Counterpunch
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Counterpunch

The Cultural Battles over Heavyweight Prizefighting in the American West

Meg Frisbee

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eBook - ePub

Counterpunch

The Cultural Battles over Heavyweight Prizefighting in the American West

Meg Frisbee

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About This Book

Boxing was popular in the American West long before Las Vegas became its epicenter. However, not everyone in the region was a fan. Counterpunch examines how the sport's meteoric rise in popularity in the West ran concurrently with a growing backlash among Progressive Era social reformers who saw boxing as barbaric. These tensions created a morality war that pitted state officials against city leaders, boxing promoters against social reformers, and fans against religious groups. Historian Meg Frisbee focuses on several legendary heavyweight prizefights of the period and the protests they inspired to explain why western geography, economy, and culture ultimately helped the sport's supporters defeat its detractors. A fascinating look at early American boxing, Counterpunch showcases fighters such as "Gentleman" Jim Corbett, Bob Fitzsimmons, and Jack Johnson, the first African American heavyweight champ, and it provides an entertaining way to understand both the growth of the American West and the history of this popular—and controversial—sport.

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Year
2016
ISBN
9780295806440
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THE “SLOGGING” CRAZE IN SAN FRANCISCO
THE THIRD PRIZEFIGHT IN California came off yesterday afternoon and evidences our advancement in civilization and morals
. It had been supposed that this brutal sport would be confined to the Atlantic States, but we are satisfied that the march of civilization is onward and that even the shores of the Pacific cannot escape.” This observation in the Pacific News concluded a brief report describing the bareknuckle boxing match between “McGee” and “Kelly,” a few miles from Mission San Francisco de Asís. Kelly caught McGee under the eye in the third round, “scattering the claret” and winning the side bet for drawing first blood. The side bets for first blood and first knockdown were for twenty-five dollars each. The prize purse totaled one thousand dollars.1 A California miner in 1849 might make sixteen dollars a day. Given the challenges of mining, the appeal of prizefighting is clear, but the legality of the economic activity was not.2
The fighters clashed on October 16, 1850, just over a month after California became a state and lawmakers had prohibited such sport. Critics in California wasted no time censuring prizefighting and maligning the East for allowing its toxic decadence, represented by prizefighting, to spread. If settling the Pacific Coast fulfilled American manifest destiny (as the quotation indicates) then the commentator also understood that the progress of white civilization was not always polite. The unappealing aspects of Euroamerican culture traveled across the continent, in step with its admirable institutions. And already, white Californians were trying to distinguish themselves from the people they had likely left behind only a few years before. The 1850 news piece expressed the crux of California’s relationship with professional boxing in policy and practice over the following forty-five years: while people condemned prizefighting, they were also resigned to its existence. In time, observers would celebrate California’s exceptional contributions to the international sport of prizefighting. Historical reflections are often kinder than the original reactions.
A brief primer on the turn-of-the-century world of prizefighting is necessary to understand fully the changes in both the sport and the people devoted to prohibiting it as time passed. The planned act of two men hitting each other with bare or material-covered fists is at least as old as ancient Greek civilization and likely older. Boxing for a prize, often money, became popular and somewhat formalized in eighteenth-century England. In nineteenth-century America, the pugilistic world was divided between boxers who studied the art and science of hitting and then exhibited their skill in nonlethal sparring matches and the sluggers who participated in fights to the finish for financial reward. The inherent class distinction made the practice of boxing acceptable for the gentleman but prizefighting a despicable vice fit only for the workingman. In this work, the terms boxing, prizefighting, and pugilism are often used interchangeably. Social context will differentiate the manly art from the reviled sport or business of prizefighting. And of course, the athletic sport and the business are closely tied.3
By the middle of the nineteenth century, San Francisco was both the busiest economic region in California and the center of the young prizefight culture in the West. Until the mid-1890s, Bay Area officials declared unofficial independence from the state capital, Sacramento, and ignored any negative criticism from it. As they spurned the state law that prohibited prizefighting, San Francisco authorities claimed local control over public morality. They also facilitated the growth of the small but significant business of professional prizefighting in California. Although the powers assumed by the state steadily increased during the second half of the nineteenth century, San Francisco still comfortably made its own ordinances that conflicted with state laws intended to prohibit prizefighting. State authorities made little effort to enforce the law there. Given that the city’s wealth and power elevated it to the status of most important city on the West Coast during the time, the choice of city officials to disregard state law was unsurprising. Events occurring at only the local level finally prompted a temporary suspension of heavyweight prizefights in San Francisco.4
Two unrelated problems initiated a temporary lull in fighting. The first, brutality, which troubled religious progressives, led to a stoppage of nearly all major matchups in the city during the mid-1890s. A flare up over this concern corresponded with the passage of a new anti-prizefighting statute more stringent than what was already on the books. The second, possible fraud, disenchanted prizefighting’s supporters and weakened their interest in the sport. Neither issue was potent enough to completely end championship prizefighting in California, despite the fact that it had been illegal since 1850.5
Negative attitudes toward prizefighting were conspicuous in early meetings of the California legislature. Lawmakers tried to drown prizefighting in 1850 by prohibiting fighting in general. They established a penalty for any person who fought without deadly weapons “upon previous concert and agreement” for money, a wager, or any reward, as well as for any person present at the fight and assisting in any way. Prizefighting was not mentioned by name, but fighting or “challenging to a fight” constituted disturbing the peace. The maximum punishment for disturbing the peace was two months in prison. The maximum punishment for fighting without deadly weapons was two years in prison. The specification “without deadly weapons” is curious, given that one of the problems cited by anti-prizefighting reformers was that men sometimes died from it. The actions of these lawmakers conflicted with their opinions. State congressmen formed a committee to investigate who from the House had attended a prizefight the previous day and how they had behaved at the match. Inappropriate personal conduct could increase the severity of the social crime of attending a prizefight. Clearly, California lawmakers also disregarded their own decrees, undermining the strength of law. In January 1850, the doorkeeper of the House, John Warrington, lost his post after being absent without leave “to participate in, or witness a brutal prizefight.”6 Unelected servants of the government could be punished, but Warrington was only one of many fight enthusiasts.
Revisions to the legal code prohibiting prizefighting after 1850 attest to the ongoing popularity of the sport and to an enduring opposition to it. In 1872, California’s first set of penal codes enacted section 412, which addressed prizefighting by name. The code encompassed fighters, promoters, trainers, referees, and physicians and promised the same maximum two-year sentence for violators as in the statutes.7 Spectators were not directly identified but the category “otherwise” in the list of possible offenders extended to them. When enforcing the code, officers of the law warned fans as well as fighters. Fans’ complicity in the illegal contests would be officially recognized in later years. The prizefight problem was now greater than two combatants corrupting each other. Regulations would continue to increase incrementally over the next two decades as the sport increased in national notoriety.
According to the legislative record, Californians tried to be civilized. The codes undoubtedly banned prizefighting. Words and actions are of course two very different things. Both, however, concern personal and public perception. The law books created the right national image for a young western state, but California’s first lawmakers occasionally went to the fights, a fact that might not have gone beyond state borders. But the more prohibitive words they wrote, the more the problem seemed to grow. California’s reputation for friendliness to the sport despite the official position against it only grew as time passed. Why was prizefighting so difficult to destroy when it seemed relatively new? Perhaps the historical precedent for violent sport in California fertilized the territory for the cultivation of prizefighting.
In fact, blood sport in the region well predated California statehood, and the European effort to “civilize” the region dates back to the Spanish missions of the eighteenth century. Leisure activities that many nineteenth-century Americans found repugnant had a lively following during the Mexican and California territorial periods, when the popular amusements of bullfighting and bear-baiting drew crowds to a ring to cheer violence. Horseracing, an important attraction to Spanish and later Mexican inhabitants, galloped into the American era and became extremely popular with wealthy citizens in California who had enjoyed the sport in the East. Betting on the outcomes of all types of spectator sports was not new to California immigrants. Society in Mexican California had accepted blood sports, competition, and gambling. American San Francisco had been a gambling town since the days of the gold rush, and men of all classes and ethnicities participated in games of chance, whether they rolled dice or invested in confidence schemes. Two men walloping each other was enjoyable sport as well as an exciting opportunity to participate in the risky economies that seemed to define early American California.8
The arrival of the gold rush miners, however, coincided with some of the first reports of prizefighting in California. Notes on these contests appeared regularly, and with some detail, in newspapers during the early statehood period. The Alta California reported in February 1850 that Woolley Kearney had knocked out the Sydney Slasher on Goat Island (Yerba Buena) in a challenge that went twenty-five rounds in thirty minutes.9 When the Pacific News reported on the “march of civilization” and the McGee and Kelly prizefight, the tone was critical yet the reader learned the location, the names of the combatants, their attire, the amount of the purse, the terms of the side bet, the number of spectators, the length of the fight in rounds and minutes, and the result. The reporter devoted far more lines to the fight than to his moralizing editorial. The California Police Gazette, a weekly criminal news and sporting magazine similar to the National Police Gazette, began delivering ring reports and gossip in 1859. Mark Twain mocked the breathless reporting and popularity of prizefighting in California when he penned a piece on a political battle in 1863. Californians, and people around the country, had normalized the illegal activity.10
The East glimpsed boxing in the West in the 1860s through literary pieces by Bret Harte, who composed columns for the Christian Register in Boston. Harte treated Register readers, many of them presumably Christian, to the shenanigans of their western brethren. Although New Englanders were no strangers to the prize ring, the clever author’s work implicitly divided eastern behavior from western. In 1867, a group of Californians, including “many solid, respectable, and church-going citizens,” participated in a ruse to see Tommy Chandler fight Doony Harris at Crystal Springs in San Mateo County, about twenty miles from San Francisco. Tickets to the event had “Picnic” printed on them. The sheriff of San Mateo County was not deceived by the charade. Even if he had been, the newly constructed arena with seating for three thousand spectators was cause for suspicion. The sheriff prevented the fight without major incident, and Harte noted that while the Californians were crazed for the battle, they did not want to physically harm the sheriff. Chandler broke Harris’s jaw when the fight finally transpired two days later. These citizens, in Harte’s telling, willingly submitted to the law when confronted with its representative, but were otherwise apt to disobey when it suited them.11
Harte’s tale highlights the fact that pulling off an illegal bout required careful orchestration of the fighters, fans, and press. The day before the Chandler-Harris bout, location unknown, the Alta California discussed the fight and predicted that “several people will be looking at ranch properties in Marin county” the following day; the paper also noted the several fishing boats chartered by “private parties” for the next day. Helpfully, a list of boats leaving for Marin County was also provided. The tip, pointing north rather than south to San Mateo County, might have been planned misdirection or the result of rampant rumor. Chandler and Harris actually completed their match in Contra Costa County, and Chandler won what the papers called the middleweight championship of America. The Associated Press reporter found his way to the fight ground; the county sheriff did not. Authorities complicated the execution of prizefights but both fighters and fans were determined, regardless of obstacles and the time and distance necessary to circumvent them, to consummate the agreement to fight. Harte gave easterners the measure of the crafty westerners.12
Even when cornered by incontrovertible evidence of their wrongdoing, pugilists and spectators often wriggled out of trouble with the help of the legal system. In 1884, a jury acquitted two men charged with engaging in a prizefight. At the trial, one of the accused, John Howard, claimed that he had fallen during what he defined as a sparring match. Posters actually advertised that his contest with Hugh Cottle was for $250 a side. Howard, it seemed, was just tired from demonstrating the proper methods for throwing a punch and defending against one, and Cottle gave him a strong push.13 The jury did little to create fear of the anti-prizefighting law, and its vote for acquittal suggests that the sport was not objectionable to all citizens. Two years later, fighters and fans caught in the act in an Oakland theater rolled out of windows fifteen feet above ground to escape a fine. “Lawyers, actors, doctors, merchants, pugilists, and toughs” were among the escapees from the “Buffalo” Costello and Tom Cleary fight for the middleweight championship of the Pacific Coast. They apparently recognized that their actions were illegal and that they could face consequences, but the level of enforcement and punishment did not deter them from attending.14
Law enforcement’s habit of turning a blind eye to prizefights or of letting crowds disperse in a friendly manner, without arrest, indicates that prizefights ranked low on their list of crimes to prevent or stop. The thousands of people who congregated to cheer the pugs knew that what they were doing was against the law; otherwise, they would have no need for fight sites distant from the city, deceptions to dupe county sheriffs, and escape routes out windows. These feats became less necessary in California as changes in American culture in the 1870s contributed to more instances of prizefighting and eventually, to a serious effort to suppress them.
A movement espousing a new kind of white male physical culture developed in the post–Civil War era that indirectly influenced the legality of boxing matches in San Francisco and elsewhere. The new ideal male was not the rugged outdoorsman of the Davy Crockett mold but the clean and civilized muscle man, eventually represented by men such as Theodore Roosevelt. The body was a visible marker of manhood in the late nineteenth century, and boxing required nurturing masculine muscles and exercising precise control over them. The physical result of boxing training was aesthetically pleasing and tied directly to the reassertion of white male culture at the approach of the twentieth century. Sparring demonstrations were fashionable among the upper class as a prescription for the “overwomenized” and “overcivilized” parts of Victorian society, and many professional fighters earned income as trainers to men who wished to pursue the manly art of amateur boxing. However, training one’s body with the specific purpose of pummeling another man, perhaps to death, voided the benefits of the physical development of the body. Broken jaws, jabs below the belt, and the general bloodiness that marred the sculpted muscle had no part in the aesthetic ideal.15
The worship of the body also had a religious element. Muscular Christianity, an offshoot of the trend, celebrated the vigorous yet civilized male. E...

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