I blame The Force Awakens. If we hadn’t been so keen to see the Star Wars movie the day after it opened, we’d never have ended up in the Everyman Cinema on Baker Street. And if we hadn’t gone to the Everyman my then six-year-old son, Oisín, would never have seen the trailer for Creed. He’d never have turned to us with wide-eyed amazement and announced: “That looks like the best film ever.”
We could have left it there, and perhaps we’d have been better parents if we had. But instead we went home, dug out the old Rocky movies and Osh began a marathon viewing of the first four films, swiftly followed by Creed when it arrived online.
I expected his excitement to dim. Like most six- year-olds he was prone to sudden enthusiasms – pirates, Furbies, football cards – which swiftly fade to be replaced by the next equally thrilling thing. But something about boxing took hold.
And it wasn’t just the Rocky films. Muhammad Ali died and he lapped up the tributes to the Greatest. He watched documentaries on the best boxers and held enthusiastic conversations with his bemused older sister about whether Barry McGuigan was better than Prince Naseem. We would come downstairs at weekends and find him rewatching the end of Rocky 3 or cheering along with the climax of Creed. In a burst of fitness fervour my husband had bought himself a punchbag and hung it in the garage. Yet it was Osh who used it, sneaking in after school, trying on his father’s boxing gloves and swinging at the punchbag.
He started telling everyone he was going to be a boxer – when a well-meaning father at school, who had some experience with the sport, pointed out that it’s not much fun being hit, my usually cheerful and polite son threw a water bottle at his feet and stormed off in a sulk. (He came back and apologised, but insisted he still wanted to learn the sport.) We were due to be in America when Osh turned seven and his talk was all of going to Philadelphia, running up the Rocky steps, and, most of all, getting into the ring.
By now I was worried. This didn’t seem like a passing fad. Yet I really didn’t want my son to box, not now, not when he was older. My mind was full of serious injuries from concussion to brain bleed, from fractures of the skull to shattered eye sockets. But at the same time I wondered whether my resistance to the idea of him boxing was making me a hypocrite.
For like Oisín, boxing once ruled my world. As a teenager AJ Liebling’s The Sweet Science fascinated me. I devoured non-fiction on the subject by Jimmy Breslin, Joyce Carol Oates, Hugh McIlvanney and Norman Mailer, and fiction by Dashiell Hammett, Damon Runyon and PG Wodehouse. I studied old footage of the fights between Marvin Hagler and Tommy Hearns and queued in New York in 1996 to catch Leon Gast’s superlative documentary When We Were Kings. If I never considered fighting myself, it’s only because 25 years ago it was an unheard of idea for a girl.
So instead I did the next best thing. I became a boxing correspondent, first in New York for Daily News and then later in England for Sport First. I sat ringside covering fights from Prince Naseem v Kevin Kelley to Lennox Lewis’s bouts with Evander Holyfield, collected quotes for the Daily News’s irascible chief boxing writer Michael Katz and interviewed Joe Calzaghe and David Izon, who fought a memorable bout against Lou Savarese at the Harlem Apollo that saw the noisy audience yell for the famous hook to take the Bronx boxer away. Best of all I spent time with the Observer’s boxing correspondent Kevin Mitchell and the wonderful (and sadly gone) Irish boxing writer Harry Mullan, who was always gently encouraging of my chosen career at a time when women sports writers could not attend the British Boxing Writers’ Club Dinner regardless of how often they wrote about the sport. Towards the end of my time covering boxing I even interviewed a female boxer, Ali’s daughter Laila, who was just at the start of a career that would see her fight 24 times, winning them all.
And I loved every minute. The tense feeling I’d get before the start of a bout, the pre-fight match-ups with their braggadocio and verbal jabs as well-placed as any punches in the ring, the way the best fights were half dance, half brawl. I loved the atmosphere of the New York gyms and the raw pride of the amateur bouts, in which impassioned families yelled their hearts out for fighters from all over the five boroughs. Frank Bruno once called boxing “the toughest and loneliest sport in the world”. He was right, but at its best it also feels like a club to which you’re lucky to belong.
Given I remembered that thrill, did I have any right to deny it to my son? Is it really acceptable to praise boxers in print then turn around and tell Oisín that it wasn’t for him? In mitigation many professional boxers feel the same way – when I interviewed Laila Ali she admitted her father had been very unhappy that she’d chosen to box, while Lennox Lewis has said he would have “mixed feelings” about his son Landon boxing.
The American Academy of Pediatrics and the Canadian Paediatric Society recently put out a joint statement opposing children participating in boxing, noting: “Although boxing provides benefits for participants, including exercise, self-discipline and self-confidence, the sport of boxing encourages and rewards deliberate blows to the head and face. Because of the risk of head and facial injuries, [we] oppose boxing as a sport for children and adolescents.”
At the end of last year the British Medical Association and brain injury charity Headway also condemned the sport after the death of 25-year-old Scottish boxer Mike Towell following a serious head injury sustained in a bout against Dale Evans. “As long as boxing is allowed to continue more and more young lives will be damaged or lost as a result of opponents deliberately trying to cause neurological harm to each other,” said Headway’s chief executive Peter McCabe.
There is a huge difference between fighting professionally, as Towell did, and learning the rudiments, as Osh wants to. Yet even before the young boxer’s death I was uneasy. It felt like bad parenting to allow my child to box. On the other hand both he and his sister have played rugby since they were six, with Ruby, nine, moving up from tag to contact this year.
“If you want to get your child concussed, let them play rugby or take up horse riding,” says Dr Mike Loosemore, who is the chief medical officer for England Boxing, the sport’s amateur wing. “You can sustain spinal fractures playing rugby or break your neck and back horse riding, but they’re also very middle class sports and therefore understood by doctors, many of whom have personal experience of them. Boxing by contrast tends to be misunderstood by those who have never spent any time with the sport, but simply condemn it outright.”
Loosemore, who has worked for two decades examining concussion and brain injuries within the sport – research which lead to the recent decision to abandon head guards in amateur boxing “because they were shown to increase rather than prevent brain injuries” – stresses that boxing is highly regulated, particularly at the amateur level and says he would have no problem allowing a child of his to box.
In the end I decide the only way to deal with my mixed feelings is to be honest. I tell Osh that I’m not keen on him boxing, but that while we’re in New York in the summer we can go to the city’s most famous gym, Gleason’s. Hidden in a once rundown but now prime location in Brooklyn’s Dumbo (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass), Gleason’s is part of New York boxing legend. Jake LaMotta and Carlos Ortiz trained here and it’s where Ali prepared for his first fight against Sonny Liston, back when he was still called Cassius Clay. Barry McGuigan, Tommy Hearns and Larry Holmes are among those to have passed through its battered doors, as have actors from Robert De Niro to Wesley Snipes.
These days Gleason’s also offers boxing classes for kids at the weekends. Taught by Michael “Coach Mike” Kozlowski, a Russian American who coached UK Olympic champion Luke Campbell to European Gold and won the 2012 Golden Gloves “Coach of the Year”, the classes aim to hit the sweet spot between fun and inspiring.
“I don’t think there’s any problem with starting young,” says Kozlowski. “They’re not fighting in the ring, they’re training.” The classes are split by age and it’s certainly true that the youngest children are having a lot of fun, hopping across the room, working on their jabs, trying out the punch bags. “At that age it is about trying it out,” Kozlowski says. “But some of them stick with it. I have kids in this class who have been coming here for years, some move up and keep coming back to the gym. Some have real talent, others are here to sweat a bit and have fun.”
Youth boxing is big news in America. Clubs across the US offer similar sessions to Gleason’s and children’s classes are becoming increasingly popular in the UK as well. Growing numbers of young women are getting involved, a factor that can possibly be attributed to the success of the charismatic Nicola Adams, who won gold medals in both London and Rio. Mark Collings, a boxing coach with the Limehouse Boxing Academy, agrees. “There’s definitely a feeling that the sport is more inclusive and has a more wholesome image than before,” he says. What does he attribute that to? “It’s partially the success of someone like Nicola, but it’s also that boxing clubs now offer a relatively well ordered and safe environment. In our club there are Bengali kids, Irish traveller kids, Romanians, Caribbeans, Africans… and that mix is a great benefit. Our club is one of the few places an Irish traveller kid would meet a Muslim kid and vice versa. That’s a great thing.”
Danny Davis, who won the National Junior Development title last year at just 15, adds that one of the sport’s strongest selling points is the discipline it imbues in young fighters. “Before I started boxing I wasn’t that involved in school, but after I started boxing I started concentrating more.” Davis even credits the sport with improving his GCSE results. “It gives you a mindset where you learn how to trust yourself and hold your nerve and have a positive mentality.”
So should I let go of my motherly fears and let Osh learn to box? Danny’s mother Kim admits she still struggles when her son gets in the ring. “It terrifies me in all truthfulness. When I first watched Danny I was shocked at how brutal it was even with these young kids. I was praying at the side of the ring, ‘Don’t let my son get hurt.’ Even now when he’s doing so well, I’m still full of nerves before every fight although I try not to let him see it. I have to keep reminding myself that he’s done the correct preparation and he has the skill and stamina to get through.”
Did she ever think about trying to stop him?
“So many people have said to me, ‘How could you let your son do that?’ but Danny was 12 when he decided to box and he went to the gym off his own back without telling us – it was his decision and I know how important choice is to teenagers, so I think that it’s my job as a parent to deal with that and support him. I say to myself I will deal with the fear as and when it happens because he’s living his dream and I do have so much pride in how well he’s done. The pride outweighs the fear.”
Collings agrees that it’s not an easy decision to make. “Look, I’ve got a little girl and I’d be lying if I said I wanted her to take up boxing. But if your son stays interested, then there are some really positive things to take from boxing. It’s a great confidence booster, the club can be almost like a really weird extended family. There’s a lot of support. It also has enormous benefits just as an aerobic exercise – there’s a growing number of non-contact boxing schemes in schools which cater to those who want to keep fit.”
The key phrase here is ‘stays interested’. “Officially the starting age is 11,” says Collings. “By that age you know your own mind. Start too young and you’d lose them – imagine being 19 and having already boxed for 10 years.” In other words it’s time for Oisín and I to compromise: if he still wants to box when he’s 11, he can try it. Until then it’s back to watching Adonis Creed on repeat.
