and kicking the air; my flexibility improved remarkably; and my level of fitness, especially after doing a course of the high-powered astanga yoga, was higher than it had ever been before. So after a while I stopped learning how to maim people and became a quiet and gentle yogi instead.
But after a couple of years doing the tree and the owl and the downward facing dog, and afterwards sitting cross-legged and humming prayerfully, I found I was missing the punching and the kicking, and especially the shouting, at a deep and possibly fundamental psychological level. So, in spite of the first law of yoga stating that the yogi must refrain from violence in thought, word and deed, I went out and bought a punch-bag.
And what a punch-bag! It was advertised in the free ads at the back of the local paper. I went along to the house not expecting much and there, leaning against the wall in this woman’s hallway, still wrapped in the original polythene, was a punch-bag in its Platonic Form: black leather, seven feet tall and a chain to hang it on substantial enough to tether a billy goat. ‘There,’ said the woman proudly, arms folded, nodding respectfully at the huge black phallus monopolising what little available space she had. ‘What do you think of that, then!’ I dropped my shoulder, gave it a short one, recoiled, shaking my hand in agony, then opened my wallet and handed over the cash. It was far too big to go in the car. The woman, however, said she knew a man with a van. ‘Don’t smoke it all at once,’ said this man when he delivered it a few days later.
It was so heavy it took all my strength to lift it up and carry it on my shoulder into the house. In the conservatory I got the wobbles and accidentally broke a pane of glass with the rear end. And when I got the bag into the house I found that there wasn’t a ceiling high enough to accommodate it. So I staggered outside with it again and hung it on a sawn-off branch of the eucalyptus tree. A stiff breeze was blowing, but the punch-bag hung there, unmoved by it, challenging me to hit it. I gave it a few short ones, then stepped back and gave it my best shot. This removed the skin from my first two knuckles and sprained my wrist.
Which is why, on the Sunday, me and my boy went to the cheap-jack superstore that virtually the entire local population goes to on Sundays, and made for the sports section, where they always have a selection of remaindered weights, chest expanders, boxing gloves and so forth. That particular week the boxing gloves were pink, bright pink, the colour of the pink ball in snooker. But they were almost free and I found a pair that fitted perfectly. ‘You’re not buying them?’ said my boy, turning away in disgust. ‘What’s wrong with them?’ I said, bobbing and weaving then throwing a gentle right to his temple.
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