Boxing Clever

by Theodore Dalrymple (October 2013)

I recalled my assertion about the brutalising effects of boxing as a spectacle when I attended the one and only professional boxing tournament I have ever attended as a spectator. It was in an industrial town that had once had a rather grand Victorian centre, but which had been destroyed by a combination of economic decline and modern town planning. The hall in which the boxing took place was large and dismal.

In my discussion all those years ago, however, I did not emphasise the allegedly brutalising effect, both on spectators and practitioners, of boxing. Rather, my main argument was the supposed inability of professional boxers to choose their career rather than be chosen by it as an inevitable consequence of their social and economic circumstances.

Her husband had clearly been a most remarkable man. Born into a working-class mining family, he had used boxing as a means of making his way in the world. He was adulated in the area of his birth, without such adulation in any way turning his head. In those days, there was little in the way of medical supervision of boxers: a man could fight until his brain was destroyed if he wanted to and no one stopped him. In his great book, Organic Psychiatry, Lishman says of the characteristic brain damage caused by boxing:

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Farewell Fear.

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