Boxing

Boxing is on one level simply an athletic contest between two persons, each of whom uses the fists to try to knock the other unconscious or to inflict enough punishment to cause the opponent either to quit or to be judged beaten. A boxing match is conducted under established rules and procedures and has a referee, judges, and timekeeper -- all conventions instituted to make the sport more like a sport and less like a fight and to insure that the participants are not permanently harmed.

The history of boxing has been in more or less equal parts violence, strength, the attempt to redefine violence instead of strength as the essential quality for an athlete and corruption, for boxing has almost always had a fair amount of money floating around it. It is perhaps inevitable that any sport that includes both money and violence must also be corrupted by extralegal forms of violence as well. This paper examined corruption in boxing between the years 1876 and 1917.

Before beginning to look at this particular and rather troubled period of boxing's history, a brief summary of what boxing is and how it developed into a sport up to the end of the 19th century will be helpful to put that era of boxing into context as sport. For the culture of boxing in the decades between the Civil War and the end of World War I did not arise out of a vacuum but was the product of very particular historical and social circumstances, including English common-law definitions of battery, the Puritan herita

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tes between nationalism and Protestantism. Americans began to be tired of jibes from European visitors and commentators both on the state of American sport and on the state of the American man as weak and untrained, and many political groups saw the possibility of raising the reputation of both the American athlete in particular and the American male in general by encouraging the sport of boxing. But to do this, boxing had to overcome one of its most important legal hurdles, which was that it was considered more of a crime than a sport under English common law. Throughout the early 1880s the devotees of the sport bribed and dodged police, sneaked off to some anchored barge, wooded glade, or barn to witness a fight but keeping ever alert to a possible raid by authorities. Not only were these fights considered brutal, but the competitors had difficulty confining their pugilistic pursuits to the ring. Moreover, the character of many fight enthusiasts was objectionable, and gambling frequently led to riots among the spectators. While this period predates the one under consideration here, it is essential to consider it to understand the culture of boxing later in the 19th century, for if it had had a different birth then it would ha

Category: History - B