The Lords Of The Ring

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Lacey's hit idea was imported from the U.S., where he felt the pull of pugilism first-hand. He is a wiry 50-year-old with perfectly coiffed hair, but look closely and you'll see a fine white line snaking above each eye — scars from the gym. He began to learn to box in 1998, when he was "looking down at the abyss of middle age and not fancying the drop." He heard about white-collar fights at New York's Gleason's Gym — once home of Muhammad Ali and Mike Tyson — and flew over to box a dentist (yes, a dentist) in March 1999. Upon his return home, acquaintances ventured they'd like a shot at the sweet science. So in July 2000, he organized Capital Punishment, which pitted Londoners (among them a company director and a lawyer) against New Yorkers (a judge, a Wall Street banker). A crowd of 4,000 — friends, colleagues and lots of boxing aficionados perversely curious to see well-off white men go at it — turned up. The Real Fight Club was born.

In the beginning, Lacey says he got maybe one new member per month. Now he claims six a day from around the U.K. The fights have grown from occasional to nearly every month, and are held at two kinds of venues: places like York Hall, which attract serious fight fans, and plush London hotels, which attract the dinner-jacket crowd and give a portion of the proceeds to charity.

To join, men — there are still only a handful of women — undergo a physical ("like something out of the army," says Wade) and pay €140, which doesn't include any of the training costs (from €14 per session, depending on where). The first lesson: taking a punch. More used to rhetorical jabs than any other kind, the men "screw up their faces or turn away," says boxing trainer Umar Taitt, whose two front teeth are gold set with diamonds. "In boxing, you can't flinch."

Clearly, boxing appeals to some on a primal level. "I think, in a perverse way, there's a lot of suppressed macho tendencies coming out," says Kevin Mitchell, a sportswriter for the U.K.'s Observer weekly and author of War Baby: The Glamour of Violence. "Most of us go through life without ever throwing or landing a blow in anger, except for the odd fight at school. As we grow up, it becomes a more dangerous prospect. But white-collar boxing is fairly innocent: you're not going to get badly hurt because the other guy's probably as incompetent as you."

Equally important, the level of Rocky fantasy fulfillment is high: the ceremonial weigh-ins. The bucket to spit in. The theme song when you enter the ring. The nicknames. (Where else could a middle-aged white guy be called "Baby-Faced Assassin"?) The sport has become ubiquitous enough that it's reached the agony-aunt columns. In June a woman wrote in to the Daily Star newspaper's "Just Jane," terrified her banker boyfriend was going to get hurt boxing. Jane's advice: "Once your pretty-boy boyfriend has been seriously whacked a few times, I'm sure that he won't find this 'white-collar' boxing quite so funny."

Not likely. Most display their injuries at least as proudly as the trophies they receive for fighting. Marketing manager Richard Clarke, 32, enjoyed the attention his black eye brought at an office meeting. "When I explained, the women looked disgusted," he says. "But all the men were wishing they were able to do the same thing." Parisio, the female boxer, found her first black eye embarrassing only when she walked down the street with her boyfriend. She says: "I think people thought he gave it to me."