A couple of years ago, the idea of putting on a pair of boxing gloves and attempting to bob and hook would have had me (and anyone who knows me) weeping with laughter. I was always the girl with two left feet;
Boxing Bets
Don King, on Mike Tyson
"Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter?
He went to prison, not to Princeton."
"To me, boxing is like a ballet, except there's no music
and the dancers hit each other."
Monday, August 26, 2024
Try Out Boxing
A couple of years ago, the idea of putting on a pair of boxing gloves and attempting to bob and hook would have had me (and anyone who knows me) weeping with laughter. I was always the girl with two left feet;
Mike Tyson Training for Jake Paul
Tuesday, June 4, 2024
JOE BUGNER will be completely unaware that Tuesday will be the 50th anniversary of his first fight with Muhammad Ali
CHAMP'S AGONY Heartbreaking story of Muhammad Ali’s former opponent who lives in care home with dementia and doesn’t remember fight
Colin Hart
Published: 16:31, 9 Feb 2023Updated: 21:22, 19 Jan 2024
JOE BUGNER will be completely unaware that Tuesday will be the 50th anniversary of his first fight with Muhammad Ali, at the Las Vegas Convention Center.
I always felt Bugner, despite his many successes was never really in love with boxing - which makes his record of 83 fights, 69 wins with 43 knockouts - even more remarkable.
This is an article on Joe Bugner: Heartbreaking story of Muhammad Ali’s former opponent who lives in care home with dementia https://www.thesun.co.uk/sport/213335...
Anyone seriously considering being a boxer should see Jerry Quarry
Sunday, January 21, 2024
Punch Drunk Syndrome
Dr Martland’s clinicopathological conferences served as a valuable vehicle for medical education in the state of New Jersey. Here, he is lecturing on the topic of ‘Punch Drunk’ syndrome. Reproduced with permission from: Harrison Martland Papers, Special Collections in the History of Medicine, George F. Smith Library, Rutgers University Libraries.
Pivotal work on punch drunk syndrome
To understand Martland’s role in the story of punch drunk, we must first look at his scientific predecessors. Dr Wilfred Trotter, an accomplished British surgeon, noted in a talk entitled On Certain Minor Injuries of the Brain delivered in 1924, that concussion is an ‘essentially transient state’ that ‘does not as such comprise any evidence of structural cerebral injury, and is always followed by amnesia for the actual onset of the accident’ (Trotter, 1924). This understanding of concussion would be contested in the years ahead. Dr C. B. Cassasa, one of these contesters, published a report in 1924 that documented perivascular haemorrhages after the incidence of head trauma. He theorized that concussive forces caused turbulent CSF flow within the perivascular lymph space, leading to tears of the fibrils that attached between the vessel walls and surrounding dural walls. These torn fibrils would go on to cause laceration within the vessel walls, resulting in subsequent haemorrhage within the perivascular space (Martland, 1928). In 1927, Dr Michael Osnato and Dr Vincent Gilberti published a case series that provided further evidence of Cassasa’s mechanism. They histologically showed fibrillar attachments and haemorrhages within the perivascular spaces in confirmed clinical cases of concussion. They also proposed that concussions can have more chronic effects, claiming that they were not ‘transient’ entities and could be linked to secondary degenerative changes within the brain (Martland, 1928).
That leads us to Dr Martland’s work. While working with neurologist Dr Christopher Beling, he performed a series of autopsies on 309 traumatic cerebral haemorrhage cases. Martland observed that nine cases of haemorrhage were not associated with any signs of overt cortical injuries or skull fractures (Martland, 1928). The haemorrhages in these cases were microscopic in nature and resembled the perivascular microhaemorrhages described previously by Cassasa, Osnato, and Gilberti (Martland, 1928).
Martland noted these findings and proposed a connection between these cerebral microhaemorrhages and over-punished boxers who experienced neurological symptoms after suffering repetitive head trauma. These boxers were labelled as being ‘punch drunk’. His paper, aptly entitled Punch Drunk, described this phenomenon and provided evidence of its existence. Martland utilized the knowledge of Cassasa’s mechanism with Gilberti and Osnato’s observation of chronic symptoms, to formulate a more complete theory. He believed that patients that survive after the occurrence of head injury—and probable perivascular microhaemorrhages—develop a ‘replacement gliosis’ within the brain, best explaining the ‘post-concussion neuroses and psychoses and the so-called post-traumatic encephalitis’ that resulted (Martland, 1928).
Martland’s paper documented 23 examples of boxers (five of which he examined himself) to piece together the classic clinical presentation of ‘punch drunk’ boxers. He noted that symptoms could present immediately after injury, sometimes during the boxing match itself, as evidenced by minute changes in gait or more obviously when boxers staggered as they walked back to their corners of the ring between rounds. He also highlighted the chronicity of the syndrome in severe cases, noting physical symptoms such as parkinsonian gait, tremulousness, vertigo, and even cognitive symptoms such as ‘mental deterioration’ necessitating asylum institutionalization.
Martland used his skills of observation and practical analysis to form clinical correlates, which were unique aspects of his paper. He was able to stratify boxers into different archetypes to assess their likelihood of developing the syndrome. He noted that the slower ‘slugging type’ boxers were at greater risk of developing these symptoms than those that rely on agility. Boxers that more often took risks to land a knockout punch, as opposed to boxers that relied on points to win, were also more likely to develop ‘Punch Drunk’ syndrome (Martland, 1928; Parker, 1934).
Of course, the skill level of the boxer was also a large factor since second-rate boxers or those that were used for training purposes—in which they were constantly being hit and knocked down several times a day—were at greater risk (Martland, 1928). Similarly, in Martland’s report of a 38-year-old boxer with symptoms of ‘Punch Drunk’ syndrome, he delved into the boxer’s fight history with great detail to thoroughly understand all aspects of the boxer’s history (Martland, 1928). Martland spent enormous effort to understand the nuances of boxing in order to speak knowledgably about the sport.
Although ‘Punch Drunk’ was a colloquialism that was well known within the boxing world, there was little said of it within the medical literature. Prior to Martland’s landmark paper, post-concussive syndrome was not recognized as a clinical syndrome at all. Martland noted that when boxers visited ‘eminent physicians,’ they were often turned away after being told that there is essentially no such syndromic association between boxing and the patients’ symptoms.
Martland put much more faith in the trainers, promoters, and boxers themselves, citing the value of the observations made by the numerous individuals that make a living in the sport (Martland, 1928).
Legacy of Martland’s work
Dr Harry Parker built on Martland’s thesis and presented more evidence of its existence, noting ‘punch drunkenness’ can present as a ‘medley’ of symptoms through different symptomatic time courses (Parker, 1934). J. A. Millspaugh, a naval lieutenant, published an article in 1937 that presented more examples of cognitive dysfunction in naval boxers who suffered from dementia and disorientation (Millspaugh, 1937). Millspaugh also introduced new nomenclature to the literature, re-terming ‘punch drunk syndrome’ as dementia pugilistica, which is still used today. Lastly, he analysed the landscape of regulations, rules, and precautions taken by boxing committees to ensure the safety of its boxers. Just as Martland had done, he further proposed that the medical attendant must be responsible enough to stop the fight if the attendant feels that the ‘mental hygiene’ of a defeated boxer is in danger (Millspaugh, 1937).
As diagnostic technology advanced, it demystified the histopathological consequences of repetitive head trauma, showing that Martland’s theory describing a relationship between microhaemorrhages and punch drunk symptoms was inaccurate. Corsellis et al. (1973) published the first robust neuropathological study, which looked at patient histories and autopsy specimens of 15 different retired boxers—the largest case series of the time. They confirmed that many of these boxers had a multitude of symptoms, ranging from physical symptoms such as parkinsonism, to changes in affect and cognition. The authors went beyond the scope of the patient’s post-fight days and deliberately looked at the subjects’ personalities and intelligence prior to the development of their symptoms. Importantly, Corsellis et al. (1973) and studies that followed, found that the boxers’ symptoms arose most likely due to cerebral degeneration along with histopathological changes found in the brain secondary to protein deposition. Today, this proteinopathy theory is considered to be the most comprehensive explanation for the development of CTE (McKee et al., 2009). Neuroimaging and some pathological studies have shown the presence of haemosiderin after concussion; however, the pathophysiological role of microhaemorrhages in CTE, if one exists, is not yet confirmed or denied. It is worth mentioning that Martland made a small but often overlooked point in his 1928 piece. He states: ‘It is conceivable that the milder forms of concussion may be attributed to distension of the perineuronal spaces causing hydraulic shock to the neurons without the occurrence of actual hemorrhages’ (Martland, 1928). Although this does not fit with Martland’s primary hypothesis, this statement may ironically provide more insight into the pathophysiology of concussions given today’s understanding of concussive head trauma and the questionable role of perivascular haemorrhages.
Martland’s opposition of boxing’s barbarism was prominently evident in his writing. He also shared the same sentiments regarding football (Ginley, 1969). In 2005, the most popular and monetarily prosperous sport of the time: American football, was now under the microscope when Omalu et al. published a paper describing CTE in a retired National Football League (NFL) player (Omalu et al., 2005). This study, along with subsequent works performed by others (McKee et al., 2009), brought the issue of CTE back into the forefront of neurotrauma, sports, and journalism where it continues to remain today. Similar to Martland’s writings on boxing, criticisms of the NFL from today’s medical community have served as impetus for continued evolution of football safety as insightful regulations and player health monitors are annually fine-tuned for optimal player safety. Other sports, such as soccer, have also been implicated in a similar fashion. Currently, research within the field is booming and collaborators in medicine, sports, and legislation are all working towards safer environments to prevent the development of CTE.
Martland’s seminal work on ‘Punch Drunk’ syndrome came well before the development of proper diagnostic techniques needed to evaluate his hypothesis. However, his work in introducing the paradigm to medical literature—based solely on observation and trust in ‘laymen’—laid the foundation for those confirmatory studies that built upon his thesis.
His warnings on repetitive head trauma in the realm of sports continue to resonate almost a full century later. His work is worth remembrance as present-day studies continue to elucidate the occurrence of brain injury in sports.
Source: https://academic.oup.com/brain/article/141/1/318/4774567?utm_source=TrendMD&utm_medium=cpc&utm_content=Brain_1&utm_campaign=Brain_TrendMD_1&login=false
Saturday, January 20, 2024
Damage: The Untold Story of Brain Damage in Boxing by Tris Dixon (Hamilcar Publications) is an important book.
Damage: The Untold Story of Brain Damage in Boxing by Tris Dixon (Hamilcar Publications) is an important book.
Here are some disturbing quotes from the book:
CTE progresses steadily long after a fighter has retired from the ring. It's largely irreversible. Also, as Goodman points out, "The most difficult aspect of chronic brain injuries lies in the fact that by the time a fighter is showing symptoms, it’s too late.”
"Some fighters feel they have dodged the bullets and retired unscathed," Dixon writes. "But only time will truly tell." In that vein, he recounts attending an International Boxing Hall of Fame induction weekend in Canastota, New York.
"It was like a scrapyard of high-price vintage cars that had decayed over time," Dixon recalls. "It was heartbreaking. And the Hall of Fame treats the fighters wonderfully well. It gives them more days in the sun when otherwise they would be forgotten. But it’s a fan’s guilty pleasure - posing for a picture with someone who is looking emptily into a camera, habitually holding up a shaking fist in a fighter’s pose, or watching them sign a scarcely legible scrawl. I’ve seen the decline of fighters I looked up to, some I idolized and some I’ve known. And I will keep seeing it. The next wave will be fighters I’ve watched and become friendly with. Then it will be fighters who I have covered from their debut. Then it will be fighters who weren’t born when I started writing about the sport. The brutal wheel will keep turning and fighters will keep getting spat out, broken and damaged. They will be asked to pose, staring vacantly into cameras, to sign autographs with pens they cannot control, using letters they can scarcely remember. This is not all, but it will be some, and more than a boxing man like me should care to admit."
Former Ring Magazine editor Nigel Collins echoes that theme, saying, "I went up to Canastota one year with somebody who’d never been before but was a boxing fan. And he was mortified when he saw all of these broken-down people, that some of them could hardly speak. That was a real shock to him. People have asked me about becoming boxers and I say, ‘You’re going to get brain damage. It’s cut and dried.’”
The boxing media rarely acknowledged the problem of chronic brain damage in fighters until Muhammad Ali's struggle became public. And as Dixon notes, "The old punch-drunk terminology was rarely used with Ali. Perhaps they thought it was too cruel a label for a man who had given so much and who had awed the world with his brutal elegance."
Source: https://www.boxingscene.com/damage-untold-story-brain-damage-boxing--157578
Tuesday, January 2, 2024
Former welterweight champion and Hall of Fame boxer Curtis Cokes
Known for a counterpunching style not popular with some fans, according to the Morning News, Cokes prided himself on the punches he avoided as much as the ones he threw:
“The name of the sport is boxing, not fighting,” Cokes told The Dallas Morning News in 2013. “You can play football, you can play basketball, but you can’t play boxing. It’s serious business where you can get hurt every time you step into the ring.
“It’s an art to hit and not be hit.”
Former welterweight champion and Hall of Fame boxer Curtis Cokes
Friday, September 8, 2023
The boxing film that was banned around the world
Thursday, September 7, 2023
What happens when you cross the ivory tower with the school of hard knocks?
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SF Gate
BAY AREA & STATE
By Charles Burress,
Chronicle Staff Writer
Dec 8, 2003
What happens when you cross the ivory tower with the school of hard knocks?
You get a slight, bespectacled and seemingly mild-mannered UC Berkeley professor named Loïc Wacquant, also known as "the boxing sociologist" to his peers and as fast-punching "Busy Louie" to his boxing-gym buddies from the cutthroat South Side ghetto of Chicago.
He may be the only man on the planet who fought in the famous Golden Gloves competition and writes books quoting heavy-duty French intellectuals in company with Karl Marx, Muhammad Ali and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
The outgoing, French-born Wacquant (pronounced Vah-kan) is an energetic, loquacious man of passion with little taste for lassitude. To study boxing, he became a boxer -- not a dilettante token boxer -- but a full-time, sweating, battered, bruised and highly trained pugilist who devoted three and half years to perfecting the craft.
And what fate did the ring have in store for the 137-pound, 5-foot 8-inch, self-described "young Frenchman who'd just arrived from a small village in Southern France"?
The answer comes in a new book, published somewhat belatedly 15 years after he began his journey into the "sweet science of bruising." He recalls his impression on first seeing his opponent just before the Golden Gloves bout, his first and only official fight:
"Damn, he's a tall black guy with the musculature of a panther. He must be a good six foot one, with long arms, supple like vines."
The bell rings, the fighters trade punches and then "suddenly, boom! Everything swings upside down, the ring pitches wildly, the ceiling lights blind me and ... the next thing I know, I'm on my ass on the floor. I feel like a grenade exploded right in my face! I didn't see anything coming."
But with the combative spirit that has also fueled his sometimes brutal academic battles, Wacquant sprang back up and ended the bout with a barrage of punches against his retreating opponent. His coach and fellow fighters from the Woodlawn Boys Club gym swore he'd won, but he lost on a judges' decision.
Despite waking up the next day with the bridge of his nose swollen to twice its size and much of his face looking like pummeled eggplant, he was hooked on the sport. He said he even decided at one point to chuck his academic career for professional prizefighting.
Not only had he been transformed by the emotional ties with the other fighters forged by collective sacrifice and training and especially by the father-son bond that he'd formed with his coach, DeeDee Armour. He also found it nearly impossible to regain the distance needed to write about his experience as a professional ethnologist.
It took nearly a decade for him to write his book, "Body & Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer," just released by Oxford University Press. (It first appeared in French in 2001.)
Remarkably, his plunge into extreme participant observation began without his intending it.
In Aug. 1988, when he first walked into the dimly lit, odor-rich Chicago gym that was to become his home, he had no idea that he would try boxing himself. He was a 27-year-old doctoral student at the University of Chicago, looking for a way to study the black ghetto.
"If you'd told me then, 'One day you're going to box,' I would have said, 'Look, I'm more likely to go on the next space shuttle and walk on the moon,' " the now 43-year-old Wacquant said in an interview.
But once inside the gym he quickly saw that "there was no role whereby I could sit on a chair and observe and talk to people like a fly on the wall," he said.
So when the old coach, Armour, asked, "Well, what do you want to do?," Wacquant uttered the words that would drastically alter his future.
"I said, 'Well, um, I'd like to learn how to box,' which wasn't my intention at all."
In a career that began with such a dramatic and colorful launch, it's perhaps no surprise that Wacquant has been crowned with some of America's most prestigious honors -- selected to Harvard's elite Society of Fellows and given a MacArthur Fellowship (called the "genius grant" by the media).
Nor was it viewed as out-of-character when he dropped something of a bomb into the normally genteel world of American social sciences last year with a scathing attack in the eminent American Journal of Sociology.
In a review of what he called the "cardboard cutouts" of three sociologists' work, he hurled what was seen as a broad indictment of the field, saying in effect that "American ethnography has tended to romanticize the people one is studying without paying attention to how people are shaped by forces outside the field-site itself," said one of his UC colleagues, sociologist Michael Burawoy.
Those he criticized took off the gloves in response. For example, Harvard's Katherine Newman, whom Wacquant accused of blind "sermonizing" and painting a false happy-face heroism on fast-food workers, charged Wacquant with "intellectual hypocrisy," "relentless distortion" and "head-in-the-sand thinking."
"Loïc has a kind of combative personality," said one distinguished sociologist, who asked not to be identified. "His pugilism is not restricted to the ring."
A disciple of the late French intellectual, Pierre Bourdieu, Wacquant comes from a leftist European background accustomed to vigorous academic criticism, the sociologist said.
Wacquant, who is leaving Berkeley after a decade to become a professor at the New School for Social Research in New York next month, takes the battles in stride.
He's focusing now on finishing his next volume, a more theoretical treatment of his research called "The Passion of the Pugilist," and bracing for what the critics will say about the just-released book.
Did he violate the ethnologists' commandment: Thou shalt not go native?
UC Berkeley emeritus sociologist Neil Smelser, who recommended the hiring of Wacquant at Berkeley, called the boxing sojourn "quite an ingenious and creative mode of ethnographic fieldwork."
Another issue likely to arise is whether Wacquant's portrait of the fighters bears the rose-tint that he attacked other scholars for.
"The big question," Burawoy said, "is whether Loïc Wacquant has done the same thing himself -- whether he has romanticized the boxers he studied."
At the least, Wacquant said he wants to usher the newly published work past the immediate gawking at the "boxing sociologist" -- one who's "white and French in a black gym" and regarded as a kind of "exotic circus animal."
His aim, he said, is not just to reveal "the very powerful, magnetic, sensuous, moral and aesthetic" forces that create boxers but also to "de- exoticize the craft" and show parallels to the sacrifice and commitment required of those who strive for excellence in other occupations.
Source:
Body and Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer (2022)
The new, expanded anniversary edition, 2022 (out in November 2021) contains 140 pages of new text sketching “the making of” the study, elaborating the theory of habitus, and charting the trials and tribulations of the gym members over 30 years and what they teach us about the economics of blood, masculinity, love, and sociology.
When French sociologist Loïc Wacquant signed up at a boxing gym in a black neighborhood of Chicago’s South Side, he had never contemplated getting close to a ring, let alone climbing into it. Yet for three years he immersed himself among local fighters, amateur and professional. He learned the Sweet science of bruising, participating in all phases of the pugilist’s strenuous preparation, from shadow-boxing drills to sparring to fighting in the Golden Gloves tournament. In this experimental ethnography of incandescent intensity, the scholar-turned-boxer fleshes out Pierre Bourdieu’s signal concept of habitus, deepening our theoretical grasp of human practice. And he supplies a model for a “carnal sociology” capable of capturing “the taste and ache of action.”
This expanded anniversary edition features a new preface and postface that take the reader behind the scenes and reveal the “making of” this classic ethnography. Wacquant reflects on his path to, and uses of, fieldwork based on apprenticeship. He traces the genealogy and draws the anatomy of habitus and explicates how he deployed it as method of inquiry. The postface retraces the trials and tribulations of his gym mates in and out of the gym over the past thirty years, and reflects on what they reveal about the economics of pain and masculinity, and the passion that binds boxers to their craft.
Body & Soul marries the analytic rigor of the sociologist with the stylistic grace of the novelist to offer a compelling portrait of a bodily craft and of life and labor in the black American ghetto at century’s end.
Source:
https://loicwacquant.org/body-and-soul-notebooks-of-an-apprentice-boxer/