A statue of world heavyweight champion Joe Louis which stands in his hometown of LaFayette, Alabama.
SaveRivers
Times change, but the pillar upon which society places its sporting heroes remains the same.
If hitting below the belt, not the head, was the aim, then brain damage from boxing would disappear overnight.
from www.shutterstock.com
Forget tinkering with the rules of boxing. It’s time for a wholesale change. Let’s make hits to the groin the aim of the game and ban hits to the head.
Nearly 300,000 people tuned into two live streams on Facebook of the Anthony Mundine-Danny Green fight.
AAP/David Mariuz
Foxtel’s high-priced oligopolistic control over Australian pay TV has again clashed with the demands of sport fans and the increasingly sophisticated capture and relay technologies available to them.
More going on than just boxing bravado.
Rolf Vennenbernd/EPA
Fury may help project an image, but out of the ring there are other things in play.
Bombardier (right), the reigning champion and ‘King of the Arenas’, prepares to defend his crown against the popular young challenger Modou Lô.
Mark Hann/ Global Sport
Wrestling is Senegal’s national sport. But the presence of an ethnic discourse within the sporting arena may well threaten the notion of the multi-ethnic nation state.
Ready for the unthinkable.
PA/Steve Paston
For his fight with Gennady Gennadyevich Golovkin, Kell Brook had to gain weight in just the right places.
Muhammad Ali is still front of mind in any discussion of the most important sportsman ever.
Reuters
Muhammad Ali was much bigger than boxing. He came, from the late 1960s onwards, to symbolise resistance to racism, militarism and inequality.
Various boxing authorities have ranked Muhammad Ali as the best heavyweight boxer in history.
Reuters
Central to the celebrity Muhammad Ali achieved was his exceptional ability as a boxer.
Hungry: Cassius Clay prepares to meet Henry Cooper, 1960.
PA Archive
He moved from fearsome warrior to benevolent monarch and then benign venerated figure. Now Ali has moved on again.
We mustn’t allow convicted rapists or abusers to continue as role models.
Boxer Tyson Fury is far from a champion when it comes to is attitudes towards gender and sexuality.
Reuters/Lee Smith
The boxer’s recent remarks represent everything that is wrong with attitudes towards gender and sexuality in professional sport.
What a show off.
Organic Publicity
Southpaw looks set to be a fairly familiar boxing movie. So what can we expect?
A thousand flowers cannot bloom at Baku.
Vassil Donev
Unlike the Women’s World Cup in Canada, in Baku no one will see the strides forward for women’s sport.
Floyd Mayweather, Jr and Manny Pacquiao will face off on Saturday.
Steve Marcus/Reuters
A perfect storm of personalities, demand and money has created unprecedented hype. How should the media respond?
Two very wealthy men.
EPA/Michael Nelson
How the five-year wait for a Floyd Mayweather-Manny Pacquiao boxing match could result in $400m in revenues.
If banning boxing is not the answer then how to reduce the risks and make it safer?
Flickr/WorldSeriesBoxing
Boxing is big business but can come at a cost with severe health risks, even death. So what’s being done to reduce those risks?
More than two decades after the World Medical Association called for a ban on boxing, knocking a person senseless is still condoned, even celebrated.
EPA/Christian Charisius
The death of a 23-year-old boxer and the lifting of cage-fighting bans in every state but Western Australia raise the question of why we allow violence that would be criminal outside a ring or cage.
It may be that the seemingly inhumane aim of causing your opponent to lose consciousness by punching them separates boxing from other sports.
Kate Gardiner/Flickr
The death of a 23-year-old boxer has prompted a call by the Queensland branch of the Australian Medical Association for the sport to be banned in Australia.
England players crunch into a tackle during the 2014 Six Nations.
Gerry Penny/EPA
The Six Nations tournament has put the sport’s handling of head injuries into an uncomfortable spotlight.
Today over 700 evangelical US churches now integrate MMA into their ministry programs.
Vivek Prakash/Reuters
“Can you love your neighbor as yourself, and at the same time knee him in the face as hard as you can?” American Christian Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) champion Scott “Bam Bam” Sullivan wonders in an interview…