Before closing my little book, I would like to add that I make no pretense of being an author, but found this little experiment an excellent evening pastime. Hoping I have pleased my reader, I am, very truly, GEORGE DIXON.
– George Dixon, “A Lesson in Boxing” (1893)
For all the achievements and accolades George Dixon earned and received in his lifetime, it is surprising how quickly he was forgotten in the years following his death. As memory became history and the years slowly passed, only those boxing fans with an awareness of the sport’s personalities remembered to place Dixon among the ever-changing lists of boxing’s greatest. In 1955, Dixon was inducted into Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame. He earned the same accolade in 1956 in the American Ring Hall of Fame. And in 1990, the International Boxing Hall of Fame formally recognized Dixon among boxing’s greats.
Yet in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where the cham-pion was born, George Dixon only occupies faint space in the city’s memory, with a squat, brick community centre – coincidentally sitting in the same block between Gottingen and Brunswick streets where Letson’s Lane may once have run – that bears his name. On the back wall of the Dixon Centre hangs a faded photo of George. Though nearby residents would likely recognize Dixon’s name and may even recall that Dixon was a title-winning boxer, few would appreciate the full extent of George Dixon’s accomplishments.
Even in the Nova Scotia Sports Hall of Fame, the organization dedicated to remembering sports greats from the province, George Dixon – arguably Nova Scotia’s greatest athlete – warrants only a modest display.
So what, a hundred years since his death, is one to make of George Dixon’s life?
Much, I think.
In the ring, George Dixon was among a select few who crafted what we have come to know as “the sweet science” of boxing. And he reached rarified heights that few pugilists have ever reached. More than this, he was a true artist of the age. Like modern dancer Isadora Duncan, George Dixon explored and pushed the artistic possibilities of athleticism. His art was boxing, plied on a twenty-four-square-foot canvas. And in that space, he created dazzling works of physicality in a medium that had astonishing metaphoric power.
So, too, George Dixon played a meaningful role in shaping the outer edges of the early civil rights movement for Black Americans and Black Canadians. Late in Dixon’s career The Boston Globe offered a keen observation of Dixon’s importance beyond his achievements in the ring. “To him belongs the credit of obliterating the strong prejudices against colored pugilists,” noted the article. “No one better than himself knows how far-reaching was that prejudice. He was compelled at the outset to accept defeat and lose victories on account of it even in the city of his home. Rarely was it that a colored man was permitted to score a victory over a white man, even though the latter was far inferior. The last battle he had in Boston, before going under the management of Tom O’Rourke, illustrates the antagonism there was to him. He knocked out his opponent, a popular white boxer, and the referee, heeding the cries of the spectators, declared the contest a draw, saying it was not right to give a colored man an award over a white man. Those of that crowd of spectators who are now alive are Dixon’s friends and would resent vigorously any attempt to rob him of a victory fairly won.”
Even in a fragmented form, the story of George Dixon’s rise and fall is deeply moving. It is moving because, though few of us have actually stepped into a boxing ring, we all implicitly understand the nature of the fight. We root for or against boxers like George Dixon not merely out of bloodlust – though therein lies much dark truth. Rather, we root for or against boxers like George Dixon because we recognize in their physical and artistic struggle our own fights, our own wins, and our own losses.
If boxing from the late nineteenth century through the late twentieth century reflects our most pointed struggles with class and race, then George Dixon was among our greatest boxers not just because of his extraordinary fights, but because his fights poignantly reflected, in metaphoric form, our collective struggles. George Dixon spent his short life fighting to rise above these collective struggles, to win these fights on sheer talent and will.
And for a time, he did.