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A brief history of the fight game

Clearing up some misconceptions


 

 

Oglala author Ed McGaa told me of a time, some 70 years ago, when he gloved up and boxed noted Oglala journalist Tim Giago.

“He won,” Ed told me. “They matched us up because we were the same size, but to be fair, he was older than me.” Giago recalls that he flattened McGaa with a left hook.

In those days, boxing was something school kids were encouraged to participate in. Lakota like McGaa and Giago displayed a knack for the “sweet science,” but even back then, in a remote part of the country like western South Dakota, gyms which taught the basic skills knowledgeably were already fast disappearing.

Organized prize fighting began in England several centuries back. A lord might match his bull-necked coachman, Bill, against his cousin’s cat quick farrier, Jim, and then all the gentry would wager heavily on the outcome. Bouts were bare-knuckle, inside a roped square, and fighters could wrestle and throw, but could not kick, strike a blow below the waist, or bite, gouge, scratch or head butt. Hair pulling was legal, so most shaved their heads before a bout.

There were no judges, no scoring, just a single referee. A round ended whenever a fighter went down for any reason, and the bout did not end until a fighter failed to “make scratch,” could not walk from his corner unassisted and place his toes against a line. Hence the expression, “toe the line.”

That made the sport extremely dangerous, and men sometimes died, and understandably prize fighting was illegal, but the gentry were allowed to persist in staging bouts, provided they exercised discretion. Bouts were held in isolated places, and code language was created to talk about the particulars. The gentry needed a name for themselves, so they called themselves the Fancy. They needed to talk about the wager, because that was why they even cared about prize fighting or horse racing, the wager.

If a fighter was going to throw a fight, you marked an “X” in your letter, for a cross, and if he was going to pretend to throw the fight, but actually intended to win, you marked your correspondence with an “XX,” or double cross. Hence the expressions, “He crossed me. He double crossed me.”

For centuries fighters fought under the Rules of the London Prize Ring. But as the gentry faded, as working people gained stature and money from the Industrial Revolution, modern boxing rules appeared, under the Marquis of Queensbury. Rounds were three minutes, a minute rest in between. No wrestling, throwing.

The harsh truth is people didn’t really care about a fighter’s cauliflower ears, or smashed facial features, or damaged brain. They fretted over his hands. Bust a knuckle, you can’t punch. How awful. Fighters trained with big mufflers, to protect their hands, but there was no protection in the ring. By the late 1880’s, fighters took to fighting with driving gloves, and when it was discovered some padding in them protected the hand, gloves were allowed in the ring.

I know, it seems obvious gloves were introduced to protect the fighter’s head. Nope, just his hands. But there are always unforeseen consequences. The volume of punches increased markedly, because breaking a hand was far less likely. People didn’t punch any harder, but the impact was far worse. It also seems obvious getting punched with a bare fist is worse than a getting punched with a gloved one. It isn’t.

The schwerpunkt or striking point was concentrated with a bare fist, you could break a cheek bone, or open a cut, but the brain was spared the jarring impact. A glove spread that impact over a larger surface, so it passed through the face to the brain, and shook it like jelly in a jar. Knockouts increased dramatically.

The popularity of boxing skyrocketed. It became the number one sport in the world. The heavyweight champion, John L. Sullivan, the “Boston Strong Boy,” was by far the most famous man on the planet in 1890. Up to this time most sports fans had been called “cranks.” And although the English Fancy no longer controlled prize fighting, enthusiasts were still asked who they “fancied,” and eventually this was abbreviated to “fan.” I know, it seems obvious fan is an abbreviation of fanatic. It isn’t.

Fans loved the sport for the sport, but the powers that be still loved boxing for the wager. That meant corruption, and mobsters and racketeers eventually forced Congressional action to clean the mess up. But, it’s still not really cleaned up.

Back in the 1950s your casual sports fan could have told you the champion in most of the eight traditional weight classes. Corrupt organizations soon had many new weight classes and multiple champions, so the fans could no longer make much sense of it. Always an ethnic based sport, with Irish people cheering for the Irish fighter, Jewish people rooting for the Jewish fighter, boxing has always appealed to fans at a visceral level.

It is one thing to defeat a man by hitting his pitched ball with a stick, but to physically beat him down with your fists, that disturbed many people, when the man delivering the beat down was Black, and the man receiving the beat down was White.

MMA is very popular now, but you watch, as Blacks and Hispanics take that sport over, and they will, watch the popularity plummet.

Fighters no longer display the skills common a half century back. There are few trainers left to teach them. Fans understand less and less of what they bother to watch. My father religiously watched the Gillette Friday Night Fights when I was a boy. He passed his enthusiasm for the sport on to me. Boxing will soon fade into the shadows of history. There was something elementally beautiful in the primitive spectacle of it, something every other sport struggles to match, but never quite succeeds.

Perhaps it is hereditary because my grandfather, Tim Giago Sr., religiously listened to the Friday night boxing matches way out on the Pine Ridge Reservation in the 1940s on a radio powered by a 12-volt battery. Runs in the family I guess.

(James Giago Davies can be reached at skindiesel@msn.com)


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