Boxing, Industry, Immigration, America...
Hello everybody. It’s been a while. I’ve been steady preparing the next episode of Enemy, at the expense of keeping up the exclusive content on the Substack, so to those of you who expected more, sorry. Last year, I churned out ~200 pages of a long series on the history of slavery, which I think was pretty good, but keeping up that pace meant it took me 7-8 months to get the history podcast out (a fact about which many of you voiced your displeasure, just as some of you express it now at the lack of exclusive Substack content). Well, I want to keep up a pace of putting out a new history podcast episode every few months, at least until this World War 2 series is done, so that’s where my focus has been. Still, I can’t leave you guys hanging completely, especially considering that my cats will starve if you cancel your subscriptions (very few of you have, despite my slower output, which is amazing, and thank you, but rest assured my guilt over it often has me sweating through soaked sheets, eyes wide open toward the ceiling as I lay in bed at 3 am on a Wednesday). Well, I decided to dial back the history episode work this week to write something that’s been on my mind lately. It’s a typical Martyr Made piece, I think: meandering, disjointed, with thesis that are often disconnected and probably contradictory, but we cover a lot of ground and go some fun places.
The inspiration for this post comes from a book written by a friend of mine, Brian Francis Culkin, called Postscript on Boxing: The Human Body, Virtual Worlds, and Boxing’s Living Dead. He’s a brilliant guy, an Irish kid (if the name didn’t clue you in) and boxing aficionado, and if you want more after reading this essay, I encourage you to check out his book. It’s more theory-heavy than this essay, but it’s much deeper and has a lot of local flavor I couldn’t cram in to a 15-page piece like this.
It can be hard to remember how big boxing was in its heyday. Up through World War 2, it was one of the Big 3 sports (with baseball and horse racing), and the heavyweight champion was the most significant sports celebrity in the world. Even up through the early ‘80s, and briefly during Mike Tyson’s championship run later in the decade, it was still a cultural fixation on the level of other major sports. It’s an important part of the American story, and, much like the history of organized crime or local politics (though I repeat myself), a useful way to read that story “from the bottom up.” The story of American boxing is one of successive waves of immigrants fighting their way into the American mainstream, backed by the fervent support of the ethnic neighborhoods they represented. Before the Second World War, it wasn’t uncommon to see Jewish boxing champions (even a heavyweight champion, briefly, in the 1930s). During that same era, Jewish mobsters matched the Italian mafia in size, reach, and ferocity. American Jews have moved up in the world, out of the social class that historically produced professionals of violence (legal and illegal), and the America that produced Max Baer and Lepke Buchalter seems almost too different to have ever been real. In the old days, most boxers came up on the streets of America’s big cities, where working-class black and Euro immigrant communities rubbed against each other, fighting for space, status, and jobs in heavy industry. From 1926 until the early 1960s, the heavyweight title was held by an almost uninterrupted string of second generation immigrants from Europe and African Americans who made the Great Migration out of the rural South into the industrial cities. By the early ‘60s, Irish, Italian, Jewish and other immigrant groups were on to their 3rd or 4th generation living in the US, and were being driven out of the cities into the suburbs by the social blight and urban decay that resulted from the black migration. Out in the ‘burbs, their kids no longer roamed the streets and alleyways with their coethnics, ready for trouble with rival groups. Fights were rarer, and they were more severely punished: fighting was something done by the blacks and white trash townies we left behind, suburban parents told their kids, not by respectable people like us! While champion boxers were world famous, boxing itself was seen as something for the lower classes, and newly middle-class parents were loath to let little Timmy take it up, even if there had been any boxing gyms in the suburbs (there weren’t). Blacks from America’s big cities (some born there, some moved as kids) did not follow their immigrant neighbors outward and upward, but remained packed into tough lower- and working-class urban neighborhoods, and as a result they dominated the ranks of heavyweight boxing from the 1960s all the way up until the Russian/Eastern European invasion that began with the Klitschkos in the early 2000s.
Due to the limited weaponry (fists only) and small target (head and body), boxing is a highly structured and specialized sport. Mixed martial artists have recourse to every bodily weapon except the headbutt, as well as wrestling and submission holds, and the areas of the body protected by the rules are small and few: no eyepokes, no shots to the groin, the spine, or the back of the head, no small digit manipulation (you can’t grab an opponent’s finger or toe and snap it off), and that’s pretty much it. While the three decades since the first Ultimate Fighting Championship have taught us a lot about what works and what doesn’t, there are enough ways to win that styles are still quite diverse. There are champion kickboxers whose only concern with ground fighting is how to avoid it (Alex Pereira), great wrestlers who almost exclusively use striking to close the distance and get a takedown (Khabib Nurmagomedov), and great submission fighters who practically dare their opponents to take the fight to the ground (Charles Oliveira). Not so in boxing. There are variations in emphasis - power punchers, technicians, cardio monsters, tall guys who feature the jab, etc - but in general boxing was pretty much solved by the 1930s or ‘40s. Don’t get me wrong, there has been some evolution of the game. Modern training methods, nutritional science, and supplementation have improved athletic performance in all sports, including boxing, and that inevitably changes how people fight. Changes in the rules (e.g., moving from 15 round fights to 12 rounders) and adoption of different equipment (e.g. glove size) also affects which styles are optimized for the sport. Still, go watch old videos of Sugar Ray Robinson, and you’ll see guys fighting much the same way they fight today.
Anyone who has ever trained in boxing, especially if they began as an adult, can tell you that the early days are rough. Everything feels unnatural, the body is tight and often wants to do the wrong things at the wrong time. You even learn that you don’t actually know how to walk and have to learn “footwork” from scratch. Everything feels regimented, artificial, imposed… because it is. Boxing coaches take the wild aggression and physicality that walks in off the street, harness it, yoke it to a very specialized, highly-structured purpose.
