Documenting the Female Boxing Experience: Using the Films Toy Tiger, J.C., and Tyson to Unveil Women’s Relationship with Boxing

• Published in: Sport history review 2011-05, Vol.42 (1), p.56-69
• Main Author: Ross, MacIntosh
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 1087-1659; 1543-2947
• DOI: 10.1123/shr.42.1.56

Thomas Hauser, the prolific boxing writer, once wrote that "boxing people are a special breed, denizens of a strange world that few outsiders see and even fewer understand. It's a dark world that takes what's most savage in man and pushes it centre stage against a backdrop of exploitation and pain." super(1) Indeed, exploitation is the central theme in most fictional and nonfictional accounts of boxing. This includes, but is not limited to, television series, Hollywood dramas, short stories, novels, biographies, and exposes. Men take dives, bribe officials, appease mobsters, and fight injured. The recent documentary films Tyson (2008), Toy Tiger (2009), and J.C. (2007) are no different. Each revolves around corruption and exploitation. In a sense, they are familiar stories performed by different casts of characters. We've experienced these trends before, time and again, throughout the sport's history. Yet, in subtle ways, each film reveals volumes of historical pay dirt. In each photo, snippet of film, and interview--hidden in the minutia--are unintended, often unnoticed fragments of boxing's social history. From gender to race, ethnicity to class, all the details of the boxing experience are present when such films are subjected to careful scrutiny. We must meander beyond the main focus of the films--in this case, the boxers themselves--and allow our gaze to fall upon the audiences, dressing rooms, streets, restaurants, homes, and gyms and look for what is present and that which, for whatever reason, is excluded from the narrative.