182 Fans Turned Out To See Fitz Spark Maher For A Version Of The Crown

The build-up was indeed arduous.

The K.O, by all accounts, was absolutely chilling.

 

haha! could see you dan rafael or kevin iole climbing the mountain to cover this fight? either those were 182 dedicated fans or they had serious gambling problems.

 

I'm sure I had more people watch me fight several times as an amateur. Just shows you the relevance of boxing back in that day. A couple decades later Dempsey would get million dollar gates and we would start seeing real talent in the ring.

 

Transportation difficulties probably played a role.

A few years earlier, three thousand people boarded special trains to a middle-of-nowhere Mississippi swamp to watch an illegal prizefight between Sullivan and Kilrain under London Prize Ring rules. Not a massive crowd, but considering the difficulties of the time, not bad either. Sullivan-Corbett sold out at 10,000 people.

And throughout this period, boxers could make a good living in theater, in local sparring tours against nobodies, or from movie rights despite the primitive state of film at the time. Corbett got thousands of (1890's) dollars from six minutes of fooling around with Peter Courtney, who is one of the worst filmed fighters in history. Sullivan, for his part, may have been the first sports figure to earn a million dollars over his lifetime -- again, in 1890's dollars.

Boxing appeared in a lot of the "health and sports" books of the period as part of the general physical culture regimen. At the same time, inner city slum life encouraged young men to learn some means of inflicting violence -- and boxing was one of the few options available aside from wrestling. A few decades earlier, gang-leader-slash-boxing-champion Morrissey had risen through Tammany Hall into Congress with just such a "career path".

Aside from all that, you simply didn't have the same options for entertainment that you do now. Boxing did well because it only needed to compete against the music-hall dreck that you see in Edison's films. If anything, boxing faced a lot less competition and a more captive market in the 1890's than the 1950's.

In urban areas, at least, boxing was already pretty big.

 

Not so sure what "physical culture" is (sounds a bit poofter-ish), but it really must have sucked to live back then. Damn. Glad I got my X-Box, my 80-inch plasma and some talented boxers to watch.

 

"Physical culture" roughly corresponds to what we call "fitness", but had vague overlaps with sports as well. The self-styled "professors" of physical culture usually trained people with a combination of walking, sprinting, light dumbbell exercises, a single heavy dumbbell exercise called the bent press, gymnastics, Indian clubs, boxing, and one or two other things. Not a bad way to keep in shape, actually -- except for the weird diets and dehydration.

Food for thought, though: American cities back then were violent third-world slums with lots of desperate young men accustomed to physical labor. Boxers have traditionally come from settings like that.

 

When you say "fitness" do you mean steam bathhouses and the like? Was it like Aristophocles and the Ancient Germans where this thing was considered normal?

You bet I would some sprinting... in the opposite direction!

 

Well, they did expound on the benefits of massages...

:think

 

I cant believe less than 2000 people turned out ,for great Dick Tiger/Spider Webb bout in N.Y. ??62

 

Those who did got their money's worth, though. :yep

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