• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 625 0

and his residence was in the mythic and tribal part of us. The champ held the chair of “manhood and courage,” quaint notions now, but then heavily valued. What man, warmed by a few drinks, didn’t think he had those qualities in spades; it’s not insignificant that fighters have always been confronted loudly in public, or that John L. Sullivan had to fight his way out of saloons. And the tribalism was palpable, the way a showdown pulsed with generational memory, old tales handed down, and forced millions across a vast and impersonal land mass into a single, compressed attention and expectancy. A champion—and what he did with and to the title—was tracked as closely as the presidents and, indeed, the pictures of Joe Louis and Marciano often hung next to Franklin Roosevelt and JFK in bars and urban living rooms. When JFK called Patterson to the White House, he wanted the unworthy Sonny Liston eliminated and alliance with the constituency of the heavyweight title.

A champion also lived in the eye of hate. After a modest interlude, say a couple of defenses, loathing was soon the dominant emotion. A dethroned champion was much more likeable, defeat was more human, unless he was defending against a foreigner. By losing, he faced what the rabble felt every day, the quixotic nature of life. If he had character, he would come back—just like they would—and he would soar far beyond his original appeal. Of all the champions, only Louis and Marciano would sustain the public’s admiration. Both lacked complexity, a taste for assertion or notoriety. Rocky approached his work like a trade unionist, and if you told him it was snowing in Haiti he would agree. How, then, did a champion become virally unpopular? It took some doing; personal morals were not eyed closely by the press; scandal could impede—only to a point. Usually, it took a jolt to the tribal illusion, something that was in direct conflict to the heart of the real-man qualities expected. A good example was the mauling of Jack Dempsey (1919–1926).

Just before he won the title, Dempsey was accused of avoiding the draft in World War I. The public was pacified when he was formally acquitted and took a “war essential” job in a shipyard. The trouble was a photographer showed up for a couple of shots. There he was in his overalls, with his rivet gun—and in patent leather shoes. He was vilified as a “draft dodger” on the front page. The promoter Tex Rickard seized the chance to match him against Georges Carpentier, a handsome French war hero, who got beaten badly. The public was satisfied only when Gene Tunney beat him. Even so, his rehabilitation took time and was much helped by his opening of a Broadway restaurant where for years he would sit near the big window like a pugilistic artifact, or stand at the door and greet so many tourists and members of the press that he eventually entered the kingdom of the sanctified, patent leather shoes and all.

Romance, idealism, nationalism, it all seems trivial against what was down in the dark boiler works of the ring. “There is so much hate,” Patterson said after the Vegas fight with Ali, “so much contempt inside people…that they hire prizefighters to do their hating for them.” He wasn’t talking about catharsis for people who’ve had too many bad days at work, or resented rising prices. He was talking about the snake of race hatred, race pride, and dominance that had been the engine of boxing since Jack Johnson. When critics were aghast at Ali’s racial thrust, they were being either disingenuous or stupid, at the very least inattentive to history. The ring had always been a test tube for race politics and amateur eugenics (go to the belly of a black man, “they don’t feel nothin’ in the head”; and it was said the black was lazy, unreliable, and would run like a scalded hound in the late rounds).

But it was the champion Jack Johnson who was the bold preface to racial lash. He was an unshuffling, confronting giant, a picaro whose go-to-hell presence and “armfuls of white women” incited white America to fear and a sense of inferiority. Jim Jeffries,