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

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

MacIntosh Ross University of Western Ontario

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.”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 exposés. 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, snip- pet 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 care- ful 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. This article will focus on the presence and absence of women in the films Tyson, Toy Tiger, and J.C., drawing evidence from the films that is unknowingly provided.2 In this manner I will navigate through some of the many roles played by women in boxing, including competitor, spectator, round-girl, gym-mate, and promoter. To do so, I will use the concept of hegemony, particularly hegemonic masculinity. According to Williams, hegemony “constitutes the substance and limit of common sense for most people under its sway.” This common sense is instilled through a “central system of practices, meanings and values, which we can pro- perly call dominant and effective.”3 The persuasiveness of this “common sense” is the manner in which it is disseminated. As George Rudé argues, hegemony takes

MacIntosh Ross is with the School of Kinesiology, University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada.

56 Documenting the Female Boxing Experience 57 hold “in the realm of ideas, by largely peaceful means.” The state influences “the media of indoctrination”—press, schools, and religious institutions—with ideas, consumed and often accepted by citizens, making them “partners in their own sub- jection.”4 R.W. Connell applies this notion of hegemony to gender, articulating and applying the concept of “hegemonic masculinity,” using this approach to gender to explain both man’s domination over woman, and some men’s domination over other men. A masculinity becomes hegemonic when it, like other ideas, becomes “common sense.” One way of acting “male” becomes dominant, ensuring “the superiority of men over women, and the exaltation of hegemonic masculinity over other groups of men, which is essential to the domination of women.”5 There is no “hegemonic” form of femininity. Rather, there exists only “emphasized femininity,” as prescribed through male domination, particularly the hegemonic mode of male behavior.6 Through this concept I will demonstrate how the female boxing experience is both structured and structuring, being shaped by prevailing notions of hegemonic masculinity and emphasized femininity, and at the same time shap- ing and reinforcing these gender norms via their reproduction.7 Male dominance is upheld in boxing and other violent sports, as an ideology of patriarchy emerges that rests upon violence and male physicality. The ring becomes a stage for the public performance and exaltation of this violence and physicality, which loses its ordering capacity if women are permitted entrance to the sport. Professional boxing, then, is a naturalizing practice. Boxers, largely unknowingly, “serve to stabilize a structure of domination and oppression in the gender order.”8

The Films Of the three films under review, James Toback’s Tyson is the most familiar to North Americans. The film was picked up in 2009 by Sony Classics following its premier at the Cannes Film Festival.9 A lengthy interview with Mike Tyson represents the foundation of the film, which is intertwined with various clips of archival mate- rial—including fights, news reports, and family videos—in a manner that is both comprehensive and aesthetically pleasing. The film covers Tyson’s childhood, boxing career, prison time, and retirement. Unlike like director Barbara Kopple’s Fallen Champ: The Untold Story of Mike Tyson (1993) or ESPN’s rendition of the Tyson story on its documentary series Beyond the Glory (2003), interviews with Tyson’s friends, family, and boxing associates are not used. Instead, Toback provides viewers with a unique opportunity to hear Tyson speak for himself. The result is refreshing. Tyson speaks plainly but passionately about his life in and out of the ring. His emotions range from heartfelt sadness, when speaking of his former trainer and mentor Cus D’Amato, to angry, vulgar outbursts when discussing former promoter Don King and Desiree Washington, the woman he was convicted of raping in 1991. In J.C., director Diego Luna tells the story of former multiple division champion Julio Cesar Chavez, now nearing retirement (although far older than most active boxers), preparing his son for a run at a world title. The film begins at Chavez’s “Adios Phoenix” contest—the last of his 115-fight career—against Grover Wiley. The film then shifts to Chavez’s childhood. Born in Sonora, Mexico, Chavez was raised primarily in Culiacán, where his father worked for the railway. It was here that he began boxing professionally in 1980, before moving to the boxing hotbed of Tijuana. It was not long before promoter Don King heard tales of Chavez’s