Does History do John L Sullivan a disservice?

He was absolutely a scientific offensive fighter and the forerunner of champions like Terry McGovern Jack Dempsey and Mike Tyson.

 

I knew you would come up with this sentence.


You are right, Sullivan´s skills are overlooked most of the time. But he is not alone there. Most fighters with a big punch get reduced to that. Their skills get overshadowed by their power. See Tyson as another example. Nothing unusual. People who dig a bit know better most of the time.

 

Very astute observation of the Great John L...Today most people percieve him to be the Sullivan, past his prime , of the Corbett fight...Wrong...
To use an example---When we leave a restaurant a cup of coffee often
determines the quality of the meal, because it's the last thing we tasted.
And that fight with James J Corbett, has tainted the career of John L,
wrongly IMO....
A fast and powerful man at his peak was the Boston Strong Boy...

 

Corbett matadored a bull; if he'd been in with the Sullivan of ten years previous, he'd have been up against a tiger. (Not rulling Pompador Jim out, though).

I think, technically, Sullivan was OK for his day -- not remarkable, but certainly not below the average of his time. Possibly, after he badly broke his left arm, he might have been over reliant on his right, using it when he formerly would have used his left; maybe he maight have lapsed back into being a bit of a swinger. (Sullivan was a bit of a swinger till he started working with Billy Madden in 1881; then his punches were said to have straightened out -- a straight-punching Sullivan, still motivated to train, was the monster of his day).

 

Whatever Sullivan's perceived shorcomings in technique , and I.
think he was a lot more skilled than he is given credit for,Boxing owes him a huge debt because he put it on the map and brought it out into the light.
A larger than life hero for his times ,he gave pugilism respectability, and kick started it for others to follow.

 

1. He is on record refusing to fight Peter Jackson because of his color.

2. That's a real problem.

3. No one better defend him by bringing up nonsense like his being a man of his time and culture.

4. I am grateful to him for popularizing the sport as he did.

5. He's from Boston. Me too. (No excuse there though.)

 

That´s not defending him, it´s stating a fact. Nothing more, nothing less. You don´t need to like it and still fault him for that. But that´s how it is.

 

It's an excuse.

You'd have a giant problem defending it as "a fact" for two glaring reasons:

First, there were other fighters and other men of the time and culture who did not entertain such notions. That's a real problem with false positives.

Second, you cannot say for sure that he was a man who truly held an ideology close to his heart that prevented him from fighting Jackson. It could have been true-blue racism, it could have been politics, it could have been cowardice.

John L. Sullivan was a man of his time and culture, therefore his refusing to meet a real heavyweight threat because that threat was black is what? Understandable? Excused? Rationalized? Mitigated?

Pictured below is a man who grew up in an even worse racist era. He was born in 1800 and could trace his ancestry to the Mayflower. He had freckles and a severe personality.

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He was a man of his time and his culture. Was he a racist?

 

Not an argument. There where always people ahead of their time. The majority, however, wasn´t and that´s what you have to go by.

It has nothing to do with an ideology. Racism is not an ideology. Especially not back then. I´ve seen old schoolbooks from the German Empire around the same time in which they showed why black, native americans, asians and so on were inferior to white people. Scientifically. Laughable and hard to understand for us but for the big majority of people back then it was a fact.
It has nothing to do with an ideology beeing close to his heart. People are what they are because they are raised to it. People back then were raised to be racists. So was Sullivan. You can fault him for not beeing ahead of his time. But IMO that doesn´t make any sense.

Fact. Not more not less. I don´t judge it. It is what it is. They didn´t fight.

I don´t know. Given the way you stated those things about him and asked, probably not. But there were always people ahead of their times. Those were exceptions. Without them we would still sit in some caves.


I don´t excuse anyone. I just don´t judge people. Especially people who lived in a different time and/or culture. It´s pointless - and arrogant - because we are also the result of our time and culture and thus can´t think like them. And when you can´t think like them, you can´t really understand them. And if you can´t understand them, your judgement isn´t worth much.

 

The man pictured is John Brown, abolitionist. He judged the hell out of people and picked up a rifle to judge them some more. Why? Because there's right and then there's wrong, and sitting on the sidelines wringing our hands because we are afraid of "judging" is sometimes a greater evil. A whole section of the United States were "raised to believe" that black people should be kept in chains and work their fields while they sat around on porches and complained about the heat. Brown sought to free those people in the field in the name of the golden rule. And died trying.

While you are right that we should avoid judging a person, we have a responsiblity to judge behavior, bodhi. Otherwise, Hobbes's state of chaos is just around the corner. Hell, your kids will take over your home ('don't mind junior kicking your shin, madam, he's just expressing himself. We don't judge him.'), the jails should be emptied (no judging, no judges), and every fight would be a draw (goodbye boxing)!

Sullivan refused to fight Jackson. He has no damn excuse that's worth a plug nickel. I judge his status in the boxing heirarchy accordingly. Same goes for everyone else who refused to fight a rightful contender due to their pigmentation.

 

If this is for me ,I dont condone Sullivan not fighting Jackson or any other black fighter.
Neither do I condone Corbett refusing to defend against Jackson, unless the fight was held in the deep south, then crawling out from his rock to challenge him when he was safely thousands of miles away on another continent.
Sullivan did agree to fight Godfrey at one stage, but it fell through.

Sullivan was dissipated and past it when Jackson was prime, John L would likely have gone down to defeat.

John Brown ? Nutcase.
I once read that Abe Lincoln was prepared to let the South keep their slaves if they did not cecede from the Union.If that had transpired what would we say about Lincoln today?
It's difficult to judge peoples actions over a century later I think.

 

Being of Irish extraction myself, I've studied quite a bit about the early waves of Irish immigrants in America. Back then the Irish were considered(pardon me here) the "n***ers of Europe". There was great pressure within the Irish community to conform to the standards of the established WASP society here so as to prove that they were better than the stereotypes and misconceptions about them. One of those ways was to adopt the popular American WASP posture/notion that Blacks were inferior to Whites and should be treated as such(remember, Blacks were a people that were considered mere "property" just a short time before and the notion that they could be citizens or equals to Whites in any way was considered absurd by many). Could this have been Sullivan's mindset? Or Tom Sharkey's? Both drew the color line, yet both also had no qualms about palling around with Black fighters or helping them, such as George Dixon(whom Sharkey aided by fighting in a benefit for when "Little Chocolate" fell on some hard times) and Joe Walcott. Not excusing color line drawing, btw. Just tossing out something to consider.

I remember once reading an interview with a Brooklyn Dodger who vehemently opposed Jackie Robinson being on the team(his name escapes me at the moment) When asked to elaborate a bit the player explained that he was from a small town in the south- the type where everyone knew everyone else's business- and had family and neighbors down there keeping close tabs on his career. He claimed that if they found out that he deigned to play on a ball team with a Black it would have ruined his family, both monetarily and in reputation(which was a HUGE thing in the south back then). They would have had to close the general store they ran because no one would have come within a mile of it. It would have been like slapping a scarlet letter on their chests. They would have become pariahs. Banished and driven out in a heartbeat. "Outcasts" I think was the word he used and he didn't want to put them through that.

I personally don't know what that kind of pressure was like. But again, it's interesting to consider before I too harshly condemn yesterday by today's sensibilities.

 

You'd figure they'd be more willing to fight the blacks given the reasons pointed out. If they saw them as the inferior race, why shy away from them? Wouldn't they consider it a less risky proposition? If, on the flip side, they considered their participation in the sport an insult or something to that effect, why not take it upon themselves to put a stop to it? Drawing the color line never made much sense to me unless it was simply to do with the usual high-risk, low-reward circumstances that went on for many, many years. Maybe they already knew these black fighters were far from inferior as athletes?

 

If you judge Sullivan on his behaviour you will find more to chalk up against him than the fact that he drew the colour line. He was not behaving acording to the social dictates of the day when he smashed up a saloon and pushed the piano off the stage. In drawing the colour line he was at least conforming to expectation.

On the issue of race as with much else Sullivan was a paradoxical character. He took a strong line against the violence perpetrated against black people in the south and threatened to beat people who carried out public whipings. He was also a member of a mixed race rowing team and some sources indicate that he had a black trainer early in his career.