On Saturday mourners in Southern California had a chance to commemorate Muhammad Ali by doing something that probably didn’t even occur to most Ali fans: going to a boxing match. Photograph by Sean M. Haffey / Getty

The death of Muhammad Ali proved that an event need not be surprising in order to be shocking. Sombre statements arrived from all sorts of people who loved him, and it wasn't just his friends who seemed to feel, somehow, that he loved them, too. One of the most widely quoted tributes came from President Barack Obama, whose remarks combined praise (Ali was “a man who fought for what was right”) with gentle criticism (he “could be careless with his words”), and arrived at a fittingly grand conclusion: “Muhammad Ali shook up the world.”

Anyone who was paying attention over the past three decades, as Ali made his bittersweet transition from brash conqueror to beloved survivor, might have noticed that the reverse was also true. The world shook up Muhammad Ali. He was not just an extraordinarily good boxer but also, much of the time, an extraordinarily exciting one. Yes, he floated and stung, but he got stung, too, and even Ali’s refined version of boxing did nothing to obscure the brutal physics of the sport—something hard hitting something heavy, over and over again. Everyone knows that boxing is damaging, and everyone knows that Ali was damaged; he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 1984, and the disease gradually claimed his speech and movement. In a recent Yahoo interview, Michael Okun, the medical director of the National Parkinson Foundation, cautioned that we don’t know whether boxing is what gave Ali the disease. (We may have a better idea if researchers are permitted to examine Ali’s brain.) Through skill and will and perfect timing, Ali made himself the ultimate example of how glorious boxing can be, but we still can't say exactly how he also became the ultimate example of how cruel it can be.

It can seem almost perverse to lionize Ali by talking about boxing, so completely did he transcend the sport. This weekend, there were makeshift memorials around the country, but on Saturday mourners in Southern California had a chance to commemorate the man by doing something that probably didn't even occur to most of the Ali fans who were otherwise united in grief: going to a boxing match. Thirty-five years after Ali’s sad final fight (a loss to Trevor Berbick), boxing endures, more marginal than it once was but essentially unchanged in its practice: a method, cruel but reliable, for creating moments of exquisite drama. Francisco (El Bandido) Vargas and Orlando Salido came to the StubHub Center, in Carson, California—each unknown to the general public but beloved of hardcore fans, who flocked to (but didn't fill up) the outdoor tennis stadium, lured by the promise of a match that would feature plenty of stinging and not much floating.

Even beyond Ali, the mythology of boxing remains surprisingly resonant, appealing to plenty of people who would never pay a hundred dollars to watch two men batter each other. All night long, fans in Carson heard promotional announcements for “Hands of Stone,” the forthcoming feature film about Roberto Durán, the legendary Panamanian boxer; its cast includes Robert De Niro, Ellen Barkin, and the R&B star Usher. By comparison, the fighters in the main event seemed like a couple of working guys, albeit accomplished ones. They are junior lightweights, fighting at a hundred and thirty pounds, and both are from Mexico, where boxing remains a national pastime. Salido is a rough and absurdly durable veteran from Ciudad Obregón, in Sonora; Vargas is an accomplished but free-swinging young talent from Mexico City. The crowd, which backed Salido, was almost entirely Latino, and, although there were a few people in Muhammad Ali T-shirts, the fight seemed to unfold in an entirely different universe from the one where Ali’s death dominated social media and cable news.

The two universes briefly merged around eight-thirty, right before the main event, when the announcer, Michael Buffer, entered the ring for an Ali tribute, which stressed his activism and his character, as opposed to his boxing technique. “He stood up against a horrible war,” Buffer said, adding that Ali had given the nation a lesson in “religious tolerance.” There arose from the crowd a series of chants: “Ali! Ali!” Also, “Ali, bomaye!” (This was the rallying cry—meaning “Ali, kill him!”—from Ali’s 1974 fight against George Foreman, in Zaire, known as the Rumble in the Jungle.) And, slightly less pertinently, “Fuck Donald Trump!” (The California primaries were a few days away.) And then, not much: the fight was being broadcast on HBO, which had prepared a (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThJbZR8M9a0). But there were no screens at the StubHub Center, so the fans who were present didn't see it; instead they heard an exhaustive list of the famous and not-so-famous boxers in attendance while they waited for the fight to begin.

Boxing promoters have a tendency to overpromise and underdeliver; in the run-up to this fight, the boxer turned promoter Oscar De La Hoya assured fans that it would “surely be a fight-of-the-year candidate.” Having been seduced by the promise of non-stop mayhem, some of the people in the stadium were evidently disappointed when, in the first round, Vargas and Salido came together and then stayed that way, entangled; as they were separated, the crowd began to boo. But then Vargas buckled Salido with a straight right, pushing him back toward the ropes and keeping him there, punching hard but wide and missing some; Salido, noticing this, landed a few mean-spirited counterpunches, and that was what people needed to see. All was forgiven: they cheered, and kept cheering for the rest of the fight; between rounds, some people stood and danced while the d.j. played Banda Machos and Los Tucanes de Tijuana.

The fighters’ strategies were plain enough: Vargas, slightly taller and longer, leaned and twisted away from Salido, trying to create space; Salido, undeterred, crouched and advanced, trying to fill it in. Neither fighter hits especially hard, and both can take a punch: this combination is what made De La Hoya (and many others) so excited about the pairing, because it suggested that the two fighters would trade blows for a full twelve rounds. This calculation proved correct: there were moments when each fighter’s knees buckled, or his body sagged, but both men stayed on their feet, delivering and bearing barrages that seemed, in the aggregate, unbearable. According to CompuBox statistics, they combined to throw 1,593 power punches, a category that includes every punch except a jab; that's the highest total ever recorded between two junior lightweights. (By contrast, when Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao fought last year, CompuBox recorded only 404 power punches.) Before the start of the twelfth round, a doctor ascended into the ring to examine Vargas’s face, which was swollen and blotched, partly as a result of a series of head clashes. The crowd booed, by way of exhorting the doctor not to stop the fight. Vargas passed the examination, and his reward was three more minutes of HBO glory, and of punishment. The crowd applauded both boxers at the end, although the bipartisan mood lasted only until the judges’ decision was announced: one judge had Vargas slightly ahead, but the other two scored it even, which meant a draw, and more booing; Salido had been the fan favorite, and it just so happened that most fans seemed sure that he had won. Online, the consensus among experts was that the fight had been close, and that a draw wasn't unreasonable.