Standing with the Sweet Science

“I can picture myself pouring the water paint.  How it seeps in.  Using the paint brush to smoothly glide it across the paper.  It’s beautiful and it’s very smooth.  It’s got a soft touch.”

This is how Aaron Thompson describes his boxing style—in hues of watercolor blues, mixed and gently splish-splashed into the image of an ocean.

“As a fighter you can really express yourself in a smooth way,” Thompson said, completing the analogy.  “The water mixes just like how if you throw a punch, it can mix into another.  Every punch you throw sets you up for another punch.”

Aaron Thompson is a true multi-hyphenate: The current Gold Glove Middleweight Champion of Oregon, as well as an active artist with work in the community such as a virtual reality mural he created as a recipient of the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art’s 2021 Black Lives Matter Grant.  

“To be a good fighter is to be a good artist,”  Thompson said.  “You have to be creative with how you exert yourself.  If you’re losing a fight, how are you going to change your game plan?”

A martial art, boxing is also known as the “Sweet Science.”  It’s a term I mentioned to Thompson: thinking it was used exclusively tongue-in-cheek. Thompson made it clear that the references to science are not unbased.  Physics, he said, is important to understand in a game of mass, force, and finding any slight advantage you can.    

This nuance in the dodges, shuffles and punches gets muddled by the concern of brain damage and bodily harm.  It turns people away.  The whole thing comes to seem like an atavistic holdover from some by-gone time when the medulla still called shots for the cortex.  Different strokes for different folks is a reasonable argument, but stereotyping the whole sport as Rock ‘Em, Sock ‘Em, Robots with a Caesar’s Palace paint job isn’t fair to the people in the trade.

“I know a lot of fighters who fought in the pros and they’re not punch drunk,” said Thompson. “There are some that knew when to pull out and they wanted to become a commentator, or they had a good career and felt like it’s time to do something else.”

Thompson said people often mention Muhammad Ali when discussing the danger of boxing.  Ali was the type of boxer who kept the towel dead-bolted to his trainer’s hip, though.  He simply would not quit.  Nonetheless, it is certainly visceral watching videos of him performing oratory gymnastics in his prime, “handcuffing lightning and putting thunder in jail,” then seeing him years later, deep in his affliction with Parkinson’s, struggling to light the torch at the 1996 Olympic Games.  

It’s a cruel reality of the sport, but according to Thompson, Ali did not have a fighting style at all conducive to longevity, nor is his technique preached to amateur boxers despite him being known simply as “The Greatest.” 

So what is the place of boxing in a contemporary society?  Are these our modern day gladiators?  Or, are they mavens of movement that tap into the same creative well as any artist—fully assuming the risk associated with choosing to fight on a canvas instead of paint on one.