I promised to float butterfly-like and not be bee-like but I do have to start with the title of this chapter, ‘Boxing as Sports Criminology’. I admit to being miffed. I called my book Sports Criminology, this blog Sports Criminology and regularly tweet using that hashtag so not to get a mention here is gutting.
In my book I dance about the term never really settling (that butterfly again) but think I conclude, against the book’s own title, that there is no such thing as sports criminology just a big playing field called criminology in which sport and the ludic should be taken seriously. Mind you I also argue against green and queer criminologies on the same basis but include both as perspectives in my own work. However, my efforts to break down inter- and intra- disciplinary barriers are usually ignored.
A more dispassionate complaint is that I don’t think she actually engages with the term in the chapter or elsewhere. She discusses both the sport of boxing and criminology but never brings them together. Later in the chapter she uses a word I’ve never come across ‘decussate’ (p14) in another context. Perhaps she has brought the lines of sport and criminology together on the page to form > < but not yet an X?
In her potted history we jump from ancient Greece to the 2012 Olympic Games with the perceived ‘civilising influence’ (p5) of boxing to the fore. She doesn’t use the term ‘muscular christianity’ and neither does Petty Officer Second Class Ian McCoy, of the U.S. Navy (a serendipitous discovery of mine) who only recently argued that 'Boxing Can Boost the Navy’s Fighting Spirit'.
Specifically he says:
Boxing is the essence of the fighting man (my emphasis) the value is not that in the skill that is acquired though that too has real value for hand to hand combat, but because it quickly acclimates the body and mind to the violence and shock so foreign to modern day youth, yet so absolutely essential to fighting men (my emphasis) the history of boxing is essentially the story of the molding of the combative or fighting instinct of man into a moral substitute for war.
Yet the Navy Institute who host this website illustrate the article with a picture of two women fighting!
Much of her fieldwork was done during the period around the 2012 Olympic Games and over six months she, ‘situated myself as a boxer’ (p6). She also reveals her history as a youth justice practitioner in reparation and rehabilitation. My own decision to study joyriding came from my Home Office days visiting probation led motor projects.
She moves on to discuss boxing gyms as sites of research and notes Wacquant (2004), Woodward (2007), Ingen (2011), and Trimbur (2013). She notes growth in numbers of registered boxers including increased numbers of women. Intriguingly she also mentions Page McBee’s (2018) account of becoming the first trans man to box competitively at Madison Square Gardens. Obviously much sports politics now concentrating on trans women but this case obviously touches on what it is to be a man as the sub-title screams, Amateur: A True Story About What Makes a Man. If I gave him the wool would he make me one? I hope to here more on these gender and sexuality matters.
She picks out Anthony Joshua’s trajectory ‘From Drug Offences to Heavyweight Stardom’ (Daily Telegraph, 6 April 2016) as typical of the boxing saved me from jail narrative that sometimes serves as the only evaluation of the sport as a potential crime prevention/desistance measure. My version of this appears in chapter 7 of my book and references, by way of balance, Aaron King’s '10 best boxers who went to prison’. 4 years on I realise I’d wanted to explore Traveller boxers and wonder if this will arise. Tyson Fury is currently hitting the headlines in both sport and crime categories.
Before moving on to discuss her methods she asserts, ‘boxing and football came to be symbolic representations of working-class masculinity’ which prompts two thoughts. First to agree but then to want to separate boxing out as so much more involving - more total a way of life for some. Six months for her but longer for her subjects. Secondly to note the issue of a specific class-based masculinity because elsewhere in common with many she tends to elide masculinities into the ‘hegemonic’. Perhaps because I don’t own it as my masculinity or because of my exposure to Stuart Hall’s take on Gramsci adumbrated through OU courses I see even the hegemonic as contested. My nerdy wordy masculinity wouldn’t cut in the gym but on this blog maybe.
Methodology nerds only get a few paragraphs about narrative interviewing and citations of the work of her supervisor David Gadd on the importance of the psychosocial. Her question is ‘Tell me the story of how you became a boxer’ (p10) but I still want to know, beyond the few clues she gives, also how she came to want to do a PhD on boxing. On the question of the psychosocial also glad to see the External Examiner of my PhD Tony Jefferson cited.
She then moves on to various theories of desistance and the age-curve question. She then foreshadows her individual chapters on Frank, Eric and Leroy. Frank ‘saw violence as a way to accrue respect and command obedience and Eric sought to build, ‘a carapace of muscle’ (p14). This reminded me of some women’s narratives of weight gain to protect them from the male gaze or expectations of femininity. Leroy was seen to be trying to deal with ‘the hidden injuries of class’ (p14) (Sennett and Cobb, 1973).
Boxing we are rather dramatically we are told offers, ‘a distraction from the atrocities that these men may have faced’! We shall see.
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