The Boxer

Yeah

... with a song like The Boxer or-

Yeah

...

And his... method of paying room and board to kind of live with us as an adult was that he had to teach the younger kids how to play guitar.

And, uh, I remember there was, you know, these kind of binders with pages of lyrics and chord progressions and stuff and lots of the classics, you know, me and Bobby McGee and Beatles songs and, uh, The Boxer by Paul Simon, you know, Simon and Garfunkel.

Just like a lot of the old kind of canon of a lot of the great American songbook, if you will.

And that's what I spent a lot of time doing.

You know, like I imagine a sumo wrestler, second sumo wrestler reference of this conversation, in a ring.

And in the ring with them is a boxer.

And the sumo wrestler is slowly pushing the boxer to the corner of the ring.

And the boxer is jabbing and swiping and uppercutting.

I'll never forget that first Saturday Night Live after the attack when he stood on stage with the firefighters and the police officers as Paul Simon, a New Yorker through and through, whose song Speak of New York Lives

sang, the boxer.

Since September 11th, many people have called New York a city of heroes.

Well, these are the heroes.

20 years later, those lyrics have taken on such a different meaning for me.

While they will forever be linked with September 11th, they've taken on a different meaning for me, as well as my own life took a turn I could not have fathomed all those years before.

The song is about survival, getting knocked down, and the boxer's ability to get back up.

Now the years are rolling by me.

But just to see it, to see Paul Simon performing.

I believe The Boxer is what he performed.

Um, just 25 years is crazy, man.

Like, I, I, I saw someone in the chat saying, "What sports analogy will I make today?" I don't have one.

Is that from a

movie? I think it was in a movie, but the song is called The Boxer.

And that to my partner here and my partner in crime, Jeff Christensen, that was Simon and Garfunkel off of Bridge Over Troubled Water.

The song's called The Boxer.

So here you go.

And welcome to Soakin' in the 70s, Jeff.