Boxing may well have its cost – but our society owes it a debt

http://www.theguardian.com/sport/blog/2015/mar/22/boxing-improve-lives

Version 0 of 1.

There were 60 kids at the Ingle Gym in Sheffield on Saturday morning, flicking bandaged knuckles towards ghosts and making swollen punchbags tipsy. Watching on, beneath the gym’s famous sign which warns “Boxing can seriously damage your health, but teaches self-discipline and gets you fit. Smoking, drinking and drugs just damage your health”, was Brendan Ingle, absorbed in a scene that has become so familiar to him during these past 40 years.

My great-uncle is 75 now, but still gets a similar buzz from having performed blarney-soaked interventions on troublesome young men while guiding fighters like Naseem Hamed, Johnny Nelson and Kell Brook to world titles. “I saw Mick ‘The Bomb’ Mills the other day,” Brendan says. “A tough old pro with a fearsome punch. He shook my hand and said ‘thanks for keeping me out of prison’. Then there’s Richard Towers, who became European heavyweight champion and turned his life around after being inside for kidnap. Mostly, though, I remember the hundreds who never stepped into the ring professionally but transformed themselves by coming here.”

Plenty of names and potted histories follow. Ingle left school without much of an education but has a scriptwriter’s talent for turning grim-sounding plotlines into happy endings. But as The Right Hook – a report published last week from the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Boxing – shows he is far from alone. You could walk into most of the 900 or so clubs in Britain and hear similar tales.

Stories like that of 18-year-old Abdul Guthmy, who in 2011 was pictured in the Evening Standard as one of the 12 most wanted men from the London riots, and who tells how boxing has helped him perform a U-turn on his life. And that of Jovan Young, a former gang member who fought in the Commonwealth Games, who says “boxing is the only thing that’s acceptable from the gang’s point of view. When I got involved in boxing, the gang members said to me ‘leave us behind Jovan, go and get a future for yourself’.”

The report also cites the successes of organisations such as the Boxing Academy which helps those who would have otherwise been permanently excluded from school. Over 90% of attendees have gone on to further education, training or employment.

Anyone involved in boxing knows of its power – particularly among working-class kids – to improve health, education, community cohesion and to lower crime. Other sports make major differences too, of course, but as the Olympic flyweight champion Nicola Adams puts it in the report’s foreword, boxing has an almost unmatched capacity to engage the most disaffected in society.

Why is that? Ingle believes many young people either think they can fight, want to fight, or want to defend themselves, which gives the sport a certain street cred. Then, once they get involved, they learn a set of values and a code which ends up having a dramatic impact on their behaviour.

But at the moment anecdote trumps empirical analysis. There remains too much word of mouth and too little cost/benefit analysis. Along with calling for a range of measures, including the sport to be trialled in prisons, the all-party parliamentary group wants more evidence, by getting clubs to collect data using simple online forms, so that when the money is divvied up the sport gets more of the pie.

Fight for Peace in Newham, for instance, combines boxing and martial arts with educational, personal development and support services and seeks out individuals heading the wrong way – 800 people attend each year, while the cost of 14 full-time staff and 17 coaches and youth workers is £670,000 a year. That doesn’t seem cheap. But 93% of those involved go on to further education or training and it works out at £837.50 a person – peanuts compared to the annual £8,000 cost of sending someone to a pupil referral unit.

Of course we shouldn’t kid ourselves. Boxing, for its great merits, can’t save everybody. Some of the nasty bastards who take up boxing remain nasty bastards. The sport is undoubtedly dangerous, especially at professional level, and the awful death of Australian fighter Braydon Smith last week led calls for it to be banned. Some readers will sympathise with a Guardian leader in 2000 which agreed, calling the sport “barbaric”. But while the thought of two people hitting each other is abhorrent to some, boxing’s benefits still outweigh its risks. The rate of death per 100,000 participants is higher in horse racing and American college football, for instance, while basketball and rugby have a higher injury rate.

Money is scarce in these flinty times. Even so it is surely not unreasonable to ask why, if boxing is so effective at turning lives around, authorities aren’t actively doing more to redirect money from schemes that appear to be less successful?

Brendan Ingle, who has inspired so many of the bored, feckless and reckless people he has seen to lead better lives, is more aware of the potential benefits than most. “Remember, many people have only known negative,” he adds. “I spend three, four, five years on them, getting them to change their attitude, go back to education, trying to motivate them. It’s not easy. But I’m fed up paying taxes to keep people in prison – surely it’s much better to do something constructive with those going the wrong way so everyone will benefit?”