Never mind the Tyson Fury uproar. Boxing brings huge benefits to communities

Just as one Muslim doesn’t represent Islam, Tyson Fury doesn’t represent boxing. But that hasn’t stopped liberal commentators and the morally-outraged Twitterati, who have used the BBC Sports Personality furore to attack the sport.

Julie Bindel (who claims boxing is ‘not a sport but a sadistic spectacle performed by men’) wrote in the Guardian: ‘If your job is to knock somebody unconscious, it’s unlikely that they have been raised to think that solving an argument with their fists is wrong. The ethos behind this can also breed dangerous attitudes towards women.’ Does this mean a tennis player will try to solve an argument with a racket? Or a golfer with a club? Boxing is not an argument, it is a sport, and it can be a profession. When I boxed as an amateur, it was clear that boxing’s sportsmanship almost always trumps race, gender, religion or anything else.

Bindel then went on to use Mike Tyson’s rape case as an example against boxing.