Sometimes When We Touch

I'm just going to put a thought out there and let the chips fall where they may.

In those pre-fight "stare-down" photos that newspapers love to run, it often doesn't seem entirely clear whether the two guys are getting ready to fight each other -- or to kiss each other.

There, I've said it.

I know we're all supposed to get stoked up in the days of hype before a big fight, especially at the press conferences where the two guys come out and tell everyone how deeply they desire to kill each other and what a talentless punk the other guy is. After emptying out both barrels of trash-talk, they then are forced by promoters to move really close together and pose with their faces an inch or so apart. They have to snarl and look mad to let us know it will be an awesome promotion, er, fight.

The thing is, when we write advance newspaper stories about a forthcoming fight, photo editors almost always seem to choose shots from the staged stare-down rather than running action shots of the fighters, which actually depict the sport. I think I know why photo editors choose stare-down photos. They are from an event that happened yesterday, so they are "news," while a fight that happened months ago isn't.

Also, not all newspapers can freely tap into the AP or Corbis photo archive to get great action shots or portraits of boxers; they can get yesterday's posed stare-down pictures for free off the wire they subscribe to.

So we get two guys staring into each other's eyes.

Sometimes they have a hard time pulling off the hate. Anyone who's seen Joe Calzaghe and Mikkel Kessler knows they look like they belong in GQ magazine anyway, and they seem like they really are nice guys. Still, I just can't get over the shots from their stare-down.

"Their noses touched and they started laughing," says Ed Mulholland, the award-winning boxing photographer who took the shots of that stare-down shown here.