Bolognina gym

Boxing as a sports discipline

Most of Tranvieri’s current boxers are young men of foreign origin, mostly from Moroccan families. Studying their practices of everyday life between February 2007 and February 2010, we were able to investigate the problems, needs and hopes of a ‘second generation’ of immigrants: almost all of them arrived in Italy as small children and attended school here (Scandurra and Antonelli, 2010).

The athletic education they receive by learning to box translates into practices and knowledge that grants sense to their daily lives through the continuous production and reproduction of meaning, Figures 1 and 2 a meaning that retains its validity outside the gym as well. These practices and forms of knowledge affect the ways in which these young men build their identity as citizens and are relevant to their citizenship.OPEN IN VIEWER

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

Tranvieri gym II - Photo by Fulvia Antonelli 2009.

Over the last 30 years, there has been growing interest in Italy in the younger generation and its relationship with urban space, especially in the case of ‘young foreigners’ (Zoletto, 2010), and the social sciences have participated in this expanding field of research. However, such attention is mostly focused on cultural identity and the legacy of migration, social inclusion or exclusion in the sphere of education and/or employment, or some of the fundamental aspects of formal citizenship. Researchers have granted less importance to analysing spare time and the formal and informal places devoted to leisure. Nevertheless, these arenas are key as environments in which corporeality is built and, consequently, the boundaries of multicultural citizenship are defined (Farrer and Whalen-Bridge, 2011, Sánchez García and Spencer, 2013). How does one become a boxer or, more simply, a gym-goer? How is bodily knowledge produced and reproduced in such a physical space? And is this mere knowledge of the body or is it a form of knowledge that brings participants to belong to a ‘community’ through the body?

This analysis of a boxing gym, designed for recreation, physical and mental well-being and socialization through sport, must be placed in the framework of a broader reflection on the relationship between body and space and on the role of corporeality in urban space (Satta and Scandurra, 2004). In an innovative cross-contamination between urban and immigration research, this article focuses on the link between sport and urban areas, between bodies and cities.

The old boxers

We did two matches a week on Monday and Friday, at the Paladozza, the sport palace of boxing... and the audience was huge. Have you ever seen eight thousand people who have come to see a boxing match? Let’s say that (those) memories are beautiful because it was another life, another sport (Albano). ¹

Albano directed the gym for years, and the above extract speaks to his memories of the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies, the ‘golden years’ of boxing when Bologna was the boxing capital of Italy. Almost all of the people I interviewed who had experienced this sport as direct practitioners or mere spectators described this period as unrepeatable because the boxers of the time were ‘brave’ and ‘heroes’. ² Today, the boxers fighting in the gym, almost all from foreign families, are young men who never experienced the Golden Years. The stories of today’s boxers instead reveal the challenges and difficulties of pursuing a career in this sport and deconstruct a myth of boxing that lasted until the end of the Seventies (Oates, 1987; Philonenko, 1991; Quercioli, 1994).

It is no coincidence that the boxers of the past continue to train at the same place where they started their careers. Tranvieri’s ‘veterans’ usually occupy a space between the ring and the benches, an institutionally strategic position in that this angle offers them a complete view of everything that goes on in the gym. This is the place where stories are told and the memory of the gym is passed on to new members.

Ernesto, a former amateur boxer, is one of the most respected members of the gym by virtue of the fact that he had maintained a daily presence there for more than 40 years. He can afford to represent the world of boxing with narratives other than the ‘official’ one because his loyalty to the history of boxing and the gym is indisputable. Other former boxers of the Golden Age such as Dante were also willing to talk with us about the dark side of boxing and the difficulties they encountered in their professional careers, such as unfair losses, backroom meetings and the power of sponsors (De Franco, 2006). These stories often reveal the ‘hunger’ of men who practised boxing in those glorious years to earn some extra money, to buy a motorcycle, go on dates with girls on Saturday night or purchase fashionable clothes.

I think I was a good amateur boxer [...].My sport was motorcycling [...]. My friends and I wanted to be like Marlon Brando in “On the Waterfront”. But in order to race you need money [...], and I put all the money I took from boxing into racing. Once they called me on Friday to do a boxing match on Saturday night and I hadn’t been in the gym for six months because I had had a motorcycle accident and I broke a couple of ribs. I agreed to do it because they offered money. Then finally I stopped both racing and boxing. I stopped boxing because I was supposed to let others win. It is obvious that they always called me to fight people who were better more trained than me. One [guy] who called me on Friday to do a match on Saturday had to give me a lot of money in those conditions [...]. In the factory, when I became qualified, I was earning about 75 thousand lire a month, and for this match they offered me 300 thousand lire. I did it for the money, but then I got tired of taking hits (Dante).

As many former boxers explained, the gym has helped many boxers such as Dante and Ernesto to ‘get off the streets’, that is, to engage in something besides fighting, theft and gang wars.

The young boxers

If we compare the words of Albano, Dante and Ernesto with the accounts of our study participants, we find similar motivations driving them at the gym. Today’s boxers are young people from 12 to 25 years of age, some of whom are attending vocational schools and some of whom are struggling with their first experiences in the world of waged work. Many of them live in the neighbourhood and spend a great deal of their spare time at the gym. The interviewees described their initial choice to walk into Tranvieri as coincidental or random, but when we asked about their deeper motivations, they all talked about needing to vent, gain self-discipline or socialize.

I’m only nineteen; I started about one and a half years ago. I started because I had some problems at home and the only place where I was comfortable was the gym [...]. Instead of going around bullying I decided to come to the gym, with initially no intention of fighting (Anuar).

The stories of young boxers such as Anuar and Kalhed, both sons of Moroccan citizens who came to Italy more than 10 years ago, abound with references to tensions in the family home, school environment or work place, all sites where most of them were forced to learn the meaning of the word ‘failure’. Anuar’s and Kalhed’s practices of everyday life are the same as those of their gym mates born in Italy but without citizenship. These young men go to the gym because it allows them to feel respected, to prove their worth and show they are strong without the kind of self-destructive repercussions that physically forceful self-assertion would have in other contexts. This point is clearly expressed in an interview with another boxer of Moroccan origins, Samir:

Once a guy told me “fuck off” and I threw a table at him and broke his back. I’m not the kind of person who does things like that. This guy was always telling me: “You’re a Moroccan, go back to your country.” They wanted to suspend me from school but I had never done anything [before] and I so was not punished (Samir).

The vocational schools in Bolognina where Samir, Kalhed and Anuar are enrolled represent spaces of humiliation. Most of these young boxers view their schools as total institutions that do not so much impart knowledge as impose on them an awareness of their subalternity (Giacalone, 2002; Guerzoni and Riccio, 2009; Sayad, 1999).

I liked to go to school. My father ruined me because he said I wasn’t good enough to go to proper school. He sent me to vocational school and I really hated it. I hated mechanics; I hated becoming an electrician [...]. I wondered why you must always be compelled to become a carpenter or an electrician [...]. What if I wanted to be a lawyer? (Kalhed).

For the majority of the boxers involved in this research, their backgrounds involve forced migration, economic hardship, and social and everyday insecurity. Their usual sites for socializing are courtyards, abandoned basketball and football fields or more generally the neighbourhood’s bigger streets. As Erzan, a young boxer of Albanian origins, stated:

In boxing gyms you cannot find a rich person, because people there have to be nasty [...]. In the gym you see poor people, myself, for example, people who are bad, who know what it means to live on the streets, what it means to beat each other up on the streets. People box to prevent themselves from fighting in the streets [...]. Two friends of mine had been to prison. Then one came here with me. This guy was a beast and he said to me: “I want to make money fast.” I told him: “Listen to me, be careful!”, and he said to me: “No, now I’m going to steal a car, then rob a store” [...]. I grew up with him ... [and] with him I started boxing (Erzan).

For these young men, the gym is no different from other places of spatial segregation located in certain areas of this suburb. Their peers are almost all young men born in Italy to North African parents, but what distinguishes these men from peers such as vocational schoolmates is the fact that they are engaged in the pursuit of self-control and discipline, as expressed by the choice to train in boxing. The boxing gym does not eliminate their frustration with a social world they perceive as indifferent if not overtly hostile towards them, but it does offer them the chance to be represented as something other than excluded subjects (Grillo and Pratt, 2002; Queirolo Palmas, 2006).

Weekends at the gym

The gym is made up of two rooms. The first, for training, contains a twelve-string ring positioned in front of the entrance, with equipment – bags, speedballs, punching bags, headboards, benches, scales, racks for storing weights and exercise bikes – distributed along the walls. At the centre is a space capped by a large wall-mounted mirror where boxers are trained on blow techniques, interrupted by two sacks and a suspended pear. The second, much smaller room is used as a men’s locker room. There are no lockers for women (D’Aguanno and Montesi, 2006; Fox James, 2001).

The gym is open Monday to Friday from 5:30 to 8:30 pm, but in reality, its doors are also open outside of official hours. The very young gym-goers, for example, arrive at the gym at 5:30, earlier than the trainers themselves: Ernesto opens Tranvieri before training hours to set up weights and equipment, repair damaged cords and pick up abandoned gloves. By helping Ernesto with this maintenance work, the young boxers demonstrate the relationship of trust binding old and new members, a relationship that exists independent of their relationship with the gym’s two coaches, Tito and Sante. Boxers who come to the gym straight from work and have a most extensive background in boxing arrive later and stay well beyond the official closing time. The long, hot shower after training along with the locker room gossip and jokes are ways to ease tension after the fatigue of school, work, the gloves and the ring.

The gym is open all year round: apart from a short summer break in August and some holidays, the courses last well beyond those of traditional gyms. Even when it is virtually closed, as well as on Saturdays and Sundays when the coaches are not working except for periods of intensive training, Tranvieri continues to serve as a daily gathering place.

Oh my God, but can you imagine what an African mother is like? They’re crazy, completely out of their heads!... go to your friend’s house to ring the bell and she starts screaming that her son is never home... no, no, we prefer to meet up at the gym or somewhere else! (Marcel, junior boxer of Cameroonian origin).

Ernesto holds the keys, and on Saturday afternoon, he opens a little earlier than usual and allows children living in the neighbourhood to come in and train. In these situations, the young boxers are joined by younger brothers and friends who have never been to the gym before. On Sunday morning, the gym becomes an ‘illegal’ soccer field.

We play but please don’t go telling people about it. Samir, for example, plays soccer, Anuar plays soccer and so does his brother Kalhed, they are very good. Look at how many Moroccans play in the A Series, there are many [of them]. They should take more of them for our teams, because they are good. But be careful, if someone gets hurt while playing here, it is a mess; on Sunday you’re not insured, of course. However, come if you like (Ernesto when I asked him if I could go play soccer with the other boxers in the gym on Sundays).

In these moments when Italian coaches are not present and the boys, led by Ernesto, are in charge of gym management, there is a clear prevalence of young men of North African origins (Valeri, 2006). On Saturday afternoons and Sunday mornings, a hybrid language merging Arabic idioms and the Bolognese dialect is spoken in the gym. Spending so much time together in this cramped space allows veterans, young boxers and neighbourhood kids to insult and banter with each other, often resorting to stereotypes that would be considered racist in another context, such as weekly training.

There’s no way, you’re just an Arab... do you really have to bugger around like that for a penalty? (Ernesto, in one of his verbal exchanges during a play).

The weekend games are also opportunities to recruit new boxers because most of these neighbourhoods teenagers, around 16 years old, end up joining Tranvieri: by the time they join the gym, many of them have already gone inside, used the showers and learned how to use the equipment, only without ever seeing a coach (Roets et al., 2012; Turner, 1967). Tito and Sante know that the gym is open on Saturday and Sunday, but they turn a blind eye as they are also aware that Tranvieri serves as an agent of socialization for the kids in the neighbourhood.

The gym as an apprenticeship in citizenship

Tranvieri can be described as a heterogeneous group of people who share rules, bans, standards of behaviour and a way of perceiving time and space on a daily basis and for several hours in the afternoon and evening. In studying the social organization of the gym, it is appropriate to speak of ‘cultural intimacy’ (Herzfeld, 1997).

If you stay in the gym for a day, three months, one year, you know that he [another boxer] also wants to get what you want to get and so you try to help him. Help him about how to pull a blow, how to behave in the ring. There are no different nationalities in the gym, most of the people are foreigners here and there have never been problems; we always help each other (Anuar).

Elements such as receiving respect and encouragement from gym fellows, as well as being able to train as part of a group, have a powerful influence on a boxer’s performance because individual psychological factors – perseverance, determination, self-confidence and level-headedness in the ring – are strengthened or weakened by the group. If a boxer’s teammates do not consider him ‘good’, it is unlikely that he will be able to step into the ring despite possessing the appropriate physical qualities (Beattie, 1996; Heiskanen, 2006).

The exercise of sparring or combat simulation that takes place between boxers in the gym is a decisive moment for those aspiring to enter the ring in regular competition. At the same time, sparring also plays a socialization role in that it is often followed by moments of closeness and reciprocal confidence in order to defuse the violence enacted on the mat (Wacquant, 2000). Relations between boxers sometimes take shape through this practice.

Each boxer has his own ideal sparring partner. For the young men of Tranvieri, sparring in the ring while Sante and Tito offer advice from the opposite corners constitutes a baptism, a ‘rite of passage’ (Crossley 2001; Faure, 2004; Roberts, 2006; Wacquant, 2000). When Tito calls two boxers to come spar, it means that he is focusing on them and is planning to have them fight. Alternately, if it is their first sparring session, it means that the two boxers are destined to enter the main group of Tranvieri athletes and as such will prepare to fight.

Obviously, the ‘pairs’ are formed mainly on the basis of practical considerations. This is because not all the young men train during the same hours and, if you do not take at least some boxers to spar, a gym can be a great environment for training but is not effective as a space for cultivating professionals. Tito and Sante are constantly on the lookout for a great boxer, for example, and they know they must select new members every day, continue to provide critical feedback for those who are making less progress and gradually lead the most promising ones to approach the ring.

When there is not much difference in weight, the ideal sparring partner is often a person who knows the boxer, a person he trusts even outside the gym. Studying how boxers locate partners at Tranvieri also provided insights into the relationships between these men outside of the gym. Obviously, by observing these boxers’ practices of everyday life once they had stepped out of the gym, I was also able to understand how and why they formed pairs inside the gym.

The friendships and acquaintance relationships that go on to determine the formation of subgroups in the locker room often stem from living in the same part of the city. This was the case of Samir, Anuar and Kalhed, who were neighbours and, for a period of time, even roommates.

The streets and the ring operate interdependently in shaping the group of athletes who fight for the Bolognina boxing club. Sharing the space of the gym and sparring with each other means building relationships with each other (Mauss, 1936); the streets, on the other hand, play the role of strengthening these connections but also of completely severing them.

One of the most interesting explanations of the link between street culture and the gym was provided to us by one of the Tranvieri coaches, Sante. At the end of a meeting organized by Tranvieri during the final stages of the research, a sports journalist nostalgic for the great local boxers of the Fifties and Sixties asked Sante to organize a viewing in the gym collective of footage of these Bolognese fighters’ most significant matches.

I think it is wrong to think of Anuar or Yassine like a Benvenuti [very famous Italian boxing champion] because I think that every boxer needs to be himself, to find his own way of boxing. For example, Anuar’s blows are natural; they come from his experience on the street. This way of boxing will never be taken away from him and we can slowly teach him how to transform that blow into a proper hook. You can force him to shoot straight at a distance, but as soon as he hits the ring and is provoked, he will fight to defend himself in his peculiar manner. I believe my task as a coach is to adapt boxing to the natural qualities and personality of a kid, because if you take his individual characteristics from him, he is not the same boxer anymore. They are not all the same, there is no unique way of boxing that fits everybody. A good coach is like a tailor who sews a suitable suit for every guy, enhancing their features. I want Anuar to become a good boxer while remaining himself. If you take that from him, you've taken everything. If you teach them to employ strength as well as their character, they will know how to behave in the ring and in life as well, as boxers and as men.

Monia and Costanza

Boxing gyms are often male spaces permeated by values – respect, courage, competition and physical strength – traditionally associated with a specific gender. Although women have recently been allowed to join as well, there are very few female boxers at Tranvieri and only one is active at a level similar to that of the young men who regularly step into the ring as part of encounters organized by the Bolognina boxing society. Only one female boxer fights in the few local matches involving female competitors, Monia, and she does not train at the gym on a daily basis like the young men do.

When Monia does come to the gym to prepare for upcoming matches, she arrives late in the evening when Tranvieri is almost empty and spars with the man who is both her personal coach and her partner. No one, not even the teachers and older boxers who have known her for a long time and greet her in a friendly way, steps in during her training; likewise, no one jokes with her as they do with the other women – two in total – who do not fight but do train with the male boxers. Monia’s presence, the fact that she is a boxer who fights in the ring, appears to disorient and embarrass the male Tranvieri boxers. While they accept that there are other women who train among them, they are not able to understand why Monia would want to participate in competitive matches. Her gym mates often make jokes about her willingness to fight and talk about female boxing in caricatured terms (Woodward, 2004).

All the Tranvieri members consider the male presence characterizing the gym to be natural; the presence of women is instead seen as exceptional and something to be discussed and legitimized. The female body in a boxing gym continues to be perceived as a foreign body, acceptable only to the extent that it is defeminized. Indeed, the only time a female boxer comes to be viewed as strong and has a chance to attract the attention of an experienced coach who might offer to train her to fight is when, as Tito says, ‘she hits like a man’: ‘You might do okay because you don't have much in the way of breasts. Women with big breasts can’t be boxers’.

In the context of the gym, symbols of female-bodiedness are considered obstacles to a possible career as a boxer. The less visible such signs are, the more the body of a woman is perceived to resemble the ideal body suitable for boxing: if you cannot be a man, you must at least not look like a woman. This idea of women’s difference reveals a measure of biological essentialism, but at the same time, it is supplemented by a series of moral and psychological qualities characteristic of the ideal of maleness prevailing in the gym: courage, aggression and endurance under tiring conditions are considered the true attributes of gender. ‘Constanza is actually good, she has heavy hands like a man and also she has grit, she doesn’t seem like a woman’, comments Sante when talking about Costanza during a workout at the gym.

This common-sense view is not limited to the male boxers at the gym. The few women there also consider it necessary to forcefully display a stereotypical aesthetic of virility (Sudgen, 1996) in order to gain access to the ring and fight, to enter a physical space in which male domination (Bourdieu, 1999) is manifested through the staging of physical combat.

To explore this issue, it proved very interesting to follow the boxing career of Costanza. Unlike Monia, Costanza joined the gym without the protection of a personal trainer and therefore had to catch the interest of the Tranvieri experts. Costanza’s average daily training lasts longer than those of the male boxers at the gym; she does not stop even during the minute of rest after the 3 minutes of activity that characterizes the rhythm of gym workouts and represents a point of reference for aspiring boxers because it mirrors the timing of rounds in the ring.

Costanza almost never stops to talk with the other boxers, as doing so would expose her to teasing and joking insinuations, and she never allows people to see that she is tired. When sparring with the men, she not so much simulates fighting to practice her punches as attacks her opponents in earnest, and she refuses to wear the chest protector that is mandatory for matches but also recommended for training in gloves. Costanza also avoids making friends with the other women at the gym since it would be compromising for her to have any particular affinity with another woman in that space.

The result – attesting to the difficult position women occupy in a boxing gym such as Tranvieri – is that Costanza does not maintain a relationship of intimacy with or belonging to the gym. She is clearly excluded from the group of male boxers and their bonds of friendship, and is considered a foreign element in particular because the men suspect her of ‘feigning’ an identity that diverges from the identity that would be appropriate for her. In addition, the way she stages maleness from within a female body disturbs many of the boxers and triggers doubts about her sexual identity as the men cannot come to grips with the way she is positioned outside of the social-behavioural norms that clearly demarcate male versus female identities.

The relative absence of women practising amateur boxing is matched by an absence in the organizational structures comprising this sport: there are very few female coaches, referees and managers of boxing societies. Moreover, young women who workout at Tranvieri are automatically excluded from the gym’s space of socializing par excellence, that is, the men’s locker room; before and after training, they are obliged to change in the locker room of the gym next door, a facility that offers belly dance lessons. The two gyms are separated by a door that is rarely left open, despite the fact that this female world located only a few feet from a space dedicated to worshipping the cult of the male body often generates curiosity on both sides.

Although the women at Tranvieri are almost completely absent as boxers, they are actually constantly evoked as the female ‘other’ providing the counterpart for the idea of manhood which is produced daily in the gym. Since masculinity and femininity are social constructs that cannot be understood except in reference to each other, the male identity of Tranvieri’s boxers is constructed through reference to women evoked daily in the accounts of many of the male boxers. In terms of daily representation, women appear in the boxing world as the girlfriends who accompany boxers to out-of-town matches or wait for them at home, the mothers who cheer at the ringside and the sisters who must be protected and cannot be the object of locker room jokes. The boxers’ female partners are obliged to wait outside the gym for training to end and often involved in preparing the fighters’ special meals as they are always struggling to fit weight classes in the lead up to matches. These women tend to remain in the background especially when coaches are present, and this contrasts sharply with the exclusive relationships that boxers maintain with their coaches both inside and outside the ring.

Indeed, it is the coach who governs and administers a boxer’s body in terms of diet, obligatory rest periods and sexual abstinence, and coaches do not allow women to interfere in this process (Coates, 1999). Just like alcohol and cigarettes, women, and especially girlfriends, are considered dangerous sources of corruption threatening sports asceticism and possible obstacles to ensuring optimal performance during matches.

Many young boxers seek to project an image of strong maleness, often talking about women as sexual objects while flaunting their possessiveness in relation to their own partners. Despite their constant displays of virility, however, many boxers admitted to us that they actually have trouble relating to the opposite sex and feel deficient in meeting certain of their responsibilities as companions and very young fathers. Boxing sometimes represents a means of escaping familial commitments, and some boxers are able to do so without guilt because they are engaged in boxing activities the importance of which cannot be understood by anyone living outside the Tranvieri world or who does not share in its values.

Generation gap

Having established a relationship of trust with a group of young boxers, I began to also spend time with them outside of the gym. The relationship between the ring and the streets is decisive for the operation of the gym. Tito is aware that his gym draws its top boxers, such as Erzan, Khaled, Anuar or Samir, from the street. While in the past Tito could count on blue-collar workers from the factories in Bolognina, almost all Italian, today the gym’s standing in terms of athletic achievement depends more and more on a group of young, foreign-born men who all live in close proximity to the gym.

When I asked Ernesto to describe his old gym mates, their life stories were not dissimilar from those of Tranvieri’s current boxers: elements such as familial conflicts and difficulties integrating into the local community surface repeatedly in Ernesto’s accounts just as they do in those of Kalhed, Anuar, Samir or Erzan.

In the early years after the Second World War, for a twenty-something young man such as Dante, Ernesto or Albano, Bolognina represented a territory to explore. Their parents, like Anuar’s, were not able to control their movements after school. Many of the old boxers formed ‘gangs’ of young men in those years and spent their time hanging out in backyards, parks or neighbourhood squares, just as Kalhed described in relation to himself and his friends.

Artemio, for example, recalls how, after the Second World War, he often heard his mother referred to as ‘Sicilian’ or ‘Moroccan’. Once, the former boxer confessed to me that he felt compelled to challenge some young Bolognese men who joked about his southern origins. Similarly, as we saw earlier, the only time in his young life Samir has engaged in violence outside the ring was precisely when he reacted to being called a ‘Moroccan shit’.

Despite these similarities deeply embedded in practices of everyday life, relationships with the local area, ways of investing in a boxing career and difficult school and family relationships, the boxers of the old Tranvieri do not identify with the new generation of boxers currently training at the gym.

I feel nostalgic for the times when I lived in Bolognina. I remember that at midnight we went to take newspapers at the central station, now everything has changed. I’ve never been afraid of being robbed. Now via Barbieri [one of the streets of Bolognina mostly inhabited by immigrants, mostly North Africans, n.d.a.] has changed completely (Dante).