INJUSTICE IN SPORTS COMPETITION

Injustice in Sports Competition

Injustice in Sports Competition

Introduction

Boxing matches in the United States have historically carried important symbolic meanings. They have highlighted ethnic differences, reflected racial divides, and served as high-profile expressions of national chauvinism. Above all, attitudes toward boxing have been keen indicators of popular ideas about American manhood.

The boxing arena itself was a masculine public space, but attendance at fights held different meanings for different men, depending on class and marital status. For the wealthy, a prizefight dramatized the ethos of individual competition and validated their own status as winners. For the laboring class, boxing matches were a celebration of brawn and skill and promised that toughness and dedication would be rewarded with heroic status. Married men attended the fights to reconnect with the bachelor subculture, while bachelors went to cultivate friendships and quasi-familial bonds grounded in the shared experience of sports spectatorship. For all men, the fights were a space where one could celebrate the autonomous man and enjoy membership in an all-male community. When, at the end of the nineteenth century, American boxing adopted the Marquess of Queensbury Rules, which mandated timed rounds and gloved fists, the sport seemed less brutal and more rational and began appealing to lower and upper classes equally.

Discussion

While boxing forged a sporting family, nineteenth-century prizefights also served as physical allegories of ethnoreligious difference. In urban areas where white Protestant Americans resented competition from African American and Irish-born men, prizefights between members of these rival groups were symbolic battles for group supremacy. At the pinnacle of these conflicts stood John L. Sullivan, the son of Irish immigrants, who seized the heavyweight title in 1882. Sullivan was a brawny figure whose prodigious feats appealed most especially to Irish-American men, but also to turn-of-the-century American men enamored with the notions of rugged individualism and the “strenuous life” promoted by Theodore Roosevelt.

When Jack Johnson became the first African-American heavyweight champion in 1908, black America rejoiced, while white America scurried to find a “Great White Hope” to defeat him. In an era when the heavyweight champion was held up as the pinnacle of American manhood, African Americans celebrated Johnson as a figure of masculine achievement who laid waste the doctrine of white supremacy. When Johnson defeated Jim Jeffries in a 1910 bout billed as a battle for racial supremacy, white mobs lynched black men, the press demanded that films of the fight be censored, and Progressive Era politicians sought to banish the sport.

Prizefighting underwent a renaissance in the 1920s, as the aftermath of World War I left many Americans longing for a more honorific era when men settled differences with their fists. The mass media soon transformed the sport into a commercial spectacle. Boxing's new cultural resonance resided in such iconic champions as “Manassa Mauler” Jack Dempsey, an itinerant brawler who personified the virility and impulsiveness of the Roaring Twenties and appealed to men mired in an emerging world of sedentary, white-collar work. Equally influential was black champion Joe Louis, whose 1936 knockout ...