A new day in heavyweight boxing

Tyson Fury is the new WBA, IBF and WBO heavyweight champion. After beating Wladimir Klitschko in a unanimous points decision, Fury beat the odds and the man that most said was unbeatable. While I wanted to see a Fury victory and another British champion, admittedly, I didn’t call it and thought he’d lose on a points decision despite a spirited effort. It was clear that Fury was coming to fight and was probably the most live opponent Klitschko has faced in years. But beyond catching Klitschko with a clean shot (Wladimir Klitschko is notoriously chinny) and getting a stoppage, I struggled to see a Fury win in Germany, the adopted home of the Klitschko brothers. Nor could I see how Fury would get past Klitschko’s jab. Yet Fury, full of self-belief, proved me and most boxing commentators wrong.

At no point in the build-up during the fight did Fury seem fazed by the occasion or in awe of Klitschko. Even with Team Klitschko’s usual tricks that seek to unnerve an opponent and give themselves a psychological edge, Fury remained calm. The palaver over the gloves and the ring canvas couldn’t shake Fury and he remained composed throughout. Even if the result had been different, for Fury, a win was the only conclusion.

Fury was up on my scorecard but a points win for an away fighter in Germany is almost unprecedented. Klitschko initiated a clinch repeatedly and constantly turned his head, the latter for which Fury was deducted a point for hitting in the back of the head. Although at no point was Klitschko penalised. It seemed that it was a typical Klitschko show where the W was theirs even before the first bell as a blind eye was turned against all of Wladimir’s misdemeanours in the ring. As I waited for the scorecards to be read, I expected the following day’s headlines to be of Fury being cheated in Dusseldorf, not of a well-deserved victory. I guess the judges didn’t get Team Klitschko’s memo.

Not to taint Fury’s win, let’s get the negativity out of the way early doors. Firstly, the fight was a borefest. Furthermore, Father Time seemed to have caught up with Klitschko. Though that shouldn’t detract from Fury’s achievement. He’s beaten the man that no one has beaten since 2004. Fury therefore deserves all the kudos that will hopefully now be heaped upon him. And with it, it marks a new day in heavyweight boxing.

Once the most prestigious and coveted prize in sport, the heavyweight boxing championship has become a hollow title that has increasingly failed to capture the attention of those outside of boxing. In the last decade, respective heavyweight champions have largely been unknown outside of boxing circles and even with their lengthy dominance of the division, the Klitschko brothers are largely household names only in Germany and eastern Europe.

The excitement that used to characterise the heavyweight division has been lost and replaced with the boring yet effective ‘jab and grab’ style of the Klitschkos. Their safety first approach has turned even boxing fans off from the division as it’s failed to quench our thirst for knockouts and gladiatorial battle between some of the biggest and strongest athletes in sport. Although with Vitali Klitschko retired and Wladimir Klitschko defeated after an eleven-year span of not seeing an L on his record, it provides the opening for all that we love about heavyweight boxing to return. An end to the closed shop operated by the Klitschkos.

Klitschko has said he’ll exercise the rematch clause in the contract and perhaps he will. As an athlete and a former champion, defeat will be hard to swallow and a rematch provides an opportunity to address that. Not to mention his contract with German broadcaster RTL provides a sizeable revenue stream. However, it was evident from his fight with Fury that Klitschko has peaked and now provides the ideal opportunity to bow out with an honourable defeat and a solid record.

Klitschko should have no shame in defeat and should call it a day rather than fight on with each subsequent fight showing a decline in his speed and movement. But Klitschko is a fighter and an athlete; relinquishing the attitude that comes with that is always hard for any athlete at the peak of their sport. Prior to their fight in The Gloves Are Off, Klitschko remarked that it’s “better to be dead than second”, an attitude that embodies his fighter’s mentality and one that could only be understood by an athlete that has trained with the sole objective of victory. The fighter is still within him but Father Time has already begun to cast his shadow over Klitschko and now is the time to walk away as a former great champion. As one of the most intelligent men in boxing, he also has far more opportunities open to him than many of his peers once he decides to hang up his gloves.

If Klitschko doesn’t exercise the rematch clause, or if he does but faces defeat again against Fury, the heavyweight division is wide open. Brash American Deontay Wilder, the holder of the WBC heavyweight title, has already called out Fury in a fight that would finally reignite American interest in the division. David Haye has already announced his comeback and assuming he still has the speed and explosive punching power he had prior to his three and a half year layoff, he’s certainly in the mix as a title challenger and one that would beat Fury. He’s also got the psychological edge against Wilder after schooling him in sparring. The big ‘if’ is of course how good Haye still is which will be unknown until his comeback fight. Anthony Joshua is probably looking at Fury as a fast-tracked route to a world title and if he proves himself to be the real deal, the heavyweight division could soon be alive again.

Many might not have seen Tyson Fury as the boxer to resuscitate the heavyweight boxing division and it still remains to be seen if he will. Nonetheless, he’s provided the first opportunity to end the Klitschkos’ reign and to usher in a new era of the excitement that boxing fans once relished in heavyweight boxing. Hopefully heavyweight boxing is back and its unlikely saviour Tyson Fury should be applauded for opening the gate that has remained locked for well over a decade.

School support staff deserve more recognition and respect

Think of a business and its core activity. As consumers or clients, our thoughts around a respective business rarely go beyond said activity and the staff who operate directly within the roles linked to it. However, what would a business be without the staff who don’t operate at the forefront of its main activity yet play fundamental roles in the overall business? Imagine a retailer without the cleaners to maintain the cleanliness and tidiness of a store. Or without the admin staff to process orders, payments and payroll and the IT staff to maintain the EPOS till systems from which transactions can be made. Or without the stockroom staff to replenish the store’s inventory so that they actually have something to sell. Every role within a business is a cog in a machine. And if a cog is missing, the machine simply won’t work as effectively or might even come to a standstill.

Schools are no different. When you think of school, you think of the teachers. But what of the many support staff who play integral roles within the school and in the educating of the students? The TAs (Teaching Assistants) and Learning Mentors who support in the classroom academically, pastorally and in supporting behaviour management. Or the admin staff who without whom, the unwieldy bureaucracy that education is now characterised by would be impossible to navigate. These staff play significant roles in the operation of schools. Yet unfortunately, they typically don’t get the recognition and respect that they deserve.

The problem sadly starts with the ethos of schools and consequently some teachers. Inadvertently or otherwise, schools often feed teachers with the notion that support staff play a lessor role than them and it’s reflected in the way they’re treated. It’s to the extent that many support staff have assumed that principle themselves and the utterances “I’m just a TA…”, “I just work in the office…” or similar can often be heard around schools. This hardly does anything positive for morale when half of a workforce feel they’re inferior to the other half or at least made to feel that way. Schools have a lot to answer for if this is seemingly the ethos that many possess and project when it comes to support staff. Though for some teachers, the seeds for a sometimes haughty attitude toward support staff are sown even earlier during teacher training.

Particularly on graduate employment-based training courses such as School Direct and Teach First, but also those undertaking traditional PGCE courses, trainee teachers are lauded for their attainment of a place given their competitive nature and rigorous application process. Subsequently, they’re praised for their successful completion of what is an arduous programme of study and employment as a trainee teacher. And those who heap that praise upon them would be right to do so as teacher training and the NQT year are certainly gruelling.

You’re told that you are the boss of your classroom and again the tutors and mentors are right. Your classroom is your domain and you need to oversee all that goes on within it as you’ll be accountable for all that occurs. Though many trainee teachers are relatively young and enter the profession within a few years of undergraduate study. They have little experience of a professional workplace let alone managing staff. As a result, some are unable to effectively manage additional adults in the classroom due to a literal and crass interpretation of the message ‘you’re the boss’ that they’ve heard throughout their training. Indeed, some teachers actually maintain that attitude throughout their teaching careers.

That inexperience doesn’t lend itself to working with non-classroom based support staff either. Your training and observations of other schools has suggested they’re also less important. And when you get to your first school, the school ethos often supports that. It’s the beginning of an unhealthy yet perpetual relationship between teachers and support staff. Furthermore, it illustrates how and why teaching can be a profession characterised by arrogance for some practitioners who wrongly deem themselves as superior to their colleagues on the basis of length of service (which doesn’t always equate to ability) and their respective position.

It has to be said that this isn’t the case for all teachers and it would be unfair to suggest so. Nevertheless, the fact is it does exist. I’ve seen TAs spoken down to or as if they were one of the children rather than as an adult. This is despite the fact that many classroom based support staff bring with them a wealth of untapped and often ignored experience from previous careers, CPD, the local community or just life in general.

Admittedly, some TAs can undermine teachers, particularly if they’re older than the teacher they’re working with and have been at a school for a number of years. However, that’s where establishing more assertiveness in your professional relationship comes into play.

I liken the ideal relationship between teachers and additional adults in the classroom to be almost akin to the Prime Minister and the Cabinet in that the Prime Minister is first amongst equals just as is the case with the teacher. The buck stops with you as the teacher and the individual with whom overall accountability in the classroom lies with. The breadth of your role, workload and accompanying stress is wider too but you’re still a team with the additional adult(s) and your working relationship should reflect this.

Support staff in the classroom are often able to establish a relationship with students that many teachers are unable to achieve. As teaching has become an overwhelmingly middle class profession, many teachers are in schools within communities that do not reflect their own socio-economic status. Hence they’re often unable to empathise with their students’ backgrounds. In schools subject to socio-economic pressures such as those within inner city and coastal communities, and those where once flourishing local economies such as mining have since been decimated, the social challenges facing students and their families are often alien to teachers. But classroom based support staff, who often have more roots in a community than the teachers, can. Thus, they can often be the difference in connecting with students.

That connection might be in effectively supporting behaviour management with a culturally nuanced approach that gets the results a teacher sometimes can’t. Alternatively, it can be showing the necessary empathy to students in cultivating an appropriate climate for learning; one where they don’t feel subject to the ignorance of a teacher who cannot appreciate the challenges facing their family and community. In this capacity, support staff often provide a cultural and social link between schools and the communities they lie within; something many teachers and senior leadership are unable to do. Although, particularly with new academies that have foisted themselves on communities, this is overlooked by many schools.

The relationship between teachers and support staff can resemble that of Ross’ museum in Friends where Joey realises that it’s convention for the scientists and the tour guides to sit separately for lunch. Nonetheless, it’s little wonder that many support staff feel there’s a divide between them and teachers. Relevant information is regularly disseminated to support staff through the grapevine or on a very ad hoc basis. Effective communication between them and the rest of the school can leave much to be desired and that hardly fosters a sense of inclusion within the school community.

Many teachers perceive support staff to be at their whim rather than playing integral roles within the school. They often fail to appreciate that the site team aren’t waiting around idly for the call to fix furniture in their classroom or that the IT staff have a long list of jobs and coming to fix their interactive whiteboard probably isn't the only task for the day. It could be argued that teachers often have a fairly insular perspective in this regard that theirs is not the only job of importance within a school.

In the UK, Graduate Teaching Assistants have started to increase their presence in the classroom (they’ve already been a feature of North American schools). This is presumably with a view to making the TA role more ‘professional’ which on one hand isn’t a bad thing if it helps to gain greater recognition for the post. Although, some schools are seeing it as a prerequisite for teacher training. Again, that isn’t necessarily a bad idea in providing trainee teachers with first-hand experience of the classroom before they embark on their training. Conversely, there is the risk that it will attract candidates that ultimately want to become teachers rather than be TAs and therefore lack the necessary attributes and attitudes that make so many TAs great at their jobs.

Schools are essentially communities but they’re often divided within their staff which can only be to detriment of the workplace ethos. Schools and teachers need to address this as they are primarily to blame in creating the two-tier system within schools that is not only unnecessary but disrespectful to fellow professionals. Schools need to give support staff the recognition they deserve for the integral role they play within a school, often in roles that teachers don’t possess the skillset or experience for, and more respect in the process.

Digital lust

Like many industries, adult entertainment has been compelled to adapt in a digital age. Only recently, Playboy, the iconic magazine and adult brand, announced that its magazine would follow suit after its website and would no longer include nudity from March 2016. Clearly the company has realised that while sex might sell, it no longer does so via the medium of print. The shift from print to television and film and latterly the internet respectively, has seen revenue streams for adult entertainers move accordingly. And in doing so, it’s changed the relationship fans of their work have with them too.

The allure of adult entertainers is arguably contributed to by the fact that they appear unreachable; individuals who operate within a fantasy and highly sexualised world. Traditionally, their fans could fantasise over them in the knowledge that their relationship is one the adult entertainer is ignorant to and therefore never subject to reciprocation of emotions or affection, lustful or otherwise. Though now, the internet has changed that.

As with any entertainers, social media has given unprecedented access to adult entertainers that alters the aforementioned relationship. Now, lustful desires or merely convivial banter or compliments can be expressed via a tweet to adult performers and perhaps even responded to. Where adult performers were once unreachable, the status quo has now been redefined.

Similarly, the digital age has changed the adult industry with premium rate chat line channels. And with it, it’s enabled men (and woman) to have even more access to adult entertainers than ever before.

For those not familiar with the format of these channels, scantily clad or semi-nude women (depending on the time of day) appear on-screen while gyrating with sexually suggestive motions while talking to callers. It’s essentially a chat line where callers can see the person they’re talking to and what they’re doing rather than relying on their imagination. Not wanting the constraints of the television regulations that restrict them to largely softcore acts, some performers on said channels have also opted to operate webcam shows online (and with it presumably charging their viewers even more than the premium rate numbers).

This isn’t anything new; for decades premium rate numbers offering the same service have been
found in the classifieds section of tabloid newspapers. Yet technology furthers the extent of what can be offered and what the consumers are afforded in their pleasure and gratification. Furthermore, it’s altered their relationship with the women they receive remote gratification from. And that’s given rise to the perception amongst some men that their relationship is more than simply transactional.

With the increased and unprecedented access to adult entertainers, many of the men calling these premium rate numbers or ‘chatting’ via webcam are under the impression that this represents a relationship of sorts. While their attraction is based on lustful desire that isn’t reciprocated beyond the façade they’re paying for, some men seemingly fail to understand this. Consequently, they’re happy to buy gifts for the women, shower them with sycophantic messages on social media and overall fail to realise the reality of their interaction as paid titillation.

I struggle to empathise with the rationale of these men. Firstly, and bizarrely, they’re paying for adult entertainment at a premium rate when the internet is awash with a plethora of adult entertainment that’s absolutely free. Not to mention, the internet typically offers much more risqué material than anything they’re paying for. But they’re also going beyond their transaction in buying gifts for the women; an act typically reserved for actual friendships or relationships of which these certainly aren’t.

So why do the men do it? Loneliness? Delusion? Does it make them feel that they could actually have a genuine relationship with these women? With their access to adult entertainers, perhaps they’ve decided to abandon the pursuit of relationships in the real world (which would suggest yet another erosion of social interaction that the internet has brought about). Whatever it is they think they might achieve, it certainly won’t be a relationship that isn’t commercial.

One caller to a chat line channel racked up a bill of £91,000 on account of the women he spoke to sympathising with him following a breakup with his ex-partner. He’s probably not the only person to find themselves in such a situation either. Although did the premium rate numbers not indicate to him that they weren’t providing a counselling service or seeking his friendship? Men like this are blinded by the fact that their access to these women represents little more than a financial opportunity that exploits their naivety, inability to identify the features of a friendship or relationship, delusion and loneliness.

It’s easy to drift between derision and pity for these men but certainly not empathy. To pay to watch a women gyrate on a screen when there’s free adult entertainment online just doesn’t seem to be a decision based upon logic. Alas, lust can deny people of sound perspective.

Speaking objectively, one can’t knock the hustle of the women. And it isn’t just limited to webcam and chat line performers but also traditional adult entertainment actresses. Their social media presence facilitates the interaction the men crave. Furthermore, their online shopping wish lists enable these men to frequently buy the attention (mistakenly taken for affection) of their favourite performers.

There is arguably an intimacy that is established for the men paying to ‘chat’ but arguably not reciprocated by the performers who are separated by a phone line, television screen or computer. Thus, they limit much of the vulnerability of traditional sex work. And presumably, are getting reasonably well paid for it in the process with gifts and money from their fans to boot. If there were to be a perception of the relationship between the women and their callers being imbalanced, in most cases it would seem it isn’t the women that are losing out.

Nonetheless, the digital age has reduced the extent to which adult performers are able to separate their personal and professional life with the increased access they grant. No longer are their fans faceless readers and viewers of films but individuals who they’ve spoken to and in some cases seen via webcam. As a result, they’re providing more intimacy in the relationship between performer and the public and reducing the personal sphere for performers. Given the stigma around adult entertainment, this shift has likely limited their ability to keep the spheres of their personal and professional lives as separate as they once were.

Like many industries, the digital age has changed the adult industry and with it, it’s changed the perception of relationships and friendship for some men who aren’t able to distinguish between paid entertainment and reality. It’s an enigma when juxtaposed with traditional notions of relationships and how we define friendship. But hopefully not one that sets a precedent for the features of human interaction that the human condition craves. Indeed, perhaps that craving, but the inability to fulfil it for said men, is what led to their unrequited affections for adult entertainers in the first instance.