A fleshpeddler at work: Power, pain, and profit in the prizefighting economy

Theory and Society

Volumn 27, Issue 1, 1998, Pages 1-42

  Wacquant, Loïc ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

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EID: 0032327416     PISSN: 03042421     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1023/A:1006817716428     Document Type: Review

References (81)

1. Cosell is cited by Sam Toperoff in Sugar Ray Leonard and Other Warriors (New York, McGraw-Hill, 1986, 149). The litany on that theme is endless. Columnist Jimmy Cannon puts the matter succinctly: "The fight racket, since its rotten beginnings, has been the red-light district of sports" (cited in Thomas Hauser, The Black Lights: Inside the World of Professional Boxing, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1986, 58). Canadian journalist Steven Brunt echoes this view thus: boxing is "an open meat-market where those who are useful and make money are lauded for the moment and those who do not are discarded. Corruption is accepted, expected and open. Lying well is a marketable skill" (Steven Brunt, Mean Business: The Rise and Fall of Shawn O'Sullivan, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987, 104).
2. Cosell is cited by Sam Toperoff in Sugar Ray Leonard and Other Warriors (New York, McGraw-Hill, 1986, 149). The litany on that theme is endless. Columnist Jimmy Cannon puts the matter succinctly: "The fight racket, since its rotten beginnings, has been the red-light district of sports" (cited in Thomas Hauser, The Black Lights: Inside the World of Professional Boxing, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1986, 58). Canadian journalist Steven Brunt echoes this view thus: boxing is "an open meat-market where those who are useful and make money are lauded for the moment and those who do not are discarded. Corruption is accepted, expected and open. Lying well is a marketable skill" (Steven Brunt, Mean Business: The Rise and Fall of Shawn O'Sullivan, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987, 104).
3. Cosell is cited by Sam Toperoff in Sugar Ray Leonard and Other Warriors (New York, McGraw-Hill, 1986, 149). The litany on that theme is endless. Columnist Jimmy Cannon puts the matter succinctly: "The fight racket, since its rotten beginnings, has been the red-light district of sports" (cited in Thomas Hauser, The Black Lights: Inside the World of Professional Boxing, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1986, 58). Canadian journalist Steven Brunt echoes this view thus: boxing is "an open meat-market where those who are useful and make money are lauded for the moment and those who do not are discarded. Corruption is accepted, expected and open. Lying well is a marketable skill" (Steven Brunt, Mean Business: The Rise and Fall of Shawn O'Sullivan, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987, 104).
4. "Economic phenomena are not only material phenomena. They are also collective representations that dictate to members of society their attitude towards material objects" and the patterns of conduct appropriate to them (Marcel Mauss, Manuel d'ethnographie, Paris: Editions Payot, [1959] 1967, 123).
5. For more on the conditions, objectives, and methods of this research, see Loïc Wacquant, "Protection, discipline et honneur: une salle de boxe dans le ghetto américain," Sociologie et société 27/1 (Spring 1995): 75-89, and idem, "The Pugilistic Point of View: How Boxers Think and Feel About Their Trade," Theory and Society 24/4 (August 1995): 489-535. The names of persons and locations as well as incidental details and the timing of some events have been disguised to ensure the anonymity of individual informants.
6. For more on the conditions, objectives, and methods of this research, see Loïc Wacquant, "Protection, discipline et honneur: une salle de boxe dans le ghetto américain," Sociologie et société 27/1 (Spring 1995): 75-89, and idem, "The Pugilistic Point of View: How Boxers Think and Feel About Their Trade," Theory and Society 24/4 (August 1995): 489-535. The names of persons and locations as well as incidental details and the timing of some events have been disguised to ensure the anonymity of individual informants.
7. The notion of "body-mind complex" is borrowed from John Dewey's Experience and Nature (Chicago: Open Court, 1929).
8. The collective work of fabrication of the pugilistic habitus is detailed in Loïc Wacquant, "Pugs at Work: Bodily Capital and Bodily Labor Among Professional Boxers," Body and Society 1/1 (March 1995): 65-94.
9. Much as Pierre Bourdieu utilizes Gustave Flaubert, nomothète of the modern literary cosmos, as a practical analyzer to uncover the structure and logic of the nascent artistic field in nineteenth-century France (Pierre Bourdieu, Les règles de l'art. Genèse et structure du champ littéraire, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1992).
10. Everett C. Hughes, "Work and Self," in The Sociological Eye: Selected Papers (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, [1951] 1984), 338-347, citation p. 342.
11. Mark Granovetter, "Economic Institutions as Social Constructions: A Framework for Analysis," Acta Sociologica 35/1 (1992): 3-12.
12. E.g., David Atyeo's tabloid book, Blood and Guts: Violence in Sports (New York: Paddington Press, 1979), and, in the realm of film, Sylvester Stallone's Rocky series and Woody Allen's Mighty Aphrodite - the rapprochement is deliberate. For a discussion of "urban Orientalism" in recent scholarly accounts of the ghetto, see Loïc Wacquant, "Three Pernicious Premises in the Study of the American Ghetto," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 20 (June 1997): 341-353.
13. E.g., David Atyeo's tabloid book, Blood and Guts: Violence in Sports (New York: Paddington Press, 1979), and, in the realm of film, Sylvester Stallone's Rocky series and Woody Allen's Mighty Aphrodite - the rapprochement is deliberate. For a discussion of "urban Orientalism" in recent scholarly accounts of the ghetto, see Loïc Wacquant, "Three Pernicious Premises in the Study of the American Ghetto," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 20 (June 1997): 341-353.
14. Loïc Wacquant, "Teoria e etnografia no gueto," paper presented to the Departamento de antropologia, Museu nacional, Universidade do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, October 1995, and idem, "Un mariage dans le ghetto," Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 113 (June 1996), esp. 63-65.
15. Loïc Wacquant, "Teoria e etnografia no gueto," paper presented to the Departamento de antropologia, Museu nacional, Universidade do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, October 1995, and idem, "Un mariage dans le ghetto," Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 113 (June 1996), esp. 63-65.
16. Cf. Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 75-94 and 224-234. For a stimulating discussion of the pitfalls and potentials of such a "case study" in social science, see Charles C. Ragin and Howard S. Becker, editors, What Is A Case? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), especially the chapters by John Walton ("Making the Theoretical Case") and Diane Vaughan ("Theory Elaboration: The Heuristics of Case Analysis").
17. Cf. Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 75-94 and 224-234. For a stimulating discussion of the pitfalls and potentials of such a "case study" in social science, see Charles C. Ragin and Howard S. Becker, editors, What Is A Case? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), especially the chapters by John Walton ("Making the Theoretical Case") and Diane Vaughan ("Theory Elaboration: The Heuristics of Case Analysis").
18. Cf. Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 75-94 and 224-234. For a stimulating discussion of the pitfalls and potentials of such a "case study" in social science, see Charles C. Ragin and Howard S. Becker, editors, What Is A Case? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), especially the chapters by John Walton ("Making the Theoretical Case") and Diane Vaughan ("Theory Elaboration: The Heuristics of Case Analysis").
19. Cf. Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 75-94 and 224-234. For a stimulating discussion of the pitfalls and potentials of such a "case study" in social science, see Charles C. Ragin and Howard S. Becker, editors, What Is A Case? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), especially the chapters by John Walton ("Making the Theoretical Case") and Diane Vaughan ("Theory Elaboration: The Heuristics of Case Analysis").
20. Teddy Brenner and Brian Nagler, Only the Ring was Square (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1981), 1. The son of a skilled leather-cutter in a Brooklyn shoe factory, Ted Brenner entered boxing as an afficionado at New York's Stillman's Gym in the 1940s before rising to the post of chief matchmaker for the Madison Square Garden. His professional trajectory spans the period of transformation of prizefighting from neighborhood entertainment (centered on small clubs) to corporate business (dominated by big promoters, so-called "world federations," and television programmers).
21. In anthropological terms, a broker is "a professional manipulator of people and information who brings about communication for profit" (Jeremy Boissevain, Friends of Friends: Networks, Manipulators and Coalitions, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1974, 147-169). In contrast with the "patron," who controls "first-order resources," the broker specializes in those "second-order resources" that make up the strategic networks of access to powerful agents.
22. For an insider's account of the practical and business organizations of boxing shows, consult Gregory J. Reed, This Business of Boxing and Its Secrets (Detroit: New National Publishing Company, 1981).
23. For a portrait of the journeyman, see John Schulian, Writers' Fighters and Other Sweet Scientists (Kansas City: Andrew and MacMeel, 1983), 219-221.
24. On this ethic and its social bases, Loïc Wacquant, "The Pugilistic Point of View: How Boxers Think and Feel About Their Trade," Theory and Society 24/4 (August 1995): 489-535.
25. Jeffrey T. Sammons, Beyond the Ring: The Role of Boxing in American Society (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 254.
26. For a partial compilation of irregulatities and horror stories from Ohio and New Jersey, see United States Senate, Hearings on Curruption in Professional Boxing Before the Permanent Committee on Governmental Affairs, United States Senate, One Hundred Second Congress, August 11-12, 1992 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1993), esp. 49-50, 57-63, 67-78, and 185-194.
27. Michael Shapiro, "Opponents," in Joyce Carol Oates and Daniel Halpern, editor, Reading the Fights (New York: Prentice-Hall Press, 1988), 242-249.
28. Dean Allison and Bruce B. Henderson, Empire of Deceit (Garden City: Doubleday, 1985); Mack Newfield, Only in America: The Life and Crimes of Don King (New York: Morrow, 1995).
29. Dean Allison and Bruce B. Henderson, Empire of Deceit (Garden City: Doubleday, 1985); Mack Newfield, Only in America: The Life and Crimes of Don King (New York: Morrow, 1995).
30. In a revealing parallel that analogizes boxers to race horses, Mack notes that his challenge is similar to that of "a handicapper at the race track which makes the races of the race card there, and he's weighing some horses heavier than he is others and so on, on a sliding scale. The perfect job of handicapping the horses would be, if you had eight horses in the race, you'd have an eight-horse dead heat. I guess in boxing, I have a six-bout card: the perfect card would be six draws. It wouldn't be satisfying to anyone but that would be perfect."
31. Aaron V. Cicourel, Cognitive Sociology (New York: The Free Press, 1973), 99-140.
32. "Clientelization" is a procedure characteristic of - but obviously not limited to -Third-World marketplaces, wherein "it reduces search to manageable proportions and transforms a diffuse mob into a stable collection of familiar antagonists" (Clifford Geertz, "The Bazaar Economy: Information and Search in Peasant Marketing," Supplement to the American Economic Review 68, May 1968: 29; see also Mark Granovetter, "The Nature of Economic Relationships," in Richard Swedberg, editor, Explorations in Economic Sociology, New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1993, 21-38).
33. "Clientelization" is a procedure characteristic of - but obviously not limited to - Third-World marketplaces, wherein "it reduces search to manageable proportions and transforms a diffuse mob into a stable collection of familiar antagonists" (Clifford Geertz, "The Bazaar Economy: Information and Search in Peasant Marketing," Supplement to the American Economic Review 68, May 1968: 29; see also Mark Granovetter, "The Nature of Economic Relationships," in Richard Swedberg, editor, Explorations in Economic Sociology, New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1993, 21-38).
34. Robert G. Eccles, "The Quasifirm in the Construction Industry," Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 2 (1981): 335-357.
35. Ronald Dore, "Goodwill and the Spirit of Market Capitalism," British Journal of Sociology 34 (1983): 460.
36. These registers, containing the name and hometown of licensed fighters followed by a chronological listing of their bouts (with place, opponent, weight, and outcome), are privately produced and sold for profit by small boxing operators (managers, matchmakers, or devotees of the Sweet science). There exists no official publication that collates all fights taking place in the country, let alone overseas. Matchmakers salaried with established promotion companies rely on their firm's computerized data banks, but this is a recent development.
37. A. Rees, "Information Networks in Labor Markets," in D. M. Lamberton, editor, Economics of Information and Knowledge (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971) 109-118.
38. Mack continues: "You make, you make all kindsa deals. You make deals, sometimes you forget the deals you made yourself! I booked a fight in South Africa and I forgot, I forgot what the deal was. [amused at the recollection] The promoter and I had to talk, and I don't want to tell him I don't remember! But we had to piece it together."
39. On legal entanglements in the upper tier of the boxing business, see Thomas Hauser, The Black Lights: Inside the World of Professional Boxing, and Newfield, Only in America; on the non-contractual regulation of economic transactions, see Steward Macauley, "Non-contractual Relations in Business: A Preliminary Study," American Sociological Review 28 (1963): 55-67.
40. On legal entanglements in the upper tier of the boxing business, see Thomas Hauser, The Black Lights: Inside the World of Professional Boxing, and Newfield, Only in America; on the non-contractual regulation of economic transactions, see Steward Macauley, "Non-contractual Relations in Business: A Preliminary Study," American Sociological Review 28 (1963): 55-67.
41. On legal entanglements in the upper tier of the boxing business, see Thomas Hauser, The Black Lights: Inside the World of Professional Boxing, and Newfield, Only in America; on the non-contractual regulation of economic transactions, see Steward Macauley, "Non-contractual Relations in Business: A Preliminary Study," American Sociological Review 28 (1963): 55-67.
42. Most fighters are (sub)proletarians of black and Latino extraction while most managers are white entrepreneurs and upper-level professionals. In addition, boxing operators are typically divided among mutually disdainful and diffident factions
43. Clifford Geertz, "The Bazaar Economy," 230-231.
44. This degree of involvement with amateur activities is unusual among professional matchmakers and helps account for Mack's exceptionally penetrating grasp of the dynamics of the local pugilistic arena.
45. Kenneth Leiter, A Primer on Ethnomethodology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 100.
46. William Graham Sumner, Folkways (Boston: Ginn, 1940, orig. 1906).
47. The distinction between parasitic and symbiotic cliques is borrowed from Melville Dalton's classic, Men Who Manage: Fusions of Feeling and Theory in Administration (New York: Wiley, 1959: chapter 3). To put it differently: horizontal exchange among close-knit, top-level matchmakers results from, and in turn maintains, "value-adding partnerships" (R. Johnson and P. Lawrence, "Beyond Vertical Integration: the Rise of the Value-Added Partnership," Harvard Business Review 88, 1988: 94-104). By contrast, vertical exchanges form what we might call "value-appropriating partnerships" that transfer money and opportunities from lower-to higher-level transactors.
48. The distinction between parasitic and symbiotic cliques is borrowed from Melville Dalton's classic, Men Who Manage: Fusions of Feeling and Theory in Administration (New York: Wiley, 1959: chapter 3). To put it differently: horizontal exchange among close-knit, top-level matchmakers results from, and in turn maintains, "value-adding partnerships" (R. Johnson and P. Lawrence, "Beyond Vertical Integration: the Rise of the Value-Added Partnership," Harvard Business Review 88, 1988: 94-104). By contrast, vertical exchanges form what we might call "value-appropriating partnerships" that transfer money and opportunities from lower-to higher-level transactors.
49. Victor Goldberg, "Relational exchange: Economics and Complex Contracts," American Behavioral Scientist 23 (1980): 337-342.
50. Marcel Mauss, "La cohésion sociale dans les sociétés polysegmentaires (1931),́ in Oeuvres. Vol. 3: Cohésion sociale et divisions de la sociologie (edited by Victor Karady, Paris: Minuit, 1968), 19.
51. "This type of regulation tends to develop when certain participants in the market are, by virtue of their totally or approximately exclusive control of the possession of or opportunities to acquire certain utilities - that is, of their monopolistic powers -in a position to influence the market situation in such a way as actually to abolish the market freedom of others" (Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, Berkeley: University of California Press, [1918-20] 1978, 2 vols., 83). At the higher reaches of the fistic business, a handful of promoters likewise wield oligopolistic power. See the appendix for a view of this structure of control from the boxer's standpoint.
52. The sport is periodically diagnosed in the last stages of agony, as it winds down another one of its long depressive cycles. In Chicago, the lack of good amateur-training programs, the dearth of hometown "marquee names" (recent heavyweight titlist Oliver McCall hails from the Windy City but he has trained and resided out of state for years), and the absence of a nationally active promoter have combined to reduce the boxing scene to a pale caricature of its olden glory days, "one of the fight racket's ghost towns" (Schulian, Writers' Fighters and Other Sweet Scientists, 215). On the national level, the boxing business is sustained almost solely by Hispanic fans and the heavyweight division.
53. On "colorless" currency, see Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978 [1900]); on the crafting and valuing of the fighter's body, Loïc Wacquant, "Pugs at Work: Bodily Capital and Bodily Labor Among Professional Boxers." Body and Society 1/1 (March 1995): 65-94.
54. On "colorless" currency, see Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978 [1900]); on the crafting and valuing of the fighter's body, Loïc Wacquant, "Pugs at Work: Bodily Capital and Bodily Labor Among Professional Boxers." Body and Society 1/1 (March 1995): 65-94.
55. Viviana Zelizer, "Making Multiple Monies," in Swedberg, editor, Explorations in Economic Sociology, 197; John Parry and Maurice Bloch, editors, Money and the Morality of Exchange (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
56. Viviana Zelizer, "Making Multiple Monies," in Swedberg, editor, Explorations in Economic Sociology, 197; John Parry and Maurice Bloch, editors, Money and the Morality of Exchange (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
57. The fighter then shares the resulting amount with his trainer, who receives ten percent (or a few twenties, when the purse is at the low end), and his manager (if he has one), who is entitled to between one third and one half of the purse depending on the kind and level of backing he supplies.
58. Many simply accept as a given of the business that the matchmaker will take a surreptitious bite out of their paycheck whenever a lucrative offer comes their way and that they should not meddle with the matter. A ring-worn trainer tells of a recent trip to Italy for a televised bout Mack had negotiated on behalf of his fighter: "We're fightin' in Turin, y'know, we're gettin' four thousand, you know we're gettin' more than four thousand, right? [You mean the real purse was more and Mack is keepin' the difference?] Oh sure, oh sure! [Why don't you call the Italian promoter then?] No, I know he's makin'money, [excitedly] what do I care, I mean what-do-I-care, if I m happy with four thousand? You know, if I sell you this pair of pants for ten dollars, [with alacrity] you don't care how much I'm makin', you want'em, maybe, maybe I'm pickin' up two dollars, what do you know? You want the pants for ten, you take it, you don't say 'how much you makin' ' - none of your business what I'm makin'."
59. I. Macneil, "'Contracts: Adjustment of Long-Term Economic Relations Under Classical, Neo-Classical, and Relational Contract Law," Northwestern Law Review 72 (1978): 854-906.
60. Jeffrey L Bradrach and Robert G. Eccles, "Price, Authority, and Trust: From Ideal Types to Plural Forms," Annual Review of Sociology 15 (1989): 107-108.
61. The term "team" has recently been substituted for "stable" by image-conscious promoters but the reality connoted by the older terminology has not changed much
62. These figures come from a survey of all fifty professional fighters active in the state of Illinois conducted in the summer of 1991.
63. R. D. Luce and H. Raiffa, Games and Decisions (New York: Wiley, 1957).
64. Karl Marx, "The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts," in Early Writings (edited by Quetin Hoare New York: Vintage, 1975), 377.
65. Gregory Bateson, Naven (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1958 [1936]), 119.
66. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1957); on expressive control among fighters, Wacquant, "Pugs at Work."
67. Bateson, Naven, 276.
68. Steven L. Gordon, "The Sociology of Sentiments and Emotions," in Morris Rosenberg and Ralph Turner, editors, Social Psychology: Sociological Perspectives (New York: Basic Books, 1981): 562-592.
69. In yet another parallel between prizefighting and horse racing, Mack goes on to comment: "You see, I don't jump up-and-down with too much of anything. I don't go jump up-and-down at the race tracks when my horse is coming to a photo-finish with the other horses. I don't jump up-and-down and scream and holler."
70. Robert K. Merton and Elinor Berber, "Sociological Ambivalence," in Edward Tiryakian, editor, Sociological Theories, Values, and Sociological Change: Essays in Honor of Pitirim A. Sorokin (New York: The Free Press, 1963), 91-120.
71. Brenner and Nagler, Only the Ring was Square, 22.
72. "A matchmaker never knows what he's got until the fighters he has matched are in the ring and throwing punches. Like the fighters themselves, he is always on edge, because he is never sure that both fighters will get through their training grinds in good shape and then put on a real good fight" (Brenner and Nagler, Only the Ring was Square, 112, emphasis added). What is more, "if a fight you put in is good, the fighters get the credit. If it is bad, the matchmaker gets the blame" (Brenner and Nagler, ibid., 45).
73. "A matchmaker never knows what he's got until the fighters he has matched are in the ring and throwing punches. Like the fighters themselves, he is always on edge, because he is never sure that both fighters will get through their training grinds in good shape and then put on a real good fight" (Brenner and Nagler, Only the Ring was Square, 112, emphasis added). What is more, "if a fight you put in is good, the fighters get the credit. If it is bad, the matchmaker gets the blame" (Brenner and Nagler, ibid., 45).
74. Brenner and Nagler, Only the Ring was Square, 22.
75. Everett C. Hughes, "Work and Self," in The Sociological Eye: Selected Papers (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, [1951] 1984), 338-347.
76. Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967).
77. Susan Shapiro, "The Social Control of Impersonal Trust," American Journal of Sociology 93 (1987): 623-658.
78. Marcel Mauss, "Une catégorie de l'esprit humain: la notion de personne, celle de 'moi,' un plan de travail," Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 68 (1938): 263-281.
79. Wacquant, "The Pugilistic Point of View," esp. 501-502, 507-520.
80. James S. Coleman, "Introducing Social Structure in Economic Analysis," American Economic Review 74 (1984): 84-88,
81. and idem, Foundations of Social Theory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), passim.