The Legality of Boxing

I finally got my hands on a book that challenges our entire world, The Legality of Boxing: A Punch Drunk Love?, by Jack Anderson. It was published in England this year and retails for $130, so it's not the kind of thing you pick up at the airport on the way to Tacoma. But if it were cheaper and easier to find, I'd put it on the required reading list for boxing journalists.

I had just started reading TLOB when I sat through the lovely evening of brutaliffic bouts in Atlantic City on July 14, headlined by Alfonso Gomez's gruesome destruction of Arturo Gatti, with backup from Kermit Cintron's scary Round 2 plastering of Walter Matthysse. Those fights were preceeded by four other early stoppages in painful mismatches. A week later, fights on the undercard of the Bernard Hopkins-Winky Wright match sent both Czar Amonsot and Oscar Larios to the hospital with bleeding on the brain, after they both took severe beatings that may end their careers.

So I was kind of warmed up to read Anderson's dissertation on how the profession of beating people up for sport came to be legal (despite all other laws of civilized society) and whether it still makes sense to keep it legal.

The book, unsurprisingly, recounts the saddest tales from boxing, including boxers who were killed in fights -- Davey Moore, Benny Paret, Duk-Koo Kim, Leavander Johnson -- and many more whose lives suffered after their best days in the ring were done (Muhammad Ali, Riddick Bowe, and what more do you need to say?). But the book isn't a biased screed supporting boxing's abolition. It's a measured account of facts and history.

"I am a fan of boxing," Anderson writes in the introduction (this Jack Anderson is a law professor in Belfast). "I like its characters, its courage and its mimimalism. Nonetheless, my love of the sport is uncomfortable and frequently unfaithful. Many aspects of the professional code unsettle me, and it is that sense of unease that this personal study seeks to confront."

The book at times feels like a well-researched term paper. I'm not kidding: there are 686 footnotes and a 14-page bibliography. But it reads briskly and is a terrific narrative of the sport's evolution. I never knew Bob Fitzsimmons killed an opponent in the ring, or that in 1881 John L. Sullivan, to avoid the law, fought John Flood by candlelight on a barge on the Hudson River, "in front of a select audience of professional gamblers and a sympathetic press."

The laws on public fighting, Anderson explains, have always been sketchy but have almost always made an exception for consensual combat sport. Anderson looks back to Ancient Greece to show how, even then, enlightened lawmakers made sports an exception to normal prohibitions against violence. Accidental killing in sport was, hey, something that might just happen.

Anderson's basic premise is that every time public fighting has seemed to become more trouble than it's worth (in Sullivan's bareknuckle days, for example), supporters have stepped up with regulations to make the sport safer and more palatable. The Queensbury rules were written in 1865 by John Graham Chambers, a sportsman and journalist, who got Sholto Douglas, the eight Marquis of Queensbury, to endorse them. Those rules, which took decades to catch on, set up the ten second knockdown count, three minute rounds, and gloves. Later came state boxing commissions, and, despite the occasional death or backroom scandal, it pretty much became no problem for two consenting fighters to go at each other in regulated sporting events.

But Anderson makes a case that boxing's self-regulation has often failed its athletes, allowing promoters to sign fighters to restrictive contracts that might be viewed as coercive and have made the question of "consent" less than clear-cut. Boxers banned in one state for health or other reasons can often still go to another to fight, as Sullivan did. A national boxing commission would have helped boxers in and out of the ring, but it was shot down in the House of Representatives in 2005, partly by lawmakers' "states' rights" argument.

In the end Anderson realizes the abolition of boxing isn't realistic but he holds out hope that reforms, including better regulation, medical research and fighter education, are possible.

And he hardly lets boxing journalists and fans off the hook. The book opens with a cutting quote from James Ellroy: "Writers approach boxing as idolators, inquisitors, wannabes and manques. They see boxing as an enclosed society and a groovy, blood-and-guts lifestyle....The fighters themselves chase an always fleeting glory through the sustained cultivation and infliction of pain."

Toward the end, Anderson quotes British journalist Kevin Mitchell, in a piece about the sad, endless career of the once-great Thomas Hearns. "There is a lot to love about boxing. It teaches kids discipline and respect. It can be spellbinding and heroic. But there's a lot to loathe -- like the romanticism often attached to what is a deadly enterprise, the wallowing in other people's bravery and the exploitation of notoriety."