Clinching through the Press: A Network Analysis of Public Boxing Challenges in Central Chile, 1920–30

The 1920s witnessed an explosion of boxing spectacles in Chile’s major cities. Public boxing challenges were one of the most frequent ways of arranging a fight. Boxing challenges were advertised not only in the sporting press but also in traditional newspapers and even corporate publications. Professional and amateur boxers, either experienced or newcomers, challenged each other to test their skills, strength, and courage in the ring. In the absence of established governing bodies to sanction boxing spectacles, boxers and their managers would arrange the conditions of fights through public challenges without observing established regulations. Specialized sporting publications and newspapers operated as brokers and intermediaries between boxers, managers, boxing clubs, and boxing entrepreneurs. As sports scholars have pointed out, the development of modern sports is intimately related to the emergence of mass media and the commercialization of sporting activities.

This poster will use social network analysis to describe the growing amateur boxing circuit in central Chile, during the 1920s. By using public boxing challenges as a pivotal connection between boxers and boxing managers, this poster will show a digital representation of the networks that shaped the emerging amateur boxing community in Santiago and nearby cities. Social network analysis provides a useful approach to identify particular cliques within the boxing community and to evaluate how well-connected boxers occupied central positions within the boxing spectacle industry. It also allows for the identification of marginalized actors operating in the periphery of the boxing circuit as well as the level of permeability of centralized positions. The poster will offer visualizations of the network of challenges, the relative centrality of certain individuals (boxers and managers), and the relevance of some sport publications over other media sources for the advertising of boxing challenges. It will also provide a contextualization of the historical phenomena under scrutiny and selected pictures of the boxers and their managers.

I have collected the data from newspapers, corporate publications, and sports magazines that were published in Santiago and nearby urban areas between 1920 and 1930. I stored each public challenge in a relational database that identifies the challenging boxer, his manager and location, the challenged boxer, the terms of the fight (including the cash prize at stake, and the number of rounds, if available), the response to the challenge, and the newspaper advertising the challenge. I will study and manipulate the networks of boxing challenges using the python package NetworkX. I will create the visualizations and graphs using nxviz, which is a package for building rational network visualizations using matplotlib as a backend

This poster will show how network visualizations of public boxing invitations reveal the role played by individual initiatives in the consolidation of sports' practice, and the emergence of a local entertainment sports industry during the 1920s. In addition, this research aims to re-think the role of newspapers and specialized sport magazines not merely as information conveyors, but rather as boxing brokers and intermediaries in the materialization of sports events.