![]() ![]() Sullivan created an archetype that remains in force in 2011: the athlete as cultural icon and all-around moneymaking machine. It’s from Sullivan that we get the boast, still heard today: “I can lick any sonofabitch in the house.” After he won the heavyweight championship (or at least what Americans generally viewed as the championship) in 1882, he went on a barnstorming national tour, offering $1,000 to anyone who could last four rounds with him in makeshift rings set up in theaters, ballrooms, and saloons. With his physical prowess and hot-blooded public persona, Sullivan became an Irish-American hero and a symbol of manly vigor to a nation that, experiencing an industrial revolution and transformative changes in living standards and manner of work, worried that its young men might go soft. Born in Roxbury, Massachusetts, in 1858, the son of an immigrant hod carrier from Ireland, Sullivan fought his way to wealth and fame rivaled by few in his time. Sullivan, did boxing truly arrive in America. Only with the emergence of its first great figure, John L. But the war interrupted the sport’s momentum. Before the Civil War, boxing enjoyed a brief vogue in New York, where fighters often associated with the Tammany Hall machine rose to prominence. ![]() The rules also permitted wrestling holds and other tactics, and rounds ended only with “falls,” when one man went down, whether from a punch or a throw or sheer exhaustion. Boxing then was conducted with bare fists, under the old London Prize Ring Rules, which stipulated fights to the finish-that is, until one man could not continue. One freed slave, Tom Molineaux, even fought overseas against the British champion, Tom Cribb-and probably would have won their 1810 match, had Cribb’s desperate supporters not intervened just as Molineaux seized a decisive advantage. For boxing once stood at the center of American life, and its history winds a thread through the broader history of the nation.īoxing’s beginnings in America go back to slave days, when plantation owners pitted slaves against one another and wagered on the outcomes. There was a time when things were very different. Boxing has become a ghost sport, long since discredited but still hovering in the nation’s consciousness, refusing to go away and be silent entirely. The scene frames an odd, brutal human activity that disappears from the public mind for long periods, then surfaces again when a fight or fighter reaches out to us, demanding a response.īut that happens rarely today few Americans could name more than one or two current boxers, if that. The gloves bring to mind a familiar image: a narrow, roped square eager spectators surrounding the ring and, in the fighters’ corners, old, wrinkled seconds with Q-tips behind their ears, holding buckets. ![]() Politicians, pledging to “fight” for a principle, sometimes hold up boxing gloves as a sign of commitment to cheering supporters. The scrap ends almost as soon as it began, the men laughing. Outside Grand Central Terminal on a raw spring morning, the UPS drivers are doing their moves: one guy, slight and older, crouching and bobbing his head, his breath making clouds in the chill air, throws hooking punches, left and right, which stop just short of the larger and younger man, who tucks in his elbows as if he were tapping his ancestors’ instincts: protect the body, move your feet, position yourself to be ready when the chance comes. Exiled from boxing for years for his stance on the Vietnam War, Muhammad Ali, here defeating Joe Frazier in 1974, personified an era of rebellion and change.Įven now, making our twenty-first-century rounds, we’re never far from the reach of the Fancy. ![]()
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