Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [603]
The event sent boxing enthusiasm soaring in the city. Fans packed into the Arena, a new saloon on Park Row, for nightly sparring matches, but the sport soon received a serious setback. Sullivan’s victory had helped him promote a second Anglo-Irish fight, two weeks later in White Plains, between Thomas McCoy and Christopher Lilly. This time the Englishman, Lilly, emerged victorious—except that it took him a grueling two hours and forty-one minutes, and he beat his opponent to death, with McCoy literally drowning in his own blood in the 118th round. Outraged by this first fatality in an American ring, the authorities moved quickly to indict all concerned for riot and manslaughter. Lilly’s friends hustled him out of the country, but Sullivan was packed off to Sing Sing after a sensational trial, crowded with urban street fighters and flashily dressed gamblers, in the White Plains courthouse.
An all-out press attack ensued on prizefighting as an attempt by immigrant barbarians to infect American youths—Greeley’s Tribune led the pack against these “festival[s] of fiends”—but it proved impossible to keep down. By the late 1840s the thousands of arriving Irish immigrants underwrote a resurgence of such magnitude that boxing swiftly became the most important spectator sport in the country, and New York City became its national headquarters.
The revival was marked by the great fight in 1849 between Sullivan, now out of jail, and Tom Hyer, a native American butcher. As the sport was still illegal, the combatants had to travel south, to Maryland, and even there were forced to dodge local authorities and throw their hats into a hastily constructed ring. Hyer won the brief (sixteen-round) slugfest, and the new telegraph lines flashed the results to the metropolis. Newsboys hawked bundles of papers, lithographers sold pictures of the fighters, and saloonkeepers (especially at Hyer’s haunt, the Fountain House on Park Row) did a booming business in postbellum merriment.
In the 1850s dozens of bouts took place each year, along with hundreds of sparring exhibitions. A sporting community blossomed, composed of fight connoisseurs, retired pugilists, and active boxers who opened taverns and sporting houses like Jim Gidding’s Old Crib and James Regan’s Clipper Shades. Boxing became big business. The saloon keepers at the heart of the pugilistic community became entrepreneurs: they arranged bouts, gave odds, took bets, chartered steamboats, sold railroad tickets. Fight managers whipped up public excitement by publishing challenges in the paper (an echo of the old aristocratic dueling practice). Publishers played to the new audience by putting out cheap popular pamphlets like The Life and Battles of Yankee Sullivan (1854).
Boxing did not, for the most part, attract the upper classes. There was, to be sure, a coterie of sporting lawyers, brokers, editors, doctors, and clerks who attended the fights, as well as a wider circle of genteel men who followed them in print. Gentry enthusiasts were known as the “fancy,” from which “fan.” But for working-class pugilists and participants, boxing was far more than a thrilling diversion. For the winners, it could be the ticket out of poverty into the middle-class realm wherein saloonkeepers dwelled. And in a world where ordinary men felt increasingly powerless, a tough guy who battled to the top could become an instant hero to those still trapped below.
UNDERWORLD
Betting at ringside allowed b’hoys to display their skill as gamblers, demonstrating their courageous willingness to lose all. Gambling was also a major avocation in most saloons and public houses and, as an affair among friends, had an ancient lineage in the city. Now, however, gambling went pro. Full-time sharpers had begun filtering into New York back in the 1820s, plying its taverns,