Word: ringed
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...British press denounced the tactic used against Molineaux, but the tactic itself was only an unsophisticated beginning. For black fighters were not only cheated in the ring; they were kept out of it. The Southern planters, who had found it as profitable and more entertaining than cock-fighting to pit their darkies against each other, found themselves in the shadow of black fighters such as Vesey, L'Ouverture, and Turner and did not wish to promote combativeness of any form among their slaves. How could they make their other slaves stand in fear if there were a black man amongst...
During the 96 years between the Molineaux-Cobb bout and Jack Johnson's first title fight, black heavy-weights found themselves locked out of the championship ring. But, if boxing became even more of a white man's game, it remained the poor man's game, it remained the poor man's game. The fighting Irish applied the same mixture of skill, showmanship, and exclusion to boxing that they did to the polities of the same period. (Sullivan, despie his boast, refused to meet Peter Jackson, the greatest of the heavyweight "Colored Boxing Champions of America.") Their boxers, like their...
Although the heavyweights were Jim Crowed, black little men were able to get into the white ring. Joe Gans, whose reputation earned him the nickname "The Old Master," was the most outstanding of that group. However, even as lightweight champion, he could get bouts only by accepting the short end of the purse or by agreeing to take a dive or both. His last major bout was in 1906 in Goldfield, Nevada, against a young white hope named "Battlin'" Nelson. The bout was the first promotion of the notorious Tex Rickard, at that time a local saloon owner. Rickard...
...FOUR YEARS after the Gans-Nelson bout, Tex Rickard staged and refereed the heavyweight championship contest between Jack Johnson and Jim Jeffries. Jeffries, who held the title from 1899 until he retired in 1904, had been persuaded to make a comeback. Dressed for his role, Jeffries entered the ring on July 4, 1910, with American flags on his trunks, proclaiming that he would give Johnson "the licking of his life." The record-breaking crowd cheered for all it was worth. Then Johnson stepped into the ring to an anvil chorus of passionate booing and nigger baiting. Two years before, Johnson...
...genuflected to the system by keeping their affairs clandestine. The system did not condone their activities; it controlled them. The system found Jack Johnson as controllable as flash floods, cyclones, and Standard Oil. In his body was a concentration of wealth comparable to the Beef Trust. In the ring he flaunted his power with a serene arrogance which was far more irritating than the aggressive contempt of a Morgan or a Boss Tweed because it was devoid of acrimony and humorlessness. Johnson never mauled his opponents. For a period of rounds he would lay back, content with controlling the other...