12 THENEWYORKER,APRIL11, 2022
PLAY-BY-PLAY
FIGHTCLUB
I
n one sense, Will Smith has spent a
career preparing to slap Chris Rock
across the face. In an industry that fetish
izes masochism—Christian Bale’s sub
sisting on little more than two hundred
calories’ worth of black coffee and apples
for “The Machinist”; Robert De Niro’s
arduous pasta regimen, which put sixty
pounds on him for “Raging Bull”—
Smith’s prep work stands out for its the
atrical toughness. It could be said that he
trains as if he were in a “Rocky” montage.
To recover from playing a middleaged
dad in “King Richard,” Smith undertook
workouts that included climbing the
hundred and sixty flights of stairs up the
Burj Khalifa; after that, he scaled the
spire. For “Ali,” he trained with Sugar
Ray Leonard’s former coach Darrell Fos
ter. Foster told the press at the time that
Smith spent a year taking punches from
a former heavyweight champion and
sparring with his hands tied behind his
back; he broke his thumb, bruised his
face. A certain realism was adhered to.
“Will vowed to have no sex for the year,”
Foster added. “Sex saps a fighter’s energy.”
Once, he ran Smith through exercises in
the Rocky Mountains. The oxygen depri
vation was supposed to simulate the late
rounds of a championship bout. “He fell
to his knees, and I made him write Ali’s
name in the snow,” Foster recalled last
summer. “He said, ‘Now I get it.’”
After Smith hit Chris Rock onstage
at the Oscars, individual reactions
spanned a spectrum of shock and blame.
Some of the discourse focussed on the
semiotics of a slap versus a punch. Also
on how much weight you give the ac
tionhero training. Can a Hollywood
boxer actually fight like a reallife one?
The proSmith, nothingtoseehere
crowd (“If only folks were as agitated
by members of Congress taking a swing
at democracy and then [calmly] return
ing to their seats,” one Twitter user
posted) relied on a confidence that a
Will Smith slap is physically harmless,
if psychically devastating. On the other
end were those who viewed Smith as
something like a supervillain. “Just a
reminder that if Will Smith had slapped
Betty White for a joke she made (how
ever insensitive), she easily could’ve fallen
backward, cracked her skull and died of
a brain bleed,” one doctor tweeted. “Same
with Bob Saget obviously.”
To the scorecards we go! A few ex
pert judges kept score at home. The first
matter of business was determining the
slap’s legitimacy. Could it have been
staged? Charles Farrell, who managed
the former undisputed heavyweight
champion of the world Leon Spinks after
he lost his title, and who sometimes rigged
professional fights for the Mafia, said no.
“Chris Rock doesn’t seem to anticipate
the slap,” he said. “He has his face slightly
forward. For somebody who’s not a pro,
it would be hard to take a shot like that
full force, knowing that it was coming.
You would flinch.”
Freddie Roach, the renowned trainer
of Mike Tyson and Manny Pacquiao,
was consulted on technique. An asyn
chronous panel was convened.
ROACH: He got a good shot in. But the
mechanics were terrible. He definitely tele-
graphed that punch.
FARRELL: He was too squared up when he
let the punch go.
ROACH: Two weeks in the gym, we’ll get
him fixed. Definitely he would start off on the
mirror, work on delivering the punch correctly.
Then we’d go right to the mitts. I’d hold the
mitts for him, and we’d make that shot a very
meaningful shot.
FARRELL: What’s interesting about it is that
not even by professional standards, but by any
serious standards, Will Smith has absolutely
no power. They say, in boxing, punchers are
government’s response was halting and
disorganized. With time, however, some
thing like consistency emerged: Amer
icans knew what was allowed and what
wasn’t. We’re now reverting to the Wild
West phase. The Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention has indicated
that less than one per cent of the popu
lation currently needs to wear masks.
Some states are shutting down their test
ing and vaccination sites. Earlier this
year, the Biden Administration asked for
thirty billion dollars in pandemic fund
ing, but Congress agreed only to some
fifteen billion, and has so far failed to
authorize even that. As a result, the fed
eral government has reduced shipments
of monoclonal antibodies to states and
delayed the purchase of more antiviral
pills. It no longer has the funds to pay
for tests or vaccines for uninsured Amer
icans, or to secure booster shots for the
fall. Politicians and policymakers hold
powerful tools for curbing the virus; in
creasingly, they are declining to use them.
They’re also stymied by the murkiness
of our moment: the country contains
within it such a diversity of immunity,
vulnerability, and attitude that no policy
prescription seems to fit.
Amid the uncertainty, individuals, or
ganizations, and institutions must do
their best. This means giving people the
resources to confront covid not as an
abstraction but through the decisions of
daily life. During moments of high viral
spread, this effort might entail provid
ing rapid tests in the workplace, time off
after exposure, outdoor spaces for events,
highgrade masks for all who want them,
and a culture that respects varying lev
els of risk tolerance and medical vulner
ability. Decades of behavioralscience
research have revealed that our decision
making depends crucially on our envi
ronment; even as politicians discard mit
igation measures, communities at school,
work, church, and elsewhere can make
it easier for people to do the right thing.
For individuals, fighting the pan
demic can feel a bit like combatting cli
mate change. Why recycle when poli
cymakers allow carbon emissions to rise
inexorably? And, indeed, to defeat this
and future pandemics, we’ll need invest
ments in ventilation and airfiltration
systems, paid sick leave, disability ben
efits, diseasesurveillance programs, and
more. But it’s also true that individuals
retain some agency. We can get booster
shots and persuade others to do so; we
can make plans for accessing monoclo
nal antibodies or antiviral pills. When
cases rise, as they will, we can consider
how we might lower the chances that
we’ll pass on the virus to someone for
whom the consequences could be cat
astrophic. After two years of ebbs and
flows, of surges, variants, vaccines, and
boosters, our choices matter, perhaps
now more than ever.
—Dhruv Khullar
