A little pageantry is baked into all entertaining sports. As Trenova points out, having a rave at a fight is “like ‘Mo Bamba’ being played at a football game.” But as someone who, prior to this reporting, had never seen anyone get punched in the face, let me attest: This isn’t football. This is a different kind of spectacle entirely. The one that filled Madison Square Garden in the 70s, when it was Muhammad Ali vs. Joe Frazier II boxing, and drew 19th century crowds to bare-knuckle brawls in anonymous fields outside London. In 1500s Japan, it went down on the hard-packed clay of the dohyō. It was the hottest ticket in the Roman Empire. Before that, it was animals. It’s the world’s oldest pastime. And once again we’ve returned to two dudes in a ring. There’s just something about it.
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The gallery room at Manhattan’s Classic Cars Club on Pier 76 is called The Stable. It houses the club’s troop of steeds: the 1969 Chevy Camaro SS, the Lamborghini Huracán Performante, the Ferrari 328, et cetera, any of which can be checked out by dues-paying members for a joyride up the Hudson River. But tonight, the cars have been wheeled black to the edges of the room to make space for what looks like an upmarket dinner theater in the round.
Only it’s not exactly a stage at the center of the soaring 8,000-square foot space. Drenched in red and blue lights, flanked with tables where champagne buckets sweat, it’s a regulation-size boxing ring. Five or six times a year, the club hosts a fight night for members and their guests. The ringside tables go for $1300. The dry-aged ribeyes go for $145. They sell a lot of steaks on fight night.
“Our members have an interest in escapism in cars,” Michael Prichinello, the club’s co-founder, told me. “We’re racers. Motorsport is our go-to.” He dreamt up fight night as an extension of that inclination, appropriate for a clientele who like their entertainment high-risk and high-gloss. “Boxing is quite glamorous,” he mused. FaceTiming a few weeks ahead of the event, he looked like a reclining philosopher, gazing offscreen in a turtleneck: “When someone is risking life and limb or a particular level of safety, the spectacle is just always higher, and I think that the glamour goes along with that.”