The Decline of the Popularity of Boxing in the United States

Tom Molineaux is one of my favorite mother ****ers. I've some notes on him you may be interested in.


The most ridiculous historical listing: “Tom Molineaux from Virginia, who won freedom from slavery as a pugilist, along with $500, because his generous White owner claimed a $100,000 gambling profit. Molineaux ( despite no documented proof) fought more battles in New York and arrived in England as an experienced fighter.”

Even had Molineaux been from Virginia common sense should dictate that he was more likely amongst the free Black population rather than a slave. The name ‘Molineaux’ was an important part of 18th century Massachusetts and Maryland history, but not Virginia. The Virginia Historical Society utilizes four sources to claim that ‘Molyneaux’ was from Virginia. These are brief biographical sketches that concentrate mostly on the December, 1810, bout against Cribb: (#1) Carl B. Cone, 1982, (#2) Michael Harris Goodman, 1980, (#3) Bob Mee, 2001, (#4) Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004. These appear to be English sources, which is strange, because if it is Virginia’s history the best research for public records should come from their own State.

The easiest aspect of the fake “$100,000 slave” story to detail is the gambling.

If Molineaux’s owner won a $100,000 bet it meant he had $100,000 to lose. Could ‘fellow’ Virginians of 1795-1805 such as Washington, Jefferson, and Madison afford to lose $100,000? No. Could Adams, Franklin, Hamilton afford to lose $100,000? No.

Because of my respect for BoxRec’s integrity, along with a Wikipedia link as the best source for this bout, their fictional account of the December 10th, 1810, bout between Molineaux and Cribb, must be academically challenged.

BoxRec (2009): “Pierce Egan’s Boxiana is the source for the majority of this fight narrative.” This is not true. BoxRec’s narrative is nothing like Egan’s version.

all of it is from Chris Shelton.

 

There used to be gyms on every street corner in major US cities. Boxing was a sport in college.
It was an urban sport; it was a way to draw kids energy away from stealing and mugging towards
sport, fitness and competition.

What sane suburban parent would tell their child to take up boxing? Karate/martial arts maybe,
but not boxing. Parents are moving their kids away from football because of injuries too.

Millenials don't box, unless it's one of those gym taught sessions where you hit a bag for a while.

Once boxing was taken away from colleges and local gyms, it became a niche sport. Not only that,
but it was also reduced to being a "trash" or "low class" sport. Maybe it always had been, but there
were guys, like Gene Tunney, who weren't considered low class and were champions. You don't get, or
very rarely get, rich suburban kids taking up boxing, and urban kids would rather play basket ball and/or
soccer and get way less concussions.

 

one thing, I don't think the South was that much into boxing to begin with. It was an urban sport and the South for the most part was much more rural and agricultural in those days. As for Southern blacks, would they even have been allowed to work out in the city gyms which the whites built and used?

How many white Southern boxers were there? If you look through the birth places for Hall-of-Famers you don't find many Southern born whites, although there was plenty of poverty among Southern whites, and they were very prominent in other sports such as baseball, football, golf, etc.

I found only four Southern born whites in the Hall-of-Fame. Canzoneri and Pastrano from Louisiana, Jenkins from Texas, and Stribling from Georgia. New Orleans was a boxing center, but I don't think any other Southern city really ever was.

In contrast the number and importance of Southern born blacks is overwhelming. Louis, Robinson, Armstrong, Moore, Charles, Jack, Montgomery, Flowers, Johnson, Wills, McVea, Gans, Ali, Frazier, Foreman, Leonard, etc. were born in Southern or border states,

but pursued careers in the North generally after their families moved north.

I think it obvious that the northern factories were considered a big improvement over the Southern plantations.

*just an aside, I understand there is a reverse migration going on with blacks deserting the rust belt cities which are losing their manufacturing base to move back to a modernized South.

 

Excellent point re boxing gyms being concentrated in the urban north (and some Gulf cities). Suggests that white southern men were also pretty much excluded from the sport’s potential talent pool.

 

There were some gyms in other areas, but the trainers for the most part weren't good. We had a trainer who fought Liston, Williams, DeJohn, etc. in the 50s and did well. He had a few fights locally, then moved to NYC to continue his career. He said that although he had won pro fights locally, he didn't know anything about boxing until he began training in NYC.

His brother was also a trainer. I asked him once about the twice and often three times per month pro cards that are documented on BoxRec from the area from the 40s and 50s. There were probably 20-30 active pros from the area. I asked him about the quality of the boxers and he nodded to the ring where two new boxers were sparring. He said the pros from the area in the 40s and 50s were about the caliber of the novices in the ring. I believe him because some of the old pros would stop by the gym and mention to him that they'd like to help him train fighters. He'd politely turn them down, he always said they "didn't know enough to train anybody."

 

I'm impressed that the trainers admitted that to you instead of romanticizing the past like the folks on here who act as if trainers were all wiser and better back in the day. Also supports a point that should be obvious but sadly isn't: the quantity of fighters and frequency of fights in a given era isn't necessarily a useful indicator of the quality and skill level of the actual fighters.

 

I was fortunate to have these guys as trainers. They never romanticized the business of boxing (professional or amateur) but they loved the sport. They taught fundamentals, techniques, and correct body mechanics. They generally considered their current crop of fighters to be their best.

If I went to a gym and the trainer told me that trainers or fighters were better X number of years ago, I'd find a new trainer. A good trainer should be making each generation of fighters better. He has the advantage of seeing and learning from the prior generation and he should be able to add to it. If he can't do that, I'd look for somebody who could.

 

Boxing and Music have followed on a similar path here ..
Boxing used to be about toughness, a lifestyle, passion, I'll fight anyone anytime anywhere attitude, I just want to fight.. That is why there is no comparison between old boxers and new boxers .. Same with music, now, music is catchy and poppy and what will sell, it all sounds the same and is not about the instrument but about the synthesizer, over dubbing, and all the other crap .. Older music such as The Who, Led Zepplin, The Doors, etc. will never be matched because it was from the same mold, so to speak, as the old school boxers .. Simply put, way more talent and way more hard core

 

You make good points in a subject that has been previously discussed on this forum.

I first started watching boxing as a little kid in Brooklyn back in the late 1950s. My dad was a yuge fan of the sport having done some boxing in Puerto Rico in the 1930s. Back in the good old days, many boxing shows were presented in venues such as Yankee Stadium, Ebbets Field, Comiskey Park (Chicago), Cobo Hall (Detroit), Grand Olympic (Los Angeles). Because of this the fights were accessible by the sport's fans in their home towns and often in their own neighborhoods. If you could not afford a ring side seat, you sure could afford one in the upper decks and still get a good view of the fights. Nowadays, if you want to see a live fight more often than not you have to go to Las Vegas and pay a fortune for a ticket and even more for the trip.

Back then, fighters could be seen passing the time at a neighborhood tavern where the fans would eagerly buy a beer and a sandwich for their boxing heroes. My dad and his amigos would chat with several boxeadores in beer joints near the old St Nick (Manhattan) and Eastern Parkway (Brownsville, Brooklyn). You don't see that any more.

More significantly, boxing is not presented on network TV anymore. Those of you who grew up in the 1960s-80s will recall when we had pro boxing on network TV every week. CBS/NBC/ABC and the Spanish language presented many good matches for FREE. Today you have to pay a small fortune just to watch one half way decent boxing card per month on cable or satellite. Also, live boxing matches are not presented on radio any more. Thus, the lack of access by today's fans.


It would help a great deal if today's print, TV, and internet media covered the sport as the media did in the past. Recall when top contenders were household names and celebrities back then. It would be great to bring back the good old days of boxing. But the sport cannot do so on its own. It needs media coverage and more accessibility to bring about public attention to it. And wouldn't that be great!!

 

Some quality cane wagging demonstrated in this thread.

 

The more innocent, hardscrabble, blue-collar, tight-knit communities world, where local gyms producing local heroes abounded, no longer exists.

Whereas today boxing as a pro pursuit invokes images of a Parkinsonian Ali and/or the proverbial ex-champ turned broke and broken-down pug, 100 years ago boxing ambitions were fueled by a young man’s testosterone-driven impulses, or plain need, to prove himself with his fists, in the landscape of a younger America where limited choices, hunger, manual labor, and the demand for simple physical assertion were hallmarks, and modern cautions regarding the sport of boxing and brain damage or endemic official corruption were nonexistent. Expediency and survival of the fittest were key for boxing’s preeminence back in the day.

Million-dollar purses were a thing of the future, but fighting proficiency still meant immediate money in, say, pickup matches – and more. Different ethnicities arrived in waves at Ellis Island, having to start from scratch in a Land of Opportunity that, yet, offered no guarantees. Human nature being what it is, like stuck with like and ethnic communities grew side by side or intermingled. One individual’s success as a pro boxer – the compelling realm of the Great John L., who could “lick any man in the house” – meant pride and hope for that individual’s “people” as well, and intermediate springboards to such success existed readily and locally in the form of gyms and boxing cards. Those gymnasiums and shows have all but disappeared. Today such success via sport has given way to college athletic-scholarship options in anything from football to water polo – and without much genetic tribalism anymore. Progress, perhaps.

Millionaire sporting heroes like LeBron and Brady – whose exploits can be watched live and revisited ad infinitum on myriad glitzy media – loom much more appealingly for a youth than old-time stories of boxing legends who ended up badly. Things have inexorably moved on from yesteryear. Jack Dempsey tells of Montrose, Colorado, the town he grew up, where "they used to have fights every day. You'd go to a saloon, fight anybody in the house for pass the hat." Families in Montrose, says Jack, had three or four young men “who wanted to be fighters”. Different world. Boxing was a national obsession of sorts – in physical practice and aided by imagination – like it is nothing of the sort today. Actually, it’s MMA tactics – admittedly more potentially useful in after-school scuffles – that occupy young belligerent thoughts today.

So, as the world evolves, is boxing doomed? Not necessarily at all. There is always a natural allure to boxing: a surprising number of white-collar folks of all stripes have for years shown an interest in learning the Sweet Science as gym non-fighters. Certain countries, such as Mexico and the Philippines, retain an undying tradition of interest in the sport at all levels of practice and broadcast consumption. And despite MMA’s rise, head-to-head, boxing still commands infinitely higher fascination and purses, simply because of its superior allure as a fighting art to the casual observing fan. Two finely-honed, highly-skilled men standing as opponents in a ring will always lick two guys – however able – in tights hugging and rolling around in a cage.

Boxing promotion and officiating must be cleaned up. Honesty is essential to any business – the proverbial best policy. Any field of endeavor riddled with dirty dealings is in trouble. It’s a miracle boxing has survived. But the sooner we shed the cynicism paradigm about corruption as intrinsic to boxing, the sooner it will be infused with new life for a new world. Evolution, new thinking, must be bywords. We have seen positive changes that have broken with a negative past: latter greats like, say, Larry Holmes, George Foreman, Lennox Lewis, Oscar De La Hoya, have beaten the odds and retired with their marbles and their money. Change - gradually, not overnight, mind you - is possible!

Another aspect: Proper retirement – at about age 32 – must become part of boxing tradition. It is not the sport that is bad for a young man. It is when that erstwhile youth is allowed to hang around too long that health issues multiply and become a staple. Just as it is understood that a gymnast is old at 25, the mainstream must get the idea that no one has any business in the pro ring at 35.

Network-TV broadcasts would be great, of course, but perhaps not as essential as the above. Boxing will always have that natural appeal to the young and to a world audience willing to pay for a good show. It must be seen, not as a pariah, but as what it truly is: the sport to which all other sports aspire, that can give a young man (or woman) so much in addition to money.

Boxing has got what it takes, if those who run it – and owe it, and somewhere inside, love it – are willing.

 

that and guys like Floyd using it as a platform to build his ego rather than to challenge everyone evenly. Handpicking and weight agreements have made boxing more of a joke the last 10 years. If it had more structure it would be more appealing.

 

Don't wanna derail the thread but I disagree about music. I think the 60s/70s was a unique pont in history where the majoriy taste in and the quality of music were aligned. Never really been the like that before or after. Today there is plenty of good music that can compete with the music made back then over all genres but if you are not into it or active in the attached subculture you'll never gonna hear about it.

Another witty one-liner by Seamus without contributing anything significant. Slowly becoming a bit of a cliché.

 

Fights not on often enough and too expensive.

 

Wikipedia quotes Fred Henning's Fights for the Championship, published in 1902, as the source of Molineaux's biography. The book sounds to be a compilation of write-ups previously published in Licensed Victuallers' Gazette.

At the end of the 3rd volume of Pugilistica, Henry Downes Miles wrote:

When Cid Hamer Benengeli, in the ultimate Chapter of "Don Quixote," apostrophises his pen, he speaks of scribblers "who compile false and idle histories." Even so does the smaller author of Pugilistica feel as he ceases from his "Story of the Ring." It would seem from the denunciation of the worthy Cid Hamet that in all times there have been literary fabricators and forgers, and the writer can certify that the History of the Ring in the present day has more than one flagrant instance. Foremost of these is a weekly newspaper professing to be the Argus of the Turf, and the Titan of Tipsters. The "Famous Old Fights" appearing in its columns are pure fiction, grafted on well-known names, dates, and anecdotes procurable from standard works of reference; the details of incidents, of rounds, &c., &c., being the emenation of the lively imagination of the newswriter, who, to our knowledge, and from innumerable instances in his blundering romance, is utterly ignorant and innocent of any acquaintance with the Ring, its professors, or the scenes he so inventively describes. The sole reason for this exposé is, that as, in many instances, these forged accounts of battles purport to be between men whose combats are authentically given in these pages, the reader should be made aware, that no such reports exist in any contemporary publications, of which innumerable proofs might be given, but that we cannot spare the space, time, and trouble to "break a butterfly on the wheel." Yet do we bear no grudge to the ingeious fiction-writer; and having set the point of truth and accuracy in its true light, we say, as did Uncle Toby, when he released the fly, "Go thy ways, there is room enough in the world for both of us."​

The contemporary newspaper he refers to must be (although I haven't seen a single issue of it) Licensed Victuallers' Gazette, of which Miles was previously a proprietor (in 1872), but by 1877 the owner of it was William Henry Cox. Starting from 1878 there were advertisements of that newspaper listed regularly in other newspapers, with things like

GREAT PRIZE FIGHTS.
Between all the great celebrities of days gone by, complete in each number. Descriptive accounts that have never appeared in print before. A full history of the life of every man who has ever fought in the Prize Ring.
Written by an old "Ring" Man.
PRIZE RING MEMOIRS
Are written by an old University man, himself one of Tom Spring's best pupils
Relate each week how the matches were made, how the fights were fought, and thousands of facts in connection with them, which have never been told before.​

It also printed horse racing news and predictions, so I have little doubt Miles had that newspaper in mind when he said it's full of fiction.

The round by round description at http://boxrec.com/media/index.php/Tom_Cribb_vs._Tom_Molineaux_(1st_meeting) does appear to be borrowed ("translated" to rid of old sporting slang) from Pierce Egan's Boxiana. The incident that supposedly had taken place before the start of the 29th round is noted to be taken from multiple write-ups ("mentioned in most of the sources dealing with the fight"), it doesn't say it was taken from Boxiana (where there is no mention of any such incident).

Miles, in Pugilistica, does mention such incident in his remarks, although where he had taken it from, I don't know. I have seen the report he quotes from, in contemporary newspaper, but it makes no mention of "long count" incident.

Incidentally, Miles used Egan's report for this bout in an early draft of his prize ring history (see, for example, Sportsman's Magazine & Life in London, Nov 8, 1845, p. 408, and Nov 15, 1845, p. 428), but in the published version of Pugilistica he desided to use a different source instead, noting that

The unreported rounds in this and other places, are supplied in "Boxiana" and its copyists; as well as a great quantity of vamping up, the details of which Pierce Egan must have imagined.​

So, whether such incident had taken place or not, we don't really know. Miles, who is considered a trustworthy source for the most part, does mention it, so it must have appeared in some contemporary newspaper (I suspect it might have been in London's Weekly Dispatch, with famous prize fight reporter George Kent at ringside, but I don't have access to that newspaper to check). Any further details ("pistol balls", etc) must have been the result of imagination of the writer of Licensed Victuallers' Gazette. But, overall, I don't see how the account can be considered fictional.