Fighters By Trade: Highlights Of Australian Boxing
The Age
Saturday August 9, 2008
Fighters by Trade: Highlights of Australian Boxing
Robert Drane ABC Books, $35 ROBERT DRANE'S LAST BOOK was about Lester Ellis, and he writes knowledgeably of the fight game, though he doesn't romanticise it. He does, however, think Australia would be better off if our intellectuals took an interest in boxing, as Mailer and Sartre and apparently even Heidegger did."If I woke out of a coma after 50 years and wanted to know which ethnic group was at the bottom, I'd just ask who the heavyweight champion was." As Drane points out we've never had a heavyweight champion but the remark holds broadly true: in Australia it's Aborigines, from Dave Sands to Anthony Mundine, Irish-Australians such as Les Darcy and Young Griffo, and latterly the Lebanese-Australians Hussein Hussein and his brother Nedal.Just as in the US boxing is often seen as the theatre of race conflict (it's white guys watching black guys beat each other up, as Muhammad Ali said), Drane examines the ugliness that surrounded the Green versus Mundine fight of a few years ago, which was accompanied by internet trash-talk and ended in pub car park fights, in one case fatally. Drane isn't optimistic about the future of boxing, at least in its traditional form: it's getting mixed up with various martial arts and biff-fests that make more money for the pay TV executives who run the sport.
© 2008 The Age