Quotes of the Day
In the boxing ring, five seconds can be an eternity, as Alex "the Slugger" Wade learned when Vince "Dynamite" Dickson landed a punch square in his face at the beginning of the second round. Blood trickled from Wade's mouth, and he swayed from side to side. The crowd of 800 at London's York Hall — the spiritual home of British boxing — held its breath.
But Wade returned with a flurry of punches, and finished with his pride intact. Despite his tough-guy nickname, Wade, a 37-year-old father of two, is not a professional boxer — he's a lawyer and writer. "I cannot overemphasize how terrifying the whole thing was," says Wade. "But it's an adrenaline boost you don't get every day."
In the past three years, some 1,200 lawyers, bankers, judges and other suits — mostly thirty- and fortysomething men — have joined London's The Real Fight Club, a for-profit company founded in 2001 by events promoter Alan Lacey. The white-collar amateurs squeeze in two to four 90-minute training sessions a week — plus cross-training on alternate days — with the ultimate goal of getting into the ring to beat the hell out of each other in front of crowds. The attraction? Says Lacey, "Death or glory. Boxing is a chance to make their schoolboy fantasies come true."
Now the club is set to expand to Germany, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. Lacey has had the most requests from Germans (and the German media), though he's not sure why. "Maybe they like seeing other people get hit," he says with a shrug. The Real Fight Club has a rival in Australia — the for-profit Australian Academy of Boxing already offers white-collar boxing training and competitions.
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The Real Fight Club in London is beginning to attract women. "I get a real buzz out of making my films, but that's a slow burn," says Ann Parisio, a documentary filmmaker who boxed in the first women's fight in London in June. "Boxing is so physical; so immediate. It's such a rush."
It's also slightly watered down: the three rounds of a Real Fight Club fight are two minutes apiece instead of three, and the gloves are 16 ounces instead of 8, which blunts the punches. There are paramedics and an ambulance waiting, and bouts are stopped if there is too much blood. "The bottom line is that all of these guys have to go back to the office the next day," Lacey says. There's been one knockout — a lawyer named Paul "Mad Manx" Beckett — in 280 rounds. Few egos are badly bruised, though, because no winners are named. "It's intense enough without that," says Paul Damonte, 39, a money broker.
Lacey's hit idea was imported from the U.S., where he felt the pull of pugilism first-hand. He is a wiry 50-year-old with perfectly coiffed hair, but look closely and you'll see a fine white line snaking above each eye — scars from the gym. He began to learn to box in 1998, when he was "looking down at the abyss of middle age and not fancying the drop." He heard about white-collar fights at New York's Gleason's Gym — once home of Muhammad Ali and Mike Tyson — and flew over to box a dentist (yes, a dentist) in March 1999. Upon his return home, acquaintances ventured they'd like a shot at the sweet science. So in July 2000, he organized Capital Punishment, which pitted Londoners (among them a company director and a lawyer) against New Yorkers (a judge, a Wall Street banker). A crowd of 4,000 — friends, colleagues and lots of boxing aficionados perversely curious to see well-off white men go at it — turned up. The Real Fight Club was born.
In the beginning, Lacey says he got maybe one new member per month. Now he claims six a day from around the U.K. The fights have grown from occasional to nearly every month, and are held at two kinds of venues: places like York Hall, which attract serious fight fans, and plush London hotels, which attract the dinner-jacket crowd and give a portion of the proceeds to charity.
To join, men — there are still only a handful of women — undergo a physical ("like something out of the army," says Wade) and pay €140, which doesn't include any of the training costs (from €14 per session, depending on where). The first lesson: taking a punch. More used to rhetorical jabs than any other kind, the men "screw up their faces or turn away," says boxing trainer Umar Taitt, whose two front teeth are gold set with diamonds. "In boxing, you can't flinch."
Clearly, boxing appeals to some on a primal level. "I think, in a perverse way, there's a lot of suppressed macho tendencies coming out," says Kevin Mitchell, a sportswriter for the U.K.'s Observer weekly and author of War Baby: The Glamour of Violence. "Most of us go through life without ever throwing or landing a blow in anger, except for the odd fight at school. As we grow up, it becomes a more dangerous prospect. But white-collar boxing is fairly innocent: you're not going to get badly hurt because the other guy's probably as incompetent as you."
Equally important, the level of Rocky fantasy fulfillment is high: the ceremonial weigh-ins. The bucket to spit in. The theme song when you enter the ring. The nicknames. (Where else could a middle-aged white guy be called "Baby-Faced Assassin"?) The sport has become ubiquitous enough that it's reached the agony-aunt columns. In June a woman wrote in to the Daily Star newspaper's "Just Jane," terrified her banker boyfriend was going to get hurt boxing. Jane's advice: "Once your pretty-boy boyfriend has been seriously whacked a few times, I'm sure that he won't find this 'white-collar' boxing quite so funny."
Not likely. Most display their injuries at least as proudly as the trophies they receive for fighting. Marketing manager Richard Clarke, 32, enjoyed the attention his black eye brought at an office meeting. "When I explained, the women looked disgusted," he says. "But all the men were wishing they were able to do the same thing." Parisio, the female boxer, found her first black eye embarrassing only when she walked down the street with her boyfriend. She says: "I think people thought he gave it to me."
- COURTNEY RUBIN | London
- White-collar boxing is going global