Boxing

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BOXING

From its origins as an illicit and disreputable pastime followed primarily by a small number of enthusiasts, the sport of boxing emerged as a significant cultural phenomenon throughout the United States by the turn of the twentieth century. First imported from Great Britain in the late colonial period, the spectacle of organized prizefights—often bloody, loosely regulated brawls fought with bare knuckles—catered to a curious assemblage of working-class participants, wealthy bachelors, and professional gamblers. Together, these socalled gentlemen of the fancy comprised a widespread, loosely organized network supporting occasional bouts and gloved sparring exhibitions as well as other athletic displays and contests. The evolution of professional boxing from the somewhat shadowy realm of the bare-knuckle prizefight resulted from the Progressive Era's extraordinary confluence of class and ethnic struggle, emergent consumer culture, a perceived crisis of masculinity among white, middle-class men, changes in newspaper publishing, and urban growth in the post-bellum period. Furthermore, the appearance of dynamic figures from John L. Sullivan to Jack Johnson provided commanding personalities who helped define the role of the modern sports hero. While boxing as a subject suitable for literary endeavors would remain somewhat marginalized throughout much of the twentieth century, the emergence of literary naturalism and its embrace of atavism, brutality, and the urban milieu, as well as the increasing acceptance of boxing into the mainstream of American society in general, would contribute to the literary exploration of the boxing ring in this period, most famously in the work of Jack London.

THE RISE OF BOXING AS A PROFESSIONAL SPORT

Among the many dramatic consequences of the economic and demographic changes in the mid-nineteenth century were the growing popularity of amateur athletics and the establishment of professional athletics, most notably baseball, as a commercial enterprise. Growing numbers of both native-born and immigrant men helped create a "bachelor subculture" in large American cities, often based around the neighborhood saloon and enlivened by sporting contests, from billiards to cockfighting to boxing, in which men participated either as combatants or gamblers. Such semi-clandestine activities served as an urban, working-class counterpart to the more public athletic spectacles, such as baseball, collegiate football, or yachting. For Irish Americans, in particular, pugilism proved an attractive means by which to assimilate into the increasingly masculine culture of the American city. By the late nineteenth century, other ethnic communities, including Italians, Jews, and African Americans, would also seek to identify their own efforts at assimilation with success in the boxing ring, with varying results.

Although usually outlawed by local or state statutes, boxing matches gained a broader audience through the extended reach of specialized publications catering to the bachelor subculture. Newspapers, such as prizefight impresario Richard Kyle Fox's Police Gazette and the New York Clipper, often sold in corner saloons, featured sensationalized accounts of public scandals and lurid crimes as well as news from the worlds of theater and sports. Before the widespread adoption of the "sports page" in the newspapers of William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer by the 1890s, more genteel, mainstream papers such as the New York Herald and the New York Times, which frequently editorialized against the inhumanity and indecency of boxing, offered detailed accounts of prominent prizefights, ostensibly published as crime news. In this way, both conventional and specialized journalism contributed to a growing public fascination with, if not acceptance of, boxing as both a profession and a form of entertainment.

JOHN L. SULLIVAN

The single most important figure in the evolution of boxing from illicit crime to legitimate entertainment was John Lawrence Sullivan (1858–1918), known as "the Boston Strong-Boy," a second-generation Irish American whose reign as heavyweight champion from 1882 to 1892 bridged distinct eras and served to popularize and institutionalize the sport. Beginning his career at a time when boxers and their managers negotiated over prize money, rules, and opponents on an almost entirely ad hoc basis, Sullivan retired after losing his crown to James John "Gentleman Jim" Corbett (1866–1933) in the first heavyweight title fight fought under the Marquess of Queensberry rules. These guidelines dictated strictly timed rounds and the donning of padded gloves, and promoters and regulating bodies have continued to use similar regulations ever since.

In John L. Sullivan and His America (1988), biographer Michael T. Isenberg called Sullivan "the first significant mass cultural hero in American life" (p. 13). He served as a galvanizing icon for Irish Americans, working-class men, and a culture increasingly anxious about a supposed "feminization" of American society. Signaling the breadth of his significance as a cultural hero, Sullivan's name, and his legendary fight with Corbett, are invoked by Jake, the protagonist of Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto (1896). The novel's author, Abraham Cahan (1860–1951), uses Jake's identification with Sullivan to show how his character assumes typically "Yankee" characteristics as he struggles with cultural assimilation and class friction.

BOXING IN LITERATURE

Within the broader category of sports literature, relatively few examples of boxing literature exist until the mid-twentieth century. Early representations of athletic themes and settings in literature are confined largely to the sporting subgenres of boys' books, dime novels, and pulp paperbacks that first appeared in the 1890s. Prominent among authors specializing in these types of heroic sports fiction were Ralph Henry Barbour, Albertus True Dudley, T. Truxton Hare, and Gilbert Patten (1866–1945). The latter, writing as Burt L. Standish, established the template for the college athletic hero with the Frank Merriwell series of novels (1896–1913), which celebrated an idealized combination of ingenuity, intelligence, cultivation, and athletic prowess in its Yale-educated protagonist. The dime novel formula, however, focused on sports such as baseball and football rather than boxing, which was rarely a part of collegiate athletics and was seldom practiced by the middle- and upper-class audiences for whom these stories were intended. Exceptions to this formula were provided by pulp biographies of prominent fighters, often more fictional than otherwise, such as those published by Street and Smith's New York Five Cent Library in the 1890s.

Literary naturalists, whose work reflected the growing influence of post-Darwinian scientific discourse and offered glimpses into the gritty, urban environment rarely depicted in polite literature, found in boxing a motif that suited both their thematic and contextual purposes. Frank Norris (1870–1902), for instance, extolled the virtues of prizefighting and other sports in his literary columns and published several athlete-hero stories in the San Francisco journal The Wave, including one about boxing titled "Shorty Stack, Pugilist" (1897). As an important part of the urban landscape, boxing forms part of the backdrop for works such as Maggie, A Girl of the Streets (1893), written by Stephen Crane (1871–1900), in which small-time rounder Pete first meets Maggie when he and her brother Jimmie are on their way to watch a boxing match in Brooklyn. For characters caught in the crucible of the city, the prizefight and its surrounding culture offered a sense of identity in terms of gender, ethnicity, and nationality.

JACK LONDON

By far the most significant fictional use of boxing in this period can be found in the work of Jack London (1876–1916). His extensive knowledge of the sport and commitment to its place in American culture inspired several works of fiction focusing on the world of boxing, including two novels and a large body of journalistic writing. London's novels The Game (1905) and The Abysmal Brute (1913) both feature boxing protagonists and explore the workings of the professional prize ring. The former book tells the story of Joe Fleming and Genevieve Pritchard, two "working class aristocrats" (p. 45), and their ill-fated love affair, which unravels as Joe pursues his deep, almost spiritual, commitment to "the Game"—boxing. He is killed in the ring by a "swarthy" rival named John Ponta, a "beast with a streak for a forehead, with beady eyes under lowering and bushy brows, flat-nosed, thick-lipped, sullen-mouthed" (pp. 117–118). With its clash between idealized, yet doomed, working-class Anglo-Saxons, both male and female, and the seductive and corrupt urban melting pot, embodied by the forbidding presence of Joe's nemesis in the boxing ring, The Game intermingles widespread cultural fears of immigration, unfettered capitalism, and the modern city.

In Dreaming of Heroes: American Sports Fiction, 1868–1980 (1982), Michael Oriard claims that London "created the classic stereotype of the natural in sports literature" (p. 82) with The Abysmal Brute. The novel's hero, Pat Glendon, like The Game's Joe Fleming, is an idealized figure, pure and incorruptible, who possesses instinctive skills as a fighter. Unlike Joe, however, Pat is a product of the wilderness of the American West, a displaced Leatherstocking in the corrupt world of San Francisco. Whereas Joe's tragic fate looms inevitably on the horizon, Pat draws upon his instinctive resources to win both the climactic boxing match and Maud Sangster, his pure female counterpart, before escaping the sinister city for a cleaner life in the unspoiled mountains.

Whereas London's boxing novels underscore the notion of the prizefight ring as an appropriate metaphor for the crucible of the modern city, his best-known short story involving the sport, "A Piece of Steak" (1909), is different. It employs pugilism in the pursuit of a theme often found in his Klondike tales—the inevitable and cyclical triumph of youth over old age. In this story, aging boxer Tom King, returns to the ring for a last fight with a young contender, only to be knocked out, a conclusion that affirms the irrevocable laws of nature.

JACK JOHNSON AND BOXING'S CULTURAL IMPACT

Among the events described in London's vast body of journalistic reporting, none proved more culturally significant than the heavyweight championship bout between Jack Johnson (born John Arthur Johnson, 1878–1946) and James Jackson Jeffries (1875–1953) on 4 July 1910. London himself had called on the retired champion Jeffries to return to the ring to defeat Johnson, the first African American to hold the title and a particularly controversial and polarizing figure in the history of American sport. Beginning with John L. Sullivan's firm declaration, "I will not fight a Negro. I never have and I never shall," an unofficial prohibition had been firmly established that barred black contenders from a title bout, most conspicuously the outstanding boxer Peter Jackson (1861–1901), who was born on the Caribbean island of St. Croix and later won championships in Australia and England. Subsequent champions, including Gentleman Jim Corbett, Robert Prometheus Fitzsimmons (1862–1917), and James Jeffries, maintained Sullivan's color line. Upon witnessing Johnson's assumption of the heavyweight crown in 1908 in a decisive victory over Jeffries's unimpressive Canadian successor, Tommy Burns, London himself insisted that "Jim Jeffries must emerge from his alfalfa farm and remove the golden smile from Jack Johnson's face" (Jack London Reports, p. 264).

When Johnson defeated an unprepared and humiliated Jeffries, touted as America's "Great White Hope," in Reno, Nevada, before an estimated crowd of up to twenty thousand, Johnson forced white Americans, including London, who viewed Jeffries as a prohibitive favorite, to confront their casual assumptions about athletic prowess and racial dominance. The towering Johnson, an imposing figure inside and outside the ring, not only assumed a public role reserved for white heroes but also flaunted racial conventions of Jim Crow America, dressing ostentatiously, driving expensive automobiles, and marrying a white woman. Johnson's transgressive attitude, as well as his consummate skills as a boxer, earned him a nearly legendary role within the African American community, and songs and stories quickly circulated that raised Johnson to the status of folk hero alongside such mythical figures as Railroad Bill, John Henry, and Stack-o-lee. While members of the African American intelligentsia remained somewhat wary of Johnson's apparent confirmation of white racial fears of black men, his cultural impact ensured a place in subsequent literary texts. Among contemporary writers, author and political activist James Weldon Johnson (1871–1938), in particular, offered unapologetic praise for Johnson. In a piece published in The Selected Writings of James Weldon Johnson (1995), the author notes that Jack Johnson "not only looked the white man in the eye, but hit him in the eye" and concludes that "his pugilistic record is something of a racial asset" (p. 126). Jack Johnson would serve as a symbol of black pride and resistance throughout the twentieth century: among many examples across the cultural spectrum, his name is invoked prominently in the novel Invisible Man (1952) by Ralph Ellison; his life story serves as the basis for the play The Great White Hope (1967) by Howard Sackler; and his mythic resonance permeates the 1970 film soundtrack recording A Tribute to Jack Johnson by jazz trumpeter Miles Davis.

BROADER ACCEPTANCE

With the rise of Jack Dempsey (born William Harrison Dempsey, 1895–1983) to the heavyweight championship in 1919, boxing began a period of further commercialization and consolidation. Eager to avoid the perceived embarrassment of another African American at the top of the sport, promoters and regulatory commissions exerted tighter control over the prize ring, and Dempsey, known as the "Manassa Mauler," proved a popular white champion whom the boxing establishment could use to market boxing to a wider, more respectable audience.

As the sport entered the mainstream of American society, so did it gain legitimacy within the literary world. London's early advocacy of boxing in literature and his association of boxing with the cult of the masculine writer, as well as the growing body of literary texts about other sports, foresaw the plentiful examples of boxing-related texts later in the century. These included the short stories "The Battler" (1925) and "Fifty Grand" (1927) by Ernest Hemingway; Never Come Morning (1942) by Nelson Algren; The Harder They Fall (1947) by Budd Schulberg; and Fat City (1969) by Leonard Gardner. As a unique combination of ritualized combat and athletic display, boxing has continued to fascinate observers of American culture, and its rise during the Progressive Era epitomizes the volatile convergence of race, gender, and commerce that would help define this period in American history.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Works

Johnson, James Weldon. The Selected Writings of James Weldon Johnson. Edited by Sondra Kathryn Wilson. Vol. 1. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

London, Jack. The Game. New York: Macmillan, 1905.

London, Jack. Jack London Reports: War Correspondence, Sports Articles, and Miscellaneous Writings. Edited by King Hendricks and Irving Shepard. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1970.