Boxing: A Cultural History, and: Prizefighting: An American History (review)

It has been twenty years since Jeffrey Sammons wrote Beyond The Ring: The Role of Boxing in American Society, the last scholarly survey of pugilistic history. Although both of these books take a different look at the fight game than Sammons did, neither of the works eclipses their predecessor's analysis of the social and cultural impact of boxing.

The title of Boddy's work is somewhat misleading because it is more a survey or annotated list of representations of boxing in art, literature, and film than a cultural history of the sport. The book's value is in its breadth more than in its depth. Its nearly 400 pages of text exhaustively chronicle the various sites within the arts and humanities that boxing or fighting has appeared. Starting in ancient Greece, the book works its way through the British Middle Ages to the eighteenth century and Victorian Era before making its way to American shores. Over 150 illustrations, many of them beautifully presented, give readers an idea of how representations of boxing have evolved.

If there is a glaring omission from the book, it is its bypassing of the sport of boxing. The section about fight scenes in the work of Charles Dickens is as long as the section about Muhammad Ali. There is far more written about Norman Mailer than about the great contemporary heavyweight champions that informed his work—Floyd Patterson, George Foreman, Sonny Liston, and Joe Frazier. There are six pages on Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, but less than a page about Sugar Ray Robinson. While in itself there is nothing wrong with a focus on writers instead of fighters, it is not what one would expect from a book purporting to be a cultural history of boxing. Indeed, boxing is largely absent from the work. While scholars of boxing will find the book disappointing as a source of analysis, it is a useful reference collection that has conveniently gathered a very wide range of sources about boxing and fighting into one volume.

Fans of boxing will like Lang's book better than Boddy's, but scholars will find it woefully lacking in documentation and rigor. These deficiencies are partly a result of the book's thesis, which is that boxing has always existed primarily as a vehicle for gambling. Lang relies often on rumor, hearsay, and reports from boxing's underbelly to corroborate his thesis. While much of this narrative is believable, much of it is also impossible to prove, and Lang makes no effort to do so. Far more disturbing than Lang's conjecture, however, is the seeming lack of copyediting or fact checking that went into the work. While in themselves the mistakes are not particularly important, their cumulative effect cheapens the work. Despite these flaws, boxing fans will find Lang's perspective as a Las Vegas insider to be particularly intriguing. Lang tells stories about the gambling-based machinations surrounding various prizefights that even the most jaded boxing observers will find fresh and interesting.

Perhaps somewhere between the works of Kasia Boddy and Arne Lang lies an exemplary study of boxing and its peculiar cultural history. While Boddy's work would have been better served by an increased focus on the sport itself and less effort toward exhaustively chronicling every last literary reference to the sport, Lang's work would have benefited by a more serious look at the political and social contexts surrounding prizefighting.