Boxing was pretty big when I was a kid.
It was even bigger prior to World War Two.
It's all but dead now.
Listening to the obits on Ali really bring this home. Younger people hearing about it know that he was a great boxer, but they don't really know that boxing itself was once great.
Prior to football taking pride of place in American professional football there were really only three professional sports worth considering. Baseball, boxing, and horse racing.
Yes, there were other professional sports, including football, which arrived as early as 1892, but football really wasn't a big deal.* Baseball, boxing, and horse racing, were. Only baseball really remains up there in the American mind, but even it has had to surrender pride of place to football.
Boxing was something followed by every American who followed professional sports. It was a huge deal, and it remained that way all the up up through the 1970s. Boxing was on the cover of sporting journals all the time and for much of my youth you could watch a boxing match on national broadcast television ever Saturday night.
It's hard to say what made it so big, but it was. It was huge.
Part of that may have reflected economics and demographics. Boxing has always been a sport populated largely by the economically disadvantaged. Not always, but typically. Legendary early boxer John L. Sullivan was from "Southie", South Boston, born of Irish immigrants, and had started off boxing illegally as the sport was banned in Boston.
Legendary Boston born Irish American boxer John L. Sullivan who fought over 450 fights in his career, an amazing total. He was the last bare knuckle champion and the first gloved champion.
Indeed, the early sport featured a laundry list of the disadvantaged, including a lot of Irish American and Italian American boxers. It also featured Jewish boxers, although it seems their legacy in the sport is largely forgotten now.
And it was integrated right from the start.
The larger than life Jack Johnson.
Something about the individual nature of the sport, maybe, made it impossible for the color line to keep in it, and Jack Johnson became the first black heavyweight champion in 1908. Johnson was a controversial figure, and remains so, due to his blistering refusal to adhere to color boundaries, including in his personal life, which leads a person now to wonder to what extent it was Johnson and to what extent it was simply prejudice that created the controversy. Anyhow, Johnson is sometimes regarded as setting the advancement of black athletes back, but I frankly doubt it. His brashness was impossible to ignore, and that, in my mind, likely advanced the cause of black athletes.
At any rate, blacks were so well established in boxing that by the time Joe Lewis became the world heavyweight champion in 1937 he was a national hero, remaining that way his entire life. Indeed, while people now tend to recall Jackie Robinson as breaking the color boundaries in professional sports, its interesting to note that boxing and horse racing (where they have oddly mostly disappeared) were integrated decades prior, and in boxing the lines were nearly completely erased by the 1930s.
Which doesn't mean that they couldn't offer some controversy. Muhammad Ali, who may be the greatest boxer who ever lived, stood on the shoulders of prior giants and was truly controversial in a political sense for much of his career. But it was the popularity of boxing that allowed him to do that. It was so big, it gave Ali a bully pulpit.
Well, that pulpit is all but dismantled now.
It's hard to see what happened to it, but it seems to have been a victim of its own success. As a sport it was always plagued with those who were close to it having financial goals that didn't always comport with keeping the sport organized in a rational fashion. After Ali its organization, which had always had elements that were ready to tear it apart, collapsed and a big national boxing hero, or rather international, had a harder time coming up. And in the heavyweight class, while there were clearly great boxers after Ali, none had quite what he did in terms of personality and wit, except perhaps for George Foreman, who is also now long past his boxing career.
Beyond that, however, something changed in a society where accidental early death and decay became less common. John L. Sullivan was only 59 years old when he died. Joe Lewis was 66. Jack Johnson was an old 68. In an era when strokes and heart attacks simply killed, these ages didn't seem all that unusual. Muhammad Ali was a very aged 74 years old when he just died, and had been bearing the tragic consequences of his sport for a very long time. That visible impact, which used to be called being "slapsy", was hard for the public to watch. Arguably boxing became the first sport where head injuries became a real and ongoing concern, with it now passing on to other sports, including the big current national pass time, football.
Whatever it is, boxing isn't what it once was. I don't even know who the current heavyweight champions are, although I believe there's more than one. At one time, everyone did.
____________________________________________________________________________________
*It's interesting to note in this context that football, while have a professional organization by 1892, was really regarded as a college sport until after World War Two. There are historical reasons for that, including that both football and rugby were sports that were in fact normally only maintained early on by universities. Beyond that, however, I wonder if it isn't simply demographic. Even now, football is heavily associated with universities and the college teams are the training grounds for professional football teams. Baseball, however, has tended to recruit right out of high school and has maintained its own farm system. Boxing hasn't tended to come out of schools at all, but most professional boxers started very young. So boxing and baseball were very much average man sports in an era prior to the average man having any college at all. Average men attending college only changed after World War Two, and by the 1950s professional football had really arrived.
No comments:
Post a Comment