John L Sullivan vs Jack Johnson

I'm kind of teetering on the edge of my ignorance here, but I think the original plan was that Sullivan and Corbett would box for $10k apiece, Sullivan demanded $25k, and Corbett ended up taking $5k to box Courtney.

Around this time Sullivan was off the booze and appearing regularly on stage in a show which involved a certain amount of sparring, so he was in relatively good health, but he was also greatly overweight and must have realised the danger of being made to look foolish by the world champion. Against that, you could argue that in the tiny ring which was all the film studio would allow, he might actually have done better than he did chasing Corbett round a twenty-four foot ring two years earlier.

 

Thanks Solomon. $10 K would’ve been a very nice sum in 1894 - even now on face value. Good point re The Black Maria, the proverbial phone booth. They weren’t on good terms so, if there was going to be any contrivance , choreography etc. to it, we still might’ve had a decent fight break out on film. Ah well, fate stepped in and Peter Courtney became immortalised in boxing history ever since.

I wonder what the first participants on film, Cushing and Leonard, got paid?

 

The most accurate post on this subject