Oxford University Amateur Boxing Club

The Oxford University Amateur Boxing Club (OUABC) is the boxing club of the University of Oxford, England, located in Oxford. The club was founded in 1881. It is the second oldest active amateur boxing club in the UK. Several OUABC boxers were featured in a 2006 documentary titled Blue Blood.

The club competes against Cambridge University Amateur Boxing Club in The Varsity Match, also known as The True Love Bowl, each year. Typically, the match location switches between Oxford and Cambridge, though some matches have been held in London. Male boxers who compete in the Varsity Match are traditionally awarded a Full Blue by the Oxford University Men's Blues Committee.

In 2003/2004, OUABC began including female boxers in training and matches. In the 2005 Varsity Match, Kaleen Love of Oxford defeated Catherine Tubb of Cambridge to become the first Oxford woman to compete in a varsity boxing match. Both were awarded Extraordinary Full Blues for their athletic accomplishments. More recently, Sarah Burden and Helena Matthews of CUABC were awarded the same honours for their achievements.

During the 1980s and 1990s, under the tutelage of head coach Henry Dean, OUABC won 17 Varsity Matches in a row, the longest single stretch of victories in the history of the tournament. However, since then the Match results have been more balanced - and in both the 2005 and 2009 Varsity Matches, OUABC registered defeats by the maximum 9-0 margin. Cambridge University Amateur Boxing Club (CUABC) remains the only side to have achieved this feat since the number of bouts was increased to 9 in the 1950s. Cambridge has now taken to hosting the Match every second year in London, due to seating limitations at Cambridge venues, with the 2009 Match recorded for a documentary aired on Channel 4. The 2010 Varsity Match was hosted by Oxford in the Oxford Town Hall, with Cambridge hosting the 2011 Varsity Match in The Troxy, London.

The running Varsity Match total, as of 2013, now stands at 51-51.

OUABC practices in the Iffley Road University Gym in Oxfordshire.

Read more about Oxford University Amateur Boxing Club:  See Also

Famous quotes containing the words oxford university, oxford, university, amateur, boxing and/or club:

    During the first formative centuries of its existence, Christianity was separated from and indeed antagonistic to the state, with which it only later became involved. From the lifetime of its founder, Islam was the state, and the identity of religion and government is indelibly stamped on the memories and awareness of the faithful from their own sacred writings, history, and experience.
    Bernard Lewis, U.S. Middle Eastern specialist. Islam and the West, ch. 8, Oxford University Press (1993)

    Christianity as an organized religion has not always had a harmonious relationship with the family. Unlike Judaism, it kept almost no rituals that took place in private homes. The esteem that monasticism and priestly celibacy enjoyed implied a denigration of marriage and parenthood.
    Beatrice Gottlieb, U.S. historian. The Family in the Western World from the Black Death to the Industrial Age, ch. 12, Oxford University Press (1993)

    It is in the nature of allegory, as opposed to symbolism, to beg the question of absolute reality. The allegorist avails himself of a formal correspondence between “ideas” and “things,” both of which he assumes as given; he need not inquire whether either sphere is “real” or whether, in the final analysis, reality consists in their interaction.
    Charles, Jr. Feidelson, U.S. educator, critic. Symbolism and American Literature, ch. 1, University of Chicago Press (1953)

    I have been reporting club meetings for four years and I am tired of hearing reviews of the books I was brought up on. I am tired of amateur performances at occasions announced to be for purposes either of enjoyment or improvement. I am tired of suffering under the pretense of acquiring culture. I am tired of hearing the word “culture” used so wantonly. I am tired of essays that let no guilty author escape quotation.
    Josephine Woodward, U.S. author. As quoted in Everyone Was Brave, ch. 3, by William L. O’Neill (1969)

    I can entertain the proposition that life is a metaphor for boxing—for one of those bouts that go on and on, round following round, jabs, missed punches, clinches, nothing determined, again the bell and again and you and your opponent so evenly matched it’s impossible not to see that your opponent is you.... Life is like boxing in many unsettling respects. But boxing is only like boxing.
    Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938)

    Women ... are completely alone, though they were born and bred upon this soil, as if they belonged to another class in creation.
    “Jennie June” Croly 1829–1901, U.S. founder of the woman’s club movement, journalist, author, editor. F, Demorest’s Illustrated Monthly Mirror of Fashions, pp. 363-4 (December 1870)