An education and life in the ring

I attended a local amateur boxing card not long ago. In one bout, two 14-year-old welterweights closed their three-round struggle with a furious fusillade of punches. At the bell, the crowd erupted with applause. The combatants, who had just finished trying to decapitate one another, embraced as though they were long-lost brothers. After the score cards were tallied and the referee raised the victor’s hand, they hugged again and then went through the ropes and out of the ring.

As the winner moved toward the back of the auditorium, well-wishers put out their hands for some skin. I shot out my palm -- “Way to pump that jab!” “Thanks, man,” the lanky teenager said, beaming, and then, dripping with sweat, he pulled me, a stranger, in for a quick hug. As he strode off, I could not help but wonder when, if ever, he would blossom with such tenderness again or, for that matter, revel again in the feeling of being someone of self-respect. Boxing can do that -- remind a person who feels invisible or worse that he is somebody.

There is a common perception that boxing is something the downtrodden do either out of rage or in the desperate hope of making money from causing mayhem. There is also a sense that teaching people how to use their fists is likely to lead to their using their fists all of the time. A MacArthur Foundation fellow, Loic Wacquant, tries to punch out these and other myths in “Body & Soul.”

Born in southern France, Wacquant was a doctoral student in sociology at the University of Chicago in the mid-1980s. A friend who was a devotee of the martial arts dragged him to the Woodlawn Boys Club, a boxing gym. The gym, which has since been leveled, was situated on the mean streets of Chicago’s South Side, minutes away from the cool halls of the university. Like most urban boxing centers, the club was home to both amateur and professional pugilists and was founded and supervised by the head trainer, the late Herman (DeeDee) Armour.

For obvious reasons, boxing has the highest turnover rate of any sport. Perhaps one in 10 people who make it to the gym portal will return to train on a regular basis. Wacquant was one of that 10% and for three years running he could be found jumping rope and hitting the bags almost every afternoon. The young scholar was welcomed into the fighters’ fraternity and socialized with them, traveling to boxing tournaments.

Over the years, and being completely aboveboard with his trainer and ring colleagues, Wacquant took thousands of pages of notes and then poured them into this triptych of a boxing study. As the author explains, “The first text unravels the skein of the troubled relations tying the street to the ring.” The second part of the book is a detailed description of the day leading up to and including a south Chicago boxing card highlighted by Curtis Strong, the star pro prospect of the Woodlawn gym. Text three is a “sociological novella” and “follows step-by-step the author’s preparation for and performance at the 1990 Chicago Golden Gloves” tournament.

Wacquant succeeds in limning the relationship between the academies of the sweet science and the desolation-row campuses where even the gladiators carry around a can of mace. Until the late 1940s, the Hyde Park locale of the Woodlawn gym was a thriving, racially mixed community. After the war, however, the work dried up and, with the racial strife and gang warfare of the 1960s, the moving trucks rumbled in and carted away the future. Hyde Park became and remains Dodge City.

Wacquant’s Woodlawn gym was in a block of burned-out and boarded-up buildings near the Chicago El. With steel-bolted doors at both ends and baseball bats within easy reach to fend off any undesired intruders, the club was a veritable fortress. Outside the boxing studio it was helter-skelter, but -- like boxing gyms from the favelas of Brazil to the streets of Chicago -- the Woodlawn Boys Club constituted “an island of stability and order where social relations forbidden on the outside become possible again.” The school of hard punching was “also a school of morality in Durkheim’s sense of the term, that is to say a machinery designed to fabricate the spirit of discipline, group attachment, respect for others as for self, and autonomy of the will that are indispensable to the blossoming of the pugilistic vocation.”

With the exception of an occasional Mike Tyson, it is unlikely that the most profoundly disadvantaged will have the inner organization to train regularly. As Wacquant notes, the members of his Woodlawn club were not at the bottom of the urban pit. And yet almost every one of them attests that if they hadn’t found boxing it would probably be any of the big four: prison, drugs, booze or an early grave.

Wacquant has the interpersonal range of a great shortstop, befriending the elite of the intellectual officer class, such as William Julius Wilson, and then hanging with his boxing crew in the afternoon. The text is an affecting register of conversations with fighters about everything from their education to how they feel about knocking someone senseless. Cold and clinical in its level of detail, the book is also a Baedeker to the minor leagues of professional pugilism, where boxers are often remunerated with tickets they can sell, and the hot prospects are fed hapless combatants who lose scores of fights in succession.

Wacquant would like to imagine that he has taken an inside-out look at the ring and the world orbiting it. That is partly true, as he was indeed a boxer in training. Nevertheless, it may be that to form the heart and soul of a boxer you have to have all your eggs in the boxing basket: There can be no denying that Wacquant kept most of his down the block at the University of Chicago. Nevertheless, he made the kind of connections only a boxer could make. Consider his filial relation with his trainer, DeeDee Armour. Of all the gray eminences who have worked Wacquant’s intellectual corner, none has left the impress of the man who taught him how to walk through his fears and climb into the ring with men who sent his lip twitching in anxiety.

Armour, to whom this book is affectionately dedicated, ruled the Woodlawn club with an iron hand. He had command of his trade and, more important, of his ego. There are not many stops in the hurly-burly where men learn to nurture one another. Boxing gyms, like foxholes, can be one of those places. I suspect that Armour created the atmosphere in which the same pug who pounded your ribs one moment was asking about them the next.

After three years of training, Wacquant earned his red badge of courage by competing in the storied Chicago Golden Gloves tournament. He drops a close decision but acquits himself well. In the heady time after the contest, Wacquant starts yapping about his next fight. But DeeDee has taken a read on his guy’s life trajectory and “shuts the party down,” growling, “There ain’t gonna be no next time. You had yo’ fight.”

As a writer, Wacquant’s penchant for theoretical trills sometime garbles the point he is trying to articulate. And when the bell rings, the ghetto as seen from a boxing club seems much as it did from others’ vantage points. Nevertheless, “Body & Soul” will pull you into the deep rhythms of boxing and should certainly earn a place in the canon of literature on the ring. *