Having reached the age of 41 without taking a punch to the face, my appetite for seeking one out is pretty low. But ahead of meeting the world’s top boxer, I find myself imagining what it would be like.
I’ve been reading AJ Liebling’s The Sweet Science, one of the great books on boxing. On the opening page, Liebling explains how receiving a blow from ageing pugilist Jack O’Brien had tied him directly to some of the sport’s Victorian greats through “a series of punches on the nose”.
That same logic links the clenched fist of Ukrainian heavyweight Oleksandr Usyk all the way back to his hero Muhammad Ali, via some of the hardest punchers in history including George Foreman and Mike Tyson. One of Foreman’s opponents said taking a blow from him felt like being “hit by a Mack truck going a hundred miles an hour”, while Tyson won more than 20 of his fights with a first-round knockout.