Ten years have passed since Shadowboxing – the first full-length biography of George Dixon – was published. As with many books, this small volume entered the reading world with little fanfare and modest expectations. A few interviews on radio and television followed, some encouraging reviews in boxing magazines and the local papers appeared, and some book signings were done. And that was that.
Until it wasn’t.
Not unlike George Dixon’s life, Shadowboxing soon took on a unique life of its own. In 2013, Shadowboxing: the rise and fall of George Dixon won the Evelyn Richardson Non-Fiction Award, Nova Scotia’s oldest and most prestigious non-fiction book award (meaning that, more than 100 years after his death, George was a champion again). Then, slowly but steadily, I began receiving requests from Canada, the United States, and Europe for signed copies.
And they kept coming.
In one enjoyable instance, I received a letter in my mailbox – a delightfully personal page, composed in a rather engaging cursive – from former NBA player Mike “Stinger” Glenn, who maintained a museum of African American athletes, also requesting a personalised, autographed copy.
I was honoured.
Later, academics working in the fields of African American and sports history, reached out with questions about George’s story with idea of fitting him into a broader social and historical context. At the same time, thirty or so university libraries, and many more public libraries around the world, purchased Shadowboxing for their collections. And back home, the Nova Scotia Department of Education made a point of purchasing copies for all public-school libraries. It seemed that George’s story, lost for a century in obscurity, was now being rediscovered.
I was pleased.
In 2016, George became an inaugural inductee to the Maritime Sports Hall of Fame. And in 2018, he was celebrated among the “Top 15 Athletes Nova Scotia’s Greatest Athletes” (where he occupied the number six spot). During that celebration, he was reintroduced as an inaugural inductee in the Nova Scotia Sports Hall of Fame. (Of course, George had long occupied a space Canadian Sport Hall of Fame, the Ring Magazine Hall of Fame, and the International Boxing Hall of Fame.)
In Halifax, two new public installations celebrating George’s life and accomplishments were unveiled. One was a grand celebratory sign at the George Dixon Centre, and the other was a lively mural painted in Africville. On four occasions since the book was published, filmmakers expressed serious interest in bringing George’s story to the screen. And recently, in 2021, a second biography was published, one rich with additional details of George’s life and one with an academic interest in exploring those important social and historical themes.
I was amazed, but I wondered.
Why was George’s story garnering so much attention?
It was hard to say.
I know I was first drawn to George Dixon’s life for the classic themes of courage and character in the face of opposing forces, in what I thought was going to be a familiar tale of heroic pluck and mettle in battle, in which an ordinary soul is elevated to the extraordinary. And yet, as I unearthed more details of George’s life, I discovered something quite different, something quite singular. Yes, George was an innovator as a boxer, but his true creation was a unique narrative that has become so familiar that it seems almost cliché. You see, George created the modern athletic hero’s archetype. His was a life’s story that transcended the life.
And yet, as the last decade has shown me, George’s life was becoming something like a mirror for the moment, meaning his life was one in which the viewer could see what he or she wanted to see. In his new biography, for instance, George Dixon is described as a “complicated man with a complicated legacy.”
Except I didn’t see that.
For me, George Dixon spent his life playing against the expectations of his age, living his life on its own terms. And in doing so, perhaps his life seemed “complicated” to those expecting the familiar. Rather than finding George complicated, I found clarity in his life’s purpose. I saw George as an artist, whose palette was the ring, and his paint, the story his life would tell. His artistic expression was so forceful, in fact, that it cut a deep, wide path through the forest of time for others to travel. Still, the same biographer also suggested that George was “indifferent to race.”
Except I didn’t see that, either.
Instead, I encountered a man keenly aware of the colour of his skin and how that colour tried to shape his life. George consciously, and with clear calculation, pushed back on that idea. Let’s not forget that, at the Carnival of Champions in 1892 in New Orleans, where he was the first Black headliner in the deep south at the height of lynching in America, George Dixon demanded that people of colour be given hundreds of seats to watch.
And he got them.
Then George Dixon made a point at that event of beating his white opponent, the hapless Jack Skelly, to an overworked pulp in eight rounds before finally dispatching him. George was hardly “indifferent to race.” He just would not be defined by “race” or by others’ expectations of who or what he should be.
Or at least that was my understanding of George Dixon.
I lay no claim to being an academic or to being the sole teller of George’s story anymore. I leave to others the important exploration of sociology and history and theory and George’s part in them. I am just a storyteller, with a creative writer’s intuitive sense of people, place, and motivation. Mind you, in the time we spent together, I think I got to know George reasonably well. For me, George’s life was far more than the sum of his parts, and his personal world was rightly mysterious – as it should be.
In the ten years that have followed the publication of Shadowboxing, I suspect that George Dixon’s life has become compelling because his story was one of pushing back on expectations of “race” and place and people, which puts his story at the start of the proto-civil rights movement, meaning I think there is a line to be drawn from George’s life through the civil rights and equal rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s to today with the Black Lives Matter movement and the emerging collective consciousness that we should, once again, question our expectations of “race” and place and people. Certainly, George Dixon was a man of his time, but his story, as told in Shadowboxing, was a tale for the ages. And now, it seems, George’s story has grown beyond Shadowboxing .
This pleases me the most.
Not long after I published the book, I received a message from the wonderful writer Charles Saunders, who recently passed away. “Thank you for writing about George Dixon,” he said, “a man who was small in stature but huge in significance.”
Indeed, he was.
In 2021 the Government of Canada designated George Dixon as a person of national historic significance.
Steven Laffoley
Halifax, Nova Scotia, 2022