The Knock Out Blow: Every person who goes to see or reads about boxing matches is familiar with the ‘knock out’ blow. It has caused many a dollar to change hands. It has also caused many an ambitious young athlete who aspired to championship honors and whose name was gradually ascending the ladder to fame and fortune to sink into oblivion. The ‘knock out’ blow gained its first prominence through John L. Sullivan. There are many ways of landing the blow but the one most practiced is the straight right hand punch on the point of the jaw. To land a ‘knock out’ blow, carefully gauge your opponent’s distance and just keep out of reach of his right hand by about an inch. Then draw him on to swing his right at your head. The moment he leads just draw your head back and his arm will pass your head. When the arm goes by your head, then hit out straight from the shoulder with your right for the middle or point of his jaw. In case your opponent should strike straight with his right instead of swinging the blow, jump back and then slip to the side, out of the way.
– George Dixon, “A Lesson in Boxing” (1893)
During the afternoon of January 6, 1908, as George Dixon lay alone in his Bellevue Hospital bed, Dr. Hooker paid him a visit. The two sat in silence for some time, until Dixon finally spoke. “I’m down for the count, doctor,” he said. “I know it.”
Dr. Hooker put a hand on Dixon’s shoulder and said nothing.
“I’m licked,” added Dixon, “and booze did it.” Dixon turned his head away, his “teeth clenched tightly together, but without a murmur, even from the terrible pain.” Throughout the next hour, George Dixon lay in silence. No doubt he was conscious of Dr. Hooker still sitting beside him, and conscious, too, of his life slipping away. Then, just before 2:00 p.m., Dixon took a deep breath and looked to the ceiling. He exhaled slowly.
Dr. Hooker watched in silence.
A moment later, George Dixon was dead.
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Across North America and England, hundreds of newspapers ran obituaries of George Dixon. Some were ridiculous, offering their remembrances in strained prose. “After losing several battles in the ring with third-rate opponents and fighting a long-distance battle with King Alcohol,” ran one, “George Dixon, one of the greatest fighters the world ever saw, was finally counted out by the great referee yesterday at the Bellevue Hospital in New York.”
Others were heart-wrenchingly sublime. “Drink Ends Dixon’s Life,” began the obituary in The Washington Times. “The greatest fighter of his time and the winner of several hundred fistic encounters, George Dixon, the negro pugilist, familiarly called ‘Little Chocolate,’ died today in the alcoholic ward of Bellevue Hospital, a victim of a long fight with drink. Idolized in his prime by thousands as a pugilistic hero, George Dixon passed away practically penniless and without friends. Dixon was thirty-seven years old, and for many years held the title of featherweight champion. George Dixon fought several hundred ring battles, his first being in 1886, when he whipped a boy named Johnson in Halifax, N.S. From that time, until Terry McGovern knocked him out in 1900 and broke his heart, no man of his weight ever whipped him.
“He won the feather-weight title in 1891 by whipping the champion, Cal McCarthy. Dixon was a perfect fighting machine, so far as attack and defense was concerned, and his peculiar ability to strike a blow from any position made him a formidable opponent. Dixon won thousands of dollars in the prize ring, which he spent with convivial companions. A wasted, wane figure was brought to Bellevue Hospital two days ago and ticketed in the alcoholic ward as George Dixon. To the doctor he said that he had ‘fought his last fight with John Barleycorn and had been beaten.’ He told the physicians that he had no friends except John L. Sullivan. His condition grew rapidly worse, and late to-day the former champion died.”
The outpouring of affection for George Dixon from all quarters was overwhelming. In life, and now in death, George Dixon transcended the racism of the age by touching the dignity and humanity in everyone he came across.
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After Dixon passed away, his body was brought to the Long Acre Athletic Club, where he had fought so many fights. There, his body was laid in the centre ring for viewing. More than a thousand people gathered in the chairs surrounding the ring to pay their final respects. Two ministers – one white, the other Black – entered the ring and offered their reflections.
Later, the coffin was brought to the railway station in New York where it was loaded into a boxcar and covered in flowers. “Dixon’s fate had been the principal topic of conversation in sporting circles in New York since his death,” reported The Desert News of Salt Lake City. “The little fighter, who for twelve years held the championship title in his class, made a fortune during his days in the ring, but he promptly squandered every cent of it and when through dissipation his days in the ring were ended, he drifted lower and lower until he became a wanderer and almost a vagrant. Those who profited by his free-handedness in his days of prosperity refused to help him in his days of adversity, nor were they among those who contributed to the fund for his burial or who sent the flowers that covered the coffin.”
On the morning of January 9, 1908, the train that carried George Dixon’s casket from New York arrived in Boston, where relatives and friends waited. By the afternoon, a crowd of more than two thousand men and women, Black and white, gathered inside the African Methodist Episcopal Church, on the corner of Charles and Mount Vernon Streets in Boston, for a service to remember Dixon. The swelling numbers of mourners waiting to pay their last respects were so great that the modest church could not accommodate them all. “Unquestionably,” wrote the reporter for the Providence Evening Tribune, “no other funeral of a colored person ever held in this city was so well attended.”
For much of the day, Dixon’s body lay in the chapel of Hutchins’s Funeral Home on Shawmut Avenue, where hundreds were said to have viewed the body. In the late afternoon, the casket was then closed and delivered to the home of George’s brother, James, who lived at 20 Grove Street in the west end of the city. There, members of the family and friends continued their visitation.
The next day, on January 10, 1908, the body was moved by pallbearers Joe Walcott, John E. Butler, Edward Day, Spencer Riley, James Harris, and Edward Martin and placed in a hearse that drove to the African Methodist Episcopal Church for the final service. At 2:00 p.m., the casket arrived inside the church and was met at the head of the aisle by Rev. T.W. Henderson, the pastor, Rev. E.L. Bell of Chelsea, Rev. Dr. Duckery of Cambridge, Rev. Dr. Harold of Cambridge, and Rev. H.J. Callis of Zion’s Church.
A Mrs. Hutchins played Beethoven’s funeral march on the organ, as the clergymen escorted the body to the front of the pulpit. A women’s quartet offered a hymn, and then, appropriately, Rev. Callis read from the fourteenth chapter of Job. “Man that is born of a woman is of few days and full of trouble,” he read aloud. “He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down; he fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not …”
Rev. Harold offered a prayer, and a woman named Mrs. Gilbert Harris sang a song. The pastor then preached the funeral sermon, taking his text from Hebrews, chapter nine, verse 27: “It is appointed unto man once to die, but after this is the judgment.” Later, with words lost to time, the pastor gave the eulogy. One can easily imagine his thoughts about George Dixon reflecting the challenges of Job.
Afterward the committal service was given, and Rev. Bell offered the benediction. Finally, amid the sounds of crying, the casket was opened so the body could be viewed. In all, it was reported that more than five thousand people passed by the body of the former champion.
Just before 4:00 p.m., the casket was closed for the last time. The clergymen escorted the body down the aisle, where the pallbearers lifted the casket to the waiting hearse. Soon afterward, the hearse left the church with ten carriages carrying George’s admirers and family following behind. The procession made its slow progress south, through the winding streets, in the cool of the winter’s evening, to the temporary resting place near the cemetery, until the spring ground could receive the body of George Dixon.
* * *
In March 1908, The Anaconda Standard reported that plans were being made for Memorial Day, 1908, when “a $1,500 popular subscription monument will be erected to the memory of George Dixon, the late boxing champion. The striking feature of this lasting tribute will be a bronze figure of Dixon of heroic proportions. The statue will be 6 feet 6 inches in height, will be of bronze, and will represent Dixon in costume, standing erect with one hand resting on his hip, the other hanging at his side. The base of the statue will be a block of perfect granite, six feet square and of similar height. In addition a lot has been purchased in Mount Hope cemetery, 7 by 13 feet, at the corner of Maple and Lake avenues. Dixon’s body will be removed to this lot early in the spring with the exercises in connection with the unveiling of the monument on Memorial Day, if the present plans are carried out.”
* * *
In the early spring, a solemn procession followed the casket of George Dixon to Mount Hope Cemetery in Mattapan, near Boston. By the time the body arrived at the cemetery, a quiet darkness had fallen. The procession entered the grounds, passing the stone gateposts, and ambled along a half-mile of path before stopping at an area of new burial ground just across from a large pond. While lanterns were lit around the gravesite, the coffin was lifted from the hearse and placed on the ground. No doubt the lantern light played softly on the numerous floral tributes as final words were offered and the coffin containing George Dixon’s remains was lowered into the open earth.
Some time later, a pink granite stone was placed above George’s grave. On its polished face was a relief carving – a life-like bust of George Dixon. Even after a hundred years, the stone remains a simple yet striking memorial.
Beneath the bust is written “George E. Dixon, July 29, 1870 – January 6, 1908.”
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What John L. Sullivan thought of Dixon’s passing is uncertain, though he no doubt felt a deep sense of loss. George Dixon was a friend who understood his own experiences like no other. It is fitting then that Sullivan, who died in 1918, was buried not far from his friend, just across the street from Dixon, in Mattapan’s Old Calvary Cemetery, beneath a stark, grey obelisk that simply bears the names of John L. Sullivan and his family members.
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On August 29, 1908, The Sun newspaper reported that a memorial fountain for George Dixon had been erected on the corner of Thompson and Broome Streets in New York City. The committee that had first suggested a statue for Dixon’s grave had instead decided that a “watering place” memorial would be a fitting tribute. Terry McGovern and Young Corbett were the “principal factors” in donating funds. The fountain was “one of the most beautiful of its kind in New York.” The street side of the fountain was designed for horses, and the sidewalk side for public use. On the inside wall, surrounded by a wreath, were the words, “In memory of George Dixon. Erected by his friends, 1908.”
The “watering place” monument stood for many years at the corner of Thompson and Broome streets, but over time, as such fountains for horses and the public became out of date, it was removed and discarded for scrap. Two photographs of the fountain remain in the Library of Congress. In one picture, the fountain sits on the sidewalk above a littered street, in front of a wall of advertising posters. Water spews from a lion’s mouth into a large basin. In the other photograph, taken from the opposite side of the fountain, a row of tenement houses sits in the distance.
A sense of loneliness pervades each photograph.