Fighting for Family and Glory: Hope, Racialization, and Exploitation in a U.S. Boxing Gym

Relaying on years of ethnographic research and boxers’ life stories, this article examines how boxers from racialized and marginalized communities hope for family and glory in a Midwestern U.S. gym. Hope for family is embraced by youth and young adults who develop familial ties with trainers and fellow boxers. Hope for glory begins in gyms but ultimately must be sought in competitive arenas of elite amateur tournaments and professional boxing. Competitive arenas, however, exists in sociocultural systems that capitalize on the brutalization and exploitation of racialized bodies as boxing fanatics crave blood, pain, and concussions. In these contexts, boxers’ hope for glory is fulfilled through exploitation—both physical and cultural—of their collective bodies; and hope for glory compromises the relationships and sense of community that are established as boxers pursue hope for family.

Biomecânica e Traumatologia do Boxe

Amateur boxing practiced at the Olympic Games has been evolving in conditions of safety for its athletes. The most common injuries are head wounds and lacerations, brain concussions and fractures. However, professional boxing has not kept up with this trend of revising rules and promoting greater safety, turning their athletes prone to severe injuries, especially head and neck injuries. The knowledge of epidemiology and biomechanics of boxing injuries may allow athletes and coaches to anticipate injuries and adopt effective prevention strategies.

Methods of creating sports rankings based on selected examples

Sports rankings play a very important role in modern sport. They most often determine who will be considered the favorite of a specific match or fight. In other cases, they decide on the seeding of a player (team) in the tournament, or determine whether he will be able to participate in it at all. There is no one consistent methodology for creating sports rankings. Each discipline has its own rules. Some are based on more or less complicated mathematical calculations, others are based on the subjective opinions of the experts who create them. In this study, we will look at sports rankings on the examples of football, chess and professional boxing, which represent completely different approaches to the methodology of creating rankings. The FIFA football ranking is based on multifactorial calculations taking into account, among other things, the type of match played, its result, and the expected result of the match based on the analysis of the strength of both teams. In professional boxing, no single ranking has been created so far and each federation proposes its own rankings, to which an alternative may be the system based on the algorithm proposed by boxrec.com. In chess, the Elo system remains the dominant way of classifying players, although alternative methods often turn out to be more precise.

A Good Fight: How Indigenous Women Approach Boxing as a Mechanism for Social Change

This article examines the experiences of select Indigenous female boxers from Canada and the United States to explore and appreciate the diverse meanings they attach to amateur and professional boxing and to write these athletes into history by constructing short case studies of fighters active from the 1970s through the 2010s. We augment each fighter’s story with context from scholarly and secondary source materials, such as newspapers, to round out each woman’s story and to illustrate the multiple overlapping conditions that shaped their boxing experiences. We embrace the work of van Ingen on the importance of understanding female boxers at the intersection of race and gender. In doing so, our work emphasizes the ideological foundations embedded in narratives, so that each narrative presents a certain point of view that results in real practical effects, whether it be supporting White liberal feminism or Indigenous self-determination. Following van Ingen, this article views all writing, whether by journalists or professional historians, as ideological acts, capable of exalting select athletes while marginalizing others.

Do professional fights go too long?: A video review of concussions and their consequences in professional boxing and MMA matches

ObjectivesDetermine, through video reviews, how often concussions occur in combat sport matches, how well non-medical personnel can be trained to recognize concussions and how often fights are judged to continue too long.MethodsThis is a retrospective video analysis by an 8 person panel of 60 professional fights (30 boxing and 30 mixed martial arts). Through video review, medical and non-medical personnel recorded details about each probable concussion and determined if and when they would have stopped the fight compared to the official stoppage time.ResultsA concussion was recorded in 47/60 fights. The fighter that sustained the first concussion ultimately lost 98% of the time. The physician and non-physician raters had 86% agreement regarding the number of concussions that occurred to each fighter per match. The mean number of concussions per minute of fight time was 0.08 (0.06 for boxers and 0.10 for MMA). When stratifying by outcome of the bout, the mean number of concussion per minute for the winner was 0.01 compared to the loser at 0.15 concussions per minute. The physician raters judged that 24 of the 60 fights (11 boxing [37%]; 13 MMA [43 %]) should have been stopped sooner than what occurred.ConclusionRecognizing that the losing fighter almost always is concussed first and tends to sustain more concussions during the fight, along with the demonstration that non-physician personnel can be taught to recognize concussion, may guide policy changes that improve brain health in combat sports.

Who was the greatest of all-time? A historical analysis by a complex network of professional boxing

This study seeks to examine and compare boxers throughout history creating a pound-for-pound list of the different fighters. A PageRank algorithm was utilized to rank the boxers from the network to determine a list of the top 10 fighters from 1897 to 2019. Two data sets were utilized, a truncated subset and a larger data set, to explore the impact of network size on the rank of boxers. Additionally, the researchers systematically varied the damping factor of the PageRank algorithm to determine the effects on the rankings. A discussion of the results includes a comparison of journalistic rankings and those from a points-based system from the respected boxing website BoxRec.