JAMES NALTON celebrates Ruben Blades’s song Patria – played before Panama’s game against Ghana — a song inspiring hope instead of hate
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Boxers make heroes of the working class heroes like no other sport
Fifty years ago this month, Britain faced its hottest summer on record, as welterweight champion Stracey met his match in Mexico’s Palomino, writes JOHN WIGHT.
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BOXING is well-nigh unique in the way that it has and continues to throw up fighters so popular that they transcend the sport to attain the status of folk hero.
This is a phenomenon of which no other individual sport can boast, precisely because, unlike any other individual sport, boxing is a sport of the working class. And being such, a given fighter’s exploits in the ring afford its working-class public the vicarious and self-reinforcing thrill of the glory that they are denied amid the daily grind and stresses of life as appendages to the machine.
To be working-class is to be oppressed by forces so invisible that you can easily become putty in the hands of a culture industry that’s in the business of sowing false consciousness. It’s how they control us, how they successfully convince enough working-class voters to tick the box marked Conservative at election time — a box which in truth should be marked “self-harm.”
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Mary Kom’s fists made history in the boxing world. Malak Mesleh’s never got the chance. One story ends in glory, the other in grief — but both highlight the defiance of women who dare to fight, writes JOHN WIGHT
