Читать книгу Jacobs Beach. The Mob, the Garden and the Golden Age of Boxing онлайн

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It measured 342 square feet, eighteen feet, six inches on each side inside the ropes—smaller than today's twenty-foot-by-twenty-foot rings—weighed more than a ton, and was held together through a complex set of 132 interlocking joints. A lot of heads hit the canvas (some more willingly than others), which was replaced periodically, as were the padding and the ropes, up against which wily veterans would scrape the backs of bright-eyed novices.

It was the fighters’ stage, where no man could lie to himself for very long (unless paid to do so). The canvas, ropes, and posts are as blessed in boxing as the altar is in religion—a place of worship, and, more often than some people would like to admit, a place of sacrifice.

Why a ring, why square not circular? The ring is the accidental invention of the Georgian bare-knucklers who stepped on to whatever patch of grass was available and far enough from the unwelcome attentions of the law to accommodate the bloodlust of the Fancy. There they'd face off, in deepest Surrey or Hampshire, maybe Kent or Bristol or Yorkshire, surrounded by four wooden posts and some rope, erected not for any legislated purpose of keeping order between the pugilists but to hold at bay the intoxicated mob. It was square only because the prizefighters’ seconds stood opposite each other and those entrusted with policing the occasion would put a stake beside them, upon which they'd place their coats and hats; to run the rope around the fighters, it made sense to have two more supporting stakes, on the other diagonal, and on these were placed the bets, or stakes, in the care of some hopefully reputable third party. Thus the square ring simultaneously became geometrically incongruous and indestructible in the imagination.