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Critical Beatdown

Over at Longform, Brin-Jonathan Butler writes about a boxer who trains Wall Street dudes (and then disses ’em like he was the second coming of Robin Harris):

“At the end of the day all these Wall Street cats wanna feel like men,” Kelly explains calmly, lightly tapping me against the shoulder while we wait outside his gym in the cold for the mother of one of his young students to pick up her son. “They just never had daddy say to ’em, ‘Hey champ, you’re 19 and a sophomore in college now and you ain’t never been in a fight in your life. Guess what? You might be a pussy.’ Daddy never had that conversation with these motherfuckers. ‘Hey son, you might be soft.’ So guess what? They come to Eric Kelly to do it for ’em.”

3 comments

1 Jon DeRosa   ~  Jan 16, 2013 9:18 am

It's worth contemplating how you would survive in a world without civilization. You'd have to feed yourself, clothe yourself and protect yourself from the elements, predators, and human competiton for those resources. And it's scary to think about how hard it would be to survive under those conditions.

But the world is not like this anymore and Kelly is re-attaching the appendix. Him calling me "soft" is convenient since the way for me to get "hard" is to pay him to teach me boxing and heap insults on me.

And, as someone jumped, beaten and humiliated in a fight once, I can say that the transformative, self-defining phenomenon Bulter and Kelly describe is at the very least non-universal and more likely a crock of shit.

2 Alex Belth   ~  Jan 16, 2013 9:28 am

1) Very well put. And the "pieces of shit" he trains are putting food on his table too.

3 The Hawk   ~  Jan 16, 2013 12:27 pm

[2] Well, a lack of respect for your income source is pretty common, as I'm sure any of these derivative-manipulating men could also tell you. But anyway, it's part of his schtick.

[1] The world may not be like this anymore but we are. Physiologically we haven't changed since the world was much more visceral, violent place - which really wasn't that long ago.

Not to mention, for many people it still is pretty rough and tumble.

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"This ain't football. We do this every day."
--Earl Weaver