Boxing As A 20th Century Perspective

Yvan Petitclerc (Montreal, Canada)



In our daily lives we may find it convenient to make distinctions, to give
numbers and names to things in the world but that is like counting the drops
in the ocean or classifying the leaves on a tree.
Muhamad Ali, 1999.





Want to learn more about the social history of the United States in the twentieth century? Learn about boxing. Maybe more than any other the history of this sport represents almost perfectly the various demographic trends and social events which occurred throughout this century.

During the 20's and 30's for example, there were many Jewish, Irish and Italian champion boxers. Easy to understand. They were all still aliens immigrants fighting for their place in society, and moreover blacks were not allowed to fight.

Barney Ross was one of the best Jewish boxer in the 30's. When the black fighter Henry Armstrong was finally allowed to fight him, he gave Ross such a bad beating that Barney retired from the ring following the loss. One year earlier in 1937 Joe Louis had become at 23 the first black heavyweight champion of the world after beating Jim Braddock.

When in 1910 the black fighter Jack Johnson won by KO over Jim Jeffries, the outcome provoked some racial riots through the country. Witness of the then prevalent social climate: That very same year the NAACP (National Association For the Advancement of Colored People) was founded. One year later Georges Carpentier won the European boxing title. He was going to lose it to Joe Jeanette three years later. At that time Jeanette could still not get a shot at the title in the US because he was black.

Later in the thirties the rematch between Joe Louis and the German fighter Max Schemling had also another strong political
and social connotation. It was then seen as America against Hitler's Germany. Louis won the fight.

The sixties and seventies were epitomized by Muhamed Ali. He did things his way, according to his own conscience. All the debates regarding the social situation were reflected in the opinion of Ali and his still famous words as recollected in two interviews with Playboy magazine.

At that time Ali maintained that black people would never be free in America as long as they would be on the as long as they would be on the white man's territory. He also believed that black would be free only when they would get their own country in North America: "When we separate from America and take maybe ten states, then we'll be free. Free to make our own laws, set
our own taxes, have our own courts, our own judges, our own schoolrooms, our own currency, our own passports"

But the former champ had also some very precise things to say about religion back then. For example he maintained that the Christian religion has just been used to brainwash the black man in America.

"It has just taught him to look for his heaven in the sky, in the hereafter, while the white man enjoys his heaven here on earth".

By then Ali was now a Muslim. Once again the ring was the theater of a debate regarding his new faith . In 1965 after Ali beat Sonny Liston for the second time, he had a fight against Floyd Patterson.

Patterson refused to call Ali by his newly chosen name. He then also said that he wanted to beat Ali in order to keep the title out of Muslim hands.

While punching Patterson for 12 rounds Ali asked with a revenge"What's my name?, What's my name?'"

Later, in the mid- seventies Louis Farrakhan restructured the former Nation of Islam based on the separatists racial principles of its beginnings.

As for the relationship between blacks and whites especially Jews, Ali's comments by being completely opposed to what Malcom X was thinking, announced today's rift between some segments of the black-versus Jewish communities.

"Look, we been told there's gonna be whites who help blacks. And we also know there's gonna be whites who'll escape Allah's judgment, who won't be killed when Allah destroys this country-mainly some Jewish people who really mean right and do right".

Malcom X,contrary to Ali, believed that anyone who was a critic of the Jews, even when justified, was instantly labeled anti-Semite.

Meanwhile in 1966 some militants of the black power were already divided over the criteria of the color of the skin seen as divisive and opposing one race against another.

Finally Ali also announced in some respects someone like Spike Lee, who calls today for all those black multimillionaires of sports to unite themselves to make progress the black community . Ali recalled for example than there used to be a sign along Miami each that said NO JEWS ALLOWED, and that as a result the Jews united and bought up the beach. He maintained that it was what black people should start doing-uniting and pooling their money.

"When black people with money see what I can do with my pennies, they'll begin to see what can be done with their millions". considering those affirmations, one can see how relevant they still are today. And how on the other hand, they perfectly reflected the sixties and seventies in America.

The sixties were the time where James Meredith, escorted by the police was the first black student to enter the university of Mississippi. The era where in 1963 the Alabama governor George Wallace tried to prevent the integration in schools. The time of the Watts ghetto riots in 1965.

But they were also the decade where in 1968 Tommy Smith and John Carlos, two black US athletes at the Mexico Olympic Games, refused to look at the American flag, their fists raised, after having finished first and third in the 200 meters. In one sense that act mirrored the one of Muhamad Ali who had refused to be involved in the Vietnam War earlier saying his religion prohibited him from fighting in the war: "I ain't got no quarrel with those Vietcong". Not surprisingly Ali has been called by many the first antihero.

But the sixties were was also the time where Martin Luther King brought some 200 000 persons for a civic rights demonstration in 1963 before being assassinated five years later. As for the 70's still strong from the black affirmation movement, they were once again reflected in the boxing world when in October 1974 Ali regained his title by beating George Foreman during a match in Kinshasa the Zaire capital.

Today there's a lot of talk regarding how in a near future Latinos will replace blacks as the main minority group in the United States. Nowhere else better than in boxing is also their new strength in numbers reflected with the likes of Oscar De La Hoya and Felix Trinidad. As much as the future of music or American demographic growth will be Latino, the future of boxing will be
Latin as well.

As for Ali, his latest comments still reflect the ambient social context. But today that context is one of growing awareness of difference in society at large. Asked by Forbes magazine to write something about the notion of convergence in October 1999, he expressed the idea that when looking back at his past, what he gained the most was the ability to see the world in something like the way God must see it: "To understand that there are no distinctions of any real importance in the affairs of men, that there
is only one time and one place and one person and one truth".