Boxing is a disgusting sport, my mother always says. It’s all rich people watching poor people punch each other to death. Boxers aren’t poor, I say. Some get millions of dollars a match. But my mother is insistent. Look at tennis, look at golf, she says. Those are rich men’s sports; they don’t have to beat each other in the face. Yet for some reason, everyone I knew, from a vast variety of ideological backgrounds, had simultaneously fallen in love with a Filipino boxer who turns a coarse sport new again. On Saturday night, Pacquiao fights for the first time since May, in a hotly anticipated pay-per-view bout against Juan Manuel Marquez, a fighter he has battled twice before — the first bout ended in a draw; Pacquiao took the rematch, but barely.

Pacquiao makes boxing lovable by being lovable: He overcame immense poverty to become an international phenomenon worth millions. He is monstrously fast in the ring. He named his newborn Queen Elizabeth just because he likes Queen Elizabeth. He is humble and sweet-faced and appears amazed by his own success.

But dig deeper and you see something else about Pacquiao that is an unexpected gift. For Asians and Filipinos who were born and live in the West, Pacquiao offers a space where a diasporic people can feel closer to somewhere hardly ever seen. For a few hours they are united with all the other Asians in the world hunkered down in Pacquiao caps, socks and hoodies, trying not to gnaw off the rim of their beer glasses. Pacquiao closes a distance of thousands of miles so that they are at home.

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That night in Toronto, it was just spring, the city still gasping from the end of  winter. At an uptown bar called Sports Centre Cafe, all 50-plus flat-screen TVs pulsed with the golden words Pacquiao versus Hatton, over the side-profiles of the men in a stare-down, their triceps, pectorals and latissimus dorsi rippling. Fans huddled in huge clots, vibrating with anticipation. Max, the tweeting publicist, was there with a group of about 30, some of whom he’d known since he was small. He’d even brought his dad.

Max and his friends almost always get together on weekend nights to drink beer, argue about Israel and Palestine, debate whether or not Kim Kardashian is white, and watch sports. Max is excitable, a short stocky bundle of vociferation and enthusiasm, but this night his nerves kept him quiet. Hannah, a community health worker specializing in women’s health — not your typical fight-night spectator — was at the bar with Max. She first heard of Pacquiao at her grandmother’s funeral in 2004, when half the mourners retreated to the kitchen to watch TV. All of a sudden, they began screaming and hooting. They were watching Pacquiao fight. I ask if anyone was disapproving of sports fandom at a funeral. Hannah is emphatic, “Not at all. It was the death of a grandma … and the birth of Pacquiao. It was totally acceptable,” she says, “because he was Filipino, and because he won.”

It is not just that Pacquiao is Filipino — and classically, undoubtedly so, all the way down to his shameless adoration for karaoke and tendency to belt out George Benson hits on late-night American talk shows — it is that he is Filipino and he is Great. Pacquiao goes past Filipinoness or Asianness, rousing transracial unity for anyone who has a reason to back the ethnic underdog. Kai is black, and out of Max’s social group of publishing types and lawyers, stands out as the one with the most glamorous job — he is an actual rocket scientist. He says, “Pacquiao’s being nonwhite definitely was appealing for me. Not just that, but being from a third-world country and the fact that he came from struggle. So I kind of supported him in solidarity.”

Pacquiao has broken records and the laws of science, jumping through six weight classes to win seven world titles. This is the language of boxing, but all you need to know is this: Pacquiao is X-Man fast, flattening opponents experts say should destroy him. When Pacquiao was scheduled to fight Oscar De La Hoya – sports superstar and Pacquiao’s idol – in late 2008, commentators said the fight was a mistake. The idea of the matchup, an English sports writer said, made him queasy. De La Hoya is going to kill Pacquiao. What happened instead stunned the boxing world. By the eighth round, De La Hoya’s beautiful face was a mess of swollen purples. The crowd was a solid wall of unison: MAN-NEE MAN-NEE. As Oscar sat on his stool before the ninth round, his trainer Nacho Beristain, beseeched him, “There is no reason to continue with this. He is just too fast for you.” The fight was stopped before De La Hoya got truly pulped. The fans in the stadium were beside themselves.

If you are not a boxing fan, this description may not do it for you. Yuck, my mother would say, how is it a talent to destroy another man’s face? But this is where Pacquiao’s true appeal comes in. As Beristain announced his decision, Pacquiao ran to the middle of the ring and threw his arms around De La Hoya’s neck. This was the end of De La Hoya’s boxing career. The men swayed like slow dancers as their teams begin to swarm, like brothers-in-arms embracing for the last time. Then Pacquiao pushed passed the melee, falling to his knees in his corner to pray, his gloves cupped around his face like he was telling the post a secret. His team members reached through the ropes, trying to touch him, caress his head, hold his arms. The names tattooed to his arm, of his wife Jinkee, and his children, Jimuel, Michael and Princess, glistened under the sheen of sweat and the flashbulbs of the hysterical arena. And then Pacquiao squeezed his way back to De La Hoya to hug him again, ignoring attempts by legendary boxing analyst Larry Merchant to begin the post-fight interview. “You’re still my idol,” Manny said to Oscar, “No matter what happens, you’re still my idol.” “No,” Oscar said, “Now you’re my idol.”

In a sport defined by violence and the joyful arrogance of boxers like Muhammad Ali, Pacquiao is a weirdo. He is a sweetheart. His most famous body part, after his left fist, is his smile. In narrating his weigh-ins, boxing analysts appear to be speaking of an infant rather than a prize fighter, “And oh, there it is. There’s that smile. Look at that smile.” Equally compelling is Pacquiao’s origin story. The poverty of the Global South that Pacquiao came from is unimaginable to some American boxing fans, where Manny’s single mother was among the poorest of the poor in the world. Now GQ tells thick-growing fables of Pacquiao’s generosity: A man in his camp stole a huge amount of money from him, but Pacquiao simply forgave him, which led several members of his team to believe in God. On his 31^st birthday he held a karaoke party for 3,000.

A Schwarzenegger-esque twist in “Pacman’s” story: In May 2010, Pacquiao won a seat in the Philippine Congress, by a landslide. Pacquiao’s logic for entering politics is typically charming — “I cannot turn my back on the poor … I don’t want to be just your boxing idol. I also want be your idol in public service.” My friend Janine, a poet and a Ph.D. candidate who was born in the Philippines, is not as starry-eyed about this win as Max and his friends. She asks, with some contempt, how getting hit in the head qualifies someone for government. But when I took Janine to her first Pacquiao fight last May, her logic dissolved. On a bar stool at Buffalo Wild Wings, a fan awoke. Janine covered her eyes when Shane Mosley upset Pacquiao’s balance and then yelled “That’s my guy!” when Pacquiao rallied. “I can’t explain it,” she said somewhere around the eighth round, “I’m just inexplicably drawn to him.” She gazed happily at the television screen.

For Asian fans, there is something exceptionally thrilling about Pacquiao: the joy of seeing ourselves whenever he is on TV. During an interview on “The Jimmy Kimmel Show” in 2010, Pacquiao sang “Nothing’s Gonna Change My Love For You,” for no reason really, other than that he wanted to. I was transfixed by his warbling; he employed the exact same karaoke style as my Singaporean uncles. I had never seen such a comforting, familiar and unabashed presentation of Asianness on American TV.

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It was as if the promoters of the Pacquiao-Hatton fight were goading on this ethnic rivalry. Throughout the lackluster undercard matches, the slogan of the main event kept flashing in different iterations: war of the worlds. battle of East and West. Or as Ryan put it, colonizer and colonized (though to be fair, the Philippines was colonized by Spain, not England). This was a bout underscored by nationality and ethnicity, even though boxing rivals fight simply for their name, not country. Pacquiao’s logo uses the rays and sun of the Philippines’ flag. Ricky Hatton’s trunks were cosseted by a sequined, tasselled Union Jack.

Boxing has always been about race. Sports in general are deeply racially coded, which is why Tiger Woods and Yao Ming are such fascinating figures. Colin, one of Max’s crew, tells me that boxing is history, a mirror of race relations across the decades. He recounts the story of Jack Johnson, a black heavyweight champion from the earliest days of boxing. White champions refused to fight Johnson, depriving him of a chance at the big titles.  Then, when Johnson finally fought — and beat — the undefeated white heavyweight champion on July 4, 1910, race riots erupted across the U.S. Police interrupted multiple attempted lynchings. By the end of the night, the body count was at 25 — 23 of them black. As the title of a 2005 documentary about Johnson states, Johnson was “unforgivably black.” Colin is black and white, not Filipino, but he has enough Asian and Filipino friends to provide an analysis of what Pacquiao means. “Asian men aren’t usually shown as very masculine or athletic in mainstream media. So his rise is their rise. Pacquiao potentially knocking out Hatton, a white guy, is all the more significant.”

If Pacquiao could beat Hatton, it would undo — for at least a moment — the prevalent stereotype that Asian masculinity is limp and feeble; a stereotype that has dogged Asians in American pop culture for decades, and continues still today.

Asian men in movies and television are portrayed as Korean grocery store owners silenced by English, bumbling call center operatives or stereotypical comic book nerds. There’s the ubiquitous image of the Asian man as effeminate and emasculated like “The Big Bang Theory’s” Raj, or sexually stupid like Long Duk Dong in “Sixteen Candles.”  American pop culture in general seems uncomfortable with Asian men’s sexuality. When Hong Kong megastars like Jackie Chan, Jet Li and Chow Yuen-Fatt tried to break into Hollywood in the late ’90s, they were repeatedly cast in awkwardly platonic relationships with American sexpots like Mira Sorvino and Aaliyah. Even a decade later, after Asian-American heartthrobs like Daniel Dae Kim, Asian men are still the butt of the joke in movies deeply concerned with manliness. In 2009’s “The Hangover,” Ken Jeong plays an Asian gangster named Mr. Chow who enters the scene by jumping naked out of a car trunk, and then spends the rest of the movie striking homophobic panic in audiences worldwide.

These stereotypes seem to loom in the minds of these friends. Instead of a picture of his face, Max’s brother Christian has a photo of his wife’s chest as his Facebook picture, with the words “Everyone Loves an Asian Boy” dancing across her bosom. Colin claims Anthony is morbidly obsessed with the number of Asian women he sees with white men on the street. Ryan admits that seething over that “white guy Asian girl thing” comes from a bad place and that as a younger man he struggled to get over this anger. But this anger comes from real pain; from hearing, day-in-day-out, that Asian men cannot be strong, sexy or desirable. 

I wonder if Pacquiao, as a Filipino from the Philippines, knows what he means to Asian-American men; if he is well-versed in the American racial landscape, or the excruciating immigration histories that shape it. For almost 100 years, the U.S. and Canada both created laws to make Chinese people – the largest group of Asian migrants – illegal, starting with mandatory head taxes and a “pigtail ordinance,” up to a total ban on immigration from China, which lasted until 1943 in the U.S. and 1947 in Canada. Even before the ban, Asian men who immigrated to North America could not bring their wives or families, to prevent the growth of an Asian American population. These men often only had access to jobs that culture associated with women, like running laundromats and restaurants. And the only way Asian women could come to the West was as chattel: as sex workers or mail-order brides. This history has echoes that affect even Asian folks like me, whose families came to North America long after 1947. Things are different today, but it has been only a few decades since the laws shifted, and attitudes are slower to move. Hence Asian men are sex comedy, Asian women are sex property; on one side of the coin you have Mr. Chow, on the other you have yellow fever.

Max says one of the things he loves about the Age of Pacquiao is seeing black guys in Pacquiao shirts and gear. When I ask why, he says, “Man, I been copping black athletes’ gear for what, 20 years?” “Cross-cultural solidarity,” Ryan says. “Straight up,” Max says.

It is Colin’s happiness at seeing a bona fide, nonfictional Asian hero for his friends that draws him to Manny. When I ask the group if they think it’s OK to experience enjoyment at the sight of an Asian man beating a white man, Aruna, Christian and Anthony search for a tactful response. But Colin says, “Doesn’t it sort of feel gratifying though? I’m just thinking of all the times we’ve seen Asian men emasculated, and I just think Pacquiao can be symbolic of Asian pride. It’s kind of cool and satisfying to see one of us — ” Colin stops to correct himself here, pointing out that he can’t say “us” because he’s not Asian. But it’s clear that Pacquiao means something to him directly, not just via his friends. He continues, “For me, when Obama won the presidency, it was one of the greatest moments of my life: to see a black guy, a biracial guy reach the highest levels. You can dispute Obama’s policies or whatever, but seeing that win, I cherish that. I don’t think it’s wrong to necessarily feel a little pride, a little racial pride maybe, in seeing Pacquiao knock out a white guy out.” He pauses dramatically. “He put that guy to sleep.” Everyone laughs.

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Boxing is honest about the thirst for blood that other sports obscure with penalty boxes. Its attraction is its simplicity — two players as opposed to the 20-odd of many team sports — the ease with which we can turn it into a clear narrative with heroes and villains. The appeal is instant, if you can get over the brutality and the mutilated septums. Maybe boxing gets its continuous staying power from the universal draw of a good story, when the two-dimensional masculinity and tightly held virility that once gave boxing its shine are outmoded. (Sort of.)

In Manny’s story, the villain is Floyd.

Floyd Mayweather Jr. is the antithesis of Manny Pacquiao. Mayweather seems to sunbathe in his own fast-talking cockiness. He has never been defeated, a fact that he is quick to relay to any microphone that finds itself in his face. During a September 2011 fight, Floyd’s opponent, Victor Ortiz, made the ill-considered decision to butt Floyd in the head. As Ortiz continued to say sorry after the bell rang to restart the round, Floyd sucker punched Ortiz in the middle of his apology, knocking him out and winning the fight. When Larry Merchant suggested during the post-fight interview that Floyd had taken advantage of Ortiz, Floyd shouted, “You never give me a fair shake! HBO needs to fire you! You don’t know shit about boxing! You ain’t shit!” Merchant lost his journalistic cool. “I wish I was 50 years younger,” Merchant screamed, “and I’d kick your ass!”

Personality aside, Mayweather is the other Best Boxer in the World, and fans are desperate for a Pacquiao vs. Mayweather showdown that will establish, once and for all, the true champion. Pacquiao began negotiations to fight Mayweather in late 2009. Then Mayweather requested Olympic-style drug testing for the match: random blood testing leading up into the week of the fight, on top of the official testing required by the boxing commission.  Pacquiao refused. He said that having his blood drawn so close to the fight date would weaken him. Boxing went bananas. Negotiations stopped, started and stopped: years have passed and the fight still hasn’t happened. Fanbases remain balkanized, and the Internet screams that Mayweather is just a coward and a bully who can’t bear to be defeated. Or Pacquiao is a dope user and his superstition about blood drawing shows just how backwards this foreigner is.

Just before Christmas 2009, while the rest of the guys discussed whether or not sneakers were against the dress code at the club where they had New Year’s plans, Christian, Max and Kai got into one of the first of countless heated arguments over Mayweather and Pacquiao. At one point Kai looked to Colin, the only other black guy at the table to back him up. “Sorry guy, I’m neutral,” Colin said.

While Kai says there is still a lot to like about Pacquiao, he contends that Manny is shady and lied about why he didn’t want to do the drug test. And Christian and Max, according to Kai, are too blinded by their Pacquiao love to see Kai’s logic. Christian and Max say Kai is just fronting, and he actually likes Pacquiao. They say Kai only pretends to defend Mayweather because he’s “a contrarian” and because he “feels the need to defend every black public figure.”

When Kai says that Pacquiao and his team capitalize on things that Mayweather “would never have gotten away with,” I ask if he means that Mayweather as a black man cannot get away with what Pacquiao as an Asian man can get away with.

Despite the fact that Asians are an enormous community, the perception that they are soft-spoken and submissive, and therefore a “model minority” preferred by the white ruling classes, can create rifts among communities of color. It is ridiculous to state that over 2 billion people share a deferential nature; yet in the case of Manny, the irony is that the description fits. All the Pacquiao fans at my disposal describe him as incorrigibly gentle. Ryan says, “He is a tough guy within the ring, and that confronts stereotypes about Asians, but outside of that he seems sort of nonthreatening, and maybe that fulfills a stereotype. But that’s because he just does him.” Yet contrast this with the way African Americans are stereotyped and how Mayweather appears — loud, arrogant, violent — and when two boxers who both match a racial bill come up against each other, it’s war. In an echo of the Jack Johnson treatment, perhaps Pacquiao is forgivably Asian. But neither being forgiven nor unforgiven for your ethnicity seems so hot.

It is difficult to tell how much of the feud between Kai and Max is for real. The boys-of-color solidarity that buttresses their friendship is complicated by the truth that their ethnic experiences are parallel, but definitely not the same. Max and Christian call Floyd “Fraud” and “Gayweather.” Kai calls Pacquiao “Saint Pacbot” and “Princess Pacroid.” Max says Kai has no radar for sarcasm. Kai says the pot is calling the kettle Asian.

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In a simpler time, everyone is watching as finally, Pacquiao and Hatton arrive in the arena. Some white Hatton fans near Aruna, Anthony and Hannah are making comments about “pilipinos” and “pinoys.” The friends ignore them and Aruna refuses to acknowledge the British national anthem. The bell for the first round rings. Ryan’s friend Joseph, an eccentric who owns an iguana named Shelley, keeps screaming “Here we go boys!” In the arena the onscreen crowd is chanting “MAN-NEE MAN-NEE.” The noise crescendoes and garbles and turns into the Ricky Hatton song which goes, “OooooOOOOoooo Ricky Hatton, OooOOOOooOOoo Ricky Hatton.”

Pacman and Hatton spin around the ring in a whirligig of limbs. The referee separates them, and then he separates them again. At one minute to the end of the round, Pacquiao knocks Hatton down. Hatton’s mouth opens in shock as his feet leave the mat. Joseph begins yelling, “It’s done son! It’s done son!” even though Hatton is clearly getting to his feet. Hatton resumes bouncing on the balls of his feet, looking unfazed. But Pacquiao is too fast. “He’s eating it!” Ryan yells as Pacquiao’s glove connects with Hatton’s face. The British boxing analysts cry, “This looks so bad for poor Ricky Hatton!” At five seconds till the end of the round, Pacquiao knocks Hatton down again, who gets to his feet once more as the bell rings.

“I felt conflicted seeing Hatton down,” Aruna said later — “he was a good guy.” Hatton starts backing away from Pacquiao, on the tips of his toes, as if he is always about to fall over backwards. Now everybody in the bar is on their feet, one large organism reacting with a single OH! every time Pacquiao’s glove crunches Hatton’s face. It is as if Hatton’s gloves are full of sand. And then at eight seconds until the end of the second round, Pacquiao catches Hatton in the jaw. Hatton goes down like a push-button umbrella. He lies flat on the canvas, landing with his arms above his head. And then his arms retract neatly to his sides, as if he is settling in for a peaceful nap. The referee doesn’t even bother with the count. Six minutes into the event, the fight is over.

The Sports Centre Cafe detonates. A drumming sound like the onset of monsoon rain swells as people slap their hands against the low ceiling, literally hitting the roof.  Max runs around the room, giving all the Filipinos he can find high fives. Joseph buys a round of drinks for a table of random Filipinos. Anthony notes that even the Hatton fans, bummed out as they are, are applauding out of respect. The screen begins to run replays, and the crowd cheers all over again. Mariah Carey tweets Woah.

“We knew he would win,” they all say, “but we just didn’t think it would be so fast.”

GQ quotes a boxing reporter for the Philippine Star who talks about how Pacquiao’s riches mean that he can live wherever he wants in the world. Necessity drives 3,000 Filipinos a day away from the Philippines to work overseas; the global economy has turned the Philippines into a country that is used to being left. Yet Manny has elected to stay. “Not just in the Philippines,” the reporter says. “In his hometown. The place he started. You cannot understand how this has stunned us Filipinos. That Manny Pacquiao chose us.”

Because in the end, this is the reason for the pure, tears-in-the-throat elation that he inspires. He is Manny Pacquiao — ultra-human boxer, colonized defeater of the colonizer, archetypal Asian man karaoke singer — and he belongs to us.

Micky Ward is a real person, a notable junior welterweight boxer who retired in 2003 and who will not, God willing, see this movie as the spark for a comeback at age 45. Yeah, this is yet another American movie “based on a true story,” as they say in the trade, but let’s not get distracted by that. “The Fighter” is a great yarn, full of laughs and unlikely triumphs and bigger-than-life characters, more than it is a docudrama. You’re better off knowing only the basics about Ward and his half-brother, Dick Ecklund (Christian Bale), himself a boxer who once went 10 rounds with Sugar Ray Leonard. (Exactly what happened in that fight is a plot point of sorts, so I’ll say no more.) A lightning-quick motormouth as a fighter — something like a working-class white-boy answer to Muhammad Ali — Dickie has descended into petty crime and drug addiction by the time “The Fighter” begins, in the early ’90s. He thinks, or claims to think, that the documentary crew following him around is interested in his boxing comeback; their movie’s really about his life as a crackhead.

Bale’s going to get plenty of awards love for his loosey-goosey, scary-funny portrayal of Dickie, the erstwhile “Pride of Lowell,” a skeleton with busted teeth who shuffles around the once-bustling Merrimack River mill town smoking rock with Cambodian immigrants and regaling strangers with stories of his long-ago exploits. So will the wonderful Melissa Leo, who plays Dickie and Micky’s mom, Alice, in a terrifying bouffant and a series of tailored cream, beige and mauve outfits that make Carmela Soprano look like a model of WASPy restraint. (Some costume designer had a great time buying or building her duds.) Both are tremendous as richly awful characters who stop just short of parody — at least, I think they do — but I hope they don’t overshadow Wahlberg, who plays Micky as a stolid, introverted thoughtful kid who’s used to never getting a word in around his mom, his big brother and his seemingly infinite gaggle of meddlesome, big-haired sisters. It’s one of the best performances of his continually surprising career.

At first, the indistinguishable Eklund-Ward sisters, all six or seven or 15 of them, seem like the text of a mean-spirited gag about working-class Catholicism; by the time the movie was over, I thought of them as a half-comic Greek chorus, perhaps a combination of the Pleiades, the Fates and Shakespeare’s witches. They narrate and interrupt and interfere with the story of Micky’s declining fight career, which has pretty much hit the rocks thanks to Alice’s managerial incompetence and the, er, uneven work ethic of Dicky, his trainer. After taking an Atlantic City beatdown from some ex-con who outweighs him by 20 pounds, Micky begins to face facts: He’s a second-rate white-boy punching bag from Nowheresville, with a powerful left hand but no moves; time to hang it up.

But of course then we’d have no movie. Along comes Micky’s hard-ass new girlfriend, Charlene (Amy Adams), the hot barkeep from the local tavern — Micky’s sisters insist on describing her, disparagingly, as an “MTV girl,” which I think translates to “slut and suspected bisexual” — who insists he break up with this mega-dysfunctional family and build a real career, and there’s a mom vs. girl family drama built on top of the boxing flick. There’s nothing groundbreaking about the story of “The Fighter,” but at least it doesn’t surrender to the rampant sentimentality about family and poverty that infects American cinema as a whole. Family can be as much a prison as a springboard, especially if your family is as messed up as Micky’s. He loves Alice and Dickie, but their lives have been poisoned by drugs and denial and ignorance and greed. Being poor has not ennobled them (and doesn’t ennoble much of anyone); it has made them lie and cheat and mistrust and grasp at what’s in front of them with no thought about other people or the world. Of course Russell and the screenwriters are driving toward a sentimental conclusion — much more sentimental than the real ending of the Ward-Eklund story, as it happens — but the journey is plenty wrenching.

Several other movies this year have tried to tackle working-class American reality (at least in its Caucasian, New England form), including Ben Affleck’s self-indulgent thriller “The Town” and the tedious Hilary Swank vehicle “Conviction.” Russell’s jazzy, ruthless, affectionate and funny film outshines them all, and is a terrific date movie to boot: It’s a boxing flick with bone-jarring action scenes for the guys, and a family-and-relationship comedy for the gals! I don’t know what the deal is with David O. Russell, beyond what you and I and everybody else read in the gossip columns: He’s difficult to work with and has trouble making deals or whatever, and this is his first feature since “I Heart Huckabees” in 2004 and only his fifth since his 1994 debut, “Spanking the Monkey.” (Supposedly he’s already finished his next, a political farce with Jake Gyllenhaal and Jessica Biel.)

I’m just glad to get Russell back, because he makes movies with tremendous soul, as much of a cliché as that may be. Marvelously shot and edited (the cinematographer is Hoyte van Hoytema, who shot “Let the Right One In”; the editor is Pamela Martin), “The Fighter” has high style but is never showy, blends history and fiction in fascinating fashion, and includes several of the year’s best performances. Oscar voters may well end up weighing “The Fighter” against “Black Swan,” made by Russell’s friend and producer Darren Aronofsky — a similar fable, told in vastly different fashion — but no matter who wins, nobody loses. Taken together, these movies demonstrate that there’s still passion in American cinema. 

And no real formal agenda just yet for his trip to China in December, either.

“I know he wants to see Chairman Mao’s body,” said Gary Yang, an executive with Tianjin International Sports Development in China.

The Chinese want to see Tyson, too, if Yang and his partner, Qing Yu, are correct. They held a news conference Thursday to announce a deal for Tyson to visit the country and scout boxers for a series of matches in the city of Tianjin.

The news seemed to be news to Tyson, too.

“Mike hasn’t been brought up to speed really,” promoter Sterling McPherson said. “But if Mike likes what he sees there can be many, many more trips to China.”

Apparently Tyson hadn’t brought the Chinese up to speed, either, because he already saw Mao’s tomb on a visit to China in 2006. Tyson has spoken fondly of Mao in the past, and has a tattoo of the former Chinese leader on his right arm.

As appearances go, it was a far cry from the days when a glowering Tyson used to show up an hour late and then sneer at anyone who dared ask a question. Reborn over the last few years as an actor, dancer and pitchman, he got a chance to show off his new comedic side.

“Can we talk about what will take place on the trip?” someone asked.

“Yeah, tell me,” Tyson replied. “I’m pretty interested.”

Just what Tyson will be doing in China other than visiting Mao’s tomb in Tiananmen Square wasn’t quite clear, though what was clear was that he was being paid good money to do it.

“I’m just as clueless as you,” Tyson said. “But I’m an ambassador so I should have some say.”

Yang talked vaguely about having Tyson looking for talent for boxing shows in China, where amateur boxing is thriving, and perhaps helping to sell tickets to shows the company plans to put on.

“Chinese people just love Mr. Tyson,” he said. “He’s above (Muhammad) Ali there, though I shouldn’t say that.”

Tyson probably shouldn’t have said so much either, but the news conference was faltering and in need of rescue. In answer to a question, he said he liked Thai food better than Chinese, but remembered from his earlier trip how to say hello in Chinese.

When it came to the state of boxing in China, he had some ways to make it better, too.

“Didn’t you guys have an altercation with the Japanese people at one time?” he asked Yang. “Here’s what you do: You go looking for a Chinese fighter who will beat the evil Japanese guy and get revenge. That will sell.”

Mayweather’s lawyer, Richard Wright, denied Mayweather was guilty of the criminal charges based on allegations by Josie Harris.

“He did not commit any grand larceny,” Wright told The Associated Press. “Josie can’t find her iPhone. We’re attempting to find it or replace it. We’ll cooperate in the investigation. We expect to get the matter resolved.” An iPhone typically costs less than $500.

In a request for a Clark Court Family Court protection order, Harris said Mayweather threatened to kill her in a confrontation about 5 a.m. Thursday at a home she says is listed in his name in southwest Las Vegas.

She said he was angry about her a relationship with another man.

The document says Harris and Mayweather lived together for seven years and separated in May after 15 “on and off” years.

It says Harris sought another protection order five years ago and alleges that Mayweather battered another former girlfriend. The document does not mention an iPhone.

Harris also filed a police complaint Thursday. It has not been made public.

The nine-page request for a protection order alleges Mayweather pulled Harris’s hair, punched her in the head and twisted her arm while she screamed for their children, ranging in age from 7 to almost 11, to call 911.

“He yelled and screamed that he was going to kill me and my boyfriend,” Harris wrote. “Floyd has threatened to have other people do harm to me as well and if (there) is a way I can be protected from that please help me.”

Police said Thursday that Harris was treated at a Las Vegas hospital for minor injuries.

It was not clear if Mayweather was served with a copy of the document, and Clark County courts spokeswoman Jillian Prieto said there was no immediate record whether a judge granted, denied or scheduled a hearing on the protection order request.

Mayweather is considered one of the sport’s top performers, with a record of 41-0 and 25 knockouts. He goes by the nickname “Money” and earned more than $20 million in May from his fight in Las Vegas against “Sugar” Shane Mosley.

Mayweather made headlines earlier this month with an online video laced with expletives and sometimes racial rants against boxing rival and Philippine sensation Manny Pacquiao, who faces Antonio Margarito on Nov. 13 at Cowboys Stadium near Dallas.

Fans have called for Mayweather to fight Pacquiao in what could be the richest fight in boxing history, but negotiations have stalled amid suggestions from Mayweather’s camp that Pacquiao has used performance-enhancing drugs. Pacquiao responded with a defamation lawsuit that is still pending.

Mayweather said during the video that he’s on vacation “for about a year” and would easily defeat Pacquiao after that.

Pacquiao dismissed Mayweather’s video as an “uneducated message,” and Pacquiao’s trainer, Freddie Roach, labeled it “a really cheap low blow.”

Mayweather has been arrested several times since 2002 in battery and violence cases in Las Vegas and in his hometown of Grand Rapids, Mich.

He was convicted in 2002 of misdemeanor battery stemming from a fight with two women at a Las Vegas nightclub. He received a suspended one-year jail sentence and was ordered to undergo impulse-control counseling.

He was fined in Grand Rapids in February 2005 and ordered to perform community service after pleading no contest to misdemeanor assault and battery for a bar fight.

He was acquitted by a Nevada jury in July 2005 after being accused of hitting and kicking Harris during an argument outside a Las Vegas nightclub.

Harris, then 25, recanted her allegations and testified that she lied to police because she was angry Mayweather left her for another woman.

Harris told jurors that Mayweather was a “teddy bear inside” and said she knew “no matter what I did, he would never put his hands on me.”

Except for biting and eye-gouging, everything was permitted at UFC I. The lowbrow allure was real — I sure as hell watched, and got my car-crash satisfaction when a kickboxer punted a sumo wrestler’s teeth into the ringside seats (also embedding a few teeth in his own shin). Royce Gracie, a member of the family that had founded Brazilian jiu-jitsu, won the elimination-style competition. Gracie jiu-jitsu involves dragging an opponent to the ground and twisting his extremities into uncomfortable positions, or choking him unconscious. (In the early UFC competitions, the Gracies almost always won, often defeating much larger men.) Of greater importance to the promoters was the fact that the event grossed over $12 million  in pay-per-view buys.

It’s not every day that a new sport becomes a major cultural force, especially when it comes to martial arts; after all, people have been fighting for a long time. In America, MMA jumped into the void left by boxing, which had begun waning in popularity, and now threatens to topple the “sweet science of bruising” from its long reign as the preeminent combat sport.

The UFC version of mixed martial arts has only been around for 15 years, but its history is already being written. In “Blood in the Cage: Mixed Martial Arts, Pat Miletich, and the Furious Rise of the UFC,” Sports Illustrated writer L. Jon Wertheim follows the evolution of MMA by way of Pat Miletich, an early champion. Wertheim pays full attention to the UFC’s gruesome inauguration and aftermath. The blood-flecked freak show lurched on through the ’90s — John Wayne Bobbitt even tried to get in on the act — providing a Macy’s parade-size piñata for politicians to bash in their requisite displays of moral rectitude. John McCain, a devoted boxing fan, became the most conspicuous critic of MMA, declaring it to be “human cockfighting.”

Lost in the spectacle was the fact that the sport was developing rapidly and leaving the grotesqueries of its earliest days behind. An increasing number of fighters, especially former wrestlers — Olympic-style wrestlers, not the dudes in spandex — were making MMA their profession. Although the political persecution almost drove MMA out of business, it managed to survive and then thrive through canny marketing, a successful reality TV show (“The Ultimate Fighter”) and capital infusions from the Fertitta family (billionaire casino and amusement park owners). More subtly, the introduction of weight classes and rule changes made bouts more competitive and fighters no longer had to face multiple opponents on the same night. Head butts, fishhooking, groin strikes and hair-pulling were banned, as was “small-joint manipulation” — that is, snapping fingers. The fighters also began to wear light gloves to protect the delicate bones of the hands. (Some MMA leagues banned elbow strikes to cut down on bleeding, as elbows break skin more easily than gloved fists.) The new standards also made the fights more fun to watch.

Pat Miletich gives “Blood in the Cage” a soul. People fight for all kinds of reasons — they love contact, or they need money, or because they’re filled with rage. A miserable childhood threw Miletich face first into that last category. An Iowa native, Miletich and his family were first abused then abandoned by an alcoholic father. Two of Miletich’s brothers died violently and another spent an extended stint in prison for armed robbery. An indifferent student, Miletich was a gifted athlete and even more gifted street brawler. Martial arts saved him by directing his aggression into the discipline of the gym. However, it wasn’t until the UFC came along that he started getting paid to do what came naturally.

Wertheim’s early chapters are disfigured by the clichés and lad-speak that have become the degraded baseline for prose in men’s magazine. Themes are “kicked around” and novice competitors “beat a hasty retreat.” Fighters have “testicles the size of cabbages” and, “In the Octagon, no one gives a shit about your satirical blog …” Even a little of this goes much too far. Yet Wertheim is a capable journalist and when he turns to Miletich and the development of MMA, the narrative settles down. Although a relative newcomer to the sport, Wertheim knows the difference between a chokehold and a kimura and he deftly balances the business history of MMA with colorful characters like 280-pound Henry “Tank” Abbot, self-declared “master of the ancient martial art of kicking ass” and possessed of a lengthy criminal record for assault and battery. Most important, Wertheim gives insight into the spirit of men who subject themselves to intense pain and suffering to become successful fighters.

Wertheim’s analysis of the rise of MMA is extensive, if often superficial. He credits the fact that “violence sells,” and that MMA meshes with YouTube and video game culture (“the actual fighting … often assumes the feeling of a video game, with its spasms of action and multiple ways of winning and losing”). In MMA, Wertheim writes, the stars remain approachable by fans and are less pampered than the icons of mainstream sports. For Wertheim, real men have long been under attack by a “feminized” culture that wants to put bubble wrap and knee pads on everything. He also links the popularity of MMA to an uptick in American machismo post-9/11. I have mixed feelings about Wertheim’s sociology. After all, it’s only upper-middle-class kids whose mommies keep them out of the mud, and if there is a “war against the boys,” the boys seem to be holding their own with SpikeTV and “Girls Gone Wild” videos.

Any discussion of MMA’s rise has to also include one of boxing’s fall (in the U.S. if not in Britain and Latin America). At this point, it’s difficult to understand just how important boxing was in this country through the 1960s — on par with baseball and far overshadowing upstarts like basketball and football. Wertheim makes the excellent point that MMA, for all the blood spilled in the octagon, is less dangerous long-term than boxing (pace Sen. McCain). This is because MMA fighters, who get hit in the head less than boxers, suffer less brain damage (though how much less will only be known as this generation of fighters ages).

“Blood in the Cage” is less convincing when Wertheim insists that boxing has fewer exciting fights than MMA. While it’s true that the UFC holds its fighters under tight contractual restraints and can force them to compete whenever it wants, the sport seems just as reliant on the star system as boxing. For all the greed of boxing promoters, there’s been no shortage of riveting matches in the past decade.

Wertheim claims that “boxing is still populated largely by reformed thugs” and/or people of color who don’t necessarily resonate with a mainstream audience, while MMA fighters tend to be college-educated and better behaved. Wertheim fails to explain why people don’t mind watching thugs of the unreformed variety run amok in, say, the NFL, since Plaxico Burress’ nightclub adventures didn’t have anyone tuning out the Super Bowl. While boxing’s fall does involve race and class, the story is more complex than Wertheim is ready to admit. Quintessentially urban, boxing thrived during the Depression, both because there were a lot of desperate young men and because the culture celebrated working-class heroes. (Boxing drew its top fighters from the tidal wave of immigration in the first part of the century. It’s always the guy just off the boat who has the most to prove.) After the Second World War, the city played a smaller role in the American story. The cultural focus turned to the suburbs and boxing was left behind. Suburban folk wanted their kids to be doctors, lawyers and businessmen, not fighters.

The suburban white-picket fence turned out to be hiding the same poverty, dysfunction and drugs as the cities, and all the old impulses still drove young men to fight. Yet it was impossible to go back to boxing — the infrastructure of boxing gyms and school boxing programs had never been created in the suburbs. To succeed as a professional boxer, you have to start by age 12 or so, preferably earlier. By the time some angry teenager in the exurbs wanted to learn how to use his fists, it was already too late, even if he’d had somewhere to go.

What the suburbs do have in abundance are wrestling teams and the martial arts schools that became a suburban staple in the chop-socky craze of the 1970s. (No strip mall is complete without a karate, akido or jujitsu dojo.) Former high school wrestlers found that they had been given a good foundation for a successful MMA career. Even now, a talented athlete with a background in martial arts or wrestling can pick up enough skills in a year or two to compete in MMA — something impossible to achieve in boxing. MMA gave white people a way to fight again. In the octagon, fans see men who they can imagine aren’t really all that different from them. As the sport becomes ever more professionalized, we’ll see if middle-class men will continue to be able to compete against those for whom fighting provides the only way out.

I don’t find MMA as visually compelling as boxing; unless you have a technical understanding of Brazilian jiu-jitsu, it often looks like two sweaty guys rolling around on the ground. (As a longtime prizefight fan and former amateur boxer, I have to admit a bias.) But the fact that MMA fighters generally aren’t very good at avoiding punches does lead to spectacular knockouts. There are plenty of boring boxing matches too, and I think that over time, MMA will continue to tweak the rules to make the sport easier on the eyes. Even without such changes, it could be that MMA has already permanently eclipsed boxing. Recently Oscar de la Hoya, the most recognizable boxer in the world after Muhammad Ali, was promoting two cards on the same night — one a boxing title fight in Los Angeles, the other an MMA event in Anaheim, Calif. Which one did de la Hoya attend? Oscar went to Anaheim.

Two men pitted against one another in the squared circle — or in the octagon — provides the purest expression of struggle and competition. When the bell rings, all pretense falls away and we push up against the limits of brutality, endurance and courage. (Not for nothing did A.J. Liebling label boxing a “Jansenist sport.”) For those who need to fight, or who need to watch fighting, MMA provides an outlet with a smaller cost in human suffering than boxing.

MMA has yet to find its great scribe, its Liebling, Pierce Egan or Norman Mailer, but it is young. Until that new bard of bloodshed comes along, “Blood in the Cage” will stand as a worthy introduction to the birth of something both awful and beautiful.