Carlo Rotella: Boxing in Casinos 4/14

If casinos come to Massachusetts, there's one small, specialized group in the state that will be very happy about it: fight people. Casinos attract more and bigger boxing matches, which generate excitement and TV exposure that are good for the casino business.
But that doesn't mean boxing and casinos were made for each other. It's a dissonant experience to walk through the gambling floor to get to a boxing match. What happens in the ring runs against the grain of the expensive playacting at idle pleasure that's going on all around. Leisure and luck, the essence of casino culture as it's marketed to patrons, are heretical notions in the fight world. Work and skill, the keywords of boxing, might mean something to the casino employees who deal the cards or serve the drinks, but not to the overwhelming majority of gamblers who lose their hard-earned money on unlikely bets and go home hysterically satisfied.
Almost everything about a casino's self-presentation, other than boxing, has been designed to make a visitor forget about work. You're intended to feel as if the money in your pocket has been magically devalued, made filthy and expendable by the fact that you earned it. You launder that tainted money by cycling it through slot machines or by turning it into chips, "gaming" with them, and then cashing them in for better money that's been magically supervalued because you won it through lucky play.
You can see in boxers' bodies, and in the way they fight, that luck means almost nothing to them, that every single thing they do, every choice they make, is fateful and meaningful. Every situp, every meal, every sparring session, every mistake, every effort and every failure to make the necessary effort--it all goes into shaping the fighting self. Most of them don't earn much money at this craft. They do it because it makes even their most mundane actions matter. Casinos encourage you to feel the same way about merely perverse choices--this slot machine or that one, the red or the black--and they promise to pay off handsomely when you guess right, although it never quite seems to happen that way.
Boxing may seem cruel, but compared to casino culture it's an exercise in moral rigor. In the middle of a desolation of incompetence where patrons sweat bullets in the deskilled pursuit of sloth, there are two boxers fighting expertly in the ring. They offer dramatic, brutal reminders of the material consequences of the choices you make and of the importance of disciplined self-denial, subjects that are taboo everywhere else in a casino.