The Politics of the Boxing Gym

I’ve been boxing on-and-off for the last twenty-five years, and very regularly for the last five as I’ve entered middle age and have committed more-and-more to fighting the only truly unwinable fight… the one against time and mother nature.

Because I take the sport as seriously as a middle-aged man with a family and a full-time job can, the gym where I train is not the kind where women of a certain age, lifestyle and class status go in their spotless Lululemon body suits to do “boxercise.” It’s a gym with mold in the corners and blood stains in the ring. A gym where pros whose names you would know run camps for professional fights and where striving amatuers torture their bodies and minds for an unlikely shot at the big time.

Think about the Philly gym where Burgess Meredith trains Sly Stallone in the original “Rocky” and you’ve got the general idea.

There are grimy little boxing gyms like this all over America’s urban centers… mine just happens to be deep inside the People’s Republic of Santa Monica.

Nevertheless, on the morning after Algerian trans-boxer Imane Kelif forced Italian fighter Angela Carini to submit after 46 seconds and a single power punch, a shocking Olympic match result that went around the world and back a thousand times in the first few seconds after Carini’s submission, I arrived early in the morning for a training session and walked into an extraordinary scene.

An angry crowd was discussing the overnight results… “This won’t stop until women stop showing up for these fights”, said a male trainer. “Imagine training your whole life for this moment, climbing into the ring and seeing a man across from you and knowing it was all for nothing…” said a female fighter.

I’d walked into a rant session in which the subject was the possibility that two fighters who appear to be men will eventually fight for Olympic gold medals in “Women’s Boxing”, and the sentiment was decidedly against it… in Santa Monica, California.

It might be tempting to assume that this surprising scene represents nothing more than a one-off proof of the old adage that people are most conservative about the things they know best. The problem with that assumption is this was not my first experience with opinions like this at the boxing gym.

After Javier Milei won his Presidential election in Argentina back in December, I watched as boxers and trainers filed past the Argentine trainer who manages the gym to congratulate him and to say, only half-jokingly, that they were thinking about moving to Argentina. At one point, an older woman working out in the gym wearing a shirt with a Progressive slogan on it, something like “Love is Love”, shouted “But he’s a fascist!” and was met with (good-natured) howls of protest.

On still another day, one of the trainers barrelled into the gym and delivered a long blistering rant about all the petty crime to which he’d been subjected over the previous week. He punctuated this hilarious rant (in my experience, many boxers are frustrated stand-up comics) with “fuck Gavin Newsom!”, to which he received an enthusiastic response.

And then there’s the fact that the two boxing gyms I visited regularly during the pandemic were also the only places in Los Angeles that never made me wear a mask, and where I never saw anyone else wearing one, either.

Now, it would be easy to dismiss these stories as the byproduct of a small sample size… one gym and a handful of fighters… to call it statistical noise of no real significance, but I’m not so sure.

Out in the broader culture, I’ve begun to notice something interesting. Every now and then, I’ll see a clip on social media of an athlete saying something politically heterodox, which is to say, not Progressive. Occassionaly an athlete will even stray into territory considered “conservative”… a truly revolutionary act in these charged political times. And what I’ve noticed about these moments is that more often than not, the athlete saying these things is a boxer.

It makes a crazy kind of sense…. Boxers are diverse, yes, but they are also blue collar, hard-working and often come from difficult backgrounds. They have spent their lives literally fighting for everything they have. Boxers embrace concepts like hard work and discipline and they still believe in old-fashioned truisims like “pulling oneself up by your bootstraps”, “equality of opportunity rather than outcomes” and “the most talented hard-working person should win”… concepts that our new DEI overlords tell us we must abandon because they have become “associated with White Supremacy.”

Most importantly, boxers hate a bully, which is why there was so much anger over what’s happening in the Olympic boxing ring this week. Those women are being bullied, and that’s a difficult thing for any real boxer to witness, much less accept.

But government can be a bully too… perhaps the ultimate bully. If you are an agent of the government and you have designs on taking something away that a boxer has earned, you should expect a fight. “Taxation is theft” is a slogan that, I suspect, would play to a lot of sympathy in the average urban boxing gym.

The boxing gym is also a place that, in the words of our Progressive friends across the ailse, “looks like America.” Every race, sex and creed is represented and everyone gets along. If you are in the gym and working hard, then you automatically have the respect and friendship of everyone else in the gym, no matter your background or beliefs. It is a place where immutable characteristics like race and gender matter less than whether or not you can hack it… an attitude that built this nation of ours, once upon a time.

And so, to the next crop of Republican politicians who will bear the conservative standard after Trump departs the stage, whether it be three months from now or four years, I would suggest a new strategy for appealing to minority voters… spend much less time at the First AME Church and a lot more time in urban boxing gyms.

Yes, even in the People’s Republic of Santa Monica.

If you enjoyed this essay and would like to support the work we do here at The Continental Congress, please consider subscribing. You can also pre-order Michael Walsh’s upcoming collection of essays “Against the Corporate Media” to which George contributed an essay on the weaponization of movie reviews. Thank you, so much, for your time and your patronage!