Doc - Mary Doria Russell [151]
For millennia, one man had squared off against another on a point of honor or simply to settle a question, here and now, once and for all. Which of us is stronger? Which more fearless and more fearsome? Which of us is the better man? In all that time, empires had risen and flourished and stumbled and failed. Maps of the world had been drawn and redrawn; globes had been invented. Wars and revolutions and science and industry had changed everything—but not boxing. It took the Lilly-McCoy fight to do that.
As a kid, Bat Masterson studied accounts of the match the way better-educated boys read The Iliad. In Bat’s opinion, the fight should have been stopped in the seventy-seventh round, and he was probably right. Even then, long before it was over, McCoy was in bad shape. All the newspapermen agreed about that, and they’d recorded his condition in lascivious detail. Lips grotesquely swollen. Blackened eyes puffed to slits. Broad chest red and slimy with the blood he vomited in quick, efficient gouts during the half-minute rest between the rounds. The darling of Irish immigrants, Tom McCoy would not concede, and swore he’d die before he’d let a fucking Englishman like Christopher Lilly best him. Cocky to the end, McCoy went 119 rounds, surviving a total of two hours and forty-one minutes until—choking on blood, blinded by it, speechless but head up and still defiant—he staggered into the ring from his corner, toed the scratch mark one last time, and fell down, stone-cold dead.
There were other fights that lasted as long or longer, fought by men as good or better, but the Lilly-McCoy event took on a larger meaning the moment Irish Tom died. Chris Lilly was forced to flee the country, skipping out ahead of a manslaughter charge. Eighteen others involved with the contest were arrested, tried, convicted, fined, and jailed.
Freelance scolds seized on boxing as a new source of indignation to fuel America’s rancorous political debates. People who’d never given boxing a thought—ladies and maiden aunties, for the love of Christ!—developed opinions about the sport. Rather than celebrate the victor’s unflagging sledgehammer power and the loser’s astonishing stamina, reformers attacked Lilly as a savage beast who had transformed McCoy’s face from the image of God into a loathsome ruin. The indomitable McCoy became a pitiable, doomed lamb led to the slaughter, and not the roaring, valorous, dying lion he was, refusing to be vanquished even as he was beaten.
Suddenly boxing was a thing to be loathed and done away with, like slavery and alcohol. Abolitionists rammed legislation through in state after state, until the fights were outlawed almost everywhere. “Goddam do-gooder busybodies,” Bat’s father always muttered whenever the subject came up, and it did so often.
Thomas Masterson was a hardworking, law-abiding man who’d never raised a hand in anger, not even against Bat, who might have benefited from a clout across the ear now and then. What Bat’s father couldn’t stand was reformers telling him what to do and think. Following the fights was a way to poke windbag meddlers in the eye. Tom Masterson did so with a boyish glee that he passed on to his sons, and he was not alone.
Across the country, boxing became more popular every year, for the new laws added the thrill of the illicit to the excitement of the sport. Arrangements were negotiated in secret, and word would go out: “A match tonight!” Sometimes the cops would catch wind and show up before the thing was settled, so fight promoters got craftier. Soon entire passenger trains called “Hell on Wheels” could be hired to transport the pugilists and the referees and spectators and bookies and bartenders and whores to a place nobody knew ahead of time. The train would stop in whatever isolated field took the brakeman’s fancy that evening. A ring would be scraped out into the dirt with a boot heel and boxers would put up and toe the line under the stars. Prize money and crowds soared into the thousands.
Then, in 1861, the whole damn country