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with puzzlement that afternoon in the old gymnasium, figuring he was going to get his block knocked off by Hanks. As a freshman Wister knew Roosevelt only by reputation but was pulling for him as the well-muscled underdog of the bout. According to the Advocate, it was a “spirited contest,” but Hanks got the “best of his opponent” by his impressive “quickness and power of endurance.” Yet something occurred that afternoon that Wister never forgot, and years later he showcased it as the prized anecdote of his memoir Roosevelt: The Story of a Friendship. According to Wister, amazingly, near defeat, Roosevelt, by virtue of his good sportsmanship, became the real winner of the Harvard bout. As Wister put it, the packed crowd witnessed that “prophetic flash of the Roosevelt that was to come.”

At one point during the bout, in accordance with the Queensberry rules, the referee called time-out, thereby ending a round. However, in the frenzy of the fight, Hanks didn’t hear the referee’s intervention, and just as Roosevelt relinquished his guard, Hanks smashed him in the face. Blood spurted everywhere. The audience gasped; boos and hisses filled the gym. What a cheap shot! But Roosevelt held a boxing glove up in a theatrical gesture, demanding silence from the crowd. “It’s all right,” he reassured the crowd. “He didn’t hear him.”3

As Wister recounted in his memoir, he watched mesmerized as the junior walked over to Hanks with extended hand, simply refusing to be victimized. (Some scholars, however, doubt the veracity of Wister’s story, feeling that the novelist had probably confabulated the bloody-champ aspect of the spectacle.4) With his fine eye for nuance, Wister noticed that Roosevelt’s conciliatory gesture combined dash and spirit. “He was his own limelight, and could not help it,” Wister surmised; “a creature charged with such voltage as his, became the central presence at once, whether he stepped on a platform or entered a room.”5 One can only imagine how proud Alice Lee must have felt learning that her Theodore won over the crowd’s heart by losing the boxing match with such dignity. (Wister intimated that Lee was among the spectators, but it seems unlikely.)

Although Roosevelt kept collecting a multitude of birds, as 1879 turned to 1880 he toyed with the idea of a career in politics for the first time. Business or law brought home income; ornithology clearly didn’t. Also, he was itching to be a public servant for the state of New York; politics ran deep in the family gene pool. Upon his engagement to Alice Lee in February, in fact, he wrote Minot a very telling letter about his future plans. “I have made everything subordinate to winning her,” he wrote, “so you can perhaps understand a change in my ideas as regards to science.” Roosevelt’s main goal in life, as he put it, was to “keep up” the family name.6 He and Alice would marry in October. “Natural History was to remain a genuine avocation,” his biographer Carleton Putnam rightly noted in Theodore Roosevelt: The Formative Years, “but it never loomed again as a feasible career.” 7

By Roosevelt’s senior year at Harvard his classmates respected him for more than just losing boxing bouts and misplacing turtles at 16 Winthrop with a patrician air. Everywhere he walked on campus (or took his dogcart, pulled by his favorite horse, Lightfoot) he was met with “uproarious cordiality.” The combination of having his own horse plus his doggedness and vitality had made Roosevelt legendary by his junior and senior years. Everybody had to admit that Roosevelt was sui generis, that he wore no man’s collar. Although President Eliot later scoffed that Roosevelt took “soft courses” during his last years, keeping a “very light schedule,” he nevertheless received A’s and B’s. Reading over his journal for the senior year 1879–1880 makes it clear that Roosevelt’s worst problem was insomnia. Unable to turn off his mind, he’d spend “night after night” walking by himself in the Cambridge woods near Fresh Pond, sometimes never catching even a couple of hours of shut-eye.8 It appears that Roosevelt