Filmmaker Jason Hutt followed a Brooklyn junior welterweight named Dmitriy Salita around for three years, from the fall of 2002 to the summer of 2005, from age 20 to 23, from his ninth pro fight to his 23rd, from four-round undercard bouts in Las Vegas casinos to 10-round main events in front of roaring crowds of Chasidics in New York ballrooms. And he made a damn good boxing documentary.

It's called "Orthodox Stance." The hook is that Salita, 25, who immigrated with his family from Ukraine when he was 9, is not just an up-and-coming undefeated 140-pounder, he's also an observant Orthodox Jew, a member of the Chabad Lubavitch sect. He won't fight on the Sabbath or on Jewish holidays. A promoter in the film quotes Salita saying about Saturday fights: "Anyone who wants a good whuppin' from me is just going to have to wait until sundown."

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But this is no Supercuts. Knockouts offers a variety of haircuts that include more luxurious touches than my women's salon -- the "Heavyweight," for example, includes a consultation, "relaxing shampoo," haircut, "re-shampoo with head massage and conditioning" and style; the "Upper-cut" involves an "all-over clipper cut," shampoo and head massage. And it doesn't stop there: You can get highlights, cover up your gray, treat yourself to a manicure or pedicure, sign up for a Swedish, deep-tissue, trigger point or hot stone massage, or try out reflexology or a paraffin hand treatment. (And waxing. Let's not forget about the waxing.)

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OK, Muslim women aren't exactly boxing in burqas, but they are knocking each other out in the ring while wearing hijabs. The Age reports that women's boxing has emerged in certain Middle Eastern countries -- like Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Syria and Tunisia. Keep in mind, though, that women's boxing in the Middle East hasn't arisen because of changing attitudes toward women but because of changing sporting standards -- a country cannot enter male boxers into Olympic competitions unless it has a women's team in the same sport.

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According to the BBC, a peace group called Cooperation for Peace and Unity is sponsoring the boxing program in hopes that teaching Afghan women a martial art will improve their self-confidence and self-respect -- and help promote a martial art as something "constructive, not destructive." The women gather in a gym in the same football stadium frequently used by the Taliban for public executions. The article describes the women, who are trained by the same coaches who run the national men's boxing team, as "pac[ing] around, then warm[ing] up on punch-bags before squaring up in pairs against each other for training bouts."

It sounds like a pretty bizarre scene, especially since in between bouts of sparring, the women "sit down and discuss non-violent approaches to conflict resolution." While that sounds great -- I'm all for allowing women to break out of traditional gender roles -- if you're conducting conversations about nonviolent approaches to conflict resolution in a place like Afghanistan, wouldn't it make sense to include Afghan men?

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The Times describes Española as "a way station on a major Mexican heroin route, where officials say drug abuse is so ingrained that grandparents teach parents and parents teach children to do drugs, where state troopers carry the opiate antidote Narcan to revive addicts who overdose, and where a Rio Arriba County commissioner once protested a crackdown saying, 'We're not going to declare war on our own relatives.'" It is one of the poorest areas in the nation.

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Except for Reggie Bush. The Heisman Trophy-winning tailback from USC was so spectacular that even this hat-in-hand, nose-to-the-grindstone annum couldn't dim his luster.

Maybe the sports world was chastened by the Brawl of Palace Hills in November 2004, the consequences of which were felt well into '05.

Maybe it was the prospect of playing games in the face of a wave of worldwide disasters, of tsunami aftermath and earthquake, war and, especially, Hurricane Katrina, that injected a note of humility to the proceedings and had athletes, coaches and the commentariat talking again and again about "perspective."

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The titles of Liebling's many classics -- "The Sweet Science," his collected boxing pieces from the New Yorker; "Chicago: The Second City"; "The Press," his collected press columns in the New Yorker; "The Earl of Louisiana," his fan's note to Louisiana Gov. Earl Long; his collected food writing pieces, "Between Meals"; his war correspondence, "Mollie and Other War Pieces" and "The Road Back to Paris"; and at least half a dozen others -- are all familiar to writers and journalists of my generation, the generation that came of age influenced by the writers Liebling influenced. Tom Wolfe, for instance, who famously and generously credited Liebling with kicking off what came to be known as "new journalism."

Unfortunately, you need a bigger audience than writers and journalists to stay in print, and Liebling, in all his reincarnations, has never truly found one. His audience at his peak in the mid- to late 1950s was fairly big for a journalist, but most of his readers had already read his stuff in the New Yorker by the time the collections were published between covers, with the result that most of Liebling's books were destined for secondhand bookstores -- which is where I and my friends found them -- even before they arrived in retail bookstores.

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It's nice to see that Tyson has mellowed, cleaned up his act, that he's getting on with his life, putting it all together, the way he keeps saying he's going to do every time he's between bouts of outrageous behavior and trying to get a license for a bout in the ring.

He made his comments to Fox TV's Greta Van Susteren for a show broadcast Thursday night.

"No, I didn't rape that slimy [expletive]," wire reports of the interview quote him as saying. He called Washington, then an 18-year-old beauty pageant contestant, "a lying, monstrous young lady" and said he hates her guts. "She put me in that state where now I really do want to rape her and her mama."

Yeah, let's not forget her mama.

It goes without saying that saying, "I'm so mad at her I want to rape her" doesn't go very far in convincing people that you're not a rapist.

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Wait just a second, says his opponent, Clifford "Washington Generals" Etienne: Now I'm not going to fight. After all, says Clifford "Other Leading Brand" Etienne, my world doesn't revolve around Mike Tyson. Clifford "'Star Trek' Guy in a Red Shirt" Etienne is clearly in need of an astronomy lesson regarding his world, at least this week, but he says he broke training when Tyson announced Monday that he was pulling out, and now he's not going to jump just because Mike Tyson says to jump.

Never mind all that. Don't these people realize Tonya "The End of Civilization As We Know It" Harding's professional boxing career hangs in the balance?

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Many years, a handful of titles, and perhaps $115 million later, an older, wiser, sadder Oscar doesn't pull out the stamp any more. He exhibits a melancholy attitude when facing the press -- part humility as if he's still astonished at his enormous success (and you can't fake it all that time without it being partly genuine) -- and part puzzlement over the surprising fact that his popularity isn't greater.

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