Why Do We Think Boxing Is Dirtier Than Tennis Despite the Facts?

Sport #1 and Sport #2 both take wagers. They both feature one athlete vs. one athlete making it very easy to fix matches.

One of Sport #1’s most successful athletes, a champion, is under serious investigation for match fixing. He has inextricable ties to the mob and many shady match results. An investigation is launched in that sport which reveals 45 possible fixed matches in the last five years, matches involving some of its biggest stars.

A google search for [Sport #2, Gambling, Scandal] brings up nothing for 10 google pages except mentions of Sport #1. There has been only slight whiffs of match fixing in decades and none involving Sport #2’s superstars.

Nevertheless the conventional wisdom still prevails that Sport #1 is clean and Sport #2 is dirty. Even people who love the sport, myself included, engage in the stereotyping (see this post) and the assumptions. Of course as Tim from Ring Report – perhaps the Internet’s best boxing analysis site – revealed in his comment to my post, Sport #1 is tennis and Sport #2 is boxing.

How could this be? How could I have been so prejudiced and so scurrilous to boxing, a sport that I love. So stuck in the 1950’s so Archie Moore so The Harder They Fall. They were over 50 years ago! The answers are numerous and complex. For purposes of the argument my reasoning is based strictly in an American understanding of the situation.

Reason 1) It’s embedded in our sporting memory. I’ve grown up believing boxing’s corruption to be endemic and unbreakable. It’s what you’re father tells you. It’s what the talking heads repeat.

Reason 2) It’s embedded in the sport’s popular culture image. Nearly every boxing-centric movie made post-The Harder They Fall involves some sort of fight fixing or shady dealings: Rocky (1976), Raging Bull (1980), Diggstown (1992), The Great White Hype (1996), Hurricane (1999) and many more.

Films with auxiliary boxing plots like Pulp Fiction (1994) and Snake Eyes (1998) also highlight the corruption. Interestingly the two boxing films that don’t show involve a shady underside both involve female pugilists: Girlfight (2000) and Million Dollar Baby (2005).

Reason 3) At the same time boxing has always reveled in the above popular culture role and doesn’t deny it’s romantic underbelly. The sport actively separates itself from the general sporting world. How does it do this? Most practically, it refuses to form an all-encompassing sporting body. One with pensions, transparent wages, a player’s union, a commissioner/czar figure, and standardized rules.

Documentaries still romanticize the sweaty gyms, the boxers’ shady pasts, and the beauty of contained violence. Unlike other American professional sports boxing does not deny Las Vegas or the gambling world. Nearly all fights are held in casinos, the betting lines are known and discussed, and the casino’s money-making aspects are not denied.

Reason 4) The sport of boxing has positioned itself as an outsider in the American sports universe. This has been done through the reasons outlined in #3 but also via its insistence on showing its biggest events on pay-per-view and on subscription television. Boxing’s biggest champion, HBO, is a Time Warner company – not a part of the the major television outlets: CBS, NBC, Disney-ABC, and Fox – and doesn’t always receive the sports summary broadcast love it deserves.

Reason 5) Boxing’s participants are deemed outsiders by the American consciousness. Boxing is not offered in American high schools and it’s not a sanctioned collegiate sport. To participate you must find the proverbial dingy boxing gym, most are located in urban areas, or start fighting while a member of the armed forces. Gone are the days of noble boxing Princeton and Harvard undergrads. The educational and collegiate infrastructure will not help you learn how to box. The easy (and often wrong) assumption to make is that boxers are uneducated or did not go to school at all.

Boxers also represent a distinctly different demographic than the general American public. For example our 2008 Olympic Boxing team consists of seven African-Americans, three Mexican-Americans, one Yemeni-American. None are from particularly wealthy backgrounds. And these are the sport’s domestic athletes. So many of today’s great fighters come from non-G8 nations: Mexico, the Philippines, Kazakhstan, the Ukraine, Nigeria. Countries Americans don’t imagine to be showered in gold.

Conclusion: You have a sport that both does not want to be a part of and is not allowed into the mainstream. At this point, its fans don’t want mainstream acceptance either. Both the fans and the sport itself are rebellious towards the sporting status quo; a status quo that the media outlets, the film industry and pop culture repeat to us over and over again is fair, above-the-board, avoiding the temptations of Las Vegas, trying to rid itself of chemical and corrupting scourges, and pure as the driven snow. Boxing is the rebel and the outsider to this organizational status quo: it has no governing body, no standards and must therefore be corruptible and wrong.

We assume the participants in this organizationally-rebellious sport to be uneducated, poor, and from a minority background. A demographic that, of course, will be more likely to be corruptible. Clearly dirtier than the demographic that plays tennis: rich, white, worldly, educated. Somehow, though, it hasn’t worked out that way.

Boxing is the sport without betting scandals. It’s the sport without performance-enhancing scandals. It’s the sport that doesn’t gouge tax-payers for $1BN stadiums. It’s the sport without commonplace severe paralysis injuries. It’s the sport where referees aren’t indicted for fixing games.

Maybe it’s time to do some rethinking. Maybe boxing is a lot purer and a lot more civilized than any of us want to give it credit. Maybe it’s the other sports that need fixing.

Again, if I’m wrong please let me know in the comments.