Boxing a Cultural History

A CULTURAL HISTORY KASIA BODDY 001_025_Boxing_Pre+Ch_1 25/1/08 15:37 Page 1 BOXING 001_025_Boxing_Pre+Ch_1 25/1/08 15:37 Page 2 001_025_Boxing_Pre+Ch_1 25/1/08 15:37 Page 3 BOXING A CULTURAL HISTORY KASIA BODDY reaktion books 001_025_Boxing_Pre+Ch_1 25/1/08 15:37 Page 4 For David Published by Reaktion Books Ltd 33 Great Sutton Street London ec1v 0dx www.reaktionbooks.co.uk First published 2008 Copyright © Kasia Boddy 2008 All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers. Printed and bound in China British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Boddy, Kasia Boxing : a cultural history 1. Boxing – Social aspects – History 2. Boxing – History I. Title 796.8’3’09 isbn 978 1 86189 369 7 001_025_Boxing_Pre+Ch_1 25/1/08 15:37 Page 5 Contents Introduction 7 1 The Classical Golden Age 9 2 The English Golden Age 26 3 Pugilism and Style 55 4 ‘Fighting, Rightly Understood’ 76 5 ‘Like Any Other Profession’ 110 6 Fresh Hopes 166 7 Sport of the Future 209 8 Save Me, Jack Dempsey; Save Me, Joe Louis 257 9 King of the Hill, and Further Raging Bulls 316 Conclusion 367 References 392 Select Bibliography 456 Acknowledgements 470 Photo Acknowledgements 471 Index 472 001_025_Boxing_Pre+Ch_1 25/1/08 15:37 Page 6 001_025_Boxing_Pre+Ch_1 25/1/08 15:37 Page 7 Introduction The symbolism of boxing does not allow for ambiguity; it is, as amateur mid- dleweight Albert Camus put it, ‘utterly Manichean’. The rites of boxing ‘simplify 1 everything. Good and evil, the winner and the loser.’ More than anything, the boxing match has served as a metaphor for opposition – the struggle between two bodies before an audience, usually for money, representing struggles between opposing qualities, ideas and values. In the modern works that this book considers, those struggles involve nationality, class, race, ethnicity, religion, politics, and different versions of masculinity. As light heavyweight Roy Jones, Jr. 2 once said, ‘if it made money, it made sense.’ But the conflicts dramatized in modern boxing also rework the fundamental oppositions set up in the very earliest texts: brawn versus brain; boastfulness versus modesty; youth versus experience. In literary and artistic terms, the clash is also often one of voices and styles. In the Protagoras, Plato even likens the moves and countermoves of Socratic 3 debate to a boxing match. Boxing, it seems, has been around forever. The first evidence of the sport can be found in Mesopotamian stone reliefs from the end of the fourth millennium bc. Since then there has hardly been a time in which young men, and sometimes women, did not raise their gloved or ungloved fists to one other. William Roberts’s 1914 watercolour The Boxing Match, Novices conveys the relentless succession of contenders, champions and palookas that makes up the history of boxing. Throughout this history, potters, painters, poets, novel- ists, cartoonists, song-writers, photographers and film-makers have been there to record and make sense of the bruising, bloody confrontation. ‘For some reason,’ sportswriter Gary Wills remarked, ‘people don’t want fighters just 4 to be fighters.’ Writing about boxing is often nostalgic, evoking a golden age long since departed. Today the period most keenly remembered is that of the late 1960s and early ’70s, a time dominated by Muhammad Ali, a time, as a recent docu- 1 5 mentary would have it, ‘when we were kings’. Not long before, however, many William Roberts, were sure that the 1930s and ’40s represented the peak of excellence, and The Boxing Match, 6 Novices, 1914. lamented the arrival of televised sport as the end of a ‘heroic cycle’. Further 7 001_025_Boxing_Pre+Ch_1 25/1/08 15:37 Page 8 back still, early twentieth-century commentators considered the Regency as the time when pugilism flourished as never since; while for Regency writers, true glory and prowess resided in the sport’s original manifestations in classical Greece. In the third century ad, Philostratus looked back to the good old days before ‘the energetic became sluggards, the hardened became weak, and Sicil- 7 ian gluttony gained the upper hand’. Although this book is about boxing in its modern form, myths about the golden ages of classical and Regency boxing have had such a lasting impact on ways of thinking about the sport that I begin with them. The first two chapters chart the early history of boxing and the establishment of ideas about courage and honour, ritual and spectatorship, beauty and the grotesque that are still in use today. The third chapter explores what pugilistic style meant to Regency painters and writers. The golden age of English boxing was over by 1830. Nevertheless, the sport continued to hold sway over the popular imagination throughout the nineteenth century. Chapter Four considers the divide between (dangerous, illegal) prize fighting and (honourable, muscular Christian) sparring in the Victorian era, and the appeal of each to writers as different as George Eliot and Arthur Conan Doyle. The fin de siècle rise of professional boxing (and its association with the development of mass media such as journalism and cinema in America) is the subject of Chapter Five. Women (welcome participants in the eighteenth century) now re-entered the arenas as spectators. Chapter Six shifts the focus to questions of race and ethnicity, investigating the ways in which boxing was associated with assimilation for young Jewish immigrants and the ways in which black American boxers struggled against the early twentieth-century colour line. The career and enormous cultural impact of Jack Johnson, the first of the twentieth-century’s great black heavyweights, is explored in some detail. Another iconic presence, Jack Dempsey, dominates Chapter Seven. The chapter considers the sports-mad twenties and argues that many of modernism’s styles were self-consciously pugilistic. The final two chapters take us to the end of the twentieth century. Chapter Eight discusses mid-century representations of boxing and the ways in which the sport now featured largely as a metaphor for corruption and endurance – that is, until a young fighter called Joe Louis emerged on the scene. Finally, Chapter Nine examines the era of Muhammad Ali, television, Black Power, and further compensatory white hopes. The conclusion brings the story up to date, taking into account, among other matters, Mike Tyson and hip hop, conceptual art’s glove fetishism and the enduring appeal of sweaty gyms. 8 001_025_Boxing_Pre+Ch_1 25/1/08 15:37 Page 9 1 The Classical Golden Age Looking back nostalgically from the third century ad to the glorious athletic past 1 of Classical Greece, Philostratus claimed that the Spartans invented boxing. In fact, activities resembling boxing and wrestling were recorded much earlier, in third millennium bc Egypt and Mesopotamia. By the late Bronze Age (1600–1200 bc) images of pugilists could be found across the Eastern Mediterranean – some, like the figures on a Mycenean pot from Cyprus, are fairly sketchy (illus. 2); others, like the fresco of the young Boxing Boys from Thera (illus. 43), are striking 2 and detailed. In both cases, the boxers adopt an attitude similar to that found in Greek vase paintings 1,000 years later. The earliest of Greek literary works, the Iliad and the Odyssey, written in the eighth century bc, describe athletic games held at the time of the Trojan war, traditionally dated around 1200 bc. The funeral games for Patroclus in the Iliad (c. 750 bc) include the ‘first re- 3 port of a prize fight’ in literature. The games come late in the war, and in the penultimate book of the poem. Anthropologists and classical scholars have long debated the role of sports on such occasions. While some suggest that the funeral games simply served to celebrate the courage of the dead warrior, others argue that they were religious festivals and that sport was linked to ritual 4 sacrifice. Discussions of the symbolic role of boxing and other forms of violent combat sport often draw on Clifford Geertz’s essay on Balinese cockfighting, and Réne Girard’s Violence and the Sacred. Geertz argues that the cockfight should not be seen merely as a form of popular entertainment, but as a blood sacrifice to the forces threatening social order. ‘Deep play’, a term that Geertz adopts from Bentham, is a game whose stakes are so high that, from a utilitar- ian point of view, it is irrational to play; this does not make the game unplayable, however, but elevates it. Instead of merely demanding the calculation of odds, 5 the game works symbolically to represent the uncertain gamble that is life itself. The competitors involved in such contests are simultaneously derided and honoured, acting, as Girard put it, as ‘substitutes for all the members of the 6 community’, while ‘offered up by the community itself.’ ‘The winner symbolically “lives” by winning the ritual contest, the losers “die”’, and the spectators are 7 vaccinated ‘with the evil of violence against the evil of violence’. 9 001_025_Boxing_Pre+Ch_1 25/1/08 15:37 Page 10 2 Two boxers on a fragment of a Mycenaean pot from Cyprus, c. 1300–1200 bc. The games described in the penultimate book of the Iliad certainly do more than simply provide more entertaining fight scenes. Most commentators read the funeral games for Patroclus as one of the poem’s ‘representative moments’; that is, they encapsulate the issues of honour and reward that the poem usually 8 dramatizes on the battlefield.

Load more