“I love boxing, but I’m also very critical about boxing,” Dr. Rudy Mondragón said on the latest episode of the “Fighter Health Podcast,” hosted by BoxingScene’s Kieran Mulvaney and Voluntary Anti-Doping Association founder Margaret Goodman.
Mondragón is an Assistant Professor of Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies at Loyola Marymount University. He’s also a boxing fan. His love for the sport began with watching, alongside other men in his family, the Julio Cesar Chavez-Hector Camacho fight.
As Mondragón got older, he began thinking of boxing on multiple levels: economic, cultural and political.
“I made sense of my world through boxing,” he said on the podcast.
“Boxing, to this day, has been left out of a lot of these labor protections at the federal level. Boxers don’t have a union,” he added. The assorted inequalities and lack of safety nets for boxers forced Mondragón to reckon with his love for the sport – to the point that he considered the possibility that it shouldn’t exist at all.
“I even thought on the extreme of, we need to do research that will eventually eradicate boxing so that people can make a living doing different work – where they can pursue jobs that are full of dignity, that are well-paid, that they can raise a family with.
“If boxing is eradicated, what does that mean for those that love boxing? What does that mean for the fighters who find dignity and purpose and love and community in the boxing world? I now operate from that standpoint, too: I’m not a higher power to say I’m gonna take boxing away from these folks. Let’s continue boxing, but let’s find ways to make it safer, to first and foremost put the fighters first.”
Mondragón situates boxing as a form of labor in his research.
“When I analyze it from that perspective, it really gives us a different story,” he said. “What are the working stories of these blue-collar workers who are toiling – not just on TV when we watch them in the big fights, but what’s happening inside the gyms, and what are those working conditions like?”
Mondragón wonders what the sport could look like if it viewed promoters as employers, for example, or came up with a substitute for an HR department.
“If I were a boxer, I can’t go to Golden Boy or Top Rank and say, ‘Hey, I’m upset with how you’re treating me!’ So where is the formal reporting for fighters? That’s a huge gap right now,” he said.
Mondragón, Mulvaney and Goodman spoke about further ways to improve boxers’ conditions, including the introduction of financial literacy plans, more robust pension programs, and a (however unlikely) national boxing commission to better regulate the sport.
The conversation revolves around the uncomfortable fact that while boxing is visceral entertainment, it is still a workplace, and by consenting to violent fights, the fighters do not waive their rights to be treated humanely outside the ring.
