A Fight in a Desert and a Country's Future

Let’s be real about the first boxing broadcast on HBO this year -- tomorrow night’s super-featherweight card from a casino in the desert near Coachella: It’s painfully overshadowed.

By what is a matter of perspective -- there’s the drunk-driving arrest a few days ago of its promoter, Oscar De La Hoya; the rival show being held by Oscar’s nemesis in Las Vegas, live on Showtime, featuring, arguably, greater talent; and finally, the week’s politics, which amount to us locking out of this country good and desperate people -- because even if you think 99 out of 100 immigrants are Slendermen -- 99 girls from “The Ring” VHS who’ll kill you through visibility alone -- that leaves one legitimate refugee.

And the ones add up, and it’s heartbreaking to imagine.

So for a moment, don’t. I will convey instead this happy accident -- that about a year and a half ago, I fell half-backwards into Japanese film and wound up so immersed in the culture -- and so painfully lagging on the life schedule I’d set for myself years ago, not to mention the traditional timelines followed by friends -- that I decided it was an utter waste to continue trying to keep up -- better to do something they and my former self would never bother with at all, pursue an alternative track whose novelty would gain me favor no matter how I did.

That is partly why I’m writing about grown men hitting each other for money, after all.

So I set about studying Japanese. If someone asked me why, I’d answer that I wanted to be fluent by the next summer Olympics, which are in Tokyo (a fact, though not actually the reason) or that the CIA ranks Japanese as one of the four hardest languages in the world (another fact).

I simply wanted to reach for something and have the failing count (life’s not about always winning anyway -- even a chastened and HIV-ridden Charlie Sheen can tell you that now, unlike the bankrupted DC muppet whose chutzpah deserves comeuppance sadly beyond what Statler and Waldorf can deliver).

And so yesterday, after a two-hour drive with a good friend and film-producer/videographer, from Los Angeles to Indio, with a pit stop in the manure-rich land of South Ontario -- someone should’ve warned us the town’s home to so many dairy farms Milk.org literally directs you to its business alliance -- I arrived at the casino-resort site of tomorrow’s card, and, for the first time in my life, conversed in Japanese.

With the former 130-lb. champion of the world, Takashi Miura (the co-headliner on HBO alongside the Mexican slugger who took his title).

Um...go big or go home?

Not that I didn’t rely later for some translation on Nobu Ikushima, the bilingual coordinator of US events for Japan’s famed Teiken Gym (in Japan, a boxing gym is a stable -- your gym promotes and manages you -- much the way sumo-wrestling camps operate).

But I held my own -- got to look the man nicknamed “Bomber” in the eyes and using his language draw us somewhat closer, slightly more than 75 years after Pearl Harbor and the beginning of our countries’ internecine war, which featured internment camps here and the A-Bomb abroad, and all the battles on the Pacific islands that often weren’t even sympathetic to Japanese colonization in the first place (Okinawa, for instance) but whose names signal now so much loss of US life.

Read the rest HERE, on the home of my boxing coverage, Props.