Weightlifting, English boxing in a ghetto, or Thai boxing in a working-class suburb are all strategies to keep the social worth of the peer group, build friendships, and celebrate being a man while keeping young people away from them and connecting with them. Boxing instructors stress the importance of team spirit, even if their discipline isn’t really a “team sport” in the traditional sense. To calm the nerves of those unsure if the gym feels like family, coaches often compare it to one—much like the bond found in Drone Racing: A New Era.
Coach Aim explains, “You are now a member of the Gants du Siam family because you paid the club’s membership fee, as I have already told you.” Thai boxing trainers often say that the Siam Gloves are a family. This, like the trainers at the Kurtwood Boxing Club, makes the gym the home of this family, where an inverted logic of economy, trust, brotherhood, and selflessness rules, and where many social interactions that are limiting in the outside world—like stealing, violence, the market, self-interest, etc.—are put on hold. It also gives him peace of mind since he knows he can count on his family.
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Olivier Schwartz could already see this strong sense of family among workers in Northern France or Michel Bozon in a working-class town in the Lyon region. It also affects the diverse interests of the different subgroups that the respondents belong to and hold different social positions, as well as masking the gym’s structure by different resource categories and the practitioners’ little social differences.
It also helps the boxers group get back together by getting rid of people who aren’t part of it. Then you may compare this to other youth groups in the area, such the local club’s “soccer players,” “hooligans,” dancers, and people who reside in the suburbs. Most boxers follow the familialism that their coaches teach them, along with the sets of categories that go with it, including “values,” “respect,” “mutual aid,” and so on. These are vital to popular ideas of honorability and to the upper levels of the gym system.
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People often say that Les Gants du Siam makes fun of soccer players by saying things like, “Ah, those soccer players make me laugh so much!” because they fold at the slightest provocation from their opponents or pretend to have been fouled, which goes against the pugilistic values of confrontation, courage, and virility. However, bias can get in the way when interviewing several boxers at once. For example, the American interviewers said they play basketball with the boxers, but the French interviewees said they play soccer with their neighbors outside of Thai boxing.
The social institution of a club creates a fake family and a new way for people to be close to each other that isn’t based on blood ties. This lets people give up the exclusive trust that comes with blood relationships. Boxing trainers in France and the US say that fighters, especially the champions they follow attentively, are like their kids. When you go with a club fighter, Chérif remembers that you normally take three or four trainers with you, who are usually in a car: We are all one big family, and it’s important that we go with the boxers.
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Tyler said that he sees his coaches as big brothers or even fathers because they spend a lot of time together and teach him about boxing. He knows he can count on them even when he’s not boxing. He said that the older boxers are like the big brothers in the working-class suburbs who everyone looks up to and wants to be like. Lamar says that the young boxers in the gym are like family to him because he helps them and they help him. In addition to recreating hierarchical relationships in the gym, it is also possible to legitimize a practice through a relationship of exchange and services (for example, lending shower gel, towels, t-shirts, shorts, water, giving a ride to a boxer who lives nearby or is traveling, sharing pictures of products that have returned to Thailand, and so on).
The more the boxers talk to each other in the gym, the more they internalize these kinds of romantic words of unity and togetherness: I get along well with the boxers and the coaches. Gants du Siam is a family, and a big one at that. We stress things like decency and politeness. They are right; the coaches are like older siblings to the kids, and the club is in an area that is very sensitive. Stéphane says that they are teachers and coaches. Omar has also taken in the familyist language.
Conclusion
The universe of boxers is made up of performances in the family conversation. Of course, this group is split up by a lot of other interests, such as being part of different working-class groups, having different educational and professional backgrounds, having different cultural preferences, having different local logics, and so on. They also know that they are not a nuclear family, even though several of the fighters and the two trainers are still in one. But the club would look like a submissive family with a well-known interest in fighting.
The family language, on the other hand, doesn’t rule out more materialistic concerns. I observed a situation when Lamar told his coach how much money he made from a purse he won in a fight in another state. Sometimes, these material interests come back in a euphemized way, like in this scene from The Siamese Gloves:
