Weight Cutting

Making WeightOn the corporate art of hitting the number by becoming worse at everything the number was supposed to measureThere is a photograph taken of every fighter at every weigh-in, and the internet always says the same thing about it. He looks incredible. He does not look incredible. He looks like a man whose kidneys have filed a formal complaint and whose face has been replaced with a topographical map. He has spent three days in a sauna suit, sitting in a hot bath, spitting into a bottle, refusing water while thinking about water with an intensity most people reserve for grief. He has shed fifteen pounds that were, in the technical sense, him. And then he steps on the scale, the number appears, everybody claps, and a commission official writes it down as though something has been verified. Something has been verified. Just not the thing anyone thinks. The scale was answering a different question all alongA weight class exists to answer one question - are these two humans…