Why is Boxing the Sweet Science?

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

Linda from Salisbury, North Carolina says,

I never stopped to wonder about this until my nephew became a boxer.

Why is boxing called the sweet science?

I don’t see too much that you can say that’s sweet about it.

She’s right, Grant.

What’s so sweet about a bruising, bloody sport like boxing?

Oh, it’s such a great question.

The short answer is that sports writers began calling boxing the sweet science in the early 19th century.

It started in Britain, growing out of a stretch when boosters wanted to elevate the sport above bare-knuckle brawling.

They liked to present boxing as this disciplined craft with principles that could be studied and mastered.

So was there anybody in particular associated with it?

Yeah, there was this sports writer, Pierce Egan. He was a London journalist. He wrote a column that was later collected into these influential volumes called Boxiana.

And these books put this phrase into wide circulation.

And in these volumes, he treated boxing as something governed by observation.

So it was all about timing and footwork and distance and tactical judgment.

And notice it’s completely lacking.

It’s just kind of this free-for-all spirit that you might see, you know, in a barroom fight.

It’s an art rather than this feeling of brute force.

And so in these volumes, he wrote,

Sweet Science of Bruising.

How often has man, twice as strong as his fellow, presumed just to lark it?

Oh, yeah. I see it’s cited in the Oxford English Dictionary that way.

Yep. And by larking it, he was referring to the presumption that boxes just went out flailing like some kind of barroom brawl.

Okay, but Grant, I’m still hung up on the word science. It doesn’t seem very science-like.

Right, like they’re out there in white lab coats or something.

Right.

They’re out there with beakers and measuring their liquids.

Now, by science, what he refers to is this methodical, strategic way of thinking, you know, treating it technically.

He also wrote at a different time, without science and tactics, the pugilist knob soon becomes a mere dummy in the hands of his opponent.

Oh, no. Like knob as in head.

Yes.

Beating up on somebody’s head isn’t very sweet either.

No, and sweet also he meant a little differently.

Sweet is used in an older sense, kind of skillful, precise, adroit.

It was an ironic juxtaposition.

He knew what he was doing and was using the word sweet.

They’re very aware, boxing writers, including Egan, that their sport is violent and bloody.

Okay, so Egan was so influential that it caught on?

Well, he was the start of it.

You know, these volumes got a lot of circulation.

A lot of people read them over the years.

And throughout the 19th century, the phrase caught on in Britain.

And then the United States, but it really, really kind of caught on with the writer A.J. Liebling,

Who wrote a bunch of essays for The New Yorker, kind of these highfalutin looks at boxing,

And they were collected in a book called The Sweet Science in 1956, and it gave fresh life to the term.

And through this book, he kept the term alive and helped cement the sweet science as a reference to boxing in American literary and sports consciousnesses.

You know, he made the term kind of exist in these two parallel worlds of thinking.

And the way that he wrote about it, Sweet Science carries a tone of respect for fighters who rely on precision and ring intelligence and technical economy, as they call it.

And it contrasted with portrayals of boxing as pure slugging.

But it also had this slight wink since the sport has always mixed elegance with roughness.

Okay, so in other words, instead of just pantsing it, you’re using your noodle to bash each other about.

Yes, yes, absolutely, 100%.

Pantsing it, going by the seat of your pants.

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