Heavyweight champion Mike Tyson is famous for fighting both inside and outside the ring. Boys who box may do the same, according to a study, not because they're inherently violent but because combative sports seem to make for combative kids.
For two years, researchers at the University of Bergen in Norway followed nearly 500 preteen boys who took up boxing, wrestling, weight lifting and martial arts. These boys, on the whole, began to start fights, steal and skip school far more often than their peers. Compared with nonathletes or players of milder sports like soccer, "power sport" players were about five times as likely to be antisocial, says researcher Inger Endresen.
