John L. Sullivan & the Making of an Irish-American Sporting Legend By

Published by Century Ireland, March 2018 John L. Sullivan & the Making of an Irish-American Sporting Legend By Mark Duncan Mike Tyson idolised him. Knew his story, admired his ring-craft, his chutzpah. 'I like his confidence, his arrogance,' he remarked to a reporter from The New York Times more than 70 years after the man himself had died. ‘I like the way he used to say 'I can beat any man in the house’.’1 Before his career spiralled into the disgrace of a rape conviction in the early 1990s, Tyson revelled in his reputation as the most fierce-some fighter in the boxing game, but he delighted, too, in demonstrating his schooling, courtesy of his first tutor-trainer Cus D’Amato, in the sport’s rich history and often troublesome traditions. And John Lawrence Sullivan, Tyson rightly understood, had laid the foundations upon which those very traditions had been built. The son of a Kerry father and a Roscommon mother, Sullivan was a Boston-born brawler whose extraordinary career straddled the eras of bare-knuckle and gloved boxing. Indeed, long before the names of Marciano, Patterson, Ali, Frazier, Foreman or, for that matter, Tyson, had been stitched into the popular consciousness, that of John L. Sullivan was inseparable from that of the sport he done so much to both create and render respectable. In the late 19th century, Sullivan’s dominance of the ring was absolute and, helped by canny management and an obsessive press, he found himself catapulted into a realm of sporting celebrity that had been previously unknown. It proved both a laurel and millstone. Just as his pugilistic prowess brought him fame and fortune, so his predilection for personal excess helped fritter it away. Not the fame obviously, but the fortune most certainly. Almost a decade after he’d retired from the ring and with his finances run dry, Sullivan, still happy to stoke his own myth, told reporters that he had spent a million dollars in 20 years. Where did it all go? 1 New York Times, 21 July 1989. Accessed on 6 Feb 2018 at http://www.nytimes.com/1989/07/21/sports/sports-of-the- times-tyson-ali-armstrong-and-john-l.html Published by Century Ireland, March 2018 “Well I guess I gave away about £200,000”, he said. “I spent £200,000 on wine and general carousing. I blew about £100,000 on gambling....That’s half a million, ain’t it? It cost me about £200,000 for legitimate living expenses, and my training cost me about £100,000. Trying to be a business man without any experience cost me another £200,000. That’s another half a million, ain’t it.”2 This life of flamboyance and waste was one for which he had never really been destined. His immigrant parents, devout Catholics and staunchly working class, had mapped out a different route for him, sending him off to the Jesuit-run Boston College, the first step on an apparent path to the priesthood. It would be the only step along that route he’d take. Sullivan dropped out of Boston College without a qualification and subsequently drifted as an apprentice from trade to trade, trying his hand at one manual job and then another.3 The only place the ground felt firm beneath him was when he turned to sport. Here he was accomplished and content. More than that, in fact: Sullivan displayed a talent for baseball but his sheer bulk – he weighted 200 pounds by the age of 17 – marked him out as serious boxing material. The problem was there was no money to be had in it in Boston (Massachusetts had a law forbidding boxing for money) and no future to be found in it anywhere else either. Nobody before had ever made a living as a prize-fighter. 4 Sure, money could be earned, but fighters needed to work as well as brawl. What boxing gave the young John L. was less a living than a local notoriety. It gave him a profile, a status and a sense of importance. 5 In time, too, it also helped expand his world beyond his urban, Boston-Irish milieu. Sullivan’s name was already appearing in newspapers as far afield as New York when, in 1881, he teamed up with the entrepreneurial Billy Madden, who took on the role of his manager. London-born to Irish parents, Madden conceived of a promotional tour to take in Philadelphia and Chicago and raised the finance to send them on their way. It worked on both the financial and sporting fronts: Sullivan’s profile rose as his boxing skills sharpened and when he returned to Boston he set his sights on toppling Paddy Ryan for the prize of what was being called, erroneously of course, the “championship of the world”. He did just that. 2 Washington Times, 4 February 1918 3 Michael T. Isenberg, John L. Sullivan and His America (1988) p. 32 4 Isenberg, p. 36 5 Isenberg pp. 32-33 Published by Century Ireland, March 2018 The Sullivan-Ryan fight took place in a hastily constructed ring in front of the Barnes Hotel in Mississippi City in February 1882 under so-called London Rules (bare-knuckle). The purse was $5,000 a piece, winner take all. It turned out it was less a contest than a rout. Thurles-born Ryan, who ran a saloon, was no match for the more fight-fit Sullivan, whose conditioning and boxing instincts had been honed in the course of a busy schedule of exhibition bouts. The fight was over by the 9th round, but the result was inevitable from the get-go. Afterwards, Ryan vowed to never fight again, but news of his defeat was met with disbelief by many, including his supportive mother-in-law who learned of it from journalists she clearly considered to be the purveyors of fake news. Rolling up her sleeve to expose her bare forearm, the Tipperary-man’s mother-in-law defiantly declared to the attentive pressmen: ‘I could lick that man Sullivan me-self.’6 She couldn’t, of course. Nobody could. Not for over a decade, anyway. Not even Charley Mitchell, a hard-puncher from Birmingham, England, who, in 1883, travelled to America and floored Sullivan for the first time in his career at Madison Square Garden (even if Sullivan insisted into old age that he had merely slipped) and who, five years later, held him to a draw in an epic, if illegal, bout hosted in a French chateaux in Chantilly.7 And not even the gifted bare knuckle brawler from Long Island, Jake Kilrain, who pushed Sullivan to the limit of his endurance in 1889 in a fight recognised as perhaps the finest of the pre-modern era. Photographs of the Sullivan-Kilrain set-to survive, and they show the full splendour of the occasion: an amphitheatre set outdoors amidst tall pine trees in rural Mississippi with 3,000 spectators packed tightly around the ring, many on raised earthen banks. For those who had travelled a great distance (as many of them had), they got full value. The fight was brutal and long, even if there was no denying the ill-conditioned Sullivan’s superiority throughout. In a ring that measured 24 feet square and which was enclosed with thick manila rope wrapped around eight pine posts hammered into the ground, Kilrain clung on for two hours and 18 minutes. Too long for his own good. It was the 75th round when the fight finally came to an end. 6 The Indianapolis Leader, 11 February 1882 7 Sullivan denied he had been knocked down Charley Mitchell. ‘That is not true”, he said. “I slipped and was up and at it again in a second.” Cresco Plain Dealer, 31 December 1915. Published by Century Ireland, March 2018 Kilrain’s body was badly beaten by then, but the champion was in no mood for mercy. When Sullivan’s ring was approached to see what they would give Jake, moneywise, if he would just surrender, the Boston Strong-boy shot back uncompromisingly: ‘Not a cent. Let the __sucker get up and fight.’8 But Kilrain had nothing left to give. There was no fight left in him. He was done. The bout was over, but many in the crowd, sensing the significance of what they had just witnessed, stormed the ring to claim mementos of the occasion, sporting keepsakes upon which tall tales could be spun and history embellished. Ice buckets, ring posts, if it could be lifted and carried, it was taken.9 Victory over Kilrain, and in such an epic manner, bolstered a legend that was already firmly established. However, Sullivan’s superstardom owed much to forces beyond his own natural boxing brilliance. His celebrity and cultural power was very much the creation of a unique set of historical circumstances, the product of a particular moment in America’s industrial and social development. When, in September 1883, he set off once more on tour (one much more ambitious one than that of 1881) he traversed the country in a way that had never been done before by an American public figure. Not by a President, not by a sportsman, not by an entertainer. Not because there had been nobody to think of it, but because nobody could have done it. The means did not exist. The spread of the railways in the decades prior to Sullivan’s sporting arrival opened up possibilities that had never before prevailed and it enabled him to reach parts of the America where his boxing exhibitions were the stuff of pure novelty.

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