White-collar boxing is too dangerous to be left unlicensed
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Version 0 of 1. When it came to white-collar boxing I was an early adopter. In 2000, I was doing a fitness programme and started going to former European featherweight champion Jim McDonnell's gym in Camden, north London. I was 43 years old, three stone overweight and instantly hooked. Working out in a gym with a ring is a thousand times more fun than spending endless time on a treadmill or exercise bike. The boxing gave the slog a point. On the wall of McDonnell's gym was a poster recruiting would-be white-collar boxers for a fight night at Gleason's gym in New York – a bunch of British boxers pitted against the might of the US. Well, when I say the might, most of them were blokes like me – sedentary middle-aged men looking to get a bit fitter. They worked out at Gleason's in Brooklyn regularly and once a month gathered for a proper fight – three two-minute rounds in a ring, watched by 50 or so friends and fellow fighters. I was put in with a 58-year-old who had taken up boxing after suffering a heart attack. He decided he needed to lose some weight, and boxing seemed the perfect way to do it. It is the most fantastic exercise: high intensity, all the limbs are moving simultaneously, and you have to try to keep the brain fully focused. We spent six minutes moving round the ring and failing to land any punches in what may have been the most boring "fight" of all time. A woman from Channel 4, who was there recce-ing white collar boxing for a possible documentary, described it as a "gentlemen's fight" – minimal contact, no blood – which was just the way I liked it. I had been terrified ahead of my appearance; afterwards, I felt great. At Gleason's everyone was declared a winner – the real challenge was just to climb through the ropes – and all the participants were handed a rather naff plastic trophy. Americans love trophies. White-collar boxing subsequently became big business, with lots of gyms opening up to cater for blokes who wanted an adrenaline-fuelled way to get fit. The 1999 film Fight Club, with its portrait of emasculated men looking for an outlet for their baser instincts, acted as a recruiting sergeant for gyms that offered white-collar boxing. I remember seeing the film and walking on air as I emerged in Leicester Square, recklessly crossing roads as if no car could damage me. It is that kind of film – an ode to liberation. Now white-collar boxing, which has always had its critics, faces a crisis. A 32-year-old, Lance Ferguson-Prayogg, has died after a white-collar fight in Nottingham. The cause of his death has yet to be confirmed, but already there are calls for such boxing to be made illegal. This branch of the "sport" has, in fact, always existed in a kind of legal limbo, and it is by no means clear whether boxing of this kind – events between unlicensed boxers for which tickets were sold – was ever really legal. I have watched one of Ferguson-Prayogg's fights online, and it bears no resemblance to the sort of white-collar boxing I did in the UK or at Gleason's. My boxing was a kind of enhanced form of sparring – always wearing headguards and with no winner declared, though some of the boxers I fought alongside at Gleason's were taking it a lot more seriously than me, and there were knockdowns. Ferguson-Prayogg's fights were full-on battles – no headguards, in effect pro boxing but with less technique. Some of the knockdowns are brutal. The fights were refereed, medical staff were present, a body called the Organised International Boxing Association supervised Ferguson-Prayogg's fatal fight, and it claims everyone who fights under its auspices has a full medical. That is obviously better than completely unsupervised boxing – blokes bashing the hell out of each other in a basement, Fight Club-style – but it is still highly questionable. The British Boxing Board of Control, which oversees professional boxing in the UK, has made its feelings plain. "We have absolutely nothing to do with the OIBA and do not condone what they do," a spokesman said. "Our body regulates professional boxing to a strict set of rules and regulations. Boxing can be an extremely dangerous sport and we have strict medical procedures to follow in all professional bouts." They are obviously right. The sort of fight Ferguson-Prayogg, a supremely fit young man who boxed a lot, engaged in needs to be licensed either by the professional game, or under amateur rules (overseen by the British Amateur Boxing Association) with strict medicals, headguards, rules on the number of head punches and interventionist refereeing. One problem is that amateur clubs can be hard to find or open at inconvenient hours, which is why some young professionals are willing to pay a lot of money for the white-collar experience. Quite where that leaves the sort of pseudo-fight I had at Gleason's I'm not sure. Drawing the line between a full-on fight and what is in effect a kind of advanced form of boxercise is always going to be difficult. But Ferguson-Prayogg's death means that, after a decade of obfuscation, it's time to sort it out once and for all. Boxing can be good for you, but only if it's properly conducted. |