I haven’t seen the TV show Watchmen (nor have I seen the movie, nor have I read the comics), so perhaps I ought not to comment on it, but while starting the background on this column, an advertisement for the show came up between Youtube videos. Two characters, both female, whose backstories I do not know, speak to each other while sitting inside a car. The older woman, speaking in a tone that suggests a lecture, says masks are worn to hide pain. Although the younger woman protests, she continues the lecture, stating that the wearer is driven by trauma, obsessed with rectifying injustice. Masks, if my extremely limited knowledge of Watchmen allows me to follow this premise, grant the wearer the ability to transform their experience of trauma into a quest for justice.
In short, to become a superhero.
Now I’ll admit, that’s a pretty good premise. It worked for The Lone Ranger, Spider-Man, and Batman (and apparently, Watchmen). But could it work in the real world for a championship boxer?
Deontay Wilder, the current WBC heavyweight champion, is slated to face Luis “King Kong” Ortiz later this month, and if history is any indicator, it is extremely likely Wilder will walk into the ring wearing a mask.
Wilder has been doing this for a couple of years now as part of his pre-fight ritual. They change from fight to fight, but his masks are always ornate, often gold or diamond-encrusted. Some are more intimidating than others—a black skull with spikes is a stand-out—and sometimes the masks are accompanied by matching regalia. For his mega-fight with Tyson Fury in 2018, Wilder incorporated a matching crown and a feathered cloak not unlike Natalie Portman’s climactic costume in Black Swan.
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Boxing is a simple sport, really. It is one of the few to require no ball, no stick, no net. The boxers stand alone, stripped bare to the waist, no teams or substitutions. The object of the sport, too, is simple: to lay low your opponent. This simplicity lends a timelessness to the sport; the paucity of excess feels honest and true. Boxing’s existential silhouette reveals to its audience a shape that is understood to be authentic.
Perhaps we unconsciously see the prize fighter as something apart, something before, intrinsic to our core humanity, necessary in a hunter-gatherer way, like DNA, primal building blocks of what it means to be humans clawing their way through the adversity of an angry earth. In the ring, he can punch and be punched without recrimination; we see the fighter as having sloughed off the shackles of “decent” society, free from the banal niceties and demands of civility—indeed, of civilization. (Wilder carries this transgression a step further: “I want a body on my record.”)
How do we reconcile the sport’s sense of innate authenticity with a heavyweight champion who walks into the ring wearing a mask?
Masks are not foreign to combat sports. They often play a role in the theatricality of professional wrestling. In Mexican professional wrestling, lucha libre, masks are ubiquitous. (Tyson Fury, heavyweight boxer and Wilder rival, recently wore a mask to his weigh-in while fighting on Mexican Independence Day.) Such masks are designed to evoke archetypal figures (heroes, gods, animals) with which the audience can identify the luchador. Masks, in this contexts, are about building character and narrative, about expanding and creating something larger than the man alone. The threat of being unmasked, of being revealed, is a constant threat in, and is sometimes delivered as a punishment to the defeated.
The fear of unmasking is a fear of having a secret identity revealed, but Deontay Wilder is certainly no secret identity. Indeed, he unmasks himself in the ring every time. When he walks out with his face covered, we do not need to ask who – we instinctually ask why. The mask is an engine of wonder, a catalyst for our curiosity. By drawing attention to identity (and its obfuscation), the mask actually forces us to consider the man in a more direct and sustained way. Insofar as we are comfortable accepting the notion that sometimes a lie can be used to reveal the truth, the consideration of identity is also a consideration of authenticity. The we ask of Wilder’s mask is how we develop an expanded conceptualization of the fighter, how we weave the man to into the epics of heroes, archetypes, and gods.
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“The ring is a place where you can release everything you have been going through,” Wilder says. Heroes, per Watchmen, are processing their trauma. The Lone Ranger’s fellow Texas Rangers had been ambushed and killed; Peter Parker lost his Uncle Ben; Bruce Wayne’s parents were murdered. As readers of the comic books, we know their origin stories, but the characters they interact with do not. Unaware of any motivating trauma, they can only judge the hero based on the actions taken in the quest for justice. So too with Wilder. Without attempting to dig too deeply into his own private life for signs of trauma (everyone, including athletes, deserve some measure of privacy after all), we can still delve into what his donning of the mask means with regards to his own quest, his reign as heavyweight champion.
We can see the scope of his vision coming into focus when he is speaking about Muhammad Ali or delivering a beat down to an online troll. We see another glimpse of Wilder’s quest in his slogan, “Til This Day.” When asked about it, he refers back to the four hundred years of oppression that African-Americans have faced, a trauma that continues “(un)til this day.” In setting his own hashtag/slogan in this context, he redefines the context of his championship into something larger than himself alone: his quest for the heavyweight strap is also his quest for justice. Connecting the violence in the ring to the violence experienced outside it facilitates elements of group therapy, a communal catharsis for the trauma of racist history.
“I am already transforming now and on the week of the fight it just takes hold, especially the day of the fight,” Wilder says. “I’m no longer myself . . .”
In this light, the persona a fighter wears is not entirely his own; he is always taking on whatever emotional freight the audience unloads upon him. Much like Batman, he becomes a symbol. If the mask helps Deontay Wilder bear this load, then more power to him. He is the one walking into that ring. He is the one taking those shots. His mask, for all its ring-walk theatricality, is not at odds with the authenticity on display in the ring. Wilder has said the mask gives him access to a side of himself otherwise inaccessible, a side necessary for the destruction and dominance needed. The symbolic dimension is necessary, or at least useful, for both the fighter and the viewer. The mask, like all metaphor, is a way of identifying this by way of that, a rhetoric of expanding, of unfolding, that offers the transformation necessary for the hero’s journey into the ring.
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People need dramatic examples, according to Bruce Wayne, to shake them out of apathy. When Deontay Wilder steps into the MGM Grand Garden Arena next week, what will he be wearing? And what will we make of it?