Friday 20 March 2020

Round 6 - Eric our Champion (chapter 4)

Eric is not alone in having problems with his father but it is an issue picked out in this chapter. His father’s attempted strangling of him a feature. Many of the men at the gym were now fathers and not always making good on their promises to self to be better fathers. Earlier Wacquant (1995) is cited on how trainers come to be seen as ‘fathers’. At one gym Eric felt a coach whom he had seen as a father used methods that amounted to bullying. As a coach he admitted he may now be doing the same. I might add from an oriental fighting perspective that such a person might be called ‘sensei’ or, to go back to religious metaphors, ‘holy father’? A whole psychodynamic reading on these men’s relation to their father might be merited.

As a professional Eric had eventually won a British title but now coached at, and ‘was the gym’ (p63) spending every day there. He owns it jointly with Marcus (of whom more later). He is now 51 and was born to Jamaican parents. Wacquant is quoted on boxing as a cult and throughout the book Deborah uses the terms, ‘monastic’ and ‘ascetic’ and from the nomenclature of desistance ‘redemption’ so I’m going to through in soteriology - the theology of salvation. Joyce Carol Oates is quoted on the sacrificial universe that is boxing. The boxers and their supporters have faith that boxing will or has saved them. Deborah and I are more agnostic.

On the homosocial theme Messner (1992) is quoted on the ‘covert intimacy’ of doing sport!

Obviously I pick up on an early anecdote from Eric about being caught by the police whilst being carried in a stolen car because of the significance I give to cars in the formation of masculinities. Cars feature in several stories told to Deborah and guess a search through her fieldnotes might reveal more.

We discover Eric had used his asthma inhaler between rounds which reminds me nothing I’ve read so far or peeking ahead and examining the index talks of performance or appearance enhancing drugs. Gyms are often sites of steroid abuse yet no mention.

The abuse of the boxer’s bodies is, in a sub-heading, called ‘bulimic’, a ‘bodily destruction’ the need to make the weight requires dieting and surveillance of self that only a super-model might expect. Such concerns over one’s appearance is often societally coded as feminine or gay.

Eric, as many of the men, was quick to see disrespect and felt justified in using their physical capacity for violence to exact payback. Deborah calls this ‘transposable attitudes from ring to street’ (what critics of violent sport often focus on) but I know as ‘cultural spillover’ (see this on ice hockey but note also the ‘Super Bowl effect’ etc).

The work of Winlow and Hall (2009) feature strongly here and throughout the book. They are good on the viscerality of some men’s demeanour and here I might mention I’d not want to fight either of them. They theorise pugnaciouly. 


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