By Connor Ruebush

On November 8th, 2015 the New York Times published a story titled “Boxing Is a Brutal, Fading Sport. Could Football Be Next?” In the piece, writer Clyde Haberman criticizes both boxing and American football as violent, uncivilized sports. It isnÂ’t a new angle. With the recent influx of research into CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy) and the sports that cause it, the violent nature of two of AmericaÂ’s most beloved pastimes has come under heavy scrutiny. Mr. Haberman is merely the latest in a long line of journalists who have very valid questions about the safety of full-contact sports.

The thrust of Mr. Haberman’s argument is that boxing has been in a marked decline for years now. There is no argument that the sport has seen better days, but certain elements of the piece highlight some notable gaps in the authorÂ’s grasp of boxing history, and the nature of the sport itself.

One of the major flaws in Mr. Haberman’s argument (and that of the video series Retro Report on which his article is based) is that he imagines no difference between boxing and football. To crudely summarize his point, both are violent, and so both are wrong. However the treatment of violence is very different between the two sports.

For example, the word “defense” carries almost mythical weight in boxing. Some of the sport’s most celebrated athletes--men like Jim Corbett, Willie Pep, Archie Moore, George Benton, Pernell Whitaker, and Floyd Mayweather Jr.--are better known for their ability to avoid punches than for their talent in delivering them.

In football, on the other hand, “defense” means something entirely different. Unlike the boxer, the football playerÂ’s only goal is to defend the ball. His own brain is of comparatively little concern. Football’s best defenders don’t avoid hits, they take them, willingly meeting the brunt of the opponent’s assault with the very part of the body that boxers work hardest to protect.

Of course, to say that boxing doesn’t encourage head trauma at all would be a fallacy. Boxing is brutal, and there is no way around that. It is a dangerous sport, the goal of which is for one fighter to knock the other senseless. Mr. Haberman begins his piece with the phrase “the Sweet Science,” calling it a “lofty sobriquet assigned to boxing long ago by devoted followers with a romantic flair.” Allow me to be the first to remind both fans and detractors of the sport that A. J. Liebling’s original phrasing was neither so romantic nor so naive. Liebling called boxing “the sweet science of bruising,” a deliberate oxymoron that artfully captures both the beauty and the brutality of prizefighting.

Mr. Haberman points to the 1982 contest between Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini and Duk-koo Kim as a potential tipping point for the declining popularity of boxing, the moment when fans supposedly lost interest in the sport. In that bout, Mancini battered Kim into a state of waking unconsciousness, stopping him in the 14th round. Kim fell into a coma shortly after the defeat, and died four days later. This event prompted a number of reforms designed to make boxing safer, including the reduction of championship fights from 15 rounds to 12.



To paint this tragic outcome as the death knell of the sport is more than a little sensationalist, however. The Mancini-Kim fight preceded the meteoric rise of Mike Tyson by five years. Half a decade after Kim’s death, “Iron” Mike became the youngest heavyweight champion in boxing history, and one of the most popular pugilists to ever set foot in the ring. Surely Tyson’s reign, highlighted by more than its fair share of brutality, was more than a mere death rattle from a dying form of entertainment.

Emile Griffith killed a man in the ring as well, a Cuban boxer by the name of Benny Paret. Mr. Haberman suggests this contest as yet another transformative moment for the sport. There is no doubting the visceral sadness of the fight’s outcome. At the weigh-ins before the fight, Paret allegedly called the (in)famously bisexual Griffith “maricon” the Spanish equivalent of “faggot.” The two men fought back and forth for 11 rounds the day of the fight. In the 12th round, Griffith stormed out of the gate and hit Paret with a ferocious salvo of punches, ostensibly paying his adversary back for his bigoted remarks. The ropes held Paret up even as he lost consciousness, and Griffith kept punching away until the referee stepped in, far too late. Paret died ten days later.

That fight didn’t kill the sport either. In 1962, a young boxer named Cassius Clay was trying out his innovative blend of Cuban footwork and American braggadocio, earning a reputation as a fighter to watch. Less than eight months after Paret’s demise, Clay earned a breakthrough victory over a shopworn Archie Moore. A little over a year after that, he shocked the world by defeating Sonny Liston to become the heavyweight champion. Clay changed his name to Muhammad Ali shortly thereafter and became the iconic star of one of the most legendary eras of boxing history.

Merely pointing out that the sport of boxing survived these notable deaths does nothing to mitigate the tragedies themselves. Muhammad Ali suffers from advanced Parkinson’s disease, a condition that most suspect stems from brain trauma he received in the ring. Emile Griffith could do nothing to bring Benny Paret back to life; the boxer was haunted for decades by the ghost of the man he had killed, to the point that he broke down in tears when Paret’s son forgave him during the filming of the 2005 documentary Ring of Fire: The Emile Griffith Story.


There is a very real and very important discussion to be had about the inherent violence of boxing. I suspect it’s a conversation that Mr. Haberman’s “devoted followers” have been having with themselves and with one another for the last century.

Boxing, we can all agree, is nuanced.

I would argue that boxing does not encourage or sanction violence. Truly, violence is a reality of everyday life, not merely a construct of the boxing ring or the football field. This is particularly true in those run-down communities that, unsurprisingly, produce the best prizefighters. Rather, boxing creates an outlet for people who would otherwise be forced to use their fists on the street, or in the home. This isnÂ’t to say that boxing training alone can fix a broken individual--men like Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Carlos Monzon have made headlines for domestic violence in the past. However, it creates an outlet for very natural feelings of aggression and discontent. Undoubtedly the ring has saved as many lives as it has cost.

Perhaps Mike Tyson himself is the best embodiment of the inherent paradox of boxing. In a 1988 feature with the BBC’s Harry Carpenter a 22 year-old Tyson can be seen commenting on the heavyweight champions of pugilism past. He is soft-spoken, incredibly polite and, likely to the shock of those who watched him work in the ring, very intelligent and knowledgeable. Then again, Tyson was renowned for his particular brand of brutality. He bit a chunk out of Evander Holyfield’s ear. In the press conference prior to the fight, he threatened reporter Scoop Malinowski, saying “I’ll fuck you till you love me, faggot.” Other quotes reveal his struggles with drug addiction, and the troubled past that led him there: “I’m on the Zoloft to keep from killing y’all,” he quipped at one press conference. In 1992, Tyson was convicted of rape and spent three years in prison.


But Tyson is also known to be a kindhearted, gregarious man. A gentle soul who took to fighting after neighborhood kids bullied him for his lisp and soft voice. Tyson claims his first fight was against a bigger boy who killed one of his beloved pigeons. In 2012, Tyson launched his charitable organization, called the Mike Tyson Cares Foundation. It’s mission: to give children from broken homes like the one he experienced “a fighting chance” by offering them safe places to coalesce.

Is Mike Tyson a good man, or a bad one? The answer to both questions is obviously more complicated than a simple “yes” or “no.” Regardless, it wasn’t boxing alone that prompted Tyson’s worst moments. Like its practitioners, the sport is complicated.

More than that, boxing offers a home to the downtrodden and dejected. In the 20s and 30s, the sport was a haven for tough Jews from the slums of New York, men like “The Ghetto Wizard” Benny Leonard, widely regarded as one of the greatest fighters to ever lace up the gloves. Likewise, the ring has been a home to AmericaÂ’s downtrodden blacks ever since Jack Johnson became the first black heavyweight champion of the world in 1908 (and let’s not forget George Dixon and Joe Gans, the great non-heavyweight champions of color who preceded him). Recently, mixed martial arts has made unprecedented strides in pushing the acceptance of female athletes, further demonstrating the power of combat sports to highlight the talents and skills of underrepresented and misunderstood groups of people.

Ultimately, Mr. Haberman is not the only journalist to criticize boxing. In fact, journalists and people in general have been proclaiming the death of the sport for nearly a century and a half. After a boxer named Andy Bowen was killed in New Orleans in 1894, the local authorities banned boxing in the city. From Adam Pollack’s In the Ring with Bob Fitzsimmons: “Andy Bowen is dead, and professional pugilism in New Orleans will more than likely fill the same grave.”

The legendary Bob Fitzsimmons was once forced to fight in a remote location south of the Texas border in front of no more than about 200 spectators in order to avoid law enforcement. This took place shortly after President Grover Cleveland passed a federal anti-boxing bill to prohibit Fitzsimmons and his opponent, Peter Maher, from fighting in the US territory of New Mexico; most established states already had anti-boxing laws in place.

Ironically, Fitzsimmons found football to be a much rougher game than boxing:

“Talk about brutality,” he said on page 199 of Adam Pollack's book In The Ring with Bob Fitzsimmons, after witnessing a Princeton football game. “The Princeton boys wanted to show me a few tackles and bucks, but I said: ‘Not any for me. That game’s a little too rough.'”

These days there are no laws in the United States which prohibit gloved boxing. Indeed, several countries around the world recently reversed earlier decisions to ban the sport. As Mr. Haberman points out, Cuba, Sweden, and Norway have all legalized professional boxing in one way or another. Surely the sport is healthier today than it was at the turn of the 20th century, when the very best fighters in the world couldn’t compete even when they wanted to.

Criticism of boxing has changed little since those days. It is and always has been a violent sport. But it has a great capacity for good. Whether giving purpose to the lives of the underprivileged, or inspiring the emotions of its spectators, prizefighting has an important place in the heart of the American people, even if the ring is currently waiting for a star to remind them of that fact. Through all its ups and downs--and there have been many--boxing has always reemerged from the shadows and come out on top.

Boxing is ugly and it is beautiful. More than anything, it’s here to stay. The Sweet Science isn’t going anywhere.