The symbolism of boxing does not allow for ambiguity; it is, as amateur middleweight Albert Camus put it, ‘utterly Manichean’. The rites of boxing ‘simplify everything. Good and evil, the winner and the loser.’1 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. once said, ‘if it made money, it made sense.’2 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 debate to a boxing match.3
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, novelists, 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 to be fighters.’4
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 documentary would have it, ‘when we were kings’.5 Not long before, however, many were sure that the 1930s and ’40s represented the peak of excellence, and lamented the arrival of televised sport as the end of a ‘heroic cycle’.6 Further 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 Sicilian gluttony gained the upper hand’.7
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.