Boxing: A Cultural History
Kasia Boddy
Reaktion Books 478pp £25.00
ISBN 978 1 86189 369 7
Kasia Boddy’s vivid and highly entertaining book traces the manner in which pugilism has been represented in Western culture from Homer’s Iliad of the eighth century BC to the present.
Boxing, she notes, ‘has remained unfailingly eloquent’ since the time of the Greek bard. Strictly speaking, of course, this eloquence has generally been a matter of ventriloquism, as poets, novelists and film-makers fashioned their own accounts of the sport and its figurative resonance.
This last is crucial; as Boddy herself states, this is a study of ‘the symbolism of boxing’ rather than straightforward sports history. Her account of the most gifted and notorious boxer of recent years, for example, is not so much about the ring achievements of Mike Tyson – the ear-biting, extravagantly tattooed ex-champion of the world – as about what Ellis Cashmore has memorably called ‘the Tyson of the imagination’.
Boddy demonstrates how boxing ‘was the literal or metaphoric subject of a great variety of representational forms’, considering cultural artefacts stretching from a twelfth century bc Mycenaean potto to Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby (2004). Her approach is exactly the opposite to that of Simon Barnes in The Meaning of Sport (2006): ‘Boxing is not a metaphor. Boxing is a ....
