In 1996, British scholar John Sugden published a study showing the intertwined histories of prizefighting and male economic insecurity. When boxing was codified, during the Industrial Revolution, prizefighting deaths had become commonplace. “The naked brutality of such contests and the obvious risks to the combatants begs the question why would anybody take part?” Sugden wrote. “Entire districts consisted of filthy slums, demoralised by crime, congestion, disease and prostitution. It was from such pre-industrial ghettos that the vast majority of prize fighters came.” He suggests, too, the echoes of this relationship in the settling of feudal conflicts in proxy fights, and the sport and gladiatorial combat of antiquity, where participants often came to arenas hungry and afraid, for the chance at a fraction of the pie dangled before them by more powerful men. No critic has written more damningly of this mentality than Gerald Early. In his 1989 essay “Ringworld" ... EARLY CONCLUDES, professional boxing is “capitalism’s psychotic vision." Jeremy Keehn in The Walrus thewalrus.ca/fighting-words/
Posted on: Wed, 26 Jun 2013 22:16:58 +0000
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