BOXING is well-nigh unique in the way that it has and continues to throw up fighters so popular that they transcend the sport to attain the status of folk hero.

This is a phenomenon of which no other individual sport can boast, precisely because, unlike any other individual sport, boxing is a sport of the working class. And being such, a given fighter’s exploits in the ring afford its working-class public the vicarious and self-reinforcing thrill of the glory that they are denied amid the daily grind and stresses of life as appendages to the machine.

To be working-class is to be oppressed by forces so invisible that you can easily become putty in the hands of a culture industry that’s in the business of sowing false consciousness. It’s how they control us, how they successfully convince enough working-class voters to tick the box marked Conservative at election time — a box which in truth should be marked “self-harm.”