Initial thoughts on the figures of the Boxer & the Jitsuka

The figures of the sportsman and the soldier loomed large in the imagination of all young boys throughout the 20th century. Growing up, I remember reading boys own manuals and “Commando” comics. Other boys were more interested in soccer magazines,but the gist was the same. These are role-models, and you should seek to emulate them.

In the UK, there was some tradition of sporting figures becoming popular heros (for example, the journalist Pierce Egan wrote his famous Boxiana, which inspired spinoffs such as Wrestliana, in the first half of the 19th century), but the real birth of the modern sports hero – I would argue – is down largely to Richard Kyle Fox. An Emigrant from Ireland, Fox was working in the New York Journalism scene of the 1870’s. In 1877 he inherited the nearly defunct Police Gazette; all he had to do was agree to take on its debts.

Under Fox’s editorship, the Gazette thrived. It fed its readers a heady mix of crime, sex, scandal and violence. Over time, it began to include contests, and gradually expanded its remit to sporting journalism as well. In this sense it paved the way for modern sensationalist journalism, whether it’s the “yellow papers”, the “tabloids” or the “red tops”, they all owe a debt to Fox’s lurid pink “Police Gazette”.

While the police Gazette made many sporting heroes, it would be difficult to deny that in the early days at least, boxers were the sporting heroes extrordinaire. (I have read that this was also true in the UK, though it was somewhat mitigated by the growth of football, which by the 1920’s had rather outstripped boxing in popularity).

Because my research deals with notions and representations of masculinity, I will have to engage with the figure of the boxer as sporting hero (and theoretically, a heroised form of violence) in order to adequately understand both the idealised masculine type He represented, and to offer contradistinction with the mode modest figure of the Jitsuka.

The Jitsuka was not heroised in any manner. In fact, the few portrayals of him or her in the press of the time tend towards an expedient martial artist who was competent to overcome criminals. As I have mentioned before, Sherlock Holmes was a student of Jiu-Jitsu (or, “Baritsu”, as Conan-Doyle would have it), as were Suffragettes, Police officers and Soldiers. The commonality between these figures would seem to amount to “people who need to be good at violence in order to achieve an end”. Holmes and the Police were fighting crime, the military were fighting for king & country, the Suffragettes for the rights of women. None of their main efforts was supposed to be violence, but if it came up, they needed to be good at it.

In some respects this will make the project harder to manage. The figure of the boxer is relatively easy, because he is a masculine ideal which is widely represented. Because the figure of the Jitsuka is mostly understood through negative space, I think that understanding the heroisation of boxers will provide a good way in to the study, and allow me to examine the hypothesis that the boxer stood for an idealised masculine violence on the individual level, while the jistuka represented a more broad application of practical principles on the restraint of violence at a society wide level.