BOXING AS A BAROMETER OF THE RACIAL STRUGGLE

I happened to be living in Los Angeles when the George Floyd protests swept through the city last year. They were for the most part peaceful, but there were outbursts of fairly severe rioting and looting, especially in my old neighborhood of Mid-City West. I will always remember what it was like to see the vehicles of the National Guard rolling through my streets at night, while in the distance helicopters throbbed and the voices of an angry crowd could be heard, almost like waves at the ocean. It seemed terribly surreal and dystoptian, but in a sense it also seemed overdue.

These protests had very complex and deep-rooted origins, and were no doubt exacerbated by the need of people to expend energy after months of pandemic lockdown conditions, but at the heart of them, obviously, was race. Race is an issue over much of the globe -- including Africa -- but in the United States it has a peculiar character. The U.S. was not the last country in the Americas to rid itself of chattel slavery, that distinction falls to Brazil, but we practiced it so long, and on a scale so vast, that it became part of the social fabric of the nation -- even that quite substantial part of the nation which rejected it. And contrary to popular opinion, racism did not create American slavery. Racism, as a philosophy, was cobbled together as a means of justifying its existence. And it was here, really, that the true poison was introduced into our bloodstream, for the justification persisted after slavery itself was forcibly abolished and destroyed.

The mechanics of racism are now, in 2021, as peculiar as the mechanics of slavery were in 1859. The idea that a person could be bitterly anti-slavery and yet also deeply racist is difficult for the modern mind to grasp, but it was a common syndrome before the Civil War and remained one when the war finally ended. Nobody today would admit that they wanted a return of race-based chattel slavery, but this does not prevent millions from holding opinions almost morally indistinguishable from those of an antebellum slaveowner. Indeed, it is not difficult to coax forth statements even from people who would laugh at the idea that they themselves harbor any form of racism or racial self-loathing (they are ultimately the same), which expose the ugliness of their inner beliefs.

What does this have to do with boxing, you ask? Quite a bit, actually. Sports are and always have been a kind of cultural barometer of the nation which embraces them. In the U.S., a nation which prides itself on its virility, we have had a highly complex relationship with our combat sports, most especially boxing. Boxing, which became fashionable 20 years after the Civil War, was an enormously popular sport with "white America" when racial laws and social mores prevented, or at least made very difficult, whites and blacks from fighting each other. Those who controlled our social order frowned on the idea of white and black fighters mixing it up because they did not want blacks thinking that punching whites in the face was something to be encouraged. Psychology also came into play: one of the means by which slavery and later, Jim Crow, were perpetuated was the idea that the black man, by allowing himself to be enslaved for so long, was not actually a man at all: he he might be physically strong but he was mentally and spiritually weak. He was something less than, inferior, near-human but not quite. The heavyweight champion then, by extension, could not be black, since to be heavyweight champ was by accepted definition to be the man, the ultimate specimen of the sex. This at any rate is a thesis maintained by some who study social phenomena. Even Martin Luther King, Jr. made reference to it, albeit not in the context of boxing.

In point of fact, blacks and whites often fought during the early years of professional boxing, which is generally agreed upon as coming into existence in 1885, when the first heavyweight champion was crowned. Blacks, however, were not "encouraged" to fight for world titles, and many were simply denied the opportunity for the entirety of their careers. Racism itself was not always the main factor: many promoters who would have been happy to book black fighters in title contests were simply frightened of potential race riots. George Dixon, a black Canadian, won the world bantamweight championship in 1888, and as Carolyn Lee Adams wrote:

Dixon’s life was marked by the times in which he lived. Post-Civil War America was rife with fierce racism, and Dixon’s career was a lightning rod for this hate. Dixon participated in a “Carnival of Champions” at the Olympia Club in New Orleans. When Dixon beat the brakes off Jack Skelly, his white opponent, the reaction of the crowd was so dangerously intense that many promotions put a halt to mixed-race bouts.

Further proof of this is offered in the heavyweight championship reign of Jack Johnson. Johnson was the first black man to hold the title, and in the span of his reign (1908 - 1915), he was the target of much harassment and vitriol, even from the government. A black heavyweight champion was intolerable to the social order, and when Johnson was finally knocked out by Jess Willard, a white man, the powers that be made sure no black man would challenge for the crown for many years afterward. Jack Dempsey, a white fighter who held the title from 1919 - 1926, confirmed this in his autobiography. Often criticized for never fighting a black challenger, Dempsey, who had frequently fought and beat blacks as a contender, remarked that it was the politics of boxing which prevented it: his promoters "didn't want another Jack Johnson situation" where the outcome of any fight might end in a race riot.

Eventually they got this "situation" anyway, in "The Brown Bomber," Joe Louis, who was champion so long (1937 - 1949) that the public finally came to accept that the best man -- not the best white man, but the best man -- was going to win and should in fact win. Indeed, as the 20th century hit and then surpassed its halfway mark, a marked racial change slowly began to make itself felt in the boxing world. The sport, which had always had a massive number of whites in every weight class, especially American whites, and in top contention / championship level, began increasingly to become a black and, in the lower weight classes, a Latino concern. The last "lineal" white heavyweight champions of the 20th century were Rocky Marciano (1952 - 1956) and Ingemar Johansson (1959 - 1960). From 1960 - 2009, the lineal title was held exclusively by black fighters. This was bitter medicine to some, but as the years wore on, it became accepted that the time of white Americans, or indeed, any white men period, holding "the most prestigious title in pro sports" was over: done and dusted. It was never, or very rarely discussed in an open way, but many seemed to feel that black men, who were already dominant in basketball and to a somewhat lesser extent football, had now inverted the earlier stereotype of "not being men:" they alone seemed to possess the masculinity necessary to dominate combat sports at the premier level. This surrender of masculine agency by American whites was a curious phenomena, in some sense understandable, in some sense disgusting, and in a final sense slightly amusing, as many disgusting things tend to be. When I was growing up in the 80s, it was taken as a matter of course that one "always bet on the black guy" (one of the biggest laughs in 1988s THE NAKED GUN came when Leslie Nielsen's character uttered this line). Commenting on ROCKY IV (1985), the black director Spike Lee notoriously remarked that "the only way you'll ever see two white men fight for the heavyweight title is in a movie."

The fact that a comment as blatantly racist as this did not provoke much if any outrage or even notice by the big public goes far in underscoring the perculiar dynamics of race in the United States, but it also highlighted the unspoken belief that possession of the heavyweight title by a particular race was still seen as a confirmation of its athletic and masculine primacy. This was doubly bizarre and distasteful when one considers that the idea of national superiority manifesting itself through sports was concieved first by the Nazis, who used the medal count at the 1936 Olympics to tout their theories of Aryan supremacy (though the Jesse Owens story is inspiring, Germany completely dominated the count with 89 medals, 33 of which were gold; the next-highest contender was the U.S., with 56 medals and 24 golds). Later still, the Soviet Communists, who in effect were not less bload-soaked than the Nazis, took up the idea that athletic domination proved the superiority of their ideology. One almost had to struggle to remember that sports are competitions between people before they are confrontations between races or ideas.

As recently as 1996, this mentality was on display with THE GREAT WHITE HYPE, a comedy about an attempt by cynical boxing promoters to create, more or less out of thin air, a white contender to challenge a dominant black champion. It is taken for granted by everyone throughout the movie that such a thing is an impossibility, and indeed it proves to be; yet it is also taken for granted that the public will pay to see the mismatch: whites out of hope for a white champion, and blacks, presumably, to see the white guy get knocked out. The fact that everyone regards these response as natural and inevitable, both in the movie and among the audience, is at the core of the problem.

The individual nature of boxing, and the savagery of it, have been coupled with humanity's curious need to find avatars and proxies, to transpose identity, to choose champions who represent us as people. A nation of tens or hundreds of millions, or even a race of billions, places its hopes within one man, and takes his victory as their victory and his defeat as their defeat. This is fascinating and absurd, and has elements of tragedy in it, as Jerry Cooney, Jerry Quarry and Tommy Morrison could tell you. And it could be argued that the way "white America" adapted to this percieved humiliation was to switch mental gears, and begin to swap racial for nationalistic enthusiasm. Instead of being proud that the heavyweight champion was white, they could instead take pride in the fact that the heavyweight champion was, from 1960 - 1998, always an American. Race did not leave the picture by any means, but at the most convenient possible time it was overlaid with nationalism: and crowds of Yanks chanting "U.S.A.! U.S.A.!" when an American fought a foreigner were at any rate preferable to mobs screaming racial slurs at a fellow citizen. It was progress of a dubious sort, but it was distinctly progress. Then another curious thing happened. Black men -- whether American or not -- lost what might be called their collective grip on the crown.

It has been said that if you live long enough, you will see the wheel turn all the way 'round.
When the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991, it unlocked a gigantic population of perspective and actual athletes from both the former Soviet republics and Eastern European countries who had been debarred from professional competition by virtue of Communist ideology. These people -- these white people -- made themselves felt slowly but steadily throughout the 1990s in many sports, but probably none so dramatic as boxing. When Spike Lee made his comment, there was no virtually no prospect of a white man of any nationality taking any version of the heavyweight title. Within a few years of him uttering it, there was no version of that title which was held by a black man. Indeed, the last black champion to hold the lineal heavyweight crown was Lennox Lewis, who retired in 2004. Since then, mostly Ukranian and Russian fighters held the various titles, and the lineal title has been in white hands since 2009. It is presently held by Tyson Fury, a white British gypsy, who took it from Wladimir Klitschko, a white Ukranian. It is a similar story in other weight classes. At the time of this writing, and notwithstanding vacancies, between 140 lbs and heavyweight, there are no lineal black champions at all. This is a state of affairs that was unimaginable only 20 years ago.

Now, you could be forgiven for asking why I claim any of this matters at all. Many factors play into why a man chooses to become a prize fighter, and they are generally economic before they are anything else. The decline of "white fortunes" in boxing for 50-odd years certainly had more to do with a decline in white participation than any other factor, and whites participated less because the economic circumstances of Italians, Irish and other white ethnic subgroups improved, removing the necessity of fighting for a living. Nevertheless, the fact remains that the decline of those white fortunes did not sit well with "white America" and had to be dealt with psychologically, just as it did sit well with "black America" and became part of what might be called black identity. But that is why the subject is in fact important. It matters not because it is happening and has happened, but because the reaction of the world to the shift of control over the "most prized title in sports" from one race to another has mostly been indifference. Nobody, or very nearly nobody, seems to care that Tyson Fury is white, because few people view the possession of his title as proof of anything except that he is the best heavyweight on the planet. There is no significance to him holding the crown beyond that, no racial or ethnic subtext. In the buildups to Fury's two fights with Deontay Wilder, a black American heavyweight, I did not see one mention, anywhere, of the hated and disgusting phrase "Great White Hope." Nor did I even seem much in the way of nationalistic drum-beating, such as I witnessed years ago when Ray Mercer fought Lennox Lewis, or Mike Tyson fought Frank Bruno. Even what is called "black Twitter" took Wilder's loss more with humor than upset: there was some upset, certainly, but Wilder's attempts to make excuses for his defeat were met with ridicule, and no one framed the fight as "Wilder lost" but rather "Fury won." This is telling. When a "side" doesn't want to admit defeat, they always frame the defeat in terms of mistakes their "side" made, and never credit the "enemy."

I view this is a progress. Perhaps it's a sorry commentary on the human race (or just myself), but this seeming breakdown of tribal reactions to athletic contests strikes me as proof that people are waking up to the absurdity of loading deeper meanings into a fight between two men -- and beyond that, seeing a need to identify with a fighter because he shares the same racial characteristics and for no other reason. In time, the racial demographics of boxing champions will shift again, and it will be telling to observe our cultural barometer and gauge the extent to which anyone notices or cares.

As I said at the opening, the mechanics of racism (and by extension, nationalism, which is kissing cousin to racism) are bizarre and complicated. They lie deeply rooted in our history, and often manifest in subtle or unconscious ways. We learned a great deal about how ideas have evolved in this country in 30 years by contrasting the difference in public reaction to the Rodney King beating vs. the murder of George Floyd. Likewise, the means by which athletic contests are reported in the press and discussed on social media can give us a surprisingly clear picture of where we have made progress humans, and where there is still much work to be done.