College Boxing Injuries?

Let's start with the ugly part - If you are a competitive boxer, you will sustain head trauma. Period. How much and what it means depends on a lot of factors. You do NOT have to suffer a concussion or a knockout to damage your brain. Sub-concussive blows do damage, and sustaining many of them throughout your life will put you at risk for the same illnesses associated with more severe head trauma - dementia, alzheimers, CTE etc. Will everyone who competes in boxing develop these disorders as a result? Of course not, but we are all wagering that risk. A risk that isn't totally understood by medical science. We just don't know how much punishment a brain can take before you develop encephalopathy. We don't know what the thresholds are for irreversible brain damage. We can reasonably assume that a professional boxer with 40 fights and an amateur experience of 100 fights is at a much higher risk than my father, who boxed for a couple of years in college and never participated in a contact sport after age 22. But the risk is there for both of them.

If you cannot accept this risk, you should not participate in competitive boxing.

If you look at the history of boxing in the United States, there used to be a lot of Irish, Jewish and Italian boxers. There have always been great black champions. I'm sure you've noticed the Mexicans and other Latinos? Every immigrant or otherwise disenfranchised population in this country has had champions. This is not a coincidence. Athletes who compete at the highest levels of this sport represent deep economic and social divisions both here and abroad. Why? Because if you have ANY OTHER OPTION, you'd be crazy to be a professional boxer. The economic rewards are greater than the risks of fighting, and for a lot of them the risks of staying in their environment. There are exceptions, but not very many. Joyce Carol Oates wrote that the brutality of professional boxing requires conditions of poverty that could not exist in an ideal society. The sport would cease to exist. I'm not sure I agree with her, but the difficulty of boxing is so prohibitive that those best suited to excel at it come from extreme adversity. This is no less true in the more competitive amateur boxing scenes.

So, is it worth it? It's such a deeply personal question that, not only will you not find the answer on this little subreddit, I doubt if you can find it by looking to others at all. I personally think you should speak with a doctor and not boxers about the issue of injuries, which athletes tend to be willfully ignorant of in general. Part of their job is to inform you of the possible consequences of your lifestyle. They will probably advise you not to box.

I am not trying to scare you away. I love boxing. I spend the lion's share of my waking hours thinking about it. The rewards I reap from it are higher than the risks as I understand them, FOR NOW. That will have to change some day.

You're asking a very important question that is often answered insincerely. Why do you want to box? What rewards are you weighing against the inherent risks?

/r/amateur_boxing Thread