In 1910, boxing heavyweight champion Jack Johnson defeated Jim Jeffries in the "Battle of the Century," and the nation erupted.
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On December 26, 1908, American boxer Jack Johnson became the first Black heavyweight champion of the world, after defeating defending champion Tommy Burns in a title fight in Sydney, Australia. Black fighters were typically denied the chance to win the heavyweight title, a de-facto line of segregation that was known as “the color line.” So when Burns accepted Johnson’s challenge and lost, the film that was distributed around the fight proved controversial.
The white boxing world set out to find a white heavyweight to beat Johnson and take back the title. That white fighter ended up being James Jeffries, a former heavyweight champion who had retired undefeated.
Their fight, hyped as the “Battle of the Century,” took place in Reno, Nevada, on July 4, 1910, in front of 20,000 mostly-white spectators and nine motion picture cameras. Throughout the nation, many thousands more listened to live telegram bulletins of each round. Johnson beat Jeffries easily, and, as a result, racist mob violence broke out across the country, and Black Americans celebrating Johnson’s win were attacked, and some were killed.
The film of the fight became notorious worldwide and was the most talked-about motion picture of its time. Johnson lost the heavyweight title in 1915 after successfully defending it eight times, but remained an inspiration for many fighters to come.
Further reading:
Fight Pictures: A History of Boxing and Early Cinema, by Dan Streible
https://www.ucpress.edu/book/97805202...
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By Charles Burress, Chronicle Staff Writer Dec 8, 2003 What happens when you cross the ivory tower with the school of hard knocks?
You get a slight, bespectacled and seemingly mild-mannered UC Berkeley professor named Loïc Wacquant, also known as "the boxing sociologist" to his peers and as fast-punching "Busy Louie" to his boxing-gym buddies from the cutthroat South Side ghetto of Chicago.
He may be the only man on the planet who fought in the famous Golden Gloves competition and writes books quoting heavy-duty French intellectuals in company with Karl Marx, Muhammad Ali and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
The outgoing, French-born Wacquant (pronounced Vah-kan) is an energetic, loquacious man of passion with little taste for lassitude. To study boxing, he became a boxer -- not a dilettante token boxer -- but a full-time, sweating, battered, bruised and highly trained pugilist who devoted three and half years to perfecting the craft.
And what fate did the ring have in store for the 137-pound, 5-foot 8-inch, self-described "young Frenchman who'd just arrived from a small village in Southern France"?
The answer comes in a new book, published somewhat belatedly 15 years after he began his journey into the "sweet science of bruising." He recalls his impression on first seeing his opponent just before the Golden Gloves bout, his first and only official fight:
"Damn, he's a tall black guy with the musculature of a panther. He must be a good six foot one, with long arms, supple like vines."
The bell rings, the fighters trade punches and then "suddenly, boom! Everything swings upside down, the ring pitches wildly, the ceiling lights blind me and ... the next thing I know, I'm on my ass on the floor. I feel like a grenade exploded right in my face! I didn't see anything coming."
But with the combative spirit that has also fueled his sometimes brutal academic battles, Wacquant sprang back up and ended the bout with a barrage of punches against his retreating opponent. His coach and fellow fighters from the Woodlawn Boys Club gym swore he'd won, but he lost on a judges' decision.
Despite waking up the next day with the bridge of his nose swollen to twice its size and much of his face looking like pummeled eggplant, he was hooked on the sport. He said he even decided at one point to chuck his academic career for professional prizefighting. Not only had he been transformed by the emotional ties with the other fighters forged by collective sacrifice and training and especially by the father-son bond that he'd formed with his coach, DeeDee Armour. He also found it nearly impossible to regain the distance needed to write about his experience as a professional ethnologist.
It took nearly a decade for him to write his book, "Body & Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer," just released by Oxford University Press. (It first appeared in French in 2001.)
Remarkably, his plunge into extreme participant observation began without his intending it.
In Aug. 1988, when he first walked into the dimly lit, odor-rich Chicago gym that was to become his home, he had no idea that he would try boxing himself. He was a 27-year-old doctoral student at the University of Chicago, looking for a way to study the black ghetto.
"If you'd told me then, 'One day you're going to box,' I would have said, 'Look, I'm more likely to go on the next space shuttle and walk on the moon,' " the now 43-year-old Wacquant said in an interview.
But once inside the gym he quickly saw that "there was no role whereby I could sit on a chair and observe and talk to people like a fly on the wall," he said.
So when the old coach, Armour, asked, "Well, what do you want to do?," Wacquant uttered the words that would drastically alter his future.
"I said, 'Well, um, I'd like to learn how to box,' which wasn't my intention at all." In a career that began with such a dramatic and colorful launch, it's perhaps no surprise that Wacquant has been crowned with some of America's most prestigious honors -- selected to Harvard's elite Society of Fellows and given a MacArthur Fellowship (called the "genius grant" by the media).
Nor was it viewed as out-of-character when he dropped something of a bomb into the normally genteel world of American social sciences last year with a scathing attack in the eminent American Journal of Sociology.
In a review of what he called the "cardboard cutouts" of three sociologists' work, he hurled what was seen as a broad indictment of the field, saying in effect that "American ethnography has tended to romanticize the people one is studying without paying attention to how people are shaped by forces outside the field-site itself," said one of his UC colleagues, sociologist Michael Burawoy.
Those he criticized took off the gloves in response. For example, Harvard's Katherine Newman, whom Wacquant accused of blind "sermonizing" and painting a false happy-face heroism on fast-food workers, charged Wacquant with "intellectual hypocrisy," "relentless distortion" and "head-in-the-sand thinking."
"Loïc has a kind of combative personality," said one distinguished sociologist, who asked not to be identified. "His pugilism is not restricted to the ring."
A disciple of the late French intellectual, Pierre Bourdieu, Wacquant comes from a leftist European background accustomed to vigorous academic criticism, the sociologist said.
Wacquant, who is leaving Berkeley after a decade to become a professor at the New School for Social Research in New York next month, takes the battles in stride.
He's focusing now on finishing his next volume, a more theoretical treatment of his research called "The Passion of the Pugilist," and bracing for what the critics will say about the just-released book.
Did he violate the ethnologists' commandment: Thou shalt not go native?
UC Berkeley emeritus sociologist Neil Smelser, who recommended the hiring of Wacquant at Berkeley, called the boxing sojourn "quite an ingenious and creative mode of ethnographic fieldwork."
Another issue likely to arise is whether Wacquant's portrait of the fighters bears the rose-tint that he attacked other scholars for.
"The big question," Burawoy said, "is whether Loïc Wacquant has done the same thing himself -- whether he has romanticized the boxers he studied."
At the least, Wacquant said he wants to usher the newly published work past the immediate gawking at the "boxing sociologist" -- one who's "white and French in a black gym" and regarded as a kind of "exotic circus animal."
His aim, he said, is not just to reveal "the very powerful, magnetic, sensuous, moral and aesthetic" forces that create boxers but also to "de- exoticize the craft" and show parallels to the sacrifice and commitment required of those who strive for excellence in other occupations.
"I want the painter and the professor and the journalist and the banker at the end when you put down the book to say, 'Well, you know what? It makes sense to be a boxer.' "
Body and Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer (2022)
The new, expanded anniversary edition, 2022 (out in November 2021) contains 140 pages of new text sketching “the making of” the study, elaborating the theory of habitus, and charting the trials and tribulations of the gym members over 30 years and what they teach us about the economics of blood, masculinity, love, and sociology.
When French sociologist Loïc Wacquant signed up at a boxing gym in a black neighborhood of Chicago’s South Side, he had never contemplated getting close to a ring, let alone climbing into it. Yet for three years he immersed himself among local fighters, amateur and professional. He learned the Sweet science of bruising, participating in all phases of the pugilist’s strenuous preparation, from shadow-boxing drills to sparring to fighting in the Golden Gloves tournament. In this experimental ethnography of incandescent intensity, the scholar-turned-boxer fleshes out Pierre Bourdieu’s signal concept ofhabitus, deepening our theoretical grasp of human practice. And he supplies a model for a “carnal sociology” capable of capturing “the taste and ache of action.”
This expanded anniversary edition features a new preface and postface that take the reader behind the scenes and reveal the “making of” this classic ethnography. Wacquant reflects on his path to, and uses of, fieldwork based on apprenticeship. He traces the genealogy and draws the anatomy of habitus and explicates how he deployed it as method of inquiry. The postface retraces the trials and tribulations of his gym mates in and out of the gym over the past thirty years, and reflects on what they reveal about the economics of pain and masculinity, and the passion that binds boxers to their craft.
Body & Soul marries the analytic rigor of the sociologist with the stylistic grace of the novelist to offer a compelling portrait of a bodily craft and of life and labor in the black American ghetto at century’s end.
This is a segment from a January 2015 Conversation.
Werner Herzog was joined by the acclaimed interviewer Paul Holdengräber to offer his ‘Guidance for the Perplexed’ to the how to: Academy’s London audience. This film presents the event in its entirety.
MikeTyson and Paul Holdengräber: Undisputed Truth
https://youtu.be/sb1krIZJ7JQ
LIVE from the NYPL | Recorded live at the New York Public Library, Celeste Bartos Forum, on November 12, 2013.
Boxing champion, Broadway headliner, felon—Mike Tyson has defied expectations and conventional wisdom during his three decades in the public eye. Tyson, the one-time heavyweight champion of the world and a legend both in and out of the ring, joins LIVE for a conversation about his tumultuous life in the same straightforward and sincere tone seen in his new memoir, Undisputed Truth.
The Tao of Roberto Duran — Techniques and Tactics of a Boxing Grandmaster
https://youtu.be/N_bJVON3qMU
No copyright infringement intended. All content used in adherence to Fair Use copyright law.
The Tao of Roberto Duran
Scroll One - Feinting 0:16
Few were as deceitful between the ropes as “Manos De Piedra.” Duran used feints to throw off timing and create openings for attack and also to note his opponent’s tendencies. But above all, Duran used feints to threaten opponents and keep them on tenterhooks. Once Roberto had established that he could hurt his man, the effectiveness of the feints increased and everything else became easier. Just look at poor Carlos Palomino flinching from Duran’s menacing feints in the opening segment.
Scroll Two - Rolling, Slipping, and Ducking 1:00
Duran may have been an offensive fighter first and foremost, but he was also a defensive master, brilliant at blocking and parrying punches or stepping in to smother them. It was the evasive movement from the waist, however, which made Duran especially difficult to hit cleanly and enabled him to stay in range to return fire. Watch, for example, how Duran skillfully makes Pipino Cuevas miss with four consecutive punches simply by bending at the waist and moving his torso. Or how he stands in the pocket with Davey Moore, effortlessly rolling the right hand and then ducking under the hook.
Scroll Three - Ducking, Weaving, and Countering 2:03
This segment showcases Duran’s seamless transitions between defense and attack at mid to close range. Considering how aggressive he was, Duran’s punch anticipation was phenomenal, and he was an expert at predicting his opponent’s most likely counter-attack based on his own attack. So instead of waiting for openings to appear, Duran would create and exploit them proactively (i.e. throw a right to the body―immediately weave right to evade a counter left hook―then throw a left to the body directly off the weave). Essentially, what you're seeing here is Duran countering the counter.
Scroll Four - Waltzing 2:52
Duran’s rendition of a "waltz." After slipping or ducking a right hand, Duran would place his left arm around his opponent’s waist and then spin him while pivoting in the opposite direction. Before the opponent could recover his balance, Duran would attack. This technique was especially useful for when Duran had his back to the ropes as it allowed him to reverse positions and regain the upper hand.
Scroll Five - Shifting 3:41
Here we see Duran stepping through off his right hand to craftily close the distance and get weight behind an unpredictable left from the southpaw stance. The beauty of some of these clips is that they also highlight how Duran would punch and then immediately look to snake his arms inside of the opponent’s to gain the positional advantage for in-fighting.
Scroll Six - Baiting with the Jab 4:36
This one is self-explanatory. Here, Duran uses a “pawing” jab as bait to draw out an attack from the opponent, usually a return jab, which he would then evade and counter. Incidentally, if you go back and watch the final clip of the “Ducking, Weaving, and Countering” segment, you will see Duran using his jab to coax one from Davey Moore so that he could duck underneath it and attack the body.
Scroll Seven - Tactile Reflexes 5:49
The closer you are to your opponent, the more difficult it is to see and react to an attack. Therefore, the ability to “see” with the hands, arms, and body in order to “feel” the opponent’s intentions and respond instantaneously to his movements is crucial for inside fighting. Duran’s sense of touch was so heightened that I often wonder if he trained blindfolded. No, seriously.
Scroll Eight - The Uppercut 6:51
Arguably his signature technique, Duran was brilliant at pinning the opponent’s right arm with his left glove and then throwing the uppercut with his right hand. Often throwing it sideways across himself, Duran required little space for the uppercut to find its mark.
Scroll Nine - In-fighting 7:40
Most of the categories overlap and Duran’s superlative in-fighting features strongly throughout the video. But the last few clips against Ray Leonard and Carlos Palomino really put everything together. Spacial awareness; jockeying for the sought-after inside position with his arms; tactile sensitivity; savvy use of the head; switching his attack from side to side; pinning with one hand while hitting with the other; defensive craft and counter-punching; perfectly placed blows to the head and body: the genius of Duran is on full display here.
Did Ryan Garcia Quit? Teddy Atlas Breakdown on Tank Davis KO of Ryan Garcia
"Fight one more round. When your arms are so tired that you can hardly lift your hands to come on guard, fight one more round. When your nose is bleeding and your eyes are black and you are so tired that you wish your opponent would crack you one on the jaw and put you to sleep, fight one more round - remembering that the man who always fights one more round is never whipped." Gentleman Jim Corbett, world champion boxer
