and television companies stand to earn more money from Pacquiao and Mayweather if they never fight, based on the number of opponents they
2010: 19). Tyson’s financial affairs are well publicized and yet alarmingly are not too dissimilar to a number of retired boxing champions. The ‘Outside the Ropes’ section of The Ring and the ‘In brief’ section of Boxing News regularly report on retired boxers who are experiencing financial difficulty. Reports often address the need for ex-boxers to sell memorabilia in order to clear tax bills, ex-boxers filling for bankruptcy, or ex-boxers considering coming out of retirement in search of another big payday to settle their debts.
Despite numerous narratives detailing the financial difficulties experienced by successful boxers little to no discussion exists to explain why they fail to manage their finances. Two narrative trends run
simultaneously, one through the compensatory drive and salvation resources, and the second through the exploitation resource, with
seemingly little correlation between them. The compensatory drive and salvation resources suggest that a vocabulary of motive for boxers is the promise of financial reward from a career as a professional boxer. A reward, that in theory, would remove the boxer from the ghetto and provide social mobility. At the same time the exploitation narrative resource suggests that the boxer is often cheated out of earnings or does not receive a fair reward for his efforts in the ring. Stories about boxers leaving the sport in serious and crippling debt or having to continue fighting past their ‘natural retirement’ due to the need to earn money are equally common
(Schulberg 2008: 44). Further consideration needs to be paid to the relationship, or seemingly lack of relationship, between these resources. The personal narratives of professional boxers on this subject is often absent from boxing discourse. Furthermore the voices of amateur boxers
on this subject are seldom heard even those these individuals are engaged in the same bodily practices as the professional athletes. Both groups engage with a set of practices where money, earning potential and the value of the trained-fighting body are central components to the makeup of the sport.
Conclusion
The examples presented throughout this chapter demonstrate how the themes and shared narrative resources of boxing are woven together to tell an Idiosyncratic story. At the same time, the examples share common components which speak directly to the findings by academics about the cultural meanings of the sport. Further, the examples demonstrate the extent to which the narrative resources are limited and restrictive,
curtailing the flexibility boxers have to perform alternate stories and lead alternate lives. To this extent the shared narrative resources of boxing, particularly those which address the commoditization of the body and exploitation, can be understood as a narrative technology (Gulbrium and Holstein 1998), which, leads boxers to conspire in the exploitation of their own disadvantage (Sugden 1996). Whilst for Wacquant, the belief in pugilistic illusio ‘is found lodged deep within [the boxer’s] body’ operating ‘beneath the level of discourse and consciousness’, I argue that discourse, and the shared narrative resources of boxing help establish and sustain the cultural meanings of the sport and the illusio (Wacquant 1995a: 88).
Whilst there is a significant amount of literature being produced on boxing discourses these accounts do not always focus on the voices of the boxers themselves. On the rare occasions that the boxers’ voices are
featured it is usually the voices of professional, male, boxers. The voices of amateur, and, or, female boxers rarely feature in discussions of boxing and yet these individuals engage with the same bodily practices and as their professional equivalents. Whilst there is significant evidence to
demonstrate that amateur and professional boxers recruit from the same pool of bodily practices and draw upon similar principles when approaching training and nutrition, there is very little discussion concerning the extent to which the two groups recruit from the same pool of narrative resources. There is little discussion concerning the relationship between narratives and bodily practices for either professional or amateur boxers.
This project is a result of this void and will investigate the relationships between bodily practices and narratives, exploring the manner in which the shared narrative resources of boxing affect the narrative identities of amateur and professional boxers. With a dearth of female participants in this study it is beyond the scope of this project to fully consider how the shared narrative resources of boxing affect the narrative identity of female boxers. Further, greater work is required to determine whether there exist gender specific narrative resources that are open to one gender group and closed to another. Through the narrative account of one female boxer, this study will demonstrate that certain boxing narrative resources are engaged with despite gender differences. This project accepts that the voices of female boxers, and females writing about boxing requires greater consideration in order to fully understand the extent to which narrative resources are shared, and the manner in which they affect the narrative identity presented by individual boxers.
Chapter 3: Ontological Narratives and the Engagement with Pre-