113 years ago: Noah "Tommy Burns/Little Giant of Hanover" Brusso vs. John Arthur "Jack" Johnson

This content is protected

Combined they earned what is today a very meager annual salary of 35k USD. That is 1.75% of what Jake Paul made last time out.

Johnson, nicknamed "The Galveston Giant" (which would not fit the thread title's character limit, alas) was legitimately large for his day, and he had an advantage of 25½lbs here. He would by modern standards be a cruiser, but Brusso would in today's day-before weigh-in era likely be a super welter.

Given the physical disparities you would never see this sanctioned nowadays - but even if it were, when Johnson began asserting his dominance it wouldn't have taken long for Burns to be in a "show something or you're being saved from yourself" position. For it to last fourteen and ultimately take police intervention to halt is frankly bananas. Burns was outsized but just as much outplanned. Forcing the smaller man to not only pressure but do so while remaining on the outside by using such prolific clinching was devilishly clever of Johnson, making it easy in the later rounds to rip counter uppercuts on the tiring and desperate champ. Even more so than the challenger's strength and strategy, though, you've got to commend the fiery little Canadian's heart shown in defeat. Never stopped flinging himself at the superlative Giant, until the long arm of the law cut in.

 

For damn sure. Case in point, look at that uppercut Johnson fed him early in round eight. That should have felled a typical man of Brusso's mass right then and there, game over. He trudged on another six rounds & change!

He was only ever stopped once, in his final bout, twelve years AFTER he fought Johnson - and even that was by corner (and career, by extension) retirement, not him being knocked out cold. That despite the fact that he often faced massive gulfs in size, usually not as pronounced as with Johnson but still enough that he probably belonged at least a division or two removed from his opponents in the bulk of his thirteen world heavyweight title defenses.

 

I mean, being the much smaller and less athletic man and forced to not only pressure but do it from the outside while the much bigger man alternates between countering and clinching you is a uniquely tough position to be in. Not something fighters trained for them, nor do they now. I'm frankly not sure what Brusso could have done any differently to have more success.

 

Anybody familiar with a website called 'boxinghalloffame.com'? Apparently they were around for a while, as Google claims to have first tracked it more than a decade ago with a cache from as recently as 2018. Anyway, that is the one place I've seen traces of Burns' retirement bout versus Joe Beckett uploaded anywhere online. Both the website and the YouTube channel that hosted the video embedded on the site appear to now be defunct. You can view the cache here:
https://webcache.googleusercontent....s-day-july-16-1920/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

So the footage is out there, somewhere, theoretically available to be reuploaded.

 

We're still a couple of months away from the 117th anniversary, but if you want to celebrate in style you can use my free design and order yourself a sick Burns tee.

This content is protected

https://www.customink.com/designs/T...s4JWdercDJ6bl6u32sLHUKdxQgq__9AASyh-qA.SKGNUp