Loic Wacquant was a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of Chicago when he joined the Woodlawn Boys Club at 63rd and Woodlawn in 1988. He thought the club, a boxing gym that served the surrounding community, might provide a good point from which to study the social lives of young men in the ghetto. An acolyte of fellow Frenchman Pierre Bourdieu, he wasn’t planning on sparring himself. He was a thinker, not a fighter–a student with a bright academic future. But within two months Wacquant had thrown his first punch in the ring. “I was seduced by the thick atmosphere of discipline, dedication, and devotion that suffuses the gym,” he says. “And the camaraderie. After a while I just couldn’t stay away.”
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As his interest in boxing grew, his academic commitments fell by the wayside: “I really knew nothing about the game and had no interest in it whatsoever,” he says. “Two years later, I was ready to give up a position at Harvard University and junk my career to stay in the gym and even turn pro. That little boxing gym on 63rd Street had become my primary world.”
After three years as a pugilist, Wacquant pulled himself away from the gym. He went on to a prestigious fellowship at Harvard and has since become a respected, though controversial, figure in sociology: a MacArthur fellow and author of numerous works on urban inequality and racism who has notoriously condemned his peers for failing to recognize the complicity of the state in the perpetuation of urban poverty.
