Why boxing?

Boxing has been part of Western culture for millennia, but has always been a contentious sport, one that attracts and repels in equal measure. Like other sports, it emerged from ancient Greece as a formalised and permissible form of martial violence, adapted to peacetime, and expressed the male imperative to take up arms and fight to protect citizen and polity. Boys were taught to box just as every able-bodied man was trained to fight to protect the city from foreign aggression and to uphold the prevailing ethos. Boxing was thus seen from the beginning as being a civilising influence in society, by providing an outlet for male violence, while at the same time helping to promote the masculine ‘virtues’ – courage, strength, ingenuity and endurance. This ethos has remained fundamental to boxing throughout its long history. Today, it still forms part of the sport's appeal, motivating its institutionalisation not only in the armed services but also within civil society and professional sport. As this book will demonstrate, the issues of violence, masculinity, self-knowledge and even heroism are still relevant preoccupations of those who partake in, and reflect on, the sport at the start of the third millennium.

Boxing featured heavily in the London Olympic Games of 2012, and as these games were the first to feature women's boxing as a matter of course, boxing found itself thrust into a gendered spotlight as the contention surrounding women's role in sports spilt over into both political and public debates. Boxing has further formed the basis of political debates surrounding its transformative potential, with many professionals and policy makers arguing that it is a useful vehicle for engaging and reforming those involved in offending behaviour (Wright 2006; Sampson and Vilella 2013; Deuchar et al 2016; Meek 2018). It therefore seems that boxing is increasing its appeal and exposure for both men and women. In this book, I begin to unravel the complex relationship between the two: boxing's appealing nature, and its potential to encourage or impede desistance from crime.

It was during the London Games of 2012 that this research was conducted, and throughout them, I was speaking to and engaging with men who had boxed for most of their lives. During the course of my ethnographic fieldwork, I spent six months detailing the lives of men in a boxing gym in England.