How boxing can give prisoners a fighting chance

JOHN WIGHT makes the urgent case for a boxing programme in British prisons, arguing that the time for action is now

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One of the few available legal escapes from the affliction of poverty is boxing. The brutality of the sport notwithstanding, for its participants, the ring is considered more desirable than either a life of crime in defiance of the accomplished fact or one of bovine drudgery in acceptance of it.

And when it comes to crime, we cannot avoid the simple yet unvarnished truth that the primary function of the criminal justice system within any society underpinned by capitalism, is to keep the rebellious poor down in the interests of the rich. Because poverty, as they say, is the mother of crime. However, this being said, the vast majority of victims of the crimes of the poor in our time are other poor people. There lies the contradiction, and therein lies the horror.

One of the ironies of the history of the US prison system in particular, is that though designed for incarceration and punishment, it has allowed a small number to forge a future beyond its walls via the sport of boxing. 

Consider the evidence. Jack Johnson, Sonny Liston, Ron Lyle, Dwight Mohammed Qawi, and Bernard Hopkins were each destined for a future of no future at all, until in prison they found boxing. Or perhaps instead, it was a case of boxing finding them.

That Sonny Liston would become the most fearsome heavyweight of his generation would have been impossible if he hadn’t been sent to Missouri State Penitentiary for five years in 1950 for armed robbery and larceny. It was there that his raw aggression and rage found positive channeling when at the behest of one Catholic priest, Father Alois Stevens, he entered the prison’s boxing programme. 

From there, Liston went on to establish a legacy as one of the toughest heavyweights in the history of boxing, to the point of being crowned world champion after defeating Floyd Patterson in 1962. It was from this vantage point, when looking back at the years he spent in the penitentiary, that he said with customary stoicism: “I didn’t mind prison. I figure I had to pay for what I did. No use crying. I should have tried that before I did wrong.”

In more modern times, the journey of Bernard Hopkins from a life of crime to undisputed world middleweight champion is testament to how prison can sometimes make rather than break. In the early 1980s, at age 17, Hopkins was sent to Graterford State Penitentiary for five years for multiple felonies, including armed robbery. As with Sonny Liston and others before him, it was there he was introduced to boxing and immediately found his calling.

The Graterford State Penitentiary boxing programme was run by Robert ‘Nudie’ Mims, one of life’s forgotten yet true heroes. People such as Mims — as with Father Alois Stevens before him and a countless number after — assume the status of mentor, trainer and surrogate father in the process of making a critical intervention in the lives of troubled young working class men. And this at a seminal moment, to thus save them from a fate of a type well known.

It was in the ring that Hopkins sought and found meaning while incarcerated. It focused his mind, trained his body and allowed him to believe that the past did not have to dictate his future. 

With this in mind, upon leaving prison in 1988 he entered the gym and continued to master a craft that would see him excel, ascending to heights that nobody who knew him from way back when would ever have considered possible. A pro career involving an extraordinary 55 fights saw him participate in his share of classic encounters against some of the modern legends of the sport — fighters of the calibre of Roy Jones Jr, Glen Johnson, Felix Trinidad, Oscar De La Hoya, Howard Eastman, Antonio Tarver, and Wales’s own Joe Calzaghe.

As Bernard Hopkins said of his life in boxing: “You think it’s hard for me when I go in the ring and fight? That’s the least of my problems. I think about the five years that I did in prison. I think about the nine years on parole. Nothing — nothing! — can compare to that struggle.”

The fighters featured in this column, who entered prison with no future and emerged with one in the ring, are just the tip of the iceberg. 

The real value of boxing, whether in prison or out, is how it shapes and forges attributes that can transform people’s lives in so many ways. And this is without having to take it to the level of sparring or fighting. 

The discipline involved in the training side alone inculcates habits of emotional control, resilience, consistency and constancy, which amount to transferable skills that can be utilised in the pursuit of educational attainment, a career, or when it comes to navigating those vicissitudes of life we all experience at various points.

It is why, in the name of rehabilitation and the saving of young working class souls, the British prison system needs its own boxing programme, and it needs it now.

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