Tuesday, May 17, 2022

Who is Your Daddy?

 

We Should Bring Back Combat Sports to School.

My Dad who devoted his life to making sure that Max and I would never have to experience life on the streets is probably going to shoot me for this post but in the last two decades of my life, the people who I have come to respect have inevitably come from the streets. If I look at the people who have come up with the streaks of genius that have made a difference to my life – it’s always been the people from the streets.

The reason is simple. People like me – namely anyone with a qualification and working in a profession. Say what you like but as long as you’re relatively educated and are reasonably committed to something, you should be able to build a career and earn enough to feed the family without having to leave an airconditioned environment. Even a PMET like myself, who has somehow fallen through the cracks and never really got started on a career, has options. When I part-time in a restaurant, I do it from a position of earning a bit of pocket money and getting to know people. I can interact with customers in a different way from the rest of my colleagues because I’m not dependent on the job. I can afford to write this blog and write off what I don’t earn to brand building.

If you have a degree in Singapore, chances are you are from a decent enough family that found the means to pay for it and invested their time to ensure you could study. The very fact that you’re educated means that when you have to approach strangers, they’re willing to give you the time of the day. When it comes to job hunting, there’s a chance that you will either have a family connection or a school connection. For me, Dad played golf with a Citi vice-president. So, when I wanted to get an internship in a bank, I spoke to Dad (Incidentally, when I was asked how I got the job, I was told not to be embarrassed by the fact that I got in via a contact because that’s how everyone got their job.)

Later on, when I ended up having to do freelance PR work, I had the good fortune of Mum’s connections. I had no real experience in as much as my work record was such that I had never stayed in an agency for more than a few months. However, the mere fact that was my mother’s son and had been around her friends, meant that I had something more valuable – I could pick up the phone and get hold of many of the editors of magazines. I got enough successful jobs under my belt to develop a track record as a guy who could get things done despite the lack of formal experience.

Whether we like it or not, people who have education do start life with certain advantages. Things as who you went to school with help. Much as we may not like it, who parents are does give us certain advantages.

While all that is true for those of us who were blessed with the ability to get an education. It’s a very different story for the people who had to grow up on the proverbial streets. You’re talking about the people who could never make it through the education system or had to battle difficult backgrounds. You’re talking about people whose options in life are limited to certain career paths. I take the favourite boxer of my generation – Mike Tyson. If you read his biography “Undisputed Truth,” he talks about growing up in an environment where he saw his mother and her various men in violent situations. Should it be any surprise that the guy was lucky enough to end up in boxing. The options for a guy like him are boxing or a street gang.

One of the biggest truths for people from the streets is the fact that the paths that are available to them are often self-reliant. This was brought home to me by a story of how the son of Evan Holyfield, the son of former heavyweight champion, Evander Holyfield (who beat Mike Tyson twice) got knocked out by a guy who needed to work as an electrician to supplement whatever he was making from boxing. More on the story can be found at:

https://www.givemesport.com/88008288-evander-holyfields-son-evan-gets-brutally-knocked-out-in-massive-upset

 


 Evander Holyfield was for my generation the heroic fighter in the same way that Mike Tyson was the beast. The elder Mr. Holyfield didn’t terrify opponents the way Mr. Tyson did but we loved him because he had heart.

However, that didn’t mean anything in the ring for the younger Mr. Holyfield. His opponent was simply hungrier and wasn’t about to be intimidated by who the younger Holyfield’s father happened to be.

Mr. Evan Holyfield isn’t the first aspiring boxer with a famous father. In my generation, there was Marvis Frazier, son of “Smokin Joe Frazier,” who actually took the heavyweight crown from Mohammad Ali. Unfortunately for the younger Mr. Frazier, he ran into the youthful and very energetic Mr. Tyson who had no respect for who the younger Frazier happened to be related to and he promptly ended the younger Mr. Frazier’s boxing career.

https://alchetron.com/Mike-Tyson-vs.-Marvis-Frazier   

 


 Say what you like about boxing but in the ring, its very clear that legacy or who a person happens to be related to have utterly no bearing. The only thing that matters in the ring is whoever wants to win it more.

In a way, this is something that people like me often forget. For people like me, having to “fight” means using your mouth and telling people that you are fighter. For people on the streets (where most boxers come from), it literally means beating someone or having the stuffing beaten out of you.

In the piece “IFONLY POLITICIANS COULD LIVE AS PROSTITUTES BEFORE ASSUMING OFFICE,” I did argue that it would be an idea for politicians to live as prostitutes because it would make them more sympathetic to people. However, shoving politicians to work in a brothel is a fantasy.

However, getting people from elite schools to learn boxing or any full contact sport isn’t. Such sports should become part of the curriculum and it should be given serious weightage alongside academic success. If you don’t learn to survive in boxing ring, you shouldn’t be allowed to graduate. Furthermore, regular boxing matches should not be held just between elite schools. You need to have the elite school students paired up with the, how would you say – less fortunate schools.

Combat sports would help make our leaders much better. Consider the following:

Firstly, anyone who has been in an actual fight realises that you can get hurt as much as you inflict pain. Unfortunately, this is something that too many people don’t understand. Take the example of the recent infestation of far-right politicians who like to talk about being fighters how they want to take on everyone from the safety of highly guarded facilities. Now, imagine if you had a system where these guys could only graduate from school if they had fighting experience. They would either be denied to get into positions of power or they develop the ability to think twice before provoking unnecessary fights.

Secondly, if you get kids from elite schools to compete against schools stuffed with the kids who would love nothing better than to whack the “upper crust,” you will get an “upper crust” that will understand that it’s in their interest not to brand themselves as “uncaring elite” because they’ll be very aware of what everyone else might want to do to them.

Thirdly, as mentioned, who you happen to be related to or how rich you are, has no bearing to surviving in the boxing ring. Having to survive in a boxing ring would help breed a more self-reliant population that gets the idea that survival is about being able to get up once they’ve been knocked down.

The case for making combat sports an important part of the global education is getting stronger by the day. Its time our policy makers seriously thought about it.

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Maira Gall