Nigeria, Feb. 25 -- The most daring game I know is the one I am never quite sure should be called a game at all. Each time I think of boxing as sport, I pause. Something in me resists the word "play." Soccer invites rhythm and teamwork, table tennis dances with reflex, volleyball floats on joy. The fun is visible, the laughter audible. People compete in stamina, not in visible pain. But boxing? Boxing stands alone, wrapped in paradox. It is spectacle and suffering, discipline and danger, art and assault. And in that contradiction, it reveals something profound about how differently human beings are wired.

I love watching boxing. I am drawn to it in a way that feels almost philosophical. It appears to me as an imagined game inside a worl...