Topic: Boxing

Back in July, Blank On Blank was one of our favorite Kickstarter campaigns. Today, they're already doing great stuff, starting with this lost interview from 1966 between heavyweight champ Muhammad Ali and some very ambitious high school students from Winnetka, Illinois.

Guillermo Rigondeaux was one of Cuba's very best fighters before he finally succeeded in defecting in 2009. He has also been one of its saddest, and an emblem of a wise but thwarted and incurably sports-mad society that's quietly at war with itself, and losing.

Claressa Shields is 17 years old. She's from Flint; she's moved four times in the last year. She's into Twitter, boys, and music. Come September, she'll be back at Northwestern High School in Flint for her senior year. But between now and then, she'll be the youngest woman ever to box in the Olympics. 

Losing a boxing match is not at all like discovering that another person is better than you at a particular skill. Remember that Boxing is basically fighting. If someone outfights you then you have to come to grips with all that entails. Being outfought, or worse knocked out, means you have been emasculated and are subsequently less of a man than your opponent. In other words, if the world consisted of just you and him, he would get what he wanted and you wouldn’t.