Boxing Breaks Your Face. It is Designed to Break Your Face.

More bookbag from Kasia Boddy's Boxing: A Cultural History:

The very transience of the ideal body is made all the more poignant by the less than perfect bodies that surround it. This phenomenon is foregrounded in boxing—and not in other Olympic sports such as the discus or running—by the fact that while the processes of training are all about perfecting the body, and while, at the moment of triumph, the body may move beautifully, the sport itself is all about damaging (and making ugly) the body. Apollonian form could only temporarily contain Dionysian energy.